A Place to Call My Bike Lane

I must say, I'm a little shocked. As I continue to hear mixed stories about the status of the budget, I never thought that the city would go through with its plan to install across-town bike lanes on Spruce and Pine Streets. And yet tonight, as I found myself walking through Center City, I saw the lines. Two solid white lines painted down the right side of Spruce Street. It took me a good 10 minutes and so much staring that I walked straight into a pile of sidewalk dog excrement in order to figure it out. The middle line is simply covering what used to be the dashed line separating the two lanes of automobile traffic, with about two feet between that and the line delineating the bike lane.

Why this middle line was painted I can only guess, because line removal seems so much more appropriate. And sadly, though not at all surprisingly, it appears that drivers have already taken it upon themselves to make the bike lane into another lane of parking, leaving the maybe 2-foot "buffer lane," containing no markers, to its left. I really, really hope that it was not planned this way because having ridden in this pseudo-lane tonight, it felt about 10 times less safe than before. Now, rather than being entitled to an entire lane of the road, a biker is expected to fit between 2 lanes of cars, in an absurdly narrow space.

I looked into the requirements for bike lane width and there doesn't seem to be any government standard, just some suggestions presented in reports by various nonprofit organizations. The typical bike lane width is set at 5 feet, which is likely the width of the lane I saw tonight. But the "buffer lane" to its left was just absolutely no where near what is necessary. The width of combined parking and bike lanes is suggested to be 12 or 13 feet, though I would guess that the one the city has created is maybe 8. I honestly just see really bad things happening for bikers who feel pressured to stay in that lane when cars are parked in the true bike lane, being jammed between cars moving at regular speed and stationary vehicles, whose doors could open out onto them at any time. We'll see what happens once more signs go up and they finish painting the little stick figure bicycle men into the lanes, but right now I'd say someone really jumped the gun on this one.