On Wednesday, January 15, 2014 8:48:13 PM UTC-5, jbeattie wrote:


Our bicycle boulevards are just "traffic calmed" streets with sharrows and some hardscape. The major traffic calming device is all the bicycles. Otherwise, it's MUPs and bike lanes and cycle tracks, which are the chutes with curb on one side and parked cars on the others. I just call them "death traps."

I like the idea of bicycle boulevards better than most of the choices. They tend to bring along the idea of slowing MV traffic in residential areas, which I very much favor.

One problem, I guess, is that since they're parallel to the commercial streets, one has to know where to turn off the boulevard to get to somewhere practical, like a grocery store. That means that once again, a bicyclist really does need to know how to deal with MV traffic. We simply can't build a parallel universe for bikes.

This past summer, we cycled in one silver level "Bicycle Friendly Community.." I stopped in a bike shop to see if there might be a local bike map showing boulevards or other pleasant streets for cycling. The shop dude said no; and that the best thing to do was just ride the riverside MUP to get anywhere I needed to go... um, whether it was near that MUP or not. Then he said "But I guess you'd have to know where to get off the path..."

He followed it up with "People that ride in traffic are crazy." Nice advocacy, there. :-/

- Frank Krygowski