The City Council made it pretty clear last month that it's not quite ready to take the bold step of barring drivers from throwing things at cyclists. This is in keeping with general reluctance to turn Dallas into a legitimately bike-friendly city, a reluctance that seems to stem both from an ill-defined resentment that some bike riders have the temerity to disobey traffic laws and a hesitance to invest in cycling infrastructure when such a small percentage of the population commutes via bike.
Never mind that, extending that logic, we should stop building roads until motorists stop driving drunk and change lanes without signaling and that that Angela Hunt has pretty thoroughly destroyed the council's excuses for dragging its feet.
But while nothing has been happening at the council level, city staff seems to be making strides -- albeit tiny ones -- toward making the city a bit more welcoming for bikers. A couple of months ago, they finally got around to laying bike lanes downtown and installing more extensive bike infrastructure on Bishop Avenue and near Rosemont Elementary in Oak Cliff. A couple of weeks ago, stretches of the new bike lanes began turning neon green.
The latest effort you can see at the intersection of Fairmount and Turtle Creek where, sometime between Monday and Tuesday evening, the city installed a pair of signs reminding drivers that, per state law, bicycles are vehicles and should be "GRANTED ALL RIGHTS" as cars and trucks.
The design of these signs doesn't appear to be new. The lack of an area code for the city number listed at the bottom in particular indicates that the signs themselves -- or at least the template -- has been around for quite a while. But they have popped up in a new location. So far, I haven't seen them anywhere else, though I did leave a message with city transportation planner Keith Manoy on Tuesday to see what the deal is.
