Love/Hate

The Sunday Giro Ride heading back down Chef Highway on the new silky smooth asphalt.

Saturday's Giro Ride was well-attended, windy, and fast. I almost tagged 40 mph at one point, which wouldn't be unusual elsewhere, but on a ride where the total elevation could be best measured in inches, a non-sprint speed of 40 mph, along with a "best 20 minute speed" of 26.6 mph says something about the ride. What it doesn't say is that I had to pee the whole way out to Venetian Isles thanks to having had a big cup of coffee and then being under-dressed and cold. I did the Giro again on Sunday (there are complications right now making it ill-advised to spend all day riding my bike), and in stark contrast to Saturday's ride, this morning's was smaller and slower.

Blissfully wrong

Anyway, after each of this weekend's Giro Rides I rode back down Marconi, the latter part of which has just received a new bike lane arrangement designed by a committee of people who are apparently not the kind of cyclist I am accustomed to. While the Bike Easy folks are enthusiastically patting themselves on the back for this particular accomplishment, those of us who ride a little faster, usually in the company of others, are having a hard time wrapping our heads around this level of enthusiasm. While the Bike Easy Director, Dan Farve, recently proclaimed about the new bike lane "It was glorious! The protected bike lanes, green paint highlighting the bike lane at intersections, and smooth road surface all felt safe and comfortable," the nicest comment I've heard from the people I ride with was "somebody's going to get killed here." Dan's quote was accompanied on the Bike Easy Facebook Page by a photo of one of the organization's supporters riding the wrong way on the 2-way section of the path that's on the City Park side. Anyway, I personally have a love/hate relationship with bike lanes or paths like this.

Was this intentional?

Heading toward the lake, the path puts you literally in the gutter under the beautiful Live Oaks that line that side of the street. The lake-bound lane will probably be full of leaves, litter, water, and other debris in due time. Along the way, one finds these raised concrete pads that I guess are for people who are waiting for the bus or something. In a few places, the concrete pad pokes out into the bike lane, which just looks like an accident waiting to happen.

You can see where a car has already hit the concrete pad

Motorists are obviously confused. In fact, as we rode home today one poor soul was obviously having a hard time figuring out how to make a simple right turn across the bike lane without running us over, or plowing through the three-foot-high plastic lane divider things, and was probably at the same time wondering why in the world was one part of the road painted green, and was he allowed to drive on the green part or not. I found it all rather unsettling. While we were OK in the bike lane as we cruised easily toward home at a leisurely 15 mph or so, it goes without saying that a group of more than three, travelling at more than 15 mph, is going to be better off dealing with the auto traffic in the other lane.

This driver was very confused about where he should be.

From the motorists' perspective, it's clear that they are confused. If you look closely you can see where some unfortunate motorist drove right into the raised concrete, chipping off some of it and probably damaging his car.  From our perspective, all we want is a smooth asphalt road with two lanes going in the same direction, a reasonably low speed limit, and the ability of a group of riders to take over the right lane when appropriate. Before, we had all of that except for the smooth asphalt part. Now we have the smooth asphalt, but are left with a single traffic lane too narrow to share.

So that's my "hate" part of the equation. On the other hand, I daily ride my fifty-year old spray-painted single-speed bike to work at an average speed of perhaps 10 mph, in which case I love having a bike lane to, at least, legitimize my place on the road. Of course, I don't believe for a moment that the white stripe on the road is going to keep the distracted drivers from killing me if I'm not extremely defensive, or even if I am. Fitness and competitive cyclists are stuck in-between. For the most part, we get along much better riding with the auto traffic where the rules of the road are clear, and we don't get along so well riding in bike lanes or paths where the rules are arbitrary and confusing and the routes sometimes look like they were designed by committees of people who lump all cyclists together, along with the dog-walkers and pedestrians.  So the bottom line here is that I want the bike lane for when I'm commuting, but I also want the separate right lane for when I'm training and/or just riding faster than 15 mph.