Bike Boulevards in Berkeley

Here's yet another video that makes me question my decision to live in Columbus, Ohio... Berkeley, California has instituted a series of Bike Boulevards which are streets that favor bikes and pedestrian traffic by design.

This strikes me as the perfect traffic pattern to have in Clintonville, German Village, and other residential areas of the city.

Comments

  1. Wow, thanks for sharing! I've only seen this stuff in person, the video is new to me. Milvia is about 40% of my daily commute and Dave is one of the fine people manning the bicycle storage in the train station that I trust to keep an eye on my bike while I'm at work.

    Could you find a group of cyclists that could organize and ask for one east/west and one north/south street to be re-striped for bicycle priority as an experiment?

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  2. You're lucky to be out there where this sort of thing is taking hold. I found a link for the Bicycle-Friendly Berkeley Coalition - maybe that's what you're looking for?

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  3. No, I meant for you guys to ask the cities in your area for bike lanes or boulevards. The groups around here like BFBC even got Berkeley and Albany to re-stripe a main thoroughfare that runs from I-580 to the Berkeley hills from two lanes in each direction to one car lane and bike lane in each direction and a center turn lane for both directions to use.

    Personally, I don't understand it when there are side streets and a slower speed main commerce street on either side, but it showed what organization can do. The studies suggest that pedestrians are safer crossing now, and cyclists now have lots of space while traffic impact is not great. I'm not convinced regarding traffic impact, though. It sure seems like a lot more time spent getting from one end to another, but I don't drive much and couldn't care less.

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  4. Ah... okay, that makes more sense. Duh...

    I know of a couple of streets that could be used going east-west. I'm going to assume that the city is going to nix the idea of setting any of the north-south streets into a bike boulevard or the like as the trails we do have in town mostly run north-south already.

    Unfortunately, my attempts to contact the Central Ohio Bicycle Advocacy Coalition have been for naught to date... I'm not even sure the group still exists as such. There is another group just starting up on Earth Day, we'll see how that works.

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