Category: Photography & Images

This truck driver gave us as much room as he possibly could, given the cramped conditions on Raymond Avenue:

Notice the street lamp in view directly above the cab? Keep that in mind.

In order to give us that much clearance, he had to put the left wheels up on the median:

That’s exactly what the NYSDOT engineer who designed Raymond Avenue explained to me drivers should do. Driving on the median is the intent of the Raymond Avenue layout.

FWIW, the “brick paver” median surface is actually stamped asphalt (or some thermoplastic material) painted brick red. It has marginal durability; the same material in the rotary islands began disintegrating after a few months, has accumulated many non-textured patches, and was obviously not intended to support routine travel.

After that truck passed, the FedEx driver also gave us plenty of clearance, also with left wheels on the median:

Notice the minimal clearance between that lamp post and the protruding driver-side mirror? You’re supposed to drive on the median to avoid cyclists, while simultaneously not colliding with a zero-clearance black lamp post.

Those lamp posts replaced the original bollards bracketing the crosswalk (just ahead of Mary in the first picture). Those bollards stood directly in the pseudo-brick area on both sides of the travel lane, with zero clearance from the inclined curb and roughly in line with those truck headlights: anyone driving up on the median at the crossing to avoid a cyclist would mow down a nonreflective black bollard.

And, indeed, mowed down they were.

A few years ago, NYSDOT removed the bollards from the “pedestrian refuges” (that’s their term for the crosswalk median area) and repositioned the remainder in the center of the median, presumably to protect them from drivers.

Share the road, that we do…

Adapted from an email to NYSDOT (hvtmc@dot.state.ny.us):

The minimum green and yellow times on the signals from Burnett Blvd to Rt 55 are too short for bicycle traffic making a left turn across six traffic lanes.

The pictures show key points from our ride on 2015-07-10, returning from the Balloon Festival in Poughkeepsie. We took the DCRT around Poughkeepsie, went through Arlington to Rt 376 at Collegeview, then took Rt 376 Red Oaks Mill.

The image sequence numbers identify frames extracted from video files. The front camera (a Sony HDR-AS30V) runs at 60 fps and the rear camera (a Cycliq Fly6) at 30 fps, so you can directly calculate the time between frames. The Fly6 timestamp is one hour ahead, for reasons I don’t quite understand.

The red signals are turning off and the greens haven’t lit up yet:

One second later, the car and our bikes are starting to roll:

Given the number of drivers blowing through red signals at full speed, devoting one second to watching for oncoming traffic seems prudent.

The yellow signals begin turning on seven seconds after the green:

The car has reached the pedestrian ladder across Rt 55, but we’re still crossing the westbound lanes of traffic. Note that I’m lined up with the lane closest to our starting point on Burnett: this is a big intersection. We may not be the fastest riders on the road, but we’re not the slowest, either.

We’ve reached the far side of the intersection just under 16 seconds from the green:

However, the opposing signals turned green while we’re still crossing the eastbound lanes of Rt 55, 15 seconds after the Burnett Blvd signals went green:

About 2.7 seconds later, cars have been accelerating across the intersection toward us as we reach the pedestrian ladder:

They started rolling immediately after their signal went green; waiting a second isn’t a universal practice.

Setting the minimum Burnett green to 12 seconds, the minimum yellow to 10 seconds, and the minimum delay from Burnett green to Rt 55 green to 30 seconds would help cyclists (just barely) reach the far side of the intersection before opposing traffic starts rolling.

As a bonus, adjusting the sensor amplifiers on Burnett to respond to bicycles and marking the coil locations on the pavement in both lanes would help us through the intersection during low-traffic-volume times, as our bikes seem unable to trip the signals.