A reader writes:
There may be something to Fleming’s argument; I know of at least one cycling activist in Chapel Hill, NC who’s against bike lanes altogether on the ground that motorists need to accept that cyclists have an equal right to the road. But there are other issues with bike barriers. Here in Nashville, bike lanes have been slowly installed on existing streets, but they begin and end arbitrarily and are designed to accommodate both traffic and parking. I have bike lanes on my home street, but three blocks down from me is a sizable university and restaurant district, where double-parking in the lanes (including by semis) is rife, and the university administration is more concerned with pressuring the city to provide on-street parking than it is with bike safety. Politically, barriers are nonstarters here.
I’d also add that the bike lane failed to prevent me from nearly getting killed four years ago when a motorist made a left turn right into me. As I understand it, most car-bike collisions result from cars turning across the lane at intersections or coming off a side street; barriers would do nothing to prevent those.
Read here for a good illustration of that point. Another reader:
I’m an avid user of New York City’s new CitiBike bike-share program. For two decades, my perhaps wild-eyed theory about city cycling was that it’s considerably safer than cycling in the suburbs or in rural locations: despite the menace of getting doored, urban traffic tends to be slow and relatively predictable compared with cycling in settings where you literally never know what could come zooming around a bend.
But I must admit that a couple of months on CitiBikes has shaken my faith in my urban-cycling theory.
The problem isn’t taxis and trucks. It’s pedestrians and other cyclists. Pedestrians aren’t yet conditioned to look for thousands of additional bikes before stepping off the curb – I’ve had to scream at (and terrify) a few people to prevent either of us getting killed. Even worse are cyclists who “salmon” – riding the wrong way on one-way lanes. Store messengers are bad enough, but they ride very carefully. The real threat is other Citibikers, who I often see blithely riding in the wrong direction, without helmets, and with earbuds plugged in. They seem to believe they’re not riding actual bicycles in the middle of an actual city. They also happen to be breaking the law, and I really wish New York City’s police would ticket them. A week of tickets and the bike lanes would become a lot safer.
The Dish 