Comment by cassepipe
2 days ago
Ok for LEDs and your general point but for the bike lane situation you are kind of shooting yourself in the foot : It's either non-standard compliant bike lane, which is a problem, or it is standard compliant and then it means that the standard is a broad, inflexible set of rules dictated from the top which is either too complicated for people in charge of the implementation or leaves them no room to adapt to a special case... or probably do not incentivize the implementers to think about what they are doing, all of which is a also a problem.
Maybe they would rather not have bikers bombing onto the sidewalk at 20 mph when they are going to be sharing that space with pedestrians. A sharp turn is a good way to prevent that. I assume there are several "bike lane ends" signs here, though, which should be an indication to slow down.
Fair enough.
On a side note, I would personally avoid sharing the sidewalk with pedestrians, keep my speed and remain on the road. I know it's legal in my country to bike on (not high-speed) road even if there is a bike lane available. I'd rather share space with the plentiful, the cars, and have them slow down a bit, which cost them nothing, than bothering pedestrians.
Imagine if you were talking about a road doing this for no reason. The engineers care about how fast you can go in a car around town, not bikes. You can't argue bike lanes get the same amount of care/effort as roads.
Roads do this all the time "for no reason." Plenty of neighborhoods have very sharp curves to get drivers to slow down. This is one of many "traffic calming" techniques.
Also, I'm not sure where you got the idea that engineers don't care about the speeds of bikes (especially around pedestrians).
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Yes, the less sharp angle of the described bike-lane would imply that biker can get into the sidewalk in high speed without issue and harm a pedestrian easier.
Yeah, that's why when pedestrians have to cross where cars are that there is always a stop sign to make sure their high speed won't harm a pedestrian /sarcasm.
…we do put stop lights at pedestrian crossings on high-speed streets. They look like this: http://www.pedbikesafe.org/PEDSAFE/cm_images/PedHyb1.png