ACHD's Road Wizard Sunday, August 6, 2017

Put share and arrows together and you have sharrows. The markings display a white bike with chevrons and are a guide to the recommended riding locations on roads that do not have bike lanes.

They are painted far enough from parked vehicles to help prevent bicyclists from being "doored" by exiting occupants. They also alert motorists that bicyclists can ride in the lane even if a motor vehicle driver doesn't have room to pass.

"Bikes May Use Full Lane" signs can't do all of that. Sometimes the signs and sharrows are used together, such as on 13th and Walnut streets in Boise. The preference is to place the signs along with the sharrows, or use sharrows without the signs, rather than let the signs stand alone.

Some motorists struggle with finding the patience to wait to pass a relatively slow-moving bicyclist, regardless of what types of signs or markings are posted. But for the most part, the sharrows help explain the possibility of bikes in the street.

The signal is working as intended, but the frustration among Whitewater Park drivers is noted. What we have here is another case of programming traffic lights to keep the largest groups of vehicles moving. And those vehicles are not flowing down Whitewater Park.

The signal timing plans are set up to benefit Main and Fairview, which are one-way roads typically loaded with drivers heading to and from Downtown Boise. The timing of the Main and Fairview signals must cooperate with the signals downtown to prevent backups by favoring the direction of the majority of motorists.

Tinkering to make the Whitewater Park signals at Main and Fairview work better together would mess up arrival times at other signals for drivers already on the main routes, creating new delays and impacting more people.

These have been reported around Mountain Home, but the mayor and police department aren't aware of any reason for them. But it is fairly common to see a white cross or "X" on a road. They are drawn to mark locations for aerial surveys that use photography.

Rural intersections where roads run along one-mile square land sections are good places to look for them. The intersections are often points of known locations and elevations. The only other "X" marking I can think of would be by a railroad crossing. Or to mark buried treasure…