After failing to meet a quorum, the Tucson Bicycle Advisory Committee canceled their monthly meeting last night.
In the past, the BAC has taken one summer month off. This year the BAC took July off. The last official meeting was in June.
Tom Thivener, the City of Tucson’s bike and pedestrian manager, said the last time he could remember the BAC not meeting a quorum was his first meeting as the bike and pedestrian program manager more than five years ago.
Despite the official cancellation of the meeting, several BAC members and officials continued with a presentation of photos and information about innovative bicycle infrastructure they encountered around the world during their summer vacations.
The presenters showed images from Spain, France, Denmark, Sweden, Canada, Japan, South Korea and more.
Here are a few images from the presentation:
My favorite was the picture of the ‘bikes’ may use full lane sign in Boston.
BTW- I’m finding cars are not giving 3 feet to cyclists on the new sharrows on University. They don’t want to cross the yellow line of the left turn lane, which has admittedly been ‘ticketed’ into driver’s psyche. The solid yellow line would indicate ‘do not cross to pass’ normally and I can easily envision Tucson cops handing out tickets for doing so to go around bikes. Legal or not hardly makes any difference if drivers won’t do it. So, is that left turn lane really necessary? It has been done away with in the western sections of University.
I guess it was just too hot to ride over to the meeting.
I’ve been noticing a lot of riders having some trouble with the heat in other areas also. They’ve been riding 3 and four across, so drivers are unable to give them the needed 3 feet without running all other traffic off the opposite lanes of the street in order to get around.
Weird.
So glad I found this comment! I ride this section of University several times a day and I’ve found the exact same thing every time I ride it. I now well within the door zone because I’m so sick of cars trying to pass me 2 feet away so they don’t cross the solid yellow line (which to their credit, usually means don’t cross!). And it doesn’t help that there are always a number of cars parked several feet away from the curb that I have to avoid (which parkwise doesn’t seem to care about, despite their ticketing for all sorts of obscure parking violations). Two-way left turn lanes make sense on arterials like Speedway or Campbell, but not on streets with as little traffic volume as University or 4th Avenue. I can see why they have it where the trolley tracks are, but west of 4th Avenue it doesn’t really make sense at all.
Does anyone know who I can contact about this? For one of Tucson’s most popular bike routes, it is really unpleasant to ride.