I spent some time this weekend lending a modest amount of labor to the new Yellow Bike Project headquarters.
The old headquarters was on property that became subsumed within the swelling fiasco of the Mueller development. For a number of months now YBP has operated out of a series of cargo shipping containers secreted about town.
The new facility looks like it’ll be pretty nice. It’s far out on the East Side, at 12th and Webberville, but the City of Austin has made a lot of improvements on the bike lane situation in the past few months. There’s now a bike lane on 12th street for almost its entire length.
Supposedly this is a response to the municipal ordinance mandating a 3-foot passing distance. (Apparently the cops haven’t given any tickets for this, even when bicyclists get run over.)
A new feature on roads too narrow for a discrete bike lane is the "sharrow."
The theory is this gives bikes visual permission to appropriate an entire lane. Julia (my food-frakking deputy) is of the opinion that these are superior to bike lanes because it doesn’t give motorists the impression that bikes need to be segregated from traffic.
I like them too, because I believe it gives me the impression that I shouldn’t be segregated from traffic. They put a sharrow lane on 51st, which is the street I took whenever I had to bike out to Home Depot or Target (or the Torta Bus, but more on that later). In the past, I tried biking in one corner of the right lane, and cars were constantly straddling the dotted line and trying to share the lane with me.
Now I go right down the goddamn middle, riding straight over the peaks of the chevrons.
I still look over my shoulder to make sure that I’m not going to get run over by someone too busy texting on their iPad to pay attention to driving their SUV, but so far no one has challenged my lane supremacy.
