You might have had the chance to walk, ride, or drive through the new combination of bike and parking lanes on a 2023 road-dieted 6th between McKnight south to Mountain in Wells Park, here brazenly stolen from a nice illustration by Downtown Albuquerque News:

Going from two one-way southbound driving lanes to one enabled created of a “buffered” (striping, not physically separated) bike lane as shown here.

Before I get to the car/driver/probably resident parked in the bike lane, note the parking lane to the left. That’s where driver dude is supposed to park, then walk across the one lane of traffic (and bike lane) to get home. Problem is, nobody is gonna do than until we some education, enforcement, and likely, some more enforcement.

Just a bit north, here’s what the bike lane looks like in practice on a leisurely Sunday morning.

I think you know what is about to happen here, and it probably won’t involve the driver using the whole parking lane (fortunately not occupied) to get around the cyclist.

The problem compounds further south at Rosemont, as there’s no parking lane, the City having stopped Rosemont east as part of the Community Center expansion project. Here’s how it looked prior to this work.

In posting these “driver parked in bike lane” photos, we’re not saying the whole 6th Street project is horrible and that anyone having anything to do with it should be fired or kicked off the City’s “Complete Streets Review Committee,” which is where this engineering schema was worked out. Sure, some physical separation is needed between driveways to prevent drivers parking. Or as Martin Sheen’s character in “Apocalypse Now” says regarding getting off the boat: “Absolutely goddamn right.”

The problem is, and I say this having served for a time on the Complete Streets Review Committee, the Keller Administration is NEVER going to empower the Committee to recommend and put physically separated bike lanes anywhere. At least it hasn’t up to this point. You might remember this is the same administration that removed the only physically separated bike lanes in town (spare a few feet on MLK at intersections) as pretty much the first thing done in taking office.

Thus the only strategy left at this point is a two-parter: 1. Educate driving residents/visitors on the presence and importance of the new bike lane; 2. Enforce the hell out of it after conducting the education. As in towing, because I don’t want to be riding past a wheel-booted parked car for months and months. Circling back (don’t you just HATE that term during meetings?!?) to the earlier point, the Keller Administration could circumvent the need for this two-part strategy if it just installed the goddamn physical separation in the first place.

Failing the strategy or Administration coming to its sensese, we’re just gonna have this:

over and over and over again.