It seems logical that all the bicycle lanes and facilities would be the same from one part of town to another. After all, a stop sign is the same in Marana as it is in Green Valley.
There's an effort under way to make sure bicycling facilities are uniform throughout the metro area. Surprisingly, the communities are not always following the same standards.
Members of the Tucson-Pima County Bicycle Advisory Committee want to change that. They're considering a list of recommendations for our local governments. They vary from how wide a bike lane should be to how they should be marked and how to handle merge areas where traffic may need to cross the bike lane.
The advisory committee started the process in 2007, but thought it was time to give governments here another update, said Larry Robinson, who chairs the Bicycle Advisory Committee's facilities subcommittee.
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"It's suggested things that we would like them to adopt, just to make things more uniform," he said. It's up to each jurisdiction to set its own standards, but the advisory committee hopes the suggestions don't fall on deaf ears.
"I think education for motorists and cyclists alike needs to be more intuitive," Robinson said.
Local officials don't necessarily disagree. Pima County's Matt Zoll said he worked on a project for the Phoenix area that ran into similar issues.
The cities and towns in Pima County already try to do things fairly similarly, but there's room for the suggestions, said Zoll, the county's bicycle and pedestrian program coordinator.
"I think it's just refining it and making things better for everyone," Zoll said.
It's meant to make not just riding, but driving easier. Drivers benefit from standardization because they, too, know what to expect.
"It's all really well-meaning stuff to legitimize the bicycle in Tucson and around town," said Tom Thivener, Tucson's bicycle and pedestrian coordinator.
After all, the safer and more confident that people feel when riding, the more often they'll do it.
Road Runner addresses road-related issues in this column on Mondays. Send your Road Q questions by e-mail to roadrunner@azstarnet.com or to 4850 S. Park Ave., Tucson, AZ 85714. Please include your first and last names.
