Nice parking spots.
This weekend, I was walking around south congress while waiting for my bicycle to be worked on at Tsumani Cycles (hi guys!) when I walked by some of the side streets and saw this wonderful bicycle lane. Wonderfully bad, that is. First, this is a neighborhood street, that doesn’t have very much traffic on it, even in rush hour. I bike on Eva and other streets that are perpendicular to this one all the time. Second, it’s fairly narrow, at least for an Austin street. So… why is there a bike lane on this street?
Hmm... yes, where would you ride?
As I was taking photos standing in the middle of the road, the three cyclists you see on the left side of the photo rode up, so I chatted with them a bit while they were waiting for the light to turn green – and they agreed with me: this bike lane is absolutely useless! Not only is it on a street that doesn’t even need a bicycle lane in the first place, but of course, there are around a dozen cars parked in the lane, so even if one wanted to actually use the bicycle lane, they couldn’t.
The last thing one of the cyclists said to me as the light turned green was, “I wish they would have fixed Congress instead of doing this.” Absolutely. We have to get our future priorities straight on our cycling infrastructure.
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on Oct 28th, 2008 at 1:21 pm
earlier this year the city proposed a kind of lane diet for Mary St. (which is the street you have pictured)
http://www.bouldincreek.org/images/bikelane.pdf
As far as I know, this has gone nowhere. Perhaps neighbors didn’t like the parking change. I made sure to voice my support, but agree that there isn’t much need for a bike lane on this street. However, I don’t get the logic of the fellow cyclists – S. Congress has lanes all the way down to Ben White. (Of course, they should go further, but… that’s Austin for you.)
on Oct 29th, 2008 at 10:59 am
Thanks for that map! That plan seems to make some sense (a lot more than what is there currently), except for the chance of getting doored on the north-bound side of the road.
on Jul 20th, 2009 at 4:15 pm
I agree. The City seems to add bike lanes to streets already suitable for bike riding. They’ve proposed striping Garden Villa and it’s perfectly fine to ride now, I’ve been riding it for 5 years.
Give us lanes where it’s less safe to ride.