With the recent County Traffic Survey presentation and the commentary in various groups about e-bikes, there have been a number of questions regarding bikes and bike safety.
Given the community’s interest, we will run a series of periodic articles about the topic. Please feel free to contact us with questions or topics you’d like to know more about, and we will add them to our topic list.
Sharrows, pictured to the right first appeared in Rossmoor in 2019 when the county decided that they would enhance bike safety along Foster.
According to Bicylce.com “Sharrows first appeared in the US in Denver in the 1990s, but the word itself (a portmanteau of “share” and “arrow”) was coined in San Francisco in the early 2000s. The term has been included in the Federal Highway Administration’s (FHWA) Manual on Uniform Traffic Control Devices—the traffic engineer’s bible—since 2009.”
A sharrow is not a bike lane, as it does not create road space nominally reserved for bicycles. Instead, it is meant to be used in situations where cyclists and drivers must coexist in the same lane.
