The resolution to support the consultant's recommendations (with the 
4-foot bicycle lanes between substandard parking lanes and narrow car 
lanes) passed 5-1 last night.  I wish more of you could have seen the 
layouts shown by the city of a Honda CR-V passing a cyclist in the bike 
lane passing a pickup truck in the parking lane (parked right against the 
curb, not 18-inches away as legally permitted, and with its mirror still 
sticking out a good two feet into the 4-foot wide bike lane).  

This debacle was the inevitable result of allowing neighborhood pressure 
to redesignate this critical through street from a "minor arterial" (which 
was supported by every technical quaIification) to "residential 
collector".  As I predicted several years ago, a horrible precedent was 
set, and now the chickens have come home to roost.  

Because it allowed the neighborhood partisans to claim with a straight 
face that the whims of the neighborhood were far more important than the 
utility and safety for cyclists, since they can now claim that this is a 
"residential street" - not a "through street".  Of course, even a 
"residential collector" typically prohibits parking in many cases to allow 
for greater through travel, but "residential collector" sounds enough like 
"residential street" to fool almost anybody.  

I've fought so long and so hard for this street because the presence of 
standard (actually wider than standard) bike lanes on this particular 
street was the thing that got me into cycling in the first place when a 
friend and I would bike from near IBM down to the river and back on 
Saturdays.  Without this street's utility and obvious attraction for 
beginning cyclists, I would have never gotten started (there's no other 
route which works in this regard).  

Congratulations.  When somebody dies, or when the bicycle volume drops 
dramatically, my lone opposing vote will not be much consolation; but I 
could not in good conscience apply my name to a plan which destroys 
cycling.  



---
Mike Dahmus
mdahmus@io.com


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