One Joshua Grolman has published a petition on Change. org asking for “protected bike lanes” on Centre Street, the main street through the Jamaica Plain neighborhood in Boston.
Centre Street is two-way, narrowed by parallel parking on both sides everywhere except at special locations — bus stops, turn lanes, approaches to intersections etc. While the petition calls for “protected bike lanes” (plural) and so, for two-way bicycle travel, the drawing with the petition shows a one-way bikeway on a one-way street (dashed white center line), with parking on one side — half the parking eliminated. That gets past the narrowness issue, but how is it supposed to relate to any feasible reallocation of space? Merchants and many residents won’t accept the removal of parking. Nobody is going to find it convenient for Centre Street to be one-way. Maybe in 20 years autonomous vehicles will reduce the need for parking, but people are still going to want to use the street for two-way travel. For now, bicyclists on Centre Street will have to to ignore the existing door-zone bike lanes and control the travel lane in order to be safe.
The drawing also doesn’t show intersections, where most car-bike crashes occur. Barrier-separated bikeways d not solve that problem and often worsen it.
Here’s the drawing, copied from a NACTO publication.
Joshua Grolman illustration
Mr. Grolman’s proposal will get only positive responses. Change.org allows negative responses only in response to inappropriate online behavior. That is usual for the petition process (as opposed, say, to a polling process). Also, only people who have signed the petition are allowed to post online comments. I find Mr. Grolman’s proposal impractical and so I won’t sign the petition. As I can’t comment on the petition there, I am commenting here.
