New bike lanes on Hermitage
Northside bikers: First rejoice and then enjoy these new bike lanes.
Over the last couple of weeks, the City installed buffered bike lanes1 on both sides of Hermitage stretching from Westbrook to Bellevue. South of Bellevue, the buffer disappears and you’re left with a still usable but much less luxurious regular-style bike lane.
This particular section of bike lanes provides an excellent north-south route from the Northside into the city. Once you hit Westwood, you can connect with the buffered bike lane on Brookland Parkway and head east towards the Fan, or you can continue southward and follow the sharrows on Boulevard to Scott’s Addition and the Museum District beyond.
Before this new set of lanes, the Brookland Parkway route seemed a bit like a Bike Lane to Nowhere. Now it makes up the skeleton of a usuable network–which fills me with joy! Once bike lanes are added to other parts of Brook Road, Hermitage, and Westwood (all part of the 2-4 year plan suggested by the Richmond Bicycle Master Plan) a pretty handy grid for getting to and from the Northside to other parts of the city via bike starts to take shape:
- From the Richmond Bicycle Master Plan: “Buffered bike lanes are designed to increase the space between the bike lane and the travel lane or parked cars. This treatment is appropriate for bike lanes onroadways with high motor vehicle traffic volumes and speed, adjacent to parking lanes, or a high volume of truck or oversized vehicle traffic.” ↩
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Notice: Comments that are not conducive to an interesting and thoughtful conversation may be removed at the editor’s discretion.
Which is the bike lane…the wider part next to the curb or the more narrow part with the diagonals next to the auto traffic lane?
@amen k, the wider part next to the curb. the diagonal lines are the buffer between car traffic.
Are there laws regarding driving the bike lanes?
If I’m not mistaken there are also buffered lanes on W. Leigh st. between Allen and Hermitage almost to the Boulevard..
Nice, but unless there is some guarantee , that motorists will be prosecuted, for crossing the buffer and hitting the bike, it might be a waste of taxpayers money… Cyclists will Not trust the Bike Lane… Most professional Cyclists will ride on the white line, the “Fog Line”, and they ride the Line like it’s a tightrope (Line-Ride)…
Cyclists ought to consider spending about $400 four hundred dollars on LED Lights, and they won’t need the painted stripes, which we don’t trust, and may be a waste of taxpayers money.
Zach, thanks. How does one ride in the bike lane when cars park there?
Also, how do we learn what the bike riders “rules of the road” are?
Is there anything akin to a DMV manual? Are their laws re riding. If yes, who enforces them? And, if there are laws, are they ever enforced? I’m getting very tired of playing dodge ’em with the bikers.