Right on, ride on

Recently I marginally helped an intriguing venture to assess several Boston roads for possible bike lane inclusion. I wish I could have spared more time to the effort, and I guess I’m not the only one saying that since in a little over a month’s allotment only 16 of a desired 50 roads were surveyed. This was work spread out over several individuals who volunteered, and of which I probably helped the least or near least. (I’d offer excuses, but this is a bike story, not a work-woe story. If you need to ask: woe is work.)

The idea behind the activity was to find out what roads are already wide enough to support a bike lane, with particular preference to roads that connect any other already-established bike networking routes or major areas of the city. Ideally some roads are already wide enough to include a bike lane, and those would be cheapest and fastest for the city to adapt. The survey work involved detailing any observations from a biker’s point of view, such as metal plates in the road or incorrect alignment of gutter plates, as well as measuring road cross-sections with one of these:

The wheel I was loaned took measurements in .12″. Everyone else’s read in .10″. I have no idea why the wheel I used was any different, nor what the significance of .12″ is (anyone care to fill me in?), but that’s what I had to walk across the road many times with and note the distance of the center of every line of paint (parking, white lines, yellow lines, etc.) The person who collected all the data we obtained had to write a conversion routine and apply it to all of my collected numbers.

Someone brought up the point of “why do we have to take these measurements, wouldn’t the city already know all of this?” And the answer I heard given started out as “well, ya see…” and sorrowfully explained that the measurements currently available are all too inaccurate to be of much use. Our measurements, as accurate as they can be, still need to account for several inches for error or variance between measured points. We took measurements wherever the road widths changed a recognizable amount, which may be often but not necessarily often enough. Whatever our measurements come out to be will be better than what was there before, and up to date.

I hope that something comes of this attempt, and that we’re not left oggling the void of another action->no-action response from the city. I am disappointed about how little I chipped in for this, but would feel cheated if it all amounts to nothing. Kudos to LiveableStreets for putting up the measurement wheels that we got on loan, and to the Boston Bikes initiative that was all under the auspices of: I hope to be of more use on the next venture.