The road ahead: using the “Sharrow” in new cycling infrastructure

Abstract

New road signs go through a careful process of design, trial and approval before they appear on roads. This does not guarantee that road users will know much about them, or if they do, will comply with the sign’s intent. This problem is highly relevant to new cycling infrastructure, as it often employs relatively new road signage. The case study here concerns the use of the “sharrow”, short for shared lane arrow, in new cycling infrastructure in Wellington, New Zealand. Naturalistic video data are used to closely examine the situated detail of social interaction between cyclists and drivers. The analysis shows some support for the effectiveness of the sharrow, but also emphasises that it cannot be considered in isolation. This will not surprise road designers, but the intricacy of coordination in the road space has to be seen to be believed. Such consideration of cycling and driving in its phenomenal detail is useful for any attempt to improve mobility on roads.

Keywords:

• Sharrow
• cyclist–driver interaction
• cycling-safety
• material infrastructure
• ethnomethodology

Notes

1. We do not have sufficient space to describe the full range of design features of the IBC. Interested readers will find ample description, including maps and photos, on the Wellington City Council website (wellington.govt.nz). It should also be noted that in New Zealand vehicles drive on the left hand side of the road.

2. Even though one of us has been cycling for over 40 years, when we first encountered the sharrow sign in Island Bay we did not know what it was. This lack of specific knowledge on our part turned out to be very useful: it meant that we had no presumptions about the design or intent of sharrows, rather, we built up this knowledge through and in the experience of cycling in a sharrowed area.

3. The “we” here is Mike Lloyd and Max Baddeley, who separately rode a mountain bike on the first visit to the IBC. See endnote 5 for detail on who did the subsequent filmed rides.

4. Technically, it is also worth noting that the point of view from the GoPro cameras we used makes distance seem elongated. For example, cars seem further away than they are in reality.

5. In all of the videos analysed here the cyclist is Mike Lloyd, for the pragmatic reason that Mike was the cyclist amongst us. Hence, in the analysis the personal name “Mike” is used for the rider. In all of the material presented below Mike is riding a light weight road bike with narrow high-pressure tyres. Additionally, some detail on Mike’s cycling history is relevant: Mike is in his mid-50s and rides both road and mountain bikes, but in Wellington he rides mainly on mountain bike tracks, and does not commute by cycling. This is partly because he finds cycling on Wellington roads quite dangerous: in the last 8 years he has been both “doored” and hit by a car in Wellington. Consequently, Mike can be described as a competent cyclist alert to the dangers of cycling in a variety of traffic environs.

6. This was not a formal research interview intended to be used as data, rather we were simply filling in our background knowledge of the IBC.

7. Figure 4 is the result of filming with the camera mounted underneath the bike seat, hence it does not show any head movement by Mike. This filming occurred before we had settled on the dual camera setup.

8. Note that at the April 2016 completion of the IBC there were two speed bumps positioned at either end of the shopping village area coinciding with the end of the cycle lane and the transition to the sharrow area. However, when we started riding the IBC all that could be seen of these were 4 patches of new asphalt – the bumps had been removed. We emailed contacts at the Wellington City Council and were told, “they were removed on request of local residents as it was deemed the noise/disruption claimed was disproportionate to the benefit they were providing”. This alteration seems to have been made irrespective of the important function of the speed bumps in ensuring the safety of cyclists who ride the sharrow area in the “claim the lane” manner (an excellent example of Latham and Wood’s (2015) point about the obduracy of infrastructure settlements).

9. Cyclists too can be unpredictable, however, given their more vulnerable position, it could be argued that attention to maintaining a tight line on the road takes precedence over getting from A to B in the shortest possible time.

10. Our emphasis on “riding lines” bears some resemblance to Gibson’s early work attempting to understand the process of driving a car. As discussed by Dant (2004), in Gibson’s study of the “field of safe travel” he utilised a metaphor of drivers using a “sort of tongue protruding forward along the road” (Dant 2004, 63) seeking to perceive objects with negative “valence”. Dant is appreciative but critical of this view. For our purposes we need only note that the difference between the lines of cyclists and vehicle drivers, is that the former are able to move much more quickly and significantly in a lateral direction. This, of course, is something that can annoy drivers, who often complain about cyclists not obeying the road rules, but simply changing direction into any space that suits them (Latham and Wood 2015, provide detail on the situated grounds for such rule-breaking).