Just Now, In Front

A truck just came by and quickly spray-painted this “sharrows” symbol on the street, right in front of our condo.

Sharrows–an amalgam of “share” and “arrows”–are used on streets without a designated bike lane. As you might guess, the intent is to get bikes and cars to share the road.

In Los Angeles, the Department of Transportation and bike activist folks have specified that the pointy part of the arrow is supposed to show the correct pathway of the bike–that is, cyclists are to try to ride down the middle of the arrows, and cars are to swerve away from cyclists, leaving at least three feet between car and bike.

Ha.

I don’t know if Montreal intends their sharrows to work the same way, but in L.A. it usually doesn’t happen. I know this firsthand because I took part in a DOT/Los Angeles County Bicycle Coalition study as a volunteer cyclist when L.A. County was collaborating with bike groups and experimenting with new cycling infrastructure in Santa Monica.

At rush hour, several of us volunteers rode our bikes three blocks through the heart of the Abbott Kinney Boulevard commercial district, each riding and returning to the starting point about a dozen times. We were instructed to aim our bikes carefully down the precise line indicated by the points of the newly-painted sharrows. DOT engineers and bike activists clocked the number, speed, and path of the cars during the test rides.

DOT also had hidden cameras in their truck so they could record and analyze whether drivers would share the road and swerve around cyclists as planned.

On that day, for the most part, they did not. Sharrows were pretty new in the city at that time, and maybe drivers just didn’t know what they were about. I’m pretty sure they still don’t.

Sharrows are also problematic in that they encourage cyclists to stay within the dreaded “door zone,” increasing the risk that a car door will knock them off their bikes and into traffic as a driver exits their vehicle. This is one of the leading causes of cyclist injuries and most bikers do their utmost to avoid “getting doored” when riding city streets.

Anyway: we have our own sharrows now right outside our door now! so maybe we’ll be able to see for ourselves if it makes any difference in road-sharing behavior. Maybe this is just the beginning of further cycling infrastructure improvements around here, which would be great, and much needed. Some Rosemont streets touted as preferred bike routes are so rutted and cracked, you feel like you’re riding through a quarry after an earthquake.

Speaking of which, Sylvain and I biked to the botanical garden again this past weekend and, on the way home, some droll old French guy on a bike tried to pick up on me. It’s beautiful, he said in French, and I responded in French, yes, it’s a beautiful day, and then he said, no, *you’re* beautiful in French, to which I responded that he needed an appointment with in eye doctor in French, and then I introduced him to my HUSBAND Sylvain, in French. Which didn’t faze him at all.

Though he was speaking rapidly and I didn’t understand everything he said to me at this point, I think he explained that he spent two hours a day riding his bike and he was seventy(something) years old, and that’s how you stay healthy.

And droll, apparently.

Anyway, Sylvain and I hope to get in a few more Bixi rides before it gets too cold. It’s starting to feel distinctly fall-ish, rather early in the year too, so we shall gather our sharrows and gardens and droll old Frenchmen whilst we may.