Illustration: Bond Street Sharrow Treatment
One traffic control device innovation that is being used with a degree of success in North America is the shared land marking or “Sharrow”. The following describes the use of sharrows in a bicycle network and considers their potential application in Auckland. The Sharrow like any bike facility is a tool to use under particular circumstances. It is NOT meant as a replacement for standard bike lanes. Generally, the Sharrow can be used to achieve the following:
- help to direct riders into a safer position outside of the door zone,
- help to alert drivers of the presence of cyclists in the street and also reinforces their right to take a safe position in the lane,
- fill gaps in networks between more formalised facilities such as conventional lanes, trails, or tracks; and
- provide wayfinding assistance.
Sharrows are appropriate to use for a variety of roadway configurations, but most importantly should be only considered on streets with slower speeds (less than 50k/ph). Here are two examples that may be appropriate around central Auckland.
Bike Network Connecting Street: Bond Street
Bond Street serves as an important link to the cbd from first and second ring suburbs. Since it is a bridge, it is one of those key segments that can’t be avoided (and must be considered in a any network design). A sharrow treatment in this location would help to link the bus/bike route along Sandringham Rd to the one on Great North Rd.
On the ground the sharrows would move cyclists into a shared lane position removing the door-zone threat. Generally, hills like this would get sharrows on the downhill side and bike lanes on the uphill side. Here’s how sharrows might be used:
On the Arch Hill side it gets very narrow near the top end. Sharrows on the downhill side could help to position cyclists into a mixing position outside of the door zone. Downhill speed of motorists would be a concern here. It would be easier to implement the sharrow on the Kingsland downhill side. There is much more room, though travel speeds are again a concern. Closer to the bridge the sharrows could assume a more lane-side position but help to direct riders around the precipitous drainage grates.
A particular concern here is the speed of vehicles. The posted speed limit should be 40 k/ph and a general tightening of the lanes along here should be conducted to achieve this. The sharrow treatment may help. The uphill sides going up both directions should have a bike lane.
Residential Street: Sharrows, lane markings removed, circlet added
Neighbourhood Street: Paice Ave
Imagine an alternative to a busy arterial but instead of random signs posted on streetlights to indicate the network path there are prominent indications on the road surface at regular intervals. This would also work for local streets that serve as de facto network links such as Paice Ave in Sandringham which links the Dominion Rd and Sandringham Rd bus/bikeways. Something like this may also to help the overall condition of the streets for other users since it may have a traffic calming effect. This treatment highlights the insanity of having a default 50kph speed limit on neighbourhood streets.
Sharrows used in conjunction with partial street closures or traffic diverters, signage, and other treatments can help to build bicycle boulevards.
Clearly sharrows are not a panacea. They may however work in particular circumstances. I’m throwing this infrastructure tool out there as a way of promoting simple and inexpensive ways in which we can start filling in a fragmented bicycle network around the center city.
Pretty sure we asked for similar street markings for the 3 Great Urban Rides…. But their was some sort of restriction about what could be written on the roads. Any thoughts?
NZTA recently commissioned a report that looked into existing cycle signs & markings here (official or otherwise) and potential options for new signs/markings here. A number of potential applications for a sharrow-style marking (i.e an “advisory” cycle marking) were identified. I imagine that some trials will follow in the near future.
Some thought needs to be given what type of marking is used here, bearing in mind that the standard white cycle logo already has a legal meaning (i.e. other road users can’t normally drive there). But I don’t see that as an insurmountable problem.
Could they also put bike stop boxes into the lights at top of bond Street (where it intersects with Great North Road)? I don’t know what the criteria is for deciding where these go. So I say this for no other reason than that it would make my own life more pleasant
But also, as you say, it’s a key route in and out of the city and cyclists are often likely to try and get up onto Great North Road because it’s such a nice, flat ridge (unlike hilly New North).
A bike box where you describe sounds good to me. It would have to be only in the left lane. Incidentally, I took a photo a while back of that particular intersection.
http://morecityplease.posterous.com/on-second-thought-just-go-wherever-you-want
When it was redone for the RWC there was only one right turn lane. Apparently this caused intolerable delays for cars, so the left lane was turned into a ‘go wherever you want.’ I’ll write another cityfix article about this. Doesn’t it suck to come to intersections with no clear place for cyclists? Much of the cbd has way too many intersections with random lane-turning options (eg K Rd and Pitt St).
A final thought about bike boxes. Like the sharrows, they need to be carefully considered. The one on K Rd/ Ponsonby Rd is quite hairy. It directs cyclists to position themselves in the bix box, but then there is a left green turn arrow. Crazy.
Excuse my ignorance, but what exactly is a ‘sharrow’ and what is a ‘door zone’? – this article is hard for me to understand without these two definitions!
Hi Jess. I had never heard of a sharrow either before I read this post. It seems to be pictures of a bike that you paint onto the road to create the impression of a shared lane without actually putting in a bike lane.
A door zone is the area where you (as a cyclist) might get hit if the driver parked on the side of the road opened their door without looking behind them and you rode into it. this is known as getting “doored”. It has never happened to me but, especially if the cyclist is going fast, it can give you very serious injuries such as broken ribs, collarbone, fractured shoulders etc…
A bike box or stop box is a white box (or green box) which gets put at an intersection in front of the white line which cars must stop behind. The aim is to create a safe space for cyclists to sit in at intersections so they don’t get squeezed in behind traffic and/or have to sit in front of a car that can potentially turn left/right across them.
“Sharrow” is a blend of “share arrow”, of which the cyclist+arrows marking in the image shown is a common example. Another one used elsewhere is a bike inside a house-shape arrow. Brisbane has also just used yellow cycle symbols to denote shared zones, although the colour distinction alone may be too subtle a difference from our standard cycle-lane marking.
Re “door zone”, generally you want to stay at least 0.6-0.8m outside of a parked vehicle when passing, i.e. the distance an open door would swing open. Or, as I tell my kids, “if you can reach out and touch the car, you’re too close”!
I presume from the text that this is not a specific treatment yet – it only seems to be referenced here, not as a Auckland Transport proposal, which hopefully we’d have heard of.
To clarify, sharrows are currently not a legal road marking in New Zealand. However, I know some staff in Auckland Transport have been thinking of getting a trial exception from NZTA to test them.
I have some info on the use of sharrows in NZ. back about half a decade or so Auckland City Council did an on road trial in Auckland. It was run by the councils transport team by a good egg tranport planner whos name slips my mind but was something like “Nathan Bedingfield” It focused on the type of symbol to use. Trailing some differing options and recomending one. This means the concept is already off the drawing board so to speak. I followed this up a few years ago with an aplication to NZTA for another wider “use of the facility” type trail on Waiheke. Sadly this aplication was not suported by NZTA. I have to admit it was light in content as it came from an advocacy group rather than a transport profesional or council so it needed far more peer suported input to back it up. However I was at the time dissapointed as I felt the cycling advisor for the awards (No names, no packdrill, but definately a respected one of us) also profesionaly didnt like this type of half way house treatmant. That meant the concept was also considered ill advised. I totaly disagree with this as we have to be pragmatic when other cycle facilities cant be funded.
Recently I talked to AT and Ina Stenzel was open to aplying for another trail to NZTA but due to workload needed me to do the spade work. I would have thought there would have been great potentail in a cycle minded transport consultancy, Via Strada (then again, maybe not;-) for example, to chase the potential of a trail and cash in on the managemant of it. The time for sharrows has come. Perhaps CAN or CAA should be making these applications too? But trust me, employ a qualified engineer.
Also good to look at other advisory treatments such as marked cycle lanes that cars are still alowed to drive in. The line is dashed instead of solid. This allows lanes to go in where there is insufficient road width. Plenty of examples from UK and Holland on google under “advisory cycle lanes”
Tom, we are already looking at what you suggested in some ways. For example, marking shoulders wider than “mecessary” and lanes narrower than possible, to encourage car drivers to give cyclists a bit more width.
Similarly, in one project we are discussing putting the No Stopping lines (the broken yellow lines) a whole 50-60cm out from the kerb, again to get drivers more consistently into the middle of the road.
Such treatments often work – though it works both ways. On Ian McKinnon Drive, I have even noticed that car drivers tend to encroach more towards the cyclist side (thankfully they have cycle lanes there now) for no other reason than that there are two different shades of bitumen on the road (darker / lighter). Drivers try to stay unconciously withon one part of the lengthwise dark/light divide, and thus travel further west than they would if all had the same colour.