Maybe it’s time we restriped Candelaria Road…

Riding out this early morning to meet folks for breakfast at Milly’s (see map below), I took the North Diversion Channel up to Candelaria and turned west toward said restaurant.

The red star at Candelaria/Stanford marks the spot of the photo above that I took this morning, July 14 (Happy Bastille Day!) 2023. That’s a shameful excuse for a bike lane and a shamefully funny bike lane symbol “thermaplast.” It’s not the only such shameful lane/thermaplast in town, but I do recall that in a rather extensive measurement of Albuquerque bike lane widths Better Burque conducted a few years back, this stretch of Candelaria was “winner” of “Skinniest Bike Lane in Town” at 31 inches. And that’s with a posted 40 mph speed limit, mind you.

If you’ve studied such things a bit, one quickly figures out that there are eras of bike lane infrastructure, with “modern” era striping generally giving five or six feet of bike lane (sometimes with “buffers, etc.,” going back to extremely skinny Paleozoic striping, such at that on roadways like Candelaria east of I-25.

Having lived riding to and from Milly’s this morning, despite this shameful bike lane, I got back home and have tried to get some idea of how old the striping might be on this stretch of Candelaria. Google Streetview goes back to 2007 (that’s 16 years, folks) and…it the same damn striping width. A slightly better Streetview image in 2011 illustrates:

Yup, at least back in the old days they had the sense to minaturize the bike/rider symbol to fit between the stripe and gutter. Today, this morning, not so much sense:

In fact, a look through the years of Streetview images reveals that sometime between 2011 and, most likely, 2014 some CABQ Department of Community Development folks went out to put snazzy new striping and thermaplastic bike lanes symbols (LOOK, the cyclist has a HELMET on now!) on this stretch of Candelaria and did NOTHING to widen the bike lane to any width resembling a “modern” expectation for such infrastructure.

No, they just plopped the modern symbol onto the paleozoic lane. And drove off.

That was at least nine years ago. It still looks shamefully like shit today. What I haven’t done is answer the question of when Candelaria was last “engineered” to have driving/turn/bike lanes at their still shamefully current widths. Hell, it could have been 1970. Really. One great thing about blogging is that there might be some ABQ old-timer reading this blog who remembers when this new-fangled paleozoic striping went on this stretch of Candelaria. Blog operators are standing by for your report, old-timer!

And speaking of time, it’s been time to restripe proper, modern, bike lanes on Candelaria Road (not just this stretch but the whole damn thing) for many years, ESPECIALLY the nine years or more that shamefully forlorn bike lane symbol figure (with helmet!) has been overlapping both gutter and lane stripe at Candelaria and Stanford.

Another fun thing about blogging is that one is tempted to just repost the photo I took this morning going to Milly’s every week, hell every day, because this is the Internet and why not. Maybe something would be done if Better Burque did this every week or every day for quite some time. Unfortunately, it is far, far more likely that the only way this striping is going to be modernized is by some cyclist getting killed trying to use it. It ain’t gonna be because *some blogger wrote about it.

And that would be even more shameful than the photo above.

*Yes, naturally I hope I’m wrong about that. Ego being what it is and all.