Half-hearted, Half-assed Half-terthought...

Took the pic at left recently in Old Town, Alexandria (Virginia). Nice placement. Not the motorist's fault, this time. Seems the city saw fit to paint a sharrow in the parking zone, where it shines like an embattled beacon of hope beneath the belly of parked vehicles. North of this spot, they've painted a bike lane smack dab in the open car-door zone that stretches all of a couple blocks before terminating abruptly and mysteriously, leaving several more blocks with neither bike lane nor sharrow, until the abomination in the pic makes its less than majestic appearance. All of this on Union Street, a high-pedestrian area where the average vehicle speed is about 20 mph, and where there's an all-way stop sign at almost every intersection. Absolutely no reason at all to place any bike markers along this street, as doing so not only endangers cyclists who play by "the rules," but also underscores the widely held, misplaced belief that bikes aren't true vehicles and shouldn't mingle on the road with automobiles.

It's half-hearted, half-assed efforts like this half-terthought that really burn my ass, because someone somewhere who is clearly overpaid really, truly believes that (s)he reached out to cyclists in a meaningful way. Yep, clearly.

Well done, city planners!