For much of the summer, work crews have been repaving the main road that runs past my house. First they widened it, then they repaved it, then they painted new lines. The road was already plenty wide enough for two cars, but bicyclists use it — recreationally; I’ve never seen anyone commuting from Hillsborough to Durham on a bike — and I expect the road was widened out of safety concerns. But…
I use the road to run. I don’t run far on it, because there’s too much traffic and too many blind curves, but I have to run a brief stretch on it to get from my neighborhood to other less-traveled back roads. The wider road may be safer for bicycles — that remains to be seen — but it’s more dangerous for me. It used to be that if I saw or heard a car I could hop off onto the grass, but now for most of that stretch the paved road drops right off into the drainage ditch. And most drivers, I’ve noted, seem to think that however wide their lane is, they own the paved surface.
The wider road is also more blacktop for turtles to cross, if you care about turtles. I do, but they don’t have much of a lobbying interest with municipal governments and highway commissions.
The end result of this “improvement,” then, was to make the road less safe for those of us who rely on our feet and not on wheels. But there’s a catch, and this is the interesting part.