Once upon a time, sharrows might have seemed like a good idea for special situations. But now they are a way for communities to do “pretend” bike plans. Just stripe a bunch of sharrows on streets and voila! we have a bike network — without having to make messy political compromises on parking and lane removal. A great way for city councils to pretend to care about bicycling, without actually accomplishing anything.
For example, here is a map Alhambra’s proposed bike “plan“. As you can see, it consists almost entirely of Class III routes:
Bike advocates are correct in describing this as the worst kind of 1970’s bike planning:
Vincent Chang, co-founder of Bike SGV, said for local bikers, the draft plan came up short. It doesn’t have enough physical bike lanes, he said, and misses major streets like Fremont Avenue and Valley Boulevard altogether.
“I think it definitely needs a little more work,” Chang said. “To me it seems that this plan as it stands right now it’s not really effective, it would have been a plan in the 70s or something like that. It’s just really disappointing to be frank.”
Another example is Oklahoma City. Their plan will “stripe” some 200 miles of “bikeways”. You may think 200 miles of bikeways is awesome — but note that I put the words stripe and bikeways in quotes. That 200 miles of bikeways is all Class III infrastructure, with no special bike accommodation:
OKLAHOMA CITY — The first of more than 200 miles of bike routes, including shared lanes or “sharrow” bike lanes, are being installed in Oklahoma City. The sharrows are pavement markings which, along with new signage marking the routes, remind motorists to share the road with bicyclists and convey that the street is a preferred bike route. They are different from bike lanes because they do not allocate space just for the cyclist.
“Sharrows are being installed on streets like Hefner Road and NW 19th Street that are popular with bicyclists, but are too narrow for conventional bike lanes,” said transportation planner Randall Entz. “When they are installed downtown as a part of Project 180 renovations, they will also help to keep cyclist out of the door swing zones of parked cars.”
Here is a view of Hefner Rd. How can anyone seriously argue this road is too narrow for bike lanes?
Systemic Failure 
I excluded sharrows and “recommended routes” from my Chicago Bike Map app because it only shows infrastructure.
http://www.offlinebikemap.com/2012/why-the-app-doesnt-show-recommended-routes/
The City’s printed bike map shows TONS of these which makes it look like Chicago has a glorious network. Remove them and you see gaps, tons of them.
The most awesome thing in the Alhambra plan is the sole north-south route with bike lanes, which has two sections of 1/3 mile of lanes, alternating with sharrow sections. Because the thing that helps increase bike safety is unpredictable behaviour and weaving into and out of traffic repeatedly.
On the bright side, there are so many roads with sharrows that nobody will notice any of them. If all your roads are marked, none of your roads are marked.
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While the above example obviously doesn’t illustrate it, in many places there is a conflict between space for buses and space for bikes. When roads get squeezed down to one lane in direction buses often get delayed in congestion. Beyond the problems for the bus passengers, fewer people ride the bus, leading to more auto traffic, exactly the opposite of what cyclists want. When lanes get squeezed down below 11 feet, safe and reliable bus operation is compromised.
So the alternatives in that type of situation are A) Put in a bike lane and screw the buses (and their usually larger number of users); B) Provide no bike facility; C) Put in a sharrow. Your call.
Good post. SLMs are becoming the default “infrastructure” for the reasons you noted. It is the lazy, non-controversial approach that doesn’t inconvenience anyone.
That said, Hefner, as configured isn’t wide enough for bike lanes, unless you want sub-standard, narrow bike lanes, which are even worse than a glut of sharrows. The real question is; does Hefner need a 5-lane cross section? I know nothing about the area, so I don’t know, but it appears to be the classic arterial that has been built to satisfy peak-hour capacity, which is a bad way to engineer roads.
[…] are not a bike plan https://systemicfailure.wordpress.com/2012/11/22/sharrows-are-not-a-bike-plan/ … says Systemic […]
I’ve complained about this very thing for some time where I live. To me, Sharrows are an ‘after thought’ and I’m tired of being treated as such. Sharrows aren’t understood by the average bike ride and certainly not to the drivers. The average mom with child won’t feel any safer with a burned symbol on the road as oppose to nothing burned in the road. A smart designed bike lane is what will get those who want to ride but are concerned about their safety, to ride.
Thanks for posting this.
Excellent blog post. This is absolutely correct. Sharrows are a “cop out” by city officials too timid to reallocate street space from cars to bikes. Many streets slated for “sharrows” have plenty of room for bike lanes, or even cycle tracks, but you’d have to remove on-street automobile parking. So there you have it: for too many cities, parked cars are more important than people on bikes.
I elaborate on this point in my recent critique of Pasadena’s bike plan (which also relies too heavily on sharrows and Class III “bike routes).
http://boyonabike.wordpress.com/2012/07/02/pasadena-bike-plan/
Good call on the limited effectiveness of Sharrows. Yes they are an excellent tool in certain low-traffic situations but they shouldn’t be used as a cop-out on busier roads, like essentially useless “Share the Road” signs . Where I’ve seen Sharrows used on narrow urban roads with moderately high traffic and 25mph speed limits, all the bicyclists are on the sidewalk.
As your blog name bluntly states – Systematic Failure.
When you can write a post entitled “Bike lanes are not a bike plan,” we’ll have made progress.
[…] L.A.-based Bicycle Fixation offers their own 2013 calendar. Brewcyclers will lead a New Years ride to L.A.’s Golden Road Brewing on January 5th. Santa Monica will host the city’s first ever Family Bike Fest this Saturday. The CORBA 25th Anniversary Ride and Mingle group ride has been rescheduled for December 15th. Installing sharrows is not a bike plan. […]
What is particularly telling in the map you provided are all the Class II bike lanes shown, pointing from outside communities into Alhambra, which mysteriously dissolve at the borders into Class III sharrows. So no, it’s not about road width, it’s about priorities.
Doing a quick tour via Google Streetview, it looks like a lot of neighborhood streets, single family homes with driveways and multi-car garages. Then, in the commercial areas they have on-street parking next to giant parking lots. Why on earth is curbside parking considered such a necessity here? Beyond that, it looks like in some of these cases the neighborhood streets are already wide enough, so I wouldn’t be surprised it they could fit in 10 foot lanes next to 6 foot bike lanes and 8 foot parking zones (my preferred minimum).
Seriously, take a look at the Streetview pictures for South Almansor Street around Martha Baldwin Elementary. All of those drivers are either picking up kids or parked at the curb, waiting to pick them up. Take out the curbside parking, put in some wide, buffered bike lanes, and you’ve got a healthy, kid and family friendly way to get to school that would take a decent chunk of those cars off the street, making it all that much safer in turn.
[…] Sharrows are not a bike plan. […]
I think of sharrows as a visual reminder for motorists that they need to share the road with bicycles and as such, I appreciate them. They are not bicycle specific infrastructure. I will ride on almost any road but if my kids can’t safely ride on it- it isn’t bicycle infrastructure.
[…] Sharrows Are Not A Bike Plan « Systemic Failure […]
Blech. We use sharrows on narrow two-lane (one each way, *maybe* one parking lane each way) streets where traffic is already going at bicycle speed for the most part. This use of sharrows is… not that.
[…] efficacy of sharrows is a topic of debate. But if a street is deemed too narrow for bike lanes, yet wide enough for two […]
[…] Sharrows are not a bike plan. […]
[…] seem like an attractive and easy option but all too often they are used as a cop-out (See: Sharrows are not a bike plan). Unfortunately traffic on most of the streets where the sharrows were installed is very busy, […]