Bicycle Friendly America Summer 2017 - 30

2017 NATIONAL BIKE SUMMIT

RUMBLE STRIPS GOT YOU
GRUMBLING & TOOLS FOR
ROAD ADVOCACY
AMY JOHNSON ELY

e all like to ride on rural roads, but
these areas are often rife with bad
road designs of all types: Rumble
strips (gasp!), no shoulders (gasp!!), or
worse-chip seal. I recently presented at
the National Bike Summit alongside a few
professional advocates and planners, and
this topic attracted the big audience and
engagement I knew it would. Rural road
design is a complicated beast because our
rural areas are often where we have the
least amount of infrastructure funding
and the most Run off the Road (ROR)
crashes where DOT's love to place Rumble Strips (RS)-and our biggest bike enthusiasts scorn those with a passion.
This session had the following copresenters:
Amy Johnson Ely, Palmetto Cycling
Coalition (PCC), SC (me)
Lea Brooks, Bike San Luis Obispo
(SLO) County, CA
Steve Durrant, Principal at Alta Planning + Design
Dan Goodman, Federal Highway Administration (FHWA) Transportation
Specialist
Saara Snow, Travel Initiatives Coordinator, Adventure Cycling Association
Steve and Dan presented on the highly
useful Federal Highway Administration

30 BICYCLE FRIENDLY AMERICA

(FHWA) funded STAR Guide (Small
Town and Rural Multimodal Networks
Guide). This resource should be used by
any advocate or state agency staff member working with Rumble Strips. It is a
design and infrastructure guide for municipal, county and state planners and
engineers, but it's also helpful for community leaders or professionals advocating to these local or state agencies.
This Rural STAR Guide has a few helpful features. It describes three designs best
suited for low volume, low speed rural
roads. The first, a Yield Roadway (See
Chapter 2-3), is a two-way, multimodal
street with no center or shoulder line
painted, which serves to encourage multimodal use, and it has no lines painted
on the road! It is cost effective and simple.
The second, the Bicycle Boulevard (See
Chapter 2-9), has traffic calming features that prioritize bike traffic, but they
still allow vehicular traffic while slowing
them down. The third design, Advisory
Shoulders (See Chapter 2-17), is truly innovative with a 10-18 foot two-way, center
travel lane, flanked with dashed lines on
both sides, and a shoulder space for bicyclists and the occasional pedestrian. Then
there are visually separated facilities we
are more familiar with, such as bike lanes

and paved shoulders, and of course physically separated facilities, such as Shared
Use Paths, Sidepaths, Sidewalks and Separated Bike Lanes.
I presented from my experience with
the PCC advocating with the South
Carolina Department of Transporation
(SCDOT) and their push to install RS,
when most of our roads have one- to twofoot shoulders, and SCDOT's approved
bike map is from 1974. The PCC initially
responded to the first wave of RS by SCDOT, by acquiring the list of future projects and previewing them through six to
ten bike club listservs to find out which
roads were most popular and necessary
to prioritize on our list of "NOs" to SCDOT. This exhaustive process was again
repeated six months later, and after much
back and forth, few of our "priority"
routes were removed from their list. Because safety, they said-that is why. Our
SCDOT spends less per linear lane mile
on its roads compared to all other states,
so the onus of adding shoulders for safe
bike travel had become a local problem.
After regrouping, we then worked successfully to improve SCDOT's RS design-using FHWA guidance to make
them shallower, narrower (four to eight
inches), and including a skip pattern. Our

https://www.fhwa.dot.gov/environment/bicycle_pedestrian/publications/small_towns/fhwahep17024_lg.pdf https://www.fhwa.dot.gov/environment/bicycle_pedestrian/publications/small_towns/fhwahep17024_lg.pdf https://www.fhwa.dot.gov/environment/bicycle_pedestrian/publications/small_towns/fhwahep17024_lg.pdf https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chipseal http://www.dot.state.sc.us/ http://www.dot.state.sc.us/ http://www.dot.state.sc.us/ http://www.dot.state.sc.us/ http://www.pccsc.net/ http://www.pccsc.net/ https://www.bikeslocounty.org/ https://www.bikeslocounty.org/ http://www.altaplanning.com/ http://www.altaplanning.com/ http://www.altaplanning.com/ http://www.altaplanning.com/ https://www.fhwa.dot.gov/ https://www.fhwa.dot.gov/ https://www.adventurecycling.org/

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Bicycle Friendly America Summer 2017