Driving on Divide Avenue yesterday I noticed people swerving around an obstruction in the road.  I rolled up on it myself and noticed that the problem was one of those “bike lane” markings protruding into the driving lane, freshly painted and marked with a cone.  I think these are a bad idea in the first place, but they’re a real head-scratcher when found in places like this.

Aside from mixing bike traffic with motor vehicle traffic in an unsafe manner, these markings are often placed in areas where that merging can’t possible work well.  Case in point: this is a hundred feet or so down the road from the previous photo.  Traffic on Divide is pushed into two lanes to provide a left turn lane at 4th Street.  Where’s the room for the cyclist here?  This bottleneck seems dangerous to me.

If people have to cross the center line to get around the cone and paint, are they going to do the same to avoid a cyclist?  That’s better than hitting the guy on the bike, sure…but still not a desirable result on a busy street.

This is just one more example of how some of the starry-eyed “progressive” ideas of our community leaders don’t always translate into real world solutions.  If I find myself biking this area, I’ll just stay on the sidewalk, thanks.