Tucson’s first protected bike lane is scheduled to be completed before May 1.
The protected lane will be installed on St. Mary’s Road between I-10 and Church Avenue.
Tucson’s bike and pedestrian program manager Ann Chanecka said they will be using a type of bollard to create separation between the automobile lane and the shoulder.
The city is using a product called Bike Lane Delineators made by Impact Recovery Systems.
The plastic bollards have springs in the base in order to bend instead of break if a car does hit them.
Similar devices have been used along the Fourth Avenue Bike Boulevard in an attempt to prevent motorists from driving straight on the bikeway. Those, made by a different company, were destroyed fairly quickly.
According to Impact Recovery’s website their bollards include a five-year warranty.
Chanecka said the bollards will be placed about 40 feet apart on long stretches and closer together near driveways.
She stressed that this is a pilot and the city would determine if adjustments needed to be made in the future.
I can’t wait to check this out once it’s installed! Nice work, City!
Any info available on how left turns by bike will be facilitated? That’s the tough part there; I always want to head north as soon as possible once I’m east of the freeway.
@Suzanne With 40 feet of spacing, cyclists should be able to move left like before.
If you look way in the background on the right you can see 4 empty conventional bike racks near the street. Since they’re always empty they’d be great candidates for overflow bike parking for the Main Library patrons. It’s just a short walk. What about all those racks along the Aviation, bonus! That’s the secret to available bike parkinglocation, location, location.
I was going to make book here on tucson-velo on how long the new bollards at Speedway & 4th Ave would last, but I’m too late. A week or less would have been the winner. I was going to give them until graduation week end. One is still standing as of this writing, so the driver playing ‘traffic pins’ only got a spare.
[…] Tuscon’s first protected bike lane is scheduled to open May 1st. […]
[…] I pedaled over to it yesterday and shot a couple videos riding though the short section of bike lane separated by the bollards we wrote about last week. […]
MikeMcKisson Mike, I’m not worried about getting past the bollards– just the same problem I have now: I find St. Mary’s stressful to ride west of the interstate, as soon as I get east of it I want to turn left, since I’m almost always going north from there. It’s usually difficult to get across the lanes to make a left because of the curve, visibility, and velocity of cars coming thru the underpass. I just don’t feel like I’ll be seen, so I often get stuck w a i t i n g for a huge gap.