Cedar Street goes Contraflow

After several iterations, the Cedar Street Bikeway seems to have settled on a workable solution.

Originally the one-way street was to have a bike lane between the sidewalk and the parked cars, bur residents complained, so instead an eight foot long bikeway spilled cyclists into a one way street where they were allowed to ride against traffic. (photo at left)

This won them the title of "Stupidest Bike Lane in America".

So they went back to the drawing board and came up with two options. One put the bike lane on one side and parking on the other. Two put the bike lane between parking and traffic. Residents voted against option one because they didn't want to have to walk across the street.

So option two is the winner. It's not as good as it could be (between parking and the sidewalk or on the opposite side of the street as the parking) but it's better than it was. There are more photos than the one below at Silver Spring Trails.

Comments

[Stephen]

Rode this lane for the first time yesterday...the person I was riding with (who had not been on a bike in over a decade) was MUCH more comfortable using this lane than he was while we were riding Spring and Cedar before we got to the lane. So - mission accomplished!

[Jack]

Wow, it's great to see this, and so quickly (barely more than a year from the "stupidest" award to the result, unheard of in government). Are there curb/median changes at the end yet?

The two options proposed by MCDOT were this one (option 2) and moving parking across the street so the bike lane would be up against the curb (option 1). Originally (for a little while) the street had the bike lane between parking and the curb, and an additional low curb on the other side of the bike lane I'm told. This was not a good arrangement, and that's what the neighbors hated. I have no idea how they planned to keep debris from piling up in the bike lane between the two curbs.

Even without the extra low curb I don't think putting a bike lane between the curb and parked cars is a good idea. Call me old-fashioned, but if you have both moving vehicles and parked ones, I think the parked ones should be closer to the curb. The chosen solution creates essentially a normal two-way street with southbound and northbound lanes, except that the southbound lane is available only to bikes -- more intuitive to drivers and to people entering/exiting parked cars.

Option 1 was of course better because it would have put cyclists next to the curb instead of next to parked cars. But it wasn't in the cards, with the neighbors already very cranky and it requiring a change in parking. But we convinced DOT to add a foot to the bike lane from their original proposal (taking it from the northbound lane). That yielded 13' for parking + bike lane (looks from the photo like 7' of that is for parking). Believe me, I'm no fan of door zone bike lanes and I often don't use them, but 13' (plus the width of the double-yellow line) should be enough for riders to stay out of the door zone. I think of it not bike lane anyway but as a two way street.