Friday, May 8, 2009

Support Sharrows


The LACBC has drafted a letter to the mayor in support of sharrows. These are chevrons painted in the middle of the rightmost lane that indicate that the lane should be shared with cyclists. Many cyclists (including me) prefer them to bike lanes. Most of the bike lanes in LA feature parked cars to the right and the always impending danger of driver-side doors suddenly opening into the bike lane.

Sharrows are all over Portland and San Francisco and working great in those cities. Here in LA County, however, the only sharrows to be found are in Pasadena. (And Westwood, apparently - the above image is from an la.streetsblog.org article on the sharrows recently painted on the UCLA campus.)

Sharrows are so cheap that there's really no excuse they aren't on every single right-hand lane in Los Angeles. All they do is indicate something that's already the law: that all vehicles must share the road and that cyclists may occupy the full lane when their safety requires it.

Here's the text for the petition:

http://lacbc.wordpress.com/

There's no form to fill out, you just have to copy the text into your own email client.

Let's show the mayor that quite a few people support a more bikeable LA.