This week, we reported that Louisville’s newest bike lane was installed on Sixth Street. Yesterday, that lane got its green paint (woot!). It also got a well-intentioned safety measure in the form of a large sign reminding motorists to “Yield to bikes.” There’s only one problem…
The city already knows about the mistake and is planning on correcting it, but this kind of flub demonstrates the challenges the cycling community deals with every day. It’s not easy to go without a car when the rest of the world fundamentally doesn’t understand why that’s at all desirable. It can sometimes take a while for a cultural shift to multi-modal streets to take hold.
UPDATE! (Thursday afternoon, Nov. 5) — As we mentioned above, the city has remedied the situation and the sign is no longer in the bike lane. Just take a look at the pic above shared by Bicycling for Louisville? Ride on!
But then there’s this:
City workers are repairing potholes that were obscured by fresh paint in bike lanes. #PossibilityCity #Louisville pic.twitter.com/YwZg0ZQlq6
— Terry Meiners ™️ (@terrymeiners) November 5, 2015
What is the big issue here? They’re going to be adding paint or doing construction on the concrete in bike lane and need the bikes to merge with traffic and clear the bike lane so they can work on the lane. You would need to block the lane anyway to warn bikers that there is construction going on, and this sign is great to alert traffic that bikes will be leaving the bike lane to avoid pending construction so drivers should yield for them.
This sign seems plenty appropriate to alert drivers that bikes will be merging into traffic there. This seems like a good thing, not everything is an attack on us cyclists.