Understanding the Sharrow
If you’re a bicyclist of any frequency, your personal safety has almost certainly been put in danger by the behavior of aggressive drivers. You have stories like mine. You’ve had vehicles try to graze you, throw bottles at you, yada yada yada. It’s all par for the course. It’s just as much a failing of humanity as it is of public safety, but we can only reasonably address the latter.
So, let me tell you about the widely misunderstood sharrow!
“What are sharrows?”, ask uninitiated drivers and bicyclists, alike.
Don’t feel alone in your naivety, no one knows what they are for — and no wonder! Even the Oregon Department of Transportation doesn’t bother explaining this to motorists.
Here’s how the ODOT describes sharrows in the Oregon Driver Manual:
A sharrow indicates that the lane is shared and bicycles may be in the road. It is indicated by two chevrons above a bicycle symbol painted on the road. To learn what is required of a bicyclist, read the Oregon Bicyclist Manual available at your local DMV office or online at www.oregon.gov/odot/hwy/bikeped.
That’s clearly no fucking help.
If you follow their guidance and read the Oregon Bicyclist Manual — as I’m sure most drivers do — here’s what you’ll find:
The symbol in the graphic to the right is a sharrow. It’s provided to show bicyclists where to ride on streets without bike lanes and to indicate to motorists where to expect bicyclists. It is placed along a line of travel that avoids opening car doors.
So, sharrows are for bike safety! Now it’s getting clearer.
But both the city and the state, in all their effort to improve safety, fall short on raising awareness for these symbols and what they stand for. None of the explanations that ODOT offers up state their use explicitly — that motorists have a duty to ensure safety on roads with these markings, or to stay off of them completely.
Sharrows designate roads as neighborhood greenways, or outside of Portland, bicycle boulevards. These are roads that are established parallel to major motorist arteries, intended as safe routes for bicyclists. They indicate where exactly in the road bicyclists should ride, and remind motorists that not only are bicyclists entitled to use the full road, but they should be passed safely and slowly.
Neighborhood greenways give bicyclists dedicated routes to travel, but equally important to the city, they act as a traffic control mechanism. These greenways slow traffic to safe speeds and push motorist traffic off of neighborhood streets and back on to arteries. Motorists are free to use neighborhood greenways, under the shared assumption that they will reduce their speed and pass bicyclists safely.
Now, to be fair, bicyclists more commonly misuse neighborhood greenways. Used to being confined to a marked path on the side of the road, bicyclists frequently ride far off to the side of these greenways. This not only increases the likelihood of being hit by a car door, but it also reduces the greenway’s effect in controlling traffic, as vehicles continue normal travel on these roads with bikes riding out of the way.
As a bicyclist, make sure to do your part! Assert your right to the space you are provided to bike safely. This isn’t an assault against motorists, it’s about providing routes that promote safety and increase bike adoption — the net effect if we’re successful is reducing motorist traffic! In a city with a steadily growing population of motorists, it’s important to be working to move that population to more efficient transit that the city can sustainably manage.
It still comes back to motorist education though, and ODOT, you’re failing at
that. I’ve preemptively offered up my copy-editing services and fixed your explanation of sharrows. Feel free to use my changes, no need to thank me:
The symbol you see in the road is called a sharrow. These symbols indicate where in the road to expect bicyclists, and that bicyclists are entitled to full use of the road — no matter how hard you yell “SHARE THE ROAD” out your window at them.
These symbols also require that motorists slow their vehicle’s speed to accommodate the slower speed of the bicyclists. If you are upset with how slow bicycle traffic is, you can drive like an asshole on any of the many streets built for vehicle traffic.
Vehicles are permitted to safely overtake bicyclists on roads with sharrows, but motorists should pretend bicycles occupy the same space as at least one Prius.
Most importantly, if you are on a road with sharrows, don’t honk or yell at bicyclists or everyone will know you just moved here from California.
