I’d definitely like to see more work go into making the “for cars” street-system more bike friendly. Seems like a little extra money or attention would go a long way to making the roads more appropropriate for bikes. I usually feel perfectly safe biking but the car folks would appreciate it if I had an extra three feet in the outside lane.

However, the shared streets idea is not for everyone, and I firmly believe that having separated facilities will help more people bike. Many people ARE afraid of traffic and thus don’t bike, and many people just don’t have the biking skills necessary to take to the streets confidently (think beginning riders, children, etc). I also have had the pleasure of living in Madison, Wisconsin, which has done a good job of integrating bike paths into its transportation infrastructure. Sure, there are walkers and roller bladers on the bike paths sometimes, which slow a commuter down. At those times of day, it might be better to take the street. But there are some paths that were converted from old railroad track, that are incredible resources for bikers because they are direct and you can travel quite a distance on them to get where you need to go. Sure, you have to slow down for road crossings sometimes, but there are fewer of them than stopping at traffic lights and intersections on the streets. So, there are examples out there of how separated paths can be used IN ADDITION TO shared spaces, on-street bike lanes, and other resources to fulfill a transportation system.

I think the key is to get decision makers to not consider one option or the other, but to look at it as different riders need different resources. Just as we need residential streets, arterials, and highways for cars, we need different types of resources for bikes.

There’s a phrase for this–”transportation apartheid”–and it’s a fundamental flaw of the bikepath-ological model. The motivation for bikepaths is good: lots of folks claim to afraid to bike in traffic, and therefore to be inhibited from biking for transportation (i.e. to accomplish basic needs, e.g. commuting), so let’s build a separate bike transportation system! Unfortunately we know from history that separate rarely tends to be equal. In the case of transportation, one tends to get a recreation-oriented system for bikes (they’re for kids, right ?-), and a practical system for motor vehicles. This is great if you want to substitute bicycling for other forms of recreation, but sucks if you want to substitute human-powered vehicle miles traveled (VMTs) for greenhouse-gas producing VMTs. (The other problem here is that, more often, folks are actually more inhibited from biking by other factors–notably time, status, and comfort–but that’s a separate question.)

Of course, the bikepathologists have a “solution” to this problem, too: build a separate and parallel system of bike lanes on the same rights of way as “regular” streets. The problem with that is, sooner or later, the smogmobiles want to turn right and the bikes want to turn left.

Hence the rise of the “shared space” or “shared streets” movement. Instead of building separate-but-inferior bike infrastructure, use the resources to make existing space more bikeable (and walkable, transit-able, etc). Simple ways to do this are to widen outer lanes and improve bike parking and street maintenance. Longer-term, develop for multiple transport modes, and make smogmobilers internalize some of the costs they currently externalize.

It took me an hour to find the public parking lot and then the beach access. But boy what a great beach and a wonderful system of bike paths. Just for fun, I went to the bike shops and showed off my electric bike to a very mixed reaction. I did get a couple of the owners to take it for spin, and as is usually the case, they came back with a big smile on their face! I would recommend going in the “shoulder” season when I did. The weather was nice and the Holdiay Inn had a $59.00 weekday rate.