MILWAUKEE — If you are serious about biking in Milwaukee, you have to love what the city has done on the south side.
Raised and separated bike lanes on Becher Street are the city's latest attempt to encourage cycling.
Jake Newborn from the Wisconsin Bike Federation says doing that starts with making safe connections all across the city.
"This is definitely a trucking route from the harbor getting on to I-94, but it's also a connection street from one side of the freeway to the other," Newborn said.
Newborn has been pushing for infrastructure like that for years.
Over the last two decades, Milwaukee and cities across the country tried a little bit of everything to make biking safer and easier. Including painted markings on the pavement called "sharrows."
The name is a mash-up of the words sharing and arrows.
About 15 years ago, sharrows were the hot new way to be bike-friendly without breaking the bank.
Now, we are learning sharrows may not be the way to go.
"There were people who thought this was something we could do easily and cheaply and quickly to help make it safer," Newborn said.
"It gave the illusion of safety and I think that can sometimes make it even more dangerous."
That was also the conclusion of a 13-year study of a bunch of different bike infrastructure strategies.
Protected bike lanes -- like the ones on Becher Street? They make the streets safer for everybody.
A painted bike lane? No difference, one way or another.
When it comes to sharrows, the study found it's actually safer to not have them.
Robert Schneider is a professor of urban planning at UW Milwaukee. He has seen that study, too, including the part that said sharrows are dangerous because they give cyclists "a sense of false security."
"In the neighborhoods where they were put the cyclist crashes actually went up slightly," Schneider said.
Part of the problem is that sharrows communicate a message of safety to cyclists but not to the drivers of cars who need to share the road.
"Especially if that motorist is traveling at a high rate of speed, they may not see the marking the same way a bicyclist does," Schneider said.
So, are sharrows all bad?
Maybe not.
Schneider points to the intersection of Fratney and Wright streets in Riverwest.
"It's an environment where cars can be traveling at a bicyclist's speed and that feels comfortable to everybody," he said.
Fratney and Wright are in the middle of what the city calls a "bike boulevard" with speed bumps and signage and sharrows.
Here, sharrows work in concert and context with everything else.
"They can work in certain types of locations, most likely. But they may not be appropriate for major arterial streets," Schneider said.
Jake Newborn wants cyclists to know sharrows really don't do much more than point the way.
"I think they're okay for wayfinding if you're making a connection from a trail to another trail, but they don't offer any real protection," he said.
Newborn hopes cities like Milwaukee build more proven solutions like these bike lanes and leave the sharrows in the rear-view mirror.
Something that appears to be coming down the road ahead.
Milwaukee Mayor Cavalier Johnson has promised to add 20 more miles of protected bike lanes across the city.
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