Cindy Lange-Kubick: Bike lanes? Good idea, bad design

Cindy Lange-Kubick: Bike lanes? Good idea, bad design Bike lanes are sensible. They re hip and cool.

They play to all the things we and those savvy 2015 visioners want our city to be. Except, you know those bike lanes in downtown Lincoln? Those itty-bitty, gang plank-wide strips down the middle of our one-ways?

Let s just say this: Great idea, not so great execution. I m noticing this more since I started biking to work on sunny summer mornings. I seem to have no trouble scooting north down 14th Street from my Indian Village home, pedaling merrily along, skirting parked cars and dodging careless squirrels until suddenly annoyingly!

magically, the bike lane appears, like the Yellow Brick Road to Oz, just as perilous, only much, much shorter. First, there s the problem of getting from your relatively safe space into the bike lane. And then there is figuring out, a few short blocks later, how to get out of the bike lane without ending up like one of those flattened squirrels you just passed.

Maybe it s just me, I think, watching other bikers forge fearlessly along the concrete tightrope, their backs to approaching traffic on both sides. Thursday, when I decide to play it safe and drive downtown, I spot a bike merging into its lane. I roll down my window at the stoplight on O Street.

How do you like riding in the bike lanes, I ask in my most fair and balanced journalist voice. Jewel Noll doesn t hesitate: I think it s really scary. The graduate student, on her way to the University of Nebraska-Lincoln campus, grew up in Wisconsin, where not only do they make good Gouda, they design darned good bike lanes.

She just never wore it until she got to Lincoln. Not only does she have a problem with her lane being in the middle of the street, she can t figure out the logic of which street they chose. A bike lane on a bus route?

The buses have to dodge her. She has to dodge the buses. Cars have to dodge them both.

It seems like the whole bike system is an afterthought. Drivers are irritated. I feel like the buses are probably really irritated.

My comfort level is absolutely gone. Cindy Lange-Kubick: Bike lanes?