Market Street Bike Lane
The Market Street repaving/bike lane update is almost done, but based on the poor conditions of other new bike lanes in the city I am not optimistic it is going to be very usable. I submitted a RTKL request to PennDOT about this because I want to know why state/local government is unable to design and implement such a basic thing and have it work.
I realize government bureaucrats get a lot of unfair criticism that would be better directed at our elected officials. There’s a ton of different stuff going on to coordinate something like this big repaving project! Rights of way for electric, water, making sure there’s space for bus stops, etc - it’s a huge project to coordinate across several agencies/offices. Seeing these emails made it clear how complex the logistics are. But City Council still deserves all the blame for failing to push for better infrastructure.
Here are some interesting emails I got:
interesting comment about liability… my gut reaction is that “defective bikeway design” does not fall into one of the exceptions to the commonwealth’s sovereign immunity, but maybe someone could argue it is a “defect of the realty”? does that work against commonwealth agencies for road design? is the state the driving force behind philly’s protected bike lanes? did the city want to just do painted bike lanes and keep more parking spots??!
the city is responsible for maintaining the Market Street bike lane, so this probably won’t end well…
#optics
Here are the full 900 pages of emails PennDOT gave me:
Theoretically, one will able to ride in protected lanes for the majority of a trip from West Philly to City Hall: Chestnut Street, north on 22nd Street, and eastbound on Market Street:
This works in theory only. The Chestnut Street bike lane is a metaphorical dumpster fire, often with literal dumpsters blocking it. The bike lane disappears whenever there is a construction site nearby. And there are a bunch of places where cars make left turns through the bike lane with no apparent signal timing, so you have to be on high alert for that.
44th and Chestnut
chestnut
4200 block of Chestnut
Market Street bike lane
I am literally the only person who uses the bike room in my 39-floor office building. I wonder why???