Could we do without a K Street bike lane and instead keep L Street bikeable, walkable, and protected from vehicle traffic?

You’re a bicyclist and you ride all over Arcata.  Maybe you use your bike to commute to work, to pick up groceries, to visit friends, to take your child on a ride into the world, or to get outside on a nice day.

Perhaps you feel more people on bikes would solve some major problems facing all of us, both locally and globally.

You’re familiar with how biking currently is in Arcata, with a mish-mosh of dedicated paths, bike lanes (typically just painted stripes and inadequate for personal safety), and “sharrow” situations where bikes and cars and trucks are supposed to share the width of the road.

Maybe you ride all over the place.  Maybe you only ride out in the Arcata Bottom on the farm roads where it’s open and pleasant and safe. Maybe you stick to streets that have pretty good bike lanes, and avoid those that don’t.

Whoever you are, and whatever kind of bicycling you do, you know more about biking than I do.  In my teens and twenties and through my thirties I used my bike for everything, but no more. I acknowledge I got lazy. And as I aged, more and more I wanted the feeling of protection of having steel around me.

So:  I know very little, other than what I observe and what I get from talking with people who ride.  You know a lot.  So I am asking you these questions.

These are not rhetorical questions. I’m serious.  If you can help me with this so I better understand what’s important for bike riders, I’d like to put your responses into this article.

L Street and K Street proposal

The December 2021 draft Gateway plan proposes a “couplet” be made out of L Street and K Street — much like the way it is now in downtown Arcata with G Street is for traffic going north and H Street is for traffic going south.

K Street (northbound) would look like this.  Here the width is shown as 49 feet — within the City’s 50-foot right of way.  There could be blocks with a greater setback, for wider sidewalks or more flexibility on lane widths.
But let’s make the image more interesting.  These car are on the small side, so let’s add the outline of a Ford F-150 and the image of a box truck.

L Street looks like this in the draft plan:

And with trucks:

Question 1: 

If there were to be a 2-way bike path on L Street, would it be okay to not have a bike path on K Street?

In other words: If L Street was a very good bike path, would you still want a bike path on on K Street as well?

Question 2:

In the diagrams above, from the draft plan, the bike lanes on L Street are shown as two lanes (in both directions) each six feet wide, and on K Street is shown as a one-way seven-foot wide lane. On the K Street diagram, there’s a 3-foot-wide strip to separate the bike lane from the moving vehicles.  Presumably there would be concrete barriers there — but there would have be openings for driveways along the road.

Could the bike lane on K Street be in two directions?  Maybe a two-way provision isn’t really needed. Maybe it’s a bad idea to have bicyclists travel opposite to the direction of traffic, even though there’s a separator.  Or do you need a seven-foot width to accommodate the one-way bike lane.  Or, if six feet was sufficient width, another foot could be given back to the traffic, for a 12-foot traffic lane width.  The proposed traffic lane width on L Street is 12 feet, so it perhaps should be 12-foot wide on K Street as well.

Question 3:

Let’s assume for this question that the L Street – K Street “couplet” that’s outlined in the draft plan does not occur.  K Street is the same busy two-way street with two lanes of traffic and two lanes of parking.  It would be improved, and there’d be left-turn lanes added where appropriate.

The “L Street” area is enlarged as a pathway, a narrow road for traffic for access to some of the existing homes there, and a wide pedestrian walking area.  Buildings on either side are put up with shops, small restaurants, store-front offices, and the like.

Could there be one pathway there — kind of like the pathway is now, shown here.
Or would it better to have the strolling path where it is now and have the faster bicycle lane perhaps on the other side of the width of the “street.”  Perhaps it would work to have that bike path share the space with the very low-use lane of traffic that would be there.

Question 4:

J Street is designated as a “Bike Boulevard” — Does that eliminate the need for a bike lane on K Street, just one block over?  Eliminate or reduce perhaps.

That is, with Bike Boulevards on I, J, and then a full two-way bike path on L, would you also need a bike lane on K ?

Question 5:

Is what’s planned for 8th and 9th Streets going to work for bicyclists?  Here is the drawing from the draft plan, below.

The outline of a Ford F-150 has been added. The car in the image shown is about 68″ wide, which is the width of a pretty small car. As examples, the sub-compact Honda Fit is 67″, a Honda CRV or a Subaru Outback is 73″, a Toyota Corolla is 70″. The standard Ford F-150 is 80″ wide for the body and 96″ including the mirrors.

I don’t think an 11-foot traffic lane is wide enough for drivers to back into from an angled parking spot — it is less than standard practices.  The depiction shown below has a 6-foot sidewalk on one side and a 10-foot sidewalk on the other.  Together with the 7-foot bike lane and the only-11-foot traffic lane, it adds up to 55 feet — five feet wider than the 50-foot right of way. In theory the 10-foot sidewalk on the left could come out of someone’s parcel with a building setback; in reality 8th and 9th Streets are lined with existing buildings and a greater setback really isn’t possible.

Here are aerial images of 8th and 9th Streets, from Google Earth. Do you think the bike lane depiction shown above will work?  Or, do you have other ideas?

Question 6:

Do shared “Bike Boulevard” streets and “Sharrows” streets work well in Arcata?  Likely it is that some streets are okay and others not.  What can you tell us about shared roads?

11th & K Streets, Arcata

Question 7:

4-way stop signs. Is this a good idea or a bad idea. Two parts to this question:  On the small streets in Arcata where there are 4-way stop signs, do you actually come to a full stop when you’re at a stop sign?  Or do you look around and see if it’s safe to proceed.  Would it work or be more dangerous if the signs had an additional sign that said something like “Yield to Bicycles — Bicycles to not stop” and the cyclists would be able to legally cruise through if it were safe to do so.

Question 8:

What’s the deal with electric bikes?  Where there are signs that say “No motorized vehicles” should they be allowed to be on that path?  Many of these motorized bicycles look pretty much like motorcycles. Some bikes are pedal-assist (where the rider has to pedal to make it go) and others that just have a throttle.

Perhaps there could be a distinction between bike paths with lanes, which are wider, and trails, which might be narrow.

For that matter, what about motorized scooters, motorized skateboards, motorized unicycles, even motorized tricycles.  What are the laws, and what direction are the laws going?  What are your feelings?

Question 9:

Bulb outs. Are bike lanes compatible with bulb outs?  It all depends on how it is designed, I guess. Have you ever run into a curb at a bulb out?

Question 10:

What’s your favorite type of bike lane? Least favorite?  Favorite street to ride on in Arcata?  Least favorite?

11.  What else do you want to add to this article?

Thank you !

Write to:  Bicycles  (at)  Arcata1.com
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