I'm seeing a disheartening growth in interest in #AdvisoryBikeLanes in the US, and am here to caution #cities & #DOTs against them. We already know our #drivers don't respect conventional painted #BikeLanes. It's a bit silly to think they'll know what to do with advisory bike lanes, especially when we install them on #streets built to accommodate #speeding (i.e., nearly every US street).
@DrTCombs we kicked off a research project into them that will tackle some questions of context where they’re appropo and not
@bikepedantic oooooh I'm looking forward to what you find! I would love to see (and experience!) the contexts in which they'd work.
@DrTCombs not ‘me’ directly, but our Fed Lands folks looking at data across existing experiments, and will look at answering questions through future deployment on streets on public lands like the presidio. Unclear how much will be learned, but lots of interest in ensuring that this doesn’t become sharrow 2.0
@DrTCombs oh, and if you’re coming to #trbam, there’s an experimental deployment of #AdvisoryBikeLanes down on Kentucky Ave SE (that I’ve never checked out myself). Low-speed, maybe 1500 AADTish.
@bikepedantic I am coming to TRB, but only briefly. I'd love to see some footage of the Kentucky Ave ABL in action...
@DrTCombs they don’t even copy them. They take the name only.
@DrTCombs #AdvisoryBikeLanes pretty much suck everywhere that they exist. We luckily don't have too many painted on-road lanes in the Netherlands, properly separated and safe cyclepaths are far more common, but where painted lanes exist our drivers drive in them, park in them, use them to cut corners etc. just like drivers in your and every other country would do. Cyclists everywhere need real infrastructure not just paint.
http://www.aviewfromthecyclepath.com/2014/04/on-road-cycle-lanes-good-bad-and-ugly.html
@hembrow @DrTCombs Unfortunately our city has more than I would have liked.
Most are acceptably low traffic, but a few...really really aren't.
This road carries fairly significant traffic, and I routinely get close passed in the brand new section where there is a median in the road (indicating there was plenty of space for segregated lanes).
@DrTCombs I haven't heard of these before, but this seems like something that could work on a lot of slow residential streets, but would be worthless on the roads that are already unpleasant to bike on due to traffic speeds. I'd imagine on the residential streets it will have trouble getting past the screams of people who park on the street.
It's not that #AdvisoryBikeLanes won't work in the US. It's that we won't implement them in a way that would work. Just like so many other #RoadDesign ideas that we try and copy from Europe without actually understanding or definitely not embracing the contexts in which they work.