Those East Third bicycle lane protections

Basic manners should not need to be enforced, and a busy street is not your personal parking lot and/or drop-off zone.

I was pleased when I saw the brand new barriers between the street and the bike lane on Third Street in Bloomington. People have been illegally parking in the bike lane and blocking traffic for a long time. These should serve as a deterrent to this behavior, I thought. Apparently city government thought the same thing. From the Indiana Daily Student:

According to commission member Rob Danzman, the city had an excess of barriers and delineator poles in storage, so the commission thought the extra bike lane protection would be a good opportunity to implement those resources.

"One of the engineers said, 'Hey, we have an opportunity to protect this bike lane. We've got this material; we can do it really fast and really cheap, and we can have an impact,'" Danzman said.

Boy, was I ever wrong, and so was city government. It is now worse than ever, with motorists simply stopping in the middle of traffic, blockading half of Third Street, to pick up and drop off passengers. They are openly disregarding the law and disrespecting everyone who drives down East Third. What we need now from both the Bloomington Police and the IU Police Department, to the extent resources can be spared, is aggressive ticketing of people who illegally block traffic.

But it actually is worse. I asked city planning if there is any plan to remove snow from the bike lane in the winter. The plows will not be able to remove snow from the bike lane, so another option will be needed. The response: The city "does not have a method for snow removal on that bike lane." The barriers were installed without a plan for maintaining them when snow makes the bike lane unusable. Hopefully this will be solved within seven months.

Unfortunately, it appears that there was not enough planning for how to deal with people blocking the street. The fact that there was no plan for snow removal in place before the barriers were installed makes it significantly worse. Signage telling people not to block traffic, efforts to educate people about the law, and aggressive ticketing should have been considered before the barriers were installed.

The fact that this solution even had to be considered is sad. Basic manners should not need to be enforced, and a busy street is not your personal parking lot and/or drop-off zone. Selfishly blocking traffic for your own convenience is not acceptable behavior. It is not that much of an inconvenience to pull into a parking lot. Stop putting your needs above everyone else, and breaking the law in the process.