The VTA has produced their revised Technical Guidelines for bike facilities. It is supposed to promote “best practices” for bike facilities in Santa Clara County.
The document is all well and good — if the year were 1999. For a year 2012 publication, it looks rather dated. Perhaps they just dusted off the 1999 version?
For example, here is the recommended design for accommodating bicycles through an expressway interchange with a merging/auxiliary lane:
Does that look like a fun place to ride a bike? Now compare to how the Dutch might design this:
If you look carefully at the signal head, you will see that cars wanting to enter the ramp have a red arrow, while the cycle path has a green “bike” light. Much safer and less confusing — for all road users.
Even better: that right-turn arrow for automobiles can serve as a ramp metering signal so as to moderate the flow of traffic onto the freeway. All over the Bay Area, the MTC has been installing ramp metering signals. Problem is, they are being installed in the wrong location.
I have mixed feelings. Cyclists confined (and they will be, don’t give me any of that “you’ll still have the choice to play in the street with cars if you like” jive) to a segregated side path with pedestrians will be subject to not one but two “beg and wait” light cycles (one across the on-ramp, another across the off-ramp) while motor vehicle traffic will pass straight through without stopping, having no conflict with turning or merging traffic.
Note also that our “wrong location” metering lights use the ramps to and from the freeway lanes as holding buffers; move that function to a traffic light on the crossing local street and you’ll find that the traffic engineering boys want a couple hundred extra lane-metres of asphalted hell local road widening on the “local” street as for storing idling cars. Be careful what you ask for.
Santa Clara County: is there any solution other than bulldozing everything that isn’t a park and starting over? (Perhaps skipping the “starting over” part.)
Richard,
This is the usual argument over sidepaths. Historically, US road planners have done such a bad job with sidepaths, that cycle advocates believe we should avoid them at all costs — because the local agency will invariably screw it up. Incompetence is its own reward.
[...] Systemic Failure: New VTA Guidelines for Bicycle Facilities are a Step Backward [...]
Doesn’t the design you recommend mirror the Fell/Masonic issue in SF, with the red left turn arrow and green bike light on the path (which is on the left of Fell). Motorists have yet to figure it out, there have been a few collisions and a lot of red light tickets.
I am all for forcing a near stop with a 90 degree turn. Even better is to get ride of the merge lane completely on the secondary road.
Current Federal and California road design standards forces the cyclist to merge with fast traffic in merge zones. The VTA design puts the merge onus (correctly) on the merging traffic, not on the cyclist. We already have a handful of interchanges like that in the South Bay, and they’re vastly preferable to the standard merge zones that we have on, for example, most Hwy 101 bridges.
The “Dutch design” is the de fact practice for “folk” cyclists in the South Bay. Just watch how many people cross Hwy 101 on Willow, for example, or I-280 on Saratoga. They’ll get on the sidewalk (if they’re not already there), then stop and wait for a break in traffic where the sidewalk crosses the offramp / onramp. The City of Campbell has even posted a sign exempting that city’s sidewalk riding ban for Hamilton over Highway 17 http://www.flickr.com/photos/bike/5045787045/