The Spinal Column is reporting on the possible use of sharrows in the Village of Milford:

The Milford Village Council at its Tuesday, Sept. 7 meeting received a presentation from the Milford Downtown Development Authority (DDA) regarding possible “sharrow” lanes for bicycles in the village.

A “sharrow” is a specific on-pavement lane marking that identifies that bicycles and cars share the same lane. They are currently in place in sections of the state, including Ann Arbor, South Haven and Flint.

The DDA is recommending installing sharrows on the major connectors in the DDA district, including along General Motors Road, Milford Road, Main Street and Commerce.

Sharrows are a great, low-cost solution in many cases, especially where there is no parking and widening a road for bike lanes is too expensive. Bike lanes and/or sharrows are a much better, safer alternative to the side paths that had been proposed earlier this year in Milford.

At a recent MDOT meeting, some staff were unaware of sharrows, but were willing to look into their possible implementation on a state trunkline in Detroit. In this case the sharrows would provide bike lane continuity on short sections of road where there is inadequate road width for bike lanes.

Tags: MDOT, Milford, sharrows

This entry was posted on Thursday, September 9th, 2010 at 6:48 am and is filed under MDOT, On-road bicycling. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.