Thursday, October 22, 2020

SCAN Floats Advisory Bike Lanes for High Street

Here's a pleasant note on social media. The neighborhood association around South Salem High School and Bush Park is talking more about bikeways. They're floating an idea for "advisory bike lanes" on High Street.

Concept: Advisory Lanes on High St
via FB

High Street really is a superior link to downtown, but because it is formally designated a "collector" street, one level up from a local, neighborhood street, and because it has a de facto function as a bypass for the Liberty/Commercial couplet, there is too much auto through-travel on it. But since the bypass is ostensibly discouraged, the City should be bolder about installing a diverter at Cross, Lincoln, or Howard and making it for local traffic only. A set of advisory bike lanes could help very much with this and also make for a much pleasanter bike route connecting to downtown.

It would be very nice to have more conversation about how we really want High Street to function, and how we might make design changes to support that function. There is a real disjunction right now between the actual bypass function and the stated discouragement of it. We should have better alignment on design and intent.

The concept for Superior Street is also interesting, but since that is such a hill, it would likely serve fewer people, and in a world of limited resources other streets likely have stronger claims to design changes.

Previously on High Street and other routes in SCAN:

More on Advisory Bike Lanes:

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