Progress

      I rode downtown to check out our latest bike lanes.  Since the highway through town has been given back to the city by the state, some changes are occurring.  The first is the calming of traffic on Michigan Ave in preparation to transform it from a multi-lane one way to a two way street.  While the two way street conversion is still in the future, the city began by removing a lane and narrowing the existing.  They did the right thing with the left over asphalt,

 

and striped it to be a cycle track for the length of the street.  It's going to be a great addition to the community and probably the busiest cycle infrastructure in town. I even spotted some very stylish new bike racks along the route which leads past restaurants brew pubs, the mall and shops.  They moved parking spaces from the curb and placed them on the traffic side of the lane (good move).  Now there are several signaled intersections where a bike signal will be needed in the signal sequence.  We really need the cyclists out of the way before cars take the territory.

     Apparently we ran out of real estate.  On the eastern few blocks of the street, the cycle track narrows to a single lane.  Hmm, not sure how that's going to fit in the grand scheme of things, but I'm not bitching.  It's a huge improvement and I met several smiling people on cycles on my first trip through.  

     Of course this brought out the bike haters in conversations and social media.  It's important when talking to those narrow minded buffoons, that they are told the change was made to reduce traffic speed, volume, crashes, injury and death.  After making the traffic lane changes, the engineers are left with extra asphalt which they judiciously turned over to the bicyclists to keep them out of everybody's way, and that the city did not spend a bunch of money to patronize cyclists.   The changes are intended entirely to improve the safety of motorists,  bikers are just an afterthought.  You can't expect them to understand, but at least tell them.