Lineberry Alliance Blogs

I was reading an article on the Raleigh Public Record summarizing some of the efforts on Raleigh’s approach to improving bike amenities throughout the city, ‘Sharrows’ to make city more bike-friendly, when I thought about our part of town. I briefly mentioned my vision for sharrows on Lineberry Drive in this article, but didn’t really take the time to articulate where or why.

The Raleigh Public Record article called sharrows a “9-foot-long reminder to share the road.” And that is what my vision for Linberry Drive would accomplish.

Example of a sharrow, Source: http://streetswiki.wikispaces.com/Sharrow

Imagine one day in the future, you’re driving down Lineberry Drive and you see a marking, painted on the right hand side of the rode with a bike and an arrow going with the flow of traffic. You won’t have to swurve to avoid it, but it reminds you that if a cyclist were peddling up and down the hills of Lineberry Drive, that’s where they should be. The marking also reminds bikers that when taking to the rode, they should stay on the right-hand side of the rode and ride with the flow of traffic.

I think sharrows are a good solution for Lineberry Drive, the main collector street in our neighborhood, for several reasons.

1. Lineberry Drive, between Trailwood Drive and Sierra Drive is already an existing bike route
2. There is no onstreet parking allowed between Trailwood Drive and Sierra Drive
3. The street is wide enough to suppor sharrows
4. We have a decent amount of people biking in the area

The street is probably wide enough to support a striped bike lane, but I think sharrows are a better solution. We have numerous bus stops along Linneberry Drive, and sharrows would still allow the bus to pull over without interferring with the bike route.

While Lineberry Drive isn’t on the immediate plan to get sharrows, I plan to continue my lobbying efforts for this. That means I’ll need your help. So if you think this would be a nice improvement for our area, contact your city counclor and Jennifer Baldwin, Raleigh’s bicycle and pedestrian coordinator, and let them know about this solution. It’s one of those amenties that could help differentiate our neighborhood from others, and attract more families to our community.

Tags: bike plan, bikes, community, growth, improvements, planning, raleigh, sharrow, transportation_plan

This entry was posted on Friday, August 6th, 2010 at 7:39 am and is filed under DDNA, Lineberry Alliance, Raleigh City Council, Transportation. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.