BoltBus responds to St Paul bike lane issue

By cyclosity:

Reader Jed wrote in to let us[cyclosity] know about an update to the St Paul street bike lane / BoltBus parking situation. If you’ve ridden in the new lane, you might have encountered some large charter buses intruding into, or outright blocking the lane.

Their response is interesting to read for perspective, and is probably the best you could ask for short of “we will cease operations until we can stop blocking the bike lane” (I don’t think anyone wants that. BoltBus is probably the best way to get between New York and Baltimore, and I think there is a way Baltimore City can provide a good home for BoltBus and a safe lane for Baltimore cyclists. Oddly BoltBus did not reply to my email and those of a few others. No idea why Jed got the special treatment.

Thanks for your email.  We have been addressing this issue with Nate Evans of the Baltimore City Department of Transportation.  There wasn’t a bike lane on St. Paul prior to the recent street resurfacing project.  Unfortunately, the taxi cabs staging in this area have made it difficult for us to pull on bus in completely parallel to the curb and that’s why sometimes the rear of our buses protrudes into the bicycle lane.  We have asked the city for guidance on this issue and have recommended possibly moving the cabs stand back 10 more feet to alleviate this issue.  We have also addressed this with our drivers operating from this location and our customer service staff to ensure that we don’t block the cycling lane while our vehicle is there.   Hopefully you’ll see some improvement on this situation shortly.  We are trying our best not to block this lane, however a 45 foot bus is not the easiest thing to maneuver in the limited space that the city has given us here.

I’ve only seen a few buses in the lane myself – but the times that I did, it definitely seemed like the taxis (or private vehicles) were not really blocking the bus standing zone, and the driver probably had the extra 20 feet needed to park flush to the curb.

[B’ Spokes: Has anyone thought about putting bike lanes on the left> side of the street on one way streets? It avoids problems like this and door zone bike lanes and it is in our tool kit for our bike master plan.]

https://blog.cyclosity.com/?p=1840oldId.20100422091203286