Impeding Traffic on the Boulevard

It’s official: it is legal, and in fact encouraged, for bikes, and only bikes, to impede traffic on highways. While it is illegal for motorized vehicles and pedestrians to impede the flow of traffic, and they can be ticketed, bikes are encouraged to use the car lanes even if they  impede the flow of traffic. Their slowing down cars is now considered a good thing.

My researching the “sharrows” was a real trip down the rabbit hole. And the crosswalk islands, traffic cameras, never-ending construction, wacky stoplights, and weed-fest of signage make the Boulevard project truly monumental in its follies. Let’s start, though, with the nation’s schizophrenia regarding slow movers on fast roads.

Florida has  laws specifically banning pedestrians from slowing traffic by, say, stepping into the lane to advertise stuff. (The guys selling the daily paper have to be careful.) Political sign-wavers are expressly allowed, however. Also, motorized vehicles can be ticketed for going much slower than the flow of traffic, especially if they are in the left lane. Traffic blogs show that police officers have a special zeal for someone going forty in the left lane in a fifty zone, right next to a fellow 40-er in the right lane.

For bikes, however, a new day has dawned, nationally, not just in Florida. The new orthodoxy is that bikes have every right to the road, more-so than cars or  pedestrians. This actually had a very reasonable start. Bikes needed to use a bridge in St. Augustine. There was no promenade alternative. The city applauded the early use of sharrows there to make safer the bikes that were already, of necessity, using the car lanes. San Francisco also was an early adopter, bikes there having also no alternative to the traffic lanes, and using them with or without sharrows.

What is remarkable about the research and use of sharrow is that it has nothing to do with Key West. The main benefit is to avoid bikes keeping to the right of a traffic lane from getting nailed by a car door opening. There is no parking on the boulevard. No studies discussed the presence of a 12-foot promenade ideal for slow bikes, as we have on the boulevard.

No studies considered the danger of encouraging slow bikes to leave a safe alternative in order to bike slowly in traffic. None distinguished the use of the traffic lane by fat-tired slow bikes, like mine and those pictured in the sharrow icon, from legitimate bike commuters with their skinny tires and under-slung handlebars allowing them to move along at 20 mph. The only study of injuries related to traffic infrastructure showed an actual increase in hospitalizations due to sharrows, even without the effect, as we have, of encouraging the use of the dangerous alternative.

FDOT did not have to use sharrows here. The legislation enabling them allowed, but did not demand them.  For example, they are not on A1A. Fortunately, there is some chance that common sense will prevail over an FDOT bureaucracy making blindly irrational decisions. The most the City can do is “ask” bikers to use the promenade.  Better yet, the sheriff’s  department will continue to pull over people like me, when I dared to test the sharrows in some of the most harrowing 15 minutes of my life, in order to let the cars pass.

Florida statutes tell bikers to ride to the far right of car lanes so cars can pass. But this law is over-ridden when lanes are less than 14 feet wide. Hardly any lanes are that wide, 12 feet being the standard. In Miami, bikers say the use of sharrows is a cheap way to avoid striping real bike lanes, even in places where there is room to do so.

I’m going to plead with the Florida Secretary of Transportation, Ananth Prasad, to bring reason to our boulevard again, as he did last year when he successfully returned us to two-way traffic. Wish us luck.

The next silliest and most dangerous addition are crosswalk islands. One of these was installed up in Key Largo, already causing an accident and criticism not only from residents but the sheriff’s department as well.  And up there, it actually serves pedestrians walking from a hotel to retail services.

Our three pedestrian crosswalks bring people from nowhere to nowhere.  The worst one is at the tomb-like Homeland Security office. No humans work there, as far as I have seen. Lighted crosswalks are at 5^th and Palm, and there is nothing on the water side anyone would have to get to. I cannot imagine why anyone would want to cross there.

So we are adding something concrete in the middle of the highway. Something to run into. Worse, it may encourage, like the sharrows, people to put themselves in danger with the false assurance that it is their “right” to play in the traffic. The risk-benefit analysis is sure risk vs. doubtful benefit.

Let’s see how the traffic cameras work.  I actually saw them read no cars in the turn lane a few times and not turn on the left-turn light.  As many times, I have seen the turn light go on when there were no cars there.  The jury is out.

The endless construction today included a three-light wait coming into town at 4:30.  A jeep was parked in the right lane at Kennedy without a hint of work being done, or any asphalt setting or the like. And the silly 25-mph continues for no visible reason whatsoever.

The signs, yes, the 92 reported in the Voice going one-way into town. America leads the world in ugly signs. I watch the Tour de France in part to see how a nation survives without the visual pollution of myriad clusters of unnecessary street signs and ugly utility poles. Sigh.  Not ugly American, but ugly America.

For two years we saw the stoplight at 5^th street was totally unnecessary.  It was always easy to get only to the boulevard from 5^th without the light. Darn, it’s back, doing its own job of impeding traffic.

The good news is that I don’t believe we’ve had any accidents at the Y, with the light to A1A moved behind the trees. Maybe we actually never needed a light there anyway, so no harm, no foul.  Yay!