Source: http://ift.tt/hFWySe - Tuesday, April 07, 2015
In North Texas, March brings signs of spring: daffodils, lawn mower sounds, garden stores seedlings peeking out hopefully, and people walking and riding bicycles. I ride my bicycle in Denton throughout the year, commuting to work, riding to the grocery store and meeting up with friends. After living in New Jersey for six years, I love the slower pace of Denton and the way drivers tend to be respectful and courteous. They pass slowly, giving a wide berth. However, when I get to work, the scene is not so nice. Although city laws require cars to give cyclists at least 3 feet when passing -- and commercial vehicles 6 feet -- these laws are abandoned on a half-mile stretch of Bell Avenue, the road that bisects Texas Woman's University. When I bike along this road, I must navigate not only cracks in the road, potholes and raised manhole covers but also drivers trying to get to Point B. This narrow road with no shoulder forces cars either to slow to a crawl behind a cyclist or to pass them with barely a few feet as a buffer, dangerous even at the campus's 20-mile-per-hour speed limit. And it forces cyclists either to face the potential wrath of drivers whose progress they interrupt or to hug the right edge of the road as vehicles -- sometimes commercial trucks -- drive by. For me this traffic pattern serves primarily as an annoyance, but in January a TWU student was hit by a car and killed while crossing Bell. Poor lighting, few designa
from Top News on RSS Feeds http://ift.tt/1H2PUod
In North Texas, March brings signs of spring: daffodils, lawn mower sounds, garden stores seedlings peeking out hopefully, and people walking and riding bicycles. I ride my bicycle in Denton throughout the year, commuting to work, riding to the grocery store and meeting up with friends. After living in New Jersey for six years, I love the slower pace of Denton and the way drivers tend to be respectful and courteous. They pass slowly, giving a wide berth. However, when I get to work, the scene is not so nice. Although city laws require cars to give cyclists at least 3 feet when passing -- and commercial vehicles 6 feet -- these laws are abandoned on a half-mile stretch of Bell Avenue, the road that bisects Texas Woman's University. When I bike along this road, I must navigate not only cracks in the road, potholes and raised manhole covers but also drivers trying to get to Point B. This narrow road with no shoulder forces cars either to slow to a crawl behind a cyclist or to pass them with barely a few feet as a buffer, dangerous even at the campus's 20-mile-per-hour speed limit. And it forces cyclists either to face the potential wrath of drivers whose progress they interrupt or to hug the right edge of the road as vehicles -- sometimes commercial trucks -- drive by. For me this traffic pattern serves primarily as an annoyance, but in January a TWU student was hit by a car and killed while crossing Bell. Poor lighting, few designafrom Top News on RSS Feeds http://ift.tt/1H2PUod
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