And yes, the 14th loop solves quite a few issues with the Boren/Yesler intersection that several of us saw on a ride last summer.

Bicycle handlebars are between 18 and 24 inches wide on a lot of bicycles.

Car doors swing wide. http://www.bikexprt.com/bikepol/facil/lanes/doorwidth.htm
A GMC 3/4 ton pickup is just over 10 feet from the curb edge to the tip of an opened door, which in this illustration gives the bicycle 6″ to fit in.

Now, are we going to say that streetcars have a 3′ passing distance with bicycles? Or are streetcars not vehicles?

Also, where are the bicycle counts that SDOT promised to get for the proposed routes? When are those expected?

This all seems rushed and not well researched, at least on the bicyle end.

Pedestrians don’t like walking next to traffic lanes, it’s dangerous, noisy, and in wet climates it’s a good way to get drenched when cars hit puddles.

When you look at sidewalk width, keep in mind it’s not all available for walking laterally. You lose a couple of feet to parking meters and such, doorway room in front of buildings, etc., and then you want to keep a wide enough traffic area that two wheelchairs can pass in opposite directions without having to swerve around each other. A 14′ sidewalk isn’t really that big in an area with significant pedestrian traffic.

It definitely brings its own design concerns and costs — the buffering essentially turns the cycle track into a separate road for intersection purposes, which can require separate traffic signals and turn phases if you want to avoid car/bike conflicts.

U.S. roads would generally require even more care than Europeans given the different legal environment. In much of Europe, motoring is considered a dangerous activity, and motorists are held to some form of strict liability. If a motorist hits a pedestrian or cyclist, there’s a rebuttable presumption that the motorist was at fault. (In the U.S., “I didn’t see him” is a common excuse for not yielding to a pedestrian or cyclist. In the Netherlands, that same statement would be a confession that the driver was driving too fast for conditions or wasn’t paying enough attention to the road, because it’s assumed the driver should be able to see and avoid other legal road users.)

Cars in the U.S. may rarely carry passengers, but passenger doors are often used for loading and unloading stuff from the passenger compartment. And since motorists are used to being able to leave the passenger-side doors standing open while loading/unloading, they won’t give that up instantly just because they’re blocking traffic.

On the driver’s side they’re at least aware a passing car could take their door off. If it’s just bikes on the passenger side, most motorists really don’t even think about bikes.

In my work I’ve had the chance to see collision reports and bicyclists using sidewalks still have a higher rate of collisions than those in the roadway. Simply put, motorists see what is on the roadway, not on the sidewalk. That is the key issue that will need to be addressed for cycle tracks to be designed and accepted in this country.

The senior bicycle planner for PDOT and a principal at Alta are making a bicycle design manual for cities which is more responsive to urban environments than the highway centric designs.

Take away the lanes (well lane in this case), not parking.

Most bike lanes in the U.S. are primarily a motorist facility, designed to make cyclists feel safe without having to take a position as far into the lane as they otherwise would. A paint stripe doesn’t stop cars from killing cyclists.

According to AASHTO, the minimum physical operating envelope for a cyclist is 40 inches. This means that the cyclist’s wheel track should be at least 20 inches to the left of any obstruction.

When a typical passenger car is parked tight to the curb, the driver’s door, when opened, will extend 110 to 120 inches from the curb, though some vehicles are considerably wider. If open-door width is 120 inches, the cyclist’s wheel track should then be a minimum of 140 inches from the curb. That’s just under 12 feet from the curb as a safe, legal, standards-compliant location to expect bicycles when on-street parking is allowed.

Yet many city streets have 8-foot parking and 4-foot bike lanes. A cyclist riding within these bike lanes is accepting significantly greater risk by riding closer to parked cars, but this positioning improves traffic flow for motorists by keeping most cyclists out of the general purpose lanes.

If you’re talking about a four-foot bike lane with no parking beside it, or a bike lane with a buffer zone between parked cars and the right edge of the bike lane, those can actually improve cyclist safety. But most bike lanes are designed to make cyclists feel good about riding too far to the right.

Funny, it works just fine in Holland and Denmark and Germany. But I guess we are never going to be able to do that in the USA. Makes me doubt any real future for alternative transportation here, including true High-Speed Rail.

I think it also presents opportunities for them to increase some commercial revenue for the university or bring the public in to some student-run productions.

I agree with your value judgment, but you have to account for the lives saved by reducing driving.