One Road, Many Users
I’m back from Dallas and have much to share about that. In the meantime, I want to point you to an excellent post by John Allen.
Categorizing Vehicles and Users: Mr. Allen lists all the different types of human-powered vehicles, motorized vehicles and animal-powered vehicles and shows how the overlap in operating characterisitcs makes segregating vehicle types a fool’s errand.
My grandfather in Austria had a Fiaker business in Salzburg which was a horse-drawn carriage that gave tourists rides around the narrow often car congested streets of the old town. He also had built his own wooden trailer that he towed behind an old classic bike with a hitch. This trailer and bike also shared the narrow roads with cars.
Mr. Allen left out mentally disabled people on bicycles and tricycles. In my parent’s neighorhood in Winter Park Pines (where Cady Way crosses through) there are 2 mentally disabled men on bicycles and 1 mentally disabled woman that rides around on a trike with a huge umbrella over it. All 3, with few exceptions, ride on the sidewalks.
Shared-use paths offer limited access to most destinations (and at night are often closed down) and so the increased load on shared-use paths due to their construction forces those who use those paths to also traffic on roads/streets/highways that are primarily intended for cars/trucks/buses/motorcycles and mopeds in order for the shared-path users to reach their ultimate destinations and return home. Perhaps there should be 2 sets of laws dictating bike-use on shared-use paths and roads/streets/highways?
Today at 3pm I was driving west on Cady Way from my parent’s house to my rental when I ran into backed up traffic in both directions because of parents picking up their children from Brookshire Elementary. Behind me was a fairly new white Nissan SUV that had taken up about half of the bicycle lane to its right because it was looking for a hole so that it could go around traffic (I got a ticket for this in Gainesville). Ahead were 2 young boys coming in the opposite direction in the same bicycle lane on their BMX bikes. Even after the boys passed and we passed Brookshire, the white Nissan SUV continued to occupy the bicycle lane.