Flutterby™! : Sharrows

Sharrows

2016-02-08 21:05:20.650474+00 by Dan Lyke 2 comments

More evidence that bike sharrows are harmful to safety.

[ related topics: Bicycling ]

comments in ascending chronological order (reverse):

#Comment Re: Sharrows made: 2016-02-08 21:22:54.838904+00 by: Mars Saxman [edit history]

For the first couple years after Seattle started painting sharrows on its streets, I thought they were a sort of soft bike lane, telling cars to hug the left edge of the lane and make space for bicyclists. I think this was because the sharrows were generally painted on the right edge of the lane. I dutifully attempted to avoid driving on the sharrows, since that seemed to be what they meant, and was... kind of disgusted when I found out they meant literally nothing more than "share the road"! That is supposed to be the rule everywhere! Sharrows therefore communicate *zero information* and as a busy, intrusive element that occupies part of the visual-communication environment one could say they actually *reduce* the overall information level. Get rid of 'em and good riddance.

#Comment Re: Sharrows made: 2016-02-08 21:41:30.98164+00 by: Dan Lyke

Yeah, one hypothesis is that especially the ones painted right-aligned tend to both make drivers feel more entitled to the left hand of the lane, and make cyclists hug the right, which puts them in the door zone and makes motorists more likely to pass in unsafe conditions.

Add your own comment:

(If anyone ever actually uses Webmention/indie-action to post here, please email me)

Format with:

(You should probably use "Text" mode: URLs will be mostly recognized and linked, _underscore quoted_ text is looked up in a glossary, _underscore quoted_ (http://xyz.pdq) becomes a link, without the link in the parenthesis it becomes a <cite> tag. All <cite>ed text will point to the Flutterby knowledge base. Two enters (ie: a blank line) gets you a new paragraph, special treatment for paragraphs that are manually indented or start with "#" (as in "#include" or "#!/usr/bin/perl"), "/* " or ">" (as in a quoted message) or look like lists, or within a paragraph you can use a number of HTML tags:

p, img, br, hr, a, sub, sup, tt, i, b, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, cite, em, strong, code, samp, kbd, pre, blockquote, address, ol, dl, ul, dt, dd, li, dir, menu, table, tr, td, th

Comment policy

We will not edit your comments. However, we may delete your comments, or cause them to be hidden behind another link, if we feel they detract from the conversation. Commercial plugs are fine, if they are relevant to the conversation, and if you don't try to pretend to be a consumer. Annoying endorsements will be deleted if you're lucky, if you're not a whole bunch of people smarter and more articulate than you will ridicule you, and we will leave such ridicule in place.

Flutterby™ is a trademark claimed by

Dan Lyke

for the web publications at www.flutterby.com and www.flutterby.net.