Columbus Avenue bike lane: Easy come, easy go
By adamg - Thu, 11/12/2009 - 10:09pm.
Matthew Anderson snapped this shot of how quickly the brand-new Columbus Avenue bike lanes (installed just this past August) can disappear, thanks to some BWSC work.
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There was a web site that
There was a web site that hosted pics of bike lanes that disappear. Some ran into walls or parked cars. You have to wonder what they were thinking.
Well you see, BWSC crews
Well you see, BWSC crews could repaint the markings damaged by repair work, as they are legally required to "repair in kind", but that would violate the work rules in their contract. It doesn't help that most of the private utility work done in the city gets away without "repairing in kind" either. This is why half our roads are so rough and unmarked from poor patch jobs, and concrete/brick/stone sidewalks throughout the city have wart like asphalt patches for old ladies to trip over. THANK YOU MISTER MAYOR!
Really not that bad.
You can clearly see the bike lane continuing after the intersection.
Really not that bad yet
But as the road gets dug up (and it will), and as the BWSC and various utility companies don't repaint the markers, well, eventually the bike lane disappears.
The whole road?
All of Columbus Ave is going to be dug up? If that's the case they are going to have to repaint lines anyway. I think that if they are going to be re-painting lines for the cars they would do so for the bikes as well. I mean, this just looks like one intersection.
Not all at once
But the way things seem to happen in Boston is various parts of a road get dug up at various times and then slap-dashedly (that a word?) put back together and then, finally, after several years, they re-do the entire road. It's that interregnum where this might be an issue.
I'm not sure I agree with a
I'm not sure I agree with a bike lane here in the first place. The majority of Columbus Avenue is lined by the Southwest Corridor, which has 2 paths (one pedestrian, one bike) distinct from the street. It looks more than a little silly when the there's a separate bike path not more than 8 feet from this new bike lane in the street.
The bike path on the street
The bike path on the street picks up where the Southwest corridor diverges away from Columbus (Ruggles T Station). At that same point the path in the park becomes rather difficult to traverse, so most cyclists were already using Columbus from that point in to town. These lanes are a continuation of the overall good SW corridor paths and serve a very useful purpose.
Now some may argue whether bike lanes on the street are safe at all. I happen to think that they are, but setting that aside, there is a pretty good rationale to put them on this section of Columbus.
MASS AVE cluster #u@k
I'm still waiting for Boston to fix the city's major bike route problem. The most direct route from Cambridge to Boston is Mass AVE. How can one end of the road be so easy to transverse and, then, when you cross into Boston be complete hell? This is no cow path. Somebody fix this now.
Ditto for Charles St.
This is the most direct route to the downtown/Financial Districts from points north. This route is heavily traveled by bikes. The bike lanes run from Beacon St. near Porter Sq., through Somerville and Cambridge, all the way over the Longfellow and then?
Hell. Well, almost hell actually. There are usually enough double parked trucks to create a defacto bike lane. Clearly a very poor redesign of the roadway facility ... asthetics and dated notions were placed over functional standards here! This "redone" roadway doesn't seem to work for anybody at any time of day.
Bike Lanes on Mass Ave.
Are part of the current Mass Ave. redesign project. I believe we will see them sometime next Spring or Summer.
Not like it was brick
I'm confused. Usually a street feature needs to be brick to get this treatment from a utility contractor. The fact that they did not pave over the cobble stone strip is the real story.
Yeah,
the first thing they did after they rebuilt Columbus Ave in the late 1980s and put in the cobblestone medians was to dig holes in the middle of the street for utility work and then pave over the cobblestones with asphalt.
An amazing thing in West Roxbury
One of the utilities dug up one of the brick crosswalks on Centre Street recently and - you are sitting down, right? - when they were done, they put bricks back down instead of asphalt.
We really should be pushing
We really should be pushing for bike lanes that are separated from both the sidewalk and the car lanes with a small curb, similar to what's done in some european cities (Berlin, Amsterdam). They offer the most safety to bike riders. The paint is a start, but it doesn't do a thing to stop the double parking in bike lanes or getting pinned by a bus or truck.
Separate bike lanes with
Separate bike lanes with small curbs as lane boundaries is an excellent idea but only IF cyclists are required to stay in these designated bike lanes. What's the point of spending money on bike lanes if cyclists still prefer to ride on sidewalks?