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Friday, May 13, 2011

Ideal Bike Lanes

Central Street borders the south side of Central High School's campus.  Central Street is 40' wide and is a two way street with a center turn lane.  There are 5' sidewalks on each side of Central Street.  Our design recommendation calls for installing a median in the center turn lane and a 5' wide bike path down the center of the median.  Ralph Rognstad indicated that the City of Springfield would prefer to have 12' bike lanes to improve safety.  An online resource provides the following diagram of separation of car and bike traffic.
The diagram is metric so car lanes are identified as 2.9 meters or about 9.5' per lane.  The two way bike lane in the diagram is 7.9' wide. That allows  only 3.5' for each bike direction.  If Central could be widened to allow for separate bike and pedestrian and automobile lanes in each direction, that would be optimal for safety.  There is simply not enough development space to provide the optimal configuration so our proposal is the best available for multi-modal transportation.  The diagram was sourced from a web site named "Sydney Media" at the URL listed below.
http://www.google.com/imgres?imgurl=http://www.sydneymedia.com.au/asset/2/images/separated_bicycle_road_main.JPG&imgrefurl=http://www.sydneymedia.com.au/html/3231-new-bicycle-lanes-to-improve-safety.asp&usg=__oiCslOReoj4dadQhsY0-NGlinNE=&h=754&w=826&sz=357&hl=en&start=0&sig2=RgAOiGs0TFDbye_CkL8xPg&zoom=1&tbnid=SGC7JwH7ZC-XkM:&tbnh=166&tbnw=182&ei=u83NTeKpN4uctwfF0OCDDg&prev=/search%3Fq%3Ddiagrams%2Bof%2Bbike%2Blanes%26hl%3Den%26client%3Dfirefox-a%26hs%3D90i%26rls%3Dorg.mozilla:en-US:official%26channel%3Dnp%26biw%3D1578%26bih%3D1004%26tbm%3Disch&itbs=1&iact=hc&vpx=399&vpy=423&dur=214&hovh=214&hovw=235&tx=104&ty=114&page=1&ndsp=36&ved=1t:429,r:15,s:0

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