This fall should see the completion of a trio of bike infrastructure projects – new lanes are planned for the Near East Side; enhancements are on tap for the bike lanes installed last year on Long and Spring streets downtown; and work will be beginning soon on the much-anticipated Fourth and Third/Summit street bike lanes, which will extend north to Hudson street and include a 1.4-mile long protected lane.
On Long and Spring, work is scheduled to begin soon on re-striping the lanes, adding in a two-foot buffer zone between bikes and the “door zone” of parked cars, and painting five “queue boxes” designed to make it easier for cyclists to turn left off of Spring Street. The lanes will run from one side of downtown to the other; on Long Street from Neil Avenue to Hamilton Avenue, and on Spring Street from Marconi Boulevard to Hamilton Avenue. The queue boxes will be at Third Street, Grant Avenue, Cleveland Avenue, Lester Drive and Elijah Pierce Avenue.
The new Near East Side bike lanes are on Ohio and Champion avenues. They will extend from I-70 East to Mt Vernon Avenue, connecting up with existing lanes and sharrows on those streets that run south of the freeway.
Rick Tilton of the Department of Public Service said that the city is hoping to complete all three projects by October, although the queue boxes on Spring may be pushed back since they will not be painted until the resurfacing and installation of bike lanes on Third and Fourth streets is completed.
When CU met with the city last fall to discuss the project on Fourth and Summit/Third streets – which will also include queue boxes – city engineer Daniel Moorhead explained the thinking behind them; “when you have bike lanes, the bikes are all the way on the right side, and if you want to turn left, you’re normally stuck with having to merge into traffic and cross over several lanes…but with a queue box you take advantage of space at intersections that isn’t being used to come across and wait for the cross-signal to turn green.”
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