A cyclist rides along Market Street.Bikes: Streets or lanes?
The use of bicycles is good exercise, saves gasoline and helps people get from here to there faster than walking.
Chattanooga recently was awarded grant funds of more than $1.4 million to build separated bike lanes connecting inner-city residential areas to the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga and downtown.
The lanes have been described as protected and partitioned, meaning the cyclists — along Eighth Street, Duncan Avenue, Orchard Knob Avenue, South Willow Street, Second Street and Frazier Avenue — will be separated in a more pronounced way from normal traffic than current bike lanes offer.
Studies cited by the city say such lanes encourage more bike traffic, but an increasing way of riding — and what is being taught in some bicycling classes — is what’s called vehicular cycling or taking the street. Instead of taking designated bike lanes or remaining to the far right of the street, cyclists pedal down the street in front of and behind motorists. Sometimes they follow designated street signs and signals — as the class instructs — and sometimes they go right on through them if traffic is not coming the other way.
“It’s very, very counterintuitive,” Ruthie Thompson, events and marketing coordinator for Outdoor Chattanooga, said in a 2010 Times Free Press story. Instead of staying to the extreme right of a lane, where they could encounter hazards such as storm drains and brush piles, riders should move out in a lane to take possession of it. When they’re in that possession, she said, they should stay in the middle or right third of the lane where they’re more visible to traffic.