Category Archives: Bike Lane FAIL

If you’re designing a way for bikes to navigate a tough intersection, a great place to start is to ask bicyclists, right? Sounds great in theory but in practice, but you’ll find that bicyclists don’t always agree on what’s best.

Take this median path on El Monte Road, a high-speed four lane road that crosses under Interstate 280. At a local bicycle and pedestrian advisory committee meeting, one of the BPAC members proposed it as a good model for a redesign of a similar undercrossing just up the freeway. I strained to understand. Did he really think a narrow sidewalk would work for the packs of road riders that frequent this area? I mean, it’s so narrow that there’s even a “walk bike” sign. And the path is 1/2 mile long. No roadie would ever walk that far in their Sidis.

The reality is that few people actually walk their bikes on this path and it’s very useful for people who don’t want to ride on the roadway and deal with high-speed traffic merging on and off the freeway. While I’ve ridden on the roadway on weekly basis and have had little trouble with drivers, not everyone wants to ride like that. Ironically, the day I took these photos, a driver nearly right-hooked me in his impatience to get on the freeway.

So is this path good for bicyclists? Yes, provided the city ditches the “walk bike” sign and doesn’t expect all cyclists to use the median pathway. Bicyclists don’t always choose the same path and that’s OK by me.

Note: “No Bikes” photo from Greg McPheeters. More on the Los Altos Hills attempt to ban bikes is here.

Location: El Monte Road at Interstate 280, adjacent to Foothill College.

You see these bike racks at Mollie Stone’s Market? They’re lovely, aren’t they? They’re right next to the main entrance so they’re easy to find, and they’re sturdy ones that let you lock the frame, not just a wheel. The store owners obviously value bicyclists as customers, right? Yes, they do. But it wasn’t always this way.

Mollie Stone’s Market is located in the California Avenue business district in Palo Alto, a three block long, four lane street that’s been slated for a street makeover for years. The plan includes reducing it from four to two lanes with left turn lanes and bike lanes, but no reduction in street parking. Merchants feared the worst: “Traffic will be terrible!” “How will our customers get to our stores?” “Bikes are bad for business.”

That’s pretty much what a Mollie Stone’s co-owner said at a city council meeting. He even threatened that removing lanes could mean closing his store, an anchor for the business district.

What the co-owner didn’t count on was the reaction of his staff, who took him to task telling him how many of the store’s customers arrived by bike. He got the message and contacted volunteers at the Silicon Valley Bicycle Coalition‘s Palo Alto local team who advised him on what customers who arrive by bike want and need. The result was top tier bike parking and a steady stream of happy bike-riding customers.

The owner is now an advocate for bicycles to local businesses. In a press release co-owner David Bennett stated: “As more Palo Alto residents get around on their bikes, it’s vital that we have the infrastructure in place to support them. We wanted to make sure that we had the ideal setup, so we implemented all of the SVBC’s recommendations. We’re very excited to offer these additional racks to our Palo Alto community.”

Thank you Adina, Andrew, the rest of the Palo Alto team and SVBC for supporting everyday bicycling!

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Location: Mollie Stone’s Market, 164 S. California Avenue at Park Blvd, Palo Alto, California, USA

If you ride a bike on city streets you probably have encountered it: the traffic signal that rudely ignores you. So you wait for a car to arrive or drag your bike out of the lane and onto the sidewalk to push the pedestrian button. You complain to the city and they say they’ll fix it. Then one day six months later, on your same old commute home there it is–marking exactly where bikes need to wait to trip the signal. Patience is a virtue.

Location: Wright Avenue at N Shoreline Boulevard, Mountain View, California, USA.

When I was a young girl, almost all of us kids rode bikes all around the neighborhood while a few hotshots flew by us on motorized mini-bikes. So when cities created bicycle-and-walk-only trails and passageways, it made sense that they put up barriers to keep out the fast and loud motorized bikes and their hotshot riders.

But here it is, 40 years later and few kids ride mini-bikes. Yet the tightly-spaced gates remain, annoying people on bikes. Like me. I’m pretty good at weaving through gates, even on my big Dutch bike, but this pair on the south side of Palo Alto had me putting a foot down every time I passed through (and cussing to myself too).

I never expected the gates to be suddenly opened. A few weeks ago I was riding home from shopping trip to Palo Alto and they were completely gone, not just widened for easier access. Thank you, City of Palo Alto!

This unexpected improvement was timed perfectly for my latest project, a map of “secret passages” for a story on Bike Fun, my new blog for the Mountain View Voice. The Google map was surprisingly easy to create and in just four days the map already has over 150 views. I guess these passageways won’t be so secret for long.

Location: Between Duncan Place and Creekside Drive in Palo Alto, California, USA

What good is bike parking if you can’t find it? I’ve visited this small retail plaza in downtown Mountain View for over 15 years. With no bike rack on the sidewalk out front, I’ve always locked up to a sign post or tree. The other day I stopped at the dry cleaners and found a bike rack, hidden behind the azaleas. I don’t think it’s new.

If the dry cleaners had an entrance was on Castro Street like the other shops, instead of only an entrance from the back parking lot, I would have never found the inconspicuous rack facing Church Street. Who knew?

Location: Castro Street at Church Street, Mountain View, CA, USA.

A round of applause for the City of San Jose! In less than a week after reporting this bike path hazard, poof! the bollard is gone. Kudos go to Yves Zsutty and his San Jose parks team who manage the city’s extensive trail network. They investigated it immediately, determined the bollard wasn’t needed, sent a removal crew out quickly and kept us informed at every step through twitter. That’s service! (And it’s not the first time either)

Location: Guadalupe River Trail at Hwy 880, San Jose, California, USA.

They stand like sentries at trail entrances, guarding paths dedicated to people on foot or on bikes from the intrusion of motor vehicles. But bollards can be a hazard to more than cars when placed improperly, like this one that mysteriously appeared on the Guadalupe River Trail at the Hwy 880 undercrossing. Woe to the unsuspecting bicyclist rolling along at full speed who hits this iron guard standing in his or her path!

Location: Guadalupe River Trail at Hwy 880, San Jose, California, USA.

Little known fact: I have a degree in Computer Science and worked as a software developer for 12 years. It’s why I moved to Silicon Valley right after I graduated. As a software developer, I aspired to only create elegant solutions where the code flows naturally to meet the requirements for the software’s necessary functions.

As often as not, new requirements were thrown in after release that didn’t fit the existing structure. With no time to change the structure, I was forced to make a workaround, a kludge, a hack. It killed me every time because I knew that a kludge that solves the problem at hand has the potential to create bigger problems down the line.

Like this bike bridge, which provides a critical connection between Yahoo!, NetApp, Juniper Networks and Lockheed-Martin offices and their employees’ homes. A great idea, but it’s a hack in so many ways.

Yes, that’s a guard rail in the bike lane forcing you into traffic with a stop sign that drivers often blow through.

What bothers me most about this bridge is the wide, unused lawn on the other side of the road. If this were a freeway project, that land would have been appropriated to make a better interchange. Sadly, cities often shoe-horn bike projects to save money and everyone–on bikes, on foot, and in cars–are stuck with a hack.

Location: Borregas Bike Bridge at Moffett Park Drive, Sunnyvale, California, USA.

The America’s Cup is sailing into San Francisco this summer and the city is scrambling to get its waterfront ready. When Dick and I took our anniversary bay cruise on New Year’s Day we saw the preparations firsthand.

Construction spread from the piers across the sidewalk and into street. Since it was a holiday, no one was working and yet the bike lane was blocked needlessly. Couldn’t they move the signs closer to the curb before they went home? Such a small thing, but so considerate to the streams of people that ride there every day.

I was back in San Francisco the other week to meet with our ad agency and cruised the Embarcadero again. The workers were on duty, construction was in full swing, and the bike lanes were still out of order. And I was left wondering what the waterfront would look like after the America’s Cup sails away.

Location: The Embarcadero near Piers 9-29, San Francisco, California, USA.