This is a chart from a recent study out of Portland State University about measuring perceived comfort for different types of bicycle facilities.
You can read the report and the methodology here, but this basically says that more people think they feel more comfortable in more protected bike infrastructure.
(One other interesting result were that age didn’t have much effect on perceived comfort.)
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I refuse to ride in an on-street bike lane for any reason, so I guess I’m not the only one. Although I think the north side greenway will be a positive thing, it ends in nothing more than on-street bike lanes on the south side, while connecting to off-road trails on the north.
Many of them are worse than nothing at all, like when they’re in the door zone. Those that dump in to a right turn lane can be problematic as well. For me it seems that pulling in to the traffic lane before this happens helps but can still anger drivers (though better than getting right hooked).
Columbus recently installed its first downtown bike lanes and they do just that: tell you to merge into 35 MPH traffic instead of continuing straight forward. I’ll take a bike lane going straight forward through a right-turn-only lane with added infrastructure (signage, bright green lane through the intersection, etc). I’ve ridden the street pictured below countless times with no bike infrastructure and I’d much prefer that to this.
http://www.columbusunderground.com/forums/topic/where-would-you-put-12-miles-of-bike-lanes-downtown/page/11/#post-1046784
Bike lane w/ parking = 1st Ave bike lanes or just a bike lane that’s next to parked cars in the middle of the street?
My read on the report suggests “Bike Lane With Parking” = bike lane with adjacent on-street parking…bike lane being between the travel lane and the parking.
They go into more detail later in the report with protected bike lanes, comparing different types of buffer. 1st Ave in downtown would have been considered in the report as a protected bike lane with parked cars as the buffer.
On that note, surprised Bill didn’t include the chart on perceived comfort of protected bike lanes with various types of buffers (“planters” had the best score).