This area of Whitney Street is always a hot spot for parking violations. Are tickets ever issued? Who knows!
The frequency of illegal parking, though, leads one to assume that these drivers actually believe the bike lane to be an itsy bitsy parking lane, or, that their activities at the nearby church and school preempt the right of cyclists to have a steady, safer section of the road.
The first picture shows a double violation, with the vehicle parked too closely to the hydrant. The second vehicle was just one of a half dozen parked in this manner on a recent Sunday. There were legal parking spaces available a bit down the road. By a bit, let’s call it a thirty second or less walk.
The Learning Curb series shows vehicles parked illegally (or just carelessly) in Hartford.
Justin
have you tried calling the fuzz/DPT to report? a bike coalition I used to belong to had this # printed on the back for just this purpose. i used it pretty liberally back in the day.
Kerri Provost
Since the police very often eat at Mo’s, visible from where the cars were parked, it seemed like if they wanted to enforce, they would’ve.
Elisabeth
Bike lane / extra wide breakdown lane, who can tell the difference? I live 5 miles from my job and would love to bike, but don’t feel protected enough from the car traffic. In China they use 8 foot long and 2 foot high sections of arched metal fencing to separate cars and bikes. Each end is footed by a small cement base and they are movable. I don’t see why something similar couldn’t be deployed from April through mid-October.
Kerri Provost
People bike year-round though
Justin
Totally hear you Elisabeth. Everyone working on bikes now knows that we have to build better separated, protected bike lanes in order to get everyone biking–not just the daring. Traditional bike lanes often stink because they actually encourage riders to cruise in the ‘door zone.’ In the meantime you might look for chill back streets that you can weave together for a chill commute…in cities like Hartford and Los Angeles without fully built out bike lanes this is how I do it.
chris
I bike year-round, and cordoning off lanes is not a good solution. Education and enforcement for bicyclists and drivers are what we need to make the roads a safely shared space.
There are some ambiguously marked lanes on some roads, but this is not one of them. I have had opportunities to drive many different cars and trucks over the years, ranging from a couple of tiny vintage microcars to a school bus. Not even the tiniest of these, a friend’s comically diminutive 1958 BMW 600, would fit within the pictured bike lane. Anyone who honestly can’t tell the difference between that and a designated parking area should be disqualified from obtaining a drivers license on account of being legally blind. What this photo shows is arrogance, laziness, and self-entitlement.