I'm guessing pilots aren't trained to land along the left edge of the runway. When I learned to drive a car, I don't remember my mother teaching me to hug the yellow line or to keep the right tires on the dirt just off of the roadway (I grew up in rural VT where there are few curbs). Why not? because lanes and stripes are on a passageway for a reason, to indicate where planes or drivers should be. "Drive between the lines" seems pretty simple, and most people assume that means they should position themselves in the middle of the lane. Simple right? Not with bike lanes of course. The quote below is taken from
this pamphlet from
MassBike:
Beware of the door zone! Ride at least 4 feet away from parked cars, even if there is a bike lane, or traffic trying to pass you.
Now take a look at this picture:
So I've always been taught to ride down the middle of the lane, but I also want to follow MassBike's safety advice and stay 4 feet from parked cars. In the example above, it is simply impossible to do both. The proper bike driving technique in this case is to ride six inches outside of the inside bike lane stripe, if not further towards the center of the road.
I think a good compromise, if not ideal solution is well described at the end of
this post:
Here is an idea for the city planners. If you must park cars on Coleman Blvd. put a four foot “Door Zone” next to the parked cars. (Clearly marked “Door Zone.”) If necessary make the bike lane only eighteen inches or two feet wide at the point.
I feel this makes more sense than making a five-foot bike lane, then advising cyclists (On some obscure website.) to only use the outside one foot of the lane. Coleman Blvd. is a wide road; if necessary make the traffic lanes narrower and lower the speed limit.
This makes sense to me, since with bike lanes, when people get in or out of their cars, they often try to be considerate and only open the door enough to squeeze in. This method might encourage that and encourage riding in the correct position at the same time. If a two foot wide bike lane is too narrow (and it might be), then there could be a 2.5 to 3 foot buffer, or a four foot buffer with one of those feet within the parking zone, encouraging people to park close to the curb.
Combined with a number of other treatments (also detailed in "Making Bike Lanes Work"), I think some of the benefits of bike lanes can be preserved and at the same time make them less engineering ethics unfriendly.
The gist of the post is that bikers should ride in the green area, since the red area is the door zone area. Instead of making wide bike lanes in the door zone and then telling people not to use them, shouldn't we just make the bike lane narrower and place it where the green line is? I'm pretty sure we could do this without requiring more road width. In place of the red, unusable bike lane we could just install the diagonal/hash line danger markings. This would then give parkers some breathing room as well. Cyclists would still have a lane to "feel safe" in, but they would be encouraged to ride in the correct position on the roadway.
