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orlitzky t1_jas5as4 wrote

> move the bike lane 6-8 feet south, inside the (legally) parked cars

Please don't recommend this in Baltimore. It works in nice places, but here they will half-ass it and make things worse. The implementation that this idea is based off of can be found throughout Europe has two important factors:

  1. The "inside" bike lane is separated from the cars by an actual barrier.
  2. They clean the bike lane.

These cost money, however, so in Baltimore we skip them and keep only the easy parts of the plan.

Without #2, the bike lane is literally a gutter, where tree limbs, broken bottles, needles, and chicken bones collect. You can't ride in a month after they build it.

Without #1, people just park right next to the bike lane (on top of the painted lines or plastic bollards). This makes an "inside" bike lane far more dangerous than an "outside" bike lane. If someone opens the door on you while you're in an "inside" bike lane, you have two choices: hit the curb and die, or hit the car and die. If someone opens the door on you in an "outside" bike lane, you have two choices: hit the car and die, or swerve into traffic and only maybe die. Your odds are greatly improved! This sounds sarcastic because of how terrible everything is but sadly I am serious.

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refutalisk OP t1_jasff7q wrote

Getting doored into traffic is way more dangerous than getting doored into a sidewalk. If you have data that suggest otherwise, I will back down on this point, because we ought to make these decisions based on the best available evidence. But the way I see it, the best available evidence would say sidewalk-side is better. For example, the wikipedia article on dooring says "[G]etting doored itself usually is not fatal; rather, most serious door-zone-related injuries are sustained by getting hit by a motor vehicle after colliding with or swerving to avoid the obstructing door. Thus, most dooring deaths and serious injuries occur in the travel lane and not in the door zone."

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bmore t1_jatr9yn wrote

While crashes tend to be slightly higher at intersections on our two way protected facilities because the city is too cowardly to ban left turns, serious injury and fatal crashes are worse on roads with standard or no facilities and ridership is also much higher on the separated infrastructure.

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orlitzky t1_jattctf wrote

Aside from the left-turn issue, two-way bike lanes are usually fine because you can swerve a little to avoid surprises there, too. I was specifically talking about the one-way lanes on the inside like the ones they had to bulldoze on Roland ave. I believe those stats.

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bmore t1_jauj1mk wrote

Roland ones sucked and were designed substandard to preserve car travel lanes. Check out Central Ave. That's the standard design for a real facility with one way in either direction.

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orlitzky t1_javmda5 wrote

No argument there, but Central took like seven years and deleted a vehicle lane. It's a little more ambitious than "move the bike lane 6-8 feet south."

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moderndukes t1_jau1yvu wrote

Wouldn’t putting both directions of bike traffic on the same side with a two-way bike like fix all of these issues? Because I’m presuming with the cleaning you mean streetsweeping which could theoretically occur on such a lane.

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orlitzky t1_jau5ayg wrote

tl;dr yes

There are different problems with the two-way lanes (people don't look for bike traffic coming from the "wrong" direction, for example), but they do solve many of the problems with the typical outside single-lanes. It would be much harder to say that either is definitively better.

(And I'd love to be wrong about this, but I don't think they sweep the double-lanes even where it would be feasible.)

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moderndukes t1_jau7mxf wrote

(It would be theoretically possible though, right? Since they’re designed to be wide enough for an emergency vehicle I believe?)

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orlitzky t1_javmk1g wrote

If there wasn't such a large gap between what's theoretically possible (easy, even) and what we wind up with, I would have just kept my mouth shut in the first place!

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