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Bike lanes generally suffer in Salem. They are second-class. They are not well maintained and roadway engineering and design often orphans them from other bike lanes.
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Debris from recent paving, gravel and sticky asphalt residue, also spins and blows from the auto travel lanes into the bike lane. The bike lane is the gutter. After the winter storms, the gravel remained for months last spring.
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One part of the message is indeed thrift. Street Services Supervisor Bruce Hildebrandt explains:
The paving on Commercial Street SE is routine maintenance where vehicular travel lanes were suffering from severe rutting and potholes. These conditions are hazardous to all traffic as drivers tend to "straddle" ruts or dodge potholes and occasionally intrude into bike lanes. These lane pulls are to simply restore the profile of the street for drainage and safe lanes.
Since the center median and the bike lanes were in good condition...the street did not qualify for nor need a complete overlay at this time. These lane pulls cost our budget only 20% to 40% compared to an overlay and last 5 to 8 years. This is interim maintenance until future funding and street deterioration qualifies this segment for a complete overlay.
As for sweeping, Hildebrandt adds, the "lanes are scheduled for sweeping either Sunday night or Monday night. We cannot sweep newly applied asphalt for a few days until the asphalt has cured."
The other part of the message is that cars are more important. Cars get shiny new duds, and bikes are left with still-servicable hand-me-downs. The movement of freight and essential services should remain critical. But the bulk of motorized travel is single-occupant vehicle travel, and these wasteful trips get rewarded.
If the city wants to promote bicycling, the city might consider the signal it is sending. The city might act more quickly to improve bicycling conditions, and be less swift to improve motoring conditions. What if bicyclists got smooth new asphalt and motorists were left with gravel and potholes? These are the conditions bicyclists experience in reverse, and they currently dissuade prospective bicyclists. Can more selective road repair be a pricing signal to discourage single-occupant vehicle trips?
In any event, whether it is in sweeping, maintenance, construction, and design, too often bike lanes are second-class citizens of the transportation infrastructure, disabled and disconnected, artificially kept from full membership in the transport economy.
4 comments:
Then there's the discussion the other day about why we can't have the bike lanes in between the curb and the row of parked cars (because the city has no way to sweep the lane) . . .
Seems like a not-impossible deal to use a golf cart with a sweeper attachment to get that done. It could certainly happen if the city cared.
The same center strip paving has recently been applied to Airport Rd between Mission and State Street, however, there are places where the bike lane is in serious disrepair and the argument that the bike lanes are in fine condition leaks out through those cracks!
There's a bike lane on Airport Rd between Mission and State?!
Thanks for the airport road info! If you see other crappy bike lanes out there, drop 'em in the comments. An inventory of facilities will be part of the TSP update, I believe, and any data we gather now will be helpful!
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