The BB Sunday Bike Ride (expensive branding campaign pending) this morning took in both the delightful blustery weather and an assortment of roadway infrastructure improvements. It’s like the City’s Road Striping Machine showed up just the other day and caught up on a bunch of things. To wit:

Two or three blustery Autumns ago, the City told its bike advisory committee that it was just about to get around to correcting the out-of-compliant 3 ft. bike lane striping done during its earlier Rio Grande Blvd. work north of I-40. “It’s just a matter of the weather warming enough to do the striping,” it was told. Well, two or three blustery Autumns passed, at least, before it got warm enough, I guess.

Still, above you see the long-awaited corrected striping. Just in time for Winter, 2021-2022.

4th Street north of downtown is getting repaved, roughly Lomas to I-40. While it doesn’t look like any bike lanes are coming in, and that the new, smoother paving will just make it easier for speeding drivers to speed, the current unfinished roadwork means that southbound 4th is closed.

So you can damn well guess where the BB Sunday Bike Ride took us: Southbound on 4th Street.

BB recommends that work on 4th be immediately suspended until…the end of time. It was great riding 4th southbound this blustery morning, especially with a tailwind.

Elsewhere, one of BB’s favorite on-going (some might say never-ending) road projects is the total renovation of Woodward as part of its eventual fully functional extension of Sunport Blvd. I sense some BB readers are asking, “Where the Hell is that?” so…

You see that yellow machine that, because of my complete lack of knowledge about such things, we’ll call Yellow Road-Smoothing Thing (YRST)? It appears to be smoothing a path between the Jersey barrier to the left and pastel wall/trees to the right as part of work to create a multi-use (i.e., not pick-up trucks) path down Woodward to 2nd.

Here’s more from BernCo on the project(s).

One is tempted to snidely thank Climate Change for allowing the extra seasonal time for these and other projects (e.g., finally doing the long, long, long-awaiting restriping on 8th Street south of downtown) to be undertaken in mid-October. But that would be snide and we should instead be celebrating that these projects are getting done at all.

At least until the first frost. We’ll see in future BB Sunday Bike Rides, and BB posts, how/if work continues apace through the formerly known as Winter months.