Protected Bike Lane Frack-Up: Marshall Boulevard

It looks like striping was completed yesterday for a protected lane on Marshall... at least from the south end of Douglass park to the bend towards 24th street (I personally don't have much use for a bike lane on the boulevard so can't speak to how far it extends either way...).

(11/20-- subject line edited to reflect the surrent status)

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Permalink Reply by Anne Alt on November 1, 2012 at 9:15am

I wondered about that myself when I was passing through.

h' said:

The allotted car parking space looks like less than half of what's needed for the number of cars parked there overnight (as observed around 1 AM.) I'm not sure how that's going to work without some sort of change of plans.

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Permalink Reply by h' 1.0 on November 20, 2012 at 12:34pm

Unfortunatey this is blowing up today. Signage was never installed instructing cars where to park, and they continued to treat it as "buffered parking" and as of today there are reports of mass ticketing with fines in the $150 range-- e-mails shooting around urging people to contact the Alderman's office to complain about the lanes, Dan K yelled at by someone riding on the Boulevard this A.M. Personally I wonder if the 12th ward is purposely sabotaging this process, but I don't have much concrete to base that on (as they say, never attribute to malice that which can be attributed to simple......)

80% chance the lane gets taken out IMO.

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Permalink Reply by Cameron 7.5 mi on November 20, 2012 at 10:03pm

Given that the Elston roll out was similarly botched despite a more bike friendly Alderman, I'm going to go with incompetence.

h' said:

Unfortunatey this is blowing up today. Signage was never installed instructing cars where to park, and they continued to treat it as "buffered parking" and as of today there are reports of mass ticketing with fines in the $150 range-- e-mails shooting around urging people to contact the Alderman's office to complain about the lanes, Dan K yelled at by someone riding on the Boulevard this A.M. Personally I wonder if the 12th ward is purposely sabotaging this process, but I don't have much concrete to base that on (as they say, never attribute to malice that which can be attributed to simple......)

80% chance the lane gets taken out IMO.

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Permalink Reply by Aaron Bussey on November 29, 2012 at 1:49pm

I cant see them removing it after installing it

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Permalink Reply by h' 1.0 on November 29, 2012 at 4:25pm

I can. We're talking about paint on the street here. You're aware that that very thing happened on N. Halsted, right?

Aaron Bussey said:

I cant see them removing it after installing it

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Permalink Reply by h' 1.0 on November 30, 2012 at 1:14pm

Spoke to 12th ward office. A few details:

-the ticketing happened because some resident called 911 to complain about the parked cars and the police that responded to that call didn't know that they were not supposed to ticket yet.

-people who received tickets ($150) are basically on their own to contest them; they need to so so before the fine doubles to $300 because once it does there is no way to get it out of the system

-there will be some sort of study to determine what to do at this point, but the person I spoke to seemed to be pretty sure the outcome was going to be to restore the striping to the way it was before, as there is no way to have a protected lane without losing a very significant amount of automobile parking.

-In the meantime, no signage is going in.

This was botched on so many levels it's hard to really care much about the outcome, as it's hard to believe the buffered lane will persevere. The majority of boulevard residents have no off-street parking and the situation already sucked for them; removing more than 1/2 of the parking from the Boulevard (by my informal estimate) is basically akin to telling sidestreet residents that one half of their entire street can no longer be used for parking. Of course, I'd be fine with some hard-ass lefty-greeny mayor banning on-street parking for anything but commercial vehicles, but the current chain of events and lack of foresight on the part of whoever decided to put a buffered lane here has guaranteed an irreversible groundswell of resident animosity, IMO.