Sharrows: The Coors Light of Infrastructure
If you have been riding around town this summer, perhaps you’ve noticed that many of the degraded “sharrow” markings on the roads have been repainted a nice visible white. The new paint is related to last season’s abysmally warm winter, which gave street crews an early start on repainting during those balmy March days, so by the time September rolled around, they’ve been free to focus on those low-priority items like sharrows. (“Low-priority” = things not related to cars).
If you’ve ever wondered how, exactly, these painted marks are supposed to protect you, you’re not alone. Today we present Bike Durango’s 5-Minute Bike History: Sharrow Edition.
Like Crocs and Jolly Ranchers, sharrows are a Colorado innovation. They were originally “invented” in Denver in 1993 by James McKay*, a planner who was trying to get the city to consider actual protected bike infrastructure of the sort being built in various European countries. Predictably, the city shot him down. What officials would agree too, however, is painting pictures of bikes with little arrows on them on some streets. And thus was born the “bike in a house,” as they were originally called.
Note: even this concession was (of course) about driver comfort, since the arrows were intended to keep people from riding against traffic on Denver’s matrix of one-way streets, which were designed for efficient (ie, fast) car commuting into downtown.
More importantly, painting costs a lot less and is cheaper to replace, which is significant when your city has over 2000 miles of pavement to maintain.
And so the paint went down, the number of people on bikes stayed the same, and the number of vehicle deaths in Denver steadily rose. The paint didn’t do much to improve safety or increase ridership.
You would think that would qualify it as a failure, but never underestimate the desire of elected leaders for an easy solution to a difficult problem. The sharrow experiment offered an irresistible temptation for municipal leaders: an easy, cheap, uncontroversial option that demonstrated a commitment to change, without changing anything. And did we mention cheap?
In the following decade, their use spread into towns large and small. Burlington painted them. So did Los Angeles. Even West Des Moines has recently joined the ranks of sharrow cities.
Locally, Durango added its first sharrows in 2013, actually removing some existing painted bike lanes in the process. The plan, such as it was, was to see if they would be easier to maintain than a fully striped lane. At the time, a Durango Herald editorial gave a boldly wishy-washy take on their efficacy: “The jury will be out for a while.”
Thirteen years later, do we have a verdict?
Denver now has 443 miles of bike infrastructure, nearly all of it built in the last 8 years. They built multi-use paths, protected bike lanes, and low-speed neighborhood bikeways.
There are still some sharrows in Denver, but only on streets where bikes can realistically share the road with slow and limited local traffic. In these cases, the paint compliments street design that keeps cars and bikes at the same speed.
Most importantly, unlike the sharrows, these changes had an effect: the percentage of people riding bikes as a primary means of transportation has increased by 345%.
Meanwhile, back in Durango, this year we’re breaking ground on our first protected bike on Roosa Ave, which aims to provide protection for 1/3 mile before you get back onto…sharrows. At this pace, we’ll have 10 miles of protected bike lanes by the year 2416, just in time for Ned Overend’s last race.
And predictably, our share of people biking for primary transportation has not meaningfully increased. Other cities’ experiments have yielded similar results: install protected networks, and you get increased safety and ridership, saving lives. Keep painting sharrows, and you save… money.
*McKay is retired now, and though he blames the city leadership for not having the political will to make meaningful investments, he also had some harsh words for the Denver recreational cyclists of the 1990s. Here’s how he describes the Denver Bicycle Touring Club: “All those guys care about is riding high-priced bicycles on a Saturday morning…They drive to the ride-start location, and they take their bike off the roof rack, and only then do they become a cyclist…The bike clubs don't think in terms of weekday bicycling and making things better for people who do not have the fancy bikes. I’m talking about the people riding their bikes out of economic necessity: the Girl Scout who wants to ride her bike to the library, the liquor store clerk that needs a bike so he can get to work.” We feel you, James.