What would make good routes for Sharrows?

Atlanta has an opportunity to be at the forefront of cycling. Although we're not banning automobiles from all surface streets just yet, there are only a handful of municipalities in the US that are considering sharrows.

What are these innovative lane markings for cyclists?

The Wikipedia article for Shared lane marking (or sharrows) describes sharrows as markings on a road where the lane is too narrow for a bike lane or the bike lane would put cyclists in the "door zone" of parked cars. They indicate the location on the pavement where cyclists are expected to travel (typically about where the right wheel of a motor vehicle would be).

The intent is to mark favorable bike routes and help both motorists and cyclists understand the best lane position for a cyclist to maintain when the lane isn't suitable for bike lanes. Atlanta has a number of good roads for cyclists that are a little narrow for bike lanes. Sharrows are the proposed way to indicate those routes.

I had put together some criteria for choosing appropriate roads in Atlanta that would be suitable for an initial set of sharrows:

• Minor thoroughfare with substantial, but not heavy traffic;
  
• Single travel lane too narrow for bike lanes;
  
• On-street parking;
  
• Intersects with other facilities (planned or actual).
  

For initial selections, the following criteria will improve the chances of acceptance by both motorists and cyclists:

• Already has substantial bike traffic;
  
• High visibility;
  
• Pleasant route regardless of what it connects. In other words, the route can be its own cycling destination.
  

It was several months ago that I posted about sharrows. Since then, the Atlanta Bicycle Coalition has started talking with the City of Atlanta about a pilot program to introduce sharrows within the city. Starting with the criteria above, we've proposed a few routes:



This website allows browsing the map and getting more detail about the routes. The website will be updated as we generate more proposals for routes.

I'm interested in hearing your suggestions for either routes or criteria for selecting a route. The routes listed are examples we'd like to expand upon.

Contributing Commuting Routes to a Visual Catalog

I've added a big step forward with the ability for others to add their routes to the visual catalog. Routes in bikely.com routes may be added directly. Leave a comment if you've got a route in a different tool if you'd like me to upload your route.

These are the steps for adding your route from Bikely.com:

1. If you're using Firefox, drag the following link to the Bookmark Toolbar. If you're using IE, right-click the following link and "Add to Favorites ...". IE will prompt you asking if the link is safe because it contains the javascript for saving the bikely route. You'll click on this bookmark later to save the bikely.com route that is being displayed (Add to Catalog).
   
2. Visit the bikely.com page that displays the route you want to add to the catalog.
   
3. Click on the bookmark and your route is saved to the catalog. The browser then shows the complete catalog.
   
4. You may add as many as you like.
   

You can also view the current catalog without adding a new route.

This is being published on the Facebook page "Bike Commuters of Atlanta" so routes for bicycle commutes in Atlanta would certainly be preferred, but it would be good to see other utility cycling routes. I plan to add a second catalog of routes for recreational and group rides. Who knows, if this takes off, I may add more categories, but I'd like to start with commuting and utility routes.

There's a performance reason for starting with this type of catalog. Commuting and utility routes are generally much shorter and load much faster. When the catalog has long routes (50+ miles), the performance is sluggish. If your commute is 50 miles however, I'd like to see it in here.

Steps toward a Route Catalog

There are several good mapping tools for bike routes, but I haven't found any that allowed maintaining and viewing a catalog of routes on a single map. I'm a nerd, so it made sense that I should try to assemble my own.

This simple catalog shows the most recent bikely.com routes for Atlanta. It reads the RSS feed from bikely.com to find the list of routes, then downloads the routes from bikely.com to display on a Google Map.



The URL also takes a 'user' parameter, so the URL http://routes.cycling.jettmarks.com/showRoutes.html?user=jett will show just the routes that I've recently added. This works for any user in bikely.com, but at this time, I haven't written the code to adjust the map location or zoom level to match the routes that are loaded. (Like a house, applications always have a list of improvements to be made.)

The Route Less Traveled

 

For those learning how to get around on a bike, choosing an appropriate route means thinking outside the box. The box with four wheels, that is.

Even for those who have been riding for years, great pleasure comes from finding the little known routes, paths, and the occasional suspension foot bridge. This bridge is barely wide enough to walk a bicycle across and I like it that way.

This bikely route crosses this foot bridge approximately 3.5 miles into the route.