Gap Week follow-up: You’ve mapped 120 bikeway gaps around the city

I was just on SW Terwilliger for like the second time yesterday. Keep in mind, I have very limited experience, but is there anything stopping the city from narrowing the roadway by moving the curbs and taking all of the bike lane width and adding it to the sidewalk on the side, converting it into a ~14 foot wide MUP?

Though I may not be as experienced working for the government, I still hold more than ten years riding around on a wide variety of infrastructure, and I respectfully disagree with the idea that unprotected bike lanes offer little. While it is true they offer little in the way of physical separation and therefore actual safety, they do provide a sense of place and belonging that bicycles should be and are allowed on the road. For the majority of drivers, that is enough to get the point, and the more of it they see, the more likely they are to take the markings seriously and actually give cyclists the space they need and deserve. Without them, drivers tend to believe that bicycles have no place on the road, which, in my opinion, leads to more hostile feelings, actions, and as displayed in another article recently, dangerous road rage. When the bike lanes disappear because of thoughtless planning and road design, it is evidence that the road engineers themselves are not taking the plight of cyclists seriously. It costs comparatively little in paint and brain power to offer cyclists a small piece of the road in the form of unprotected (and please, for god’s sake, non-door zone) bike lanes. For those of us who do ride our bikes for transportation on a regular basis, we may not particularly enjoy loud, fast traffic speeding right past, but it is still preferable to being made feel like we’re holding up the whole parade just because we’re trying to get somewhere.