The city of Miami Beach just added new, brightly painted green bike lanes — also called high emphasis green bike lanes.
The lanes are made of slip-resistant material, but the simple addition of green paint also forms a visual reminder that drivers need to share the road. Length of project is approximately 2.5 miles (5 miles total if including east & west routes).
Also, the West Bascule Bridge will finally be getting a non-slip metal deck plate bike lane over the steel open grate bridge by the end of January.
From the Miami Herald: In downtown Miami, planners hope to create a compact network of protected bike lanes. Those could follow a strategy outlined for the First Street pilot project, a redesign that aims to improve safety and convenience for all users by putting pedestrians, cyclists and bus riders on an equal footing with motorists.
That $500,000 project entails reducing automobile lanes on the one-way eastbound street, which planners say does not carry a heavy traffic load, from three to one. That blueprint preserves on-street parking while making room for a green-painted bike lane delineated by plastic tubes and a bus-only lane painted in red, DDA planners Patrice Gillespie Smith and Fabian De La Espriella said. The posted speed limit will drop from 30 mph to 25 mph, and improved pedestrian crossings will get hard-to-miss zebra striping.
The county Transportation Planning Organization, meanwhile, is looking at North Miami Avenue and Northeast First Avenue as north-south routes with protected bike lanes, and at Fifth and Sixth streets for east and west routes.
That hoped-for downtown network could eventually connect downtown to Wynwood via protected bike lanes. The county water and sewer agency will install protected bike lanes as part of an already-launched project for new lines along North Miami Avenue in Wynwood, from Northwest 20th Street to Northwest 29th Street, said city bicycle coordinator Collin Worth.
Just south of that, the Omni Community Redeveloment Agency wants to install protected lanes in a parking-protected “cycletrack” — a two-way bikeway — along North Miami Avenue.
That connectivity, Sanchez-Resnik said, is essential. Without it, no one will use the bike lanes.
“We really need the county to do it in a way that’s going to succeed. That means bike lanes that have real protection, that are connected to destinations, that don’t start in the middle of nowhere and dump people into traffic,” he said, noting that the Beach seems to be doing it right. “They’re making great progress and really showing the way for other
