Bike Friendly w/o Appearing Bike Friendly 1: Left Turn Pockets

I will be pointing out road designs and infrastructure that are very bicycle friendly without actually being bicycle specific in any way. First topic: Left Turn Pockets.














Have you ever made a left turn driving a car on a busy, fast moving road with two lanes going in the same direction you are? Did you worry about drivers coming up fast from behind you and hitting your backside as you waited for opposing traffic to clear? Did you feel like those drivers were getting impatient and frustrated as they had to slow down and wait behind you or swerve at a fast pace to the right lane to go by? Yeah it stinks I know. Imagine trying to make that left turn (from the left lane of course) on a bicycle. No way!

Left turn pockets allow left turning traffic to slow down and wait without impeding the roadway. It gives both bike and car drivers a relief from the high speeds of the main lanes. Not only that, but if a bike is in the left turn lane, any cars behind the biker in the same lane end up being a safety buffer for the bicyclist's back side. This means less frustration and more safety for drivers and bikers alike.

Another post on door zone bike lanes

I've touched on this already and will again, but I think it is a huge problem. Placing bike lanes in the door zone of parallel parked cars is not wise. It encourages novice bicyclists to ride in harms way in the wrong position on the road, as well as to make incorrect and unsafe turns. I only took one engineering ethics course, but I believe those ethics would dictate that it is better to not have a bike lane altogether (or wiser markings such as properly placed sharrows) than it is to encourage poor bicycle driving. This link explains this in more detail. Poor infrastructure leads to poor biking and poor biking will never get cyclists the respect they deserve both on the road and when designing the roads.

An easy fix for the door zone bike lane problem

The solution is called back in angle parking:
As I mentioned in my second post, although I really like the idea of bike lanes, there are some serious issues with many of them as they currently exist. The worst is the door zone bike lane issue, depicted here:

The solution removes the door zone in the bike lane problem and is safer than drive in angle parking, where the parking spots and cars go the opposite way. This takes up a greater width of the road, but allows more cars to be parked in a given length of one side of the road than parallel parking. By removing parking altogether on the opposite side of the road as the angle spaces, road width may actually be freed up (for wider sidewalks or bike lanes of course) without seriously impacting the parking supply on the road. By varying which side of the road has parking, chicanes can be implemented, turns can be made tighter (or wider) and intersections could be improved, all of which benefit every user of the road. Here's some bad GIMP-work for you:
Apparently Burlington, VT uses back-in angle parking. Here is their informative write up on it.