Sparks Street

Let’s have a look at Huron Avenue in Cambridge, Massachusetts as it crosses Sparks Street and Royal
Avenue.This stretch is downhill right to left in the overhead view. The buffer is on the wrong side of the bike lane, placing it in the door zone. Faster bicyclists can travel as fast or nearly as fast as cars here, and do best to merge out into the stream of motor traffic. This also improves sight distance for motorists who might (horrors!) have to slow a little to follow a bicyclist.

And the green-painted crossing of Sparks Street is right-hook territory. Bicyclists need to be extra-careful there, look over their shoulder and preferably merge left to block a right-turning motorist or let that motorist pass on the right.

I see here a retrofit to a 1950’s-design street in an attempt to accommodate bicyclists of all ages and abilities. The hope is that motorists will develop x-ray vision to avoid dooring (on a downhill right-hand curve where they can’t see the bicyclists approaching at speed, hidden by the parked cars behind), and where bicyclists are led into the right-hook zone at Sparks Street in the expectation that all right-turning motorists will yield.

Is it actually possible to design safely for all ages and abilities here? That would require above all a major behavior change by motorists, though a speed hump could help by slowing motor traffic. Also, removing parking spaces would make a big improvement, but parking spaces are sacred to residents and business owners, and illegal parking is tolerated as a lightly-taken sin. Where the parking is on the downhill side, moving it to the uphill side, which also has better sight lines, would reduce the dooring risk.

Attempting to bring about bicycling accessible to all using paint first, without the public will to step up enforcement, gets things backwards. I’ve made my suggestions about how to ride safely here until a major behavior change happens (with autonomous vehicles — in a decade or three).