Shoulders cannot be used to add motoring lanes or designate bike lanes. Cities and towns may only add a lane when entire road can be widened, which means buildings or homes are seized by eminent domain or parking is eliminated. Often a better solution can be to convert parallel roads into one-way thoroughfares in either direction, which preserves safety for all roadway users. But macro-engineering is necessary to understand what’s causing traffic increase.

In RI, it’s obvious that traffic bunches at natural obstacles, particularly coves, estuaries, ponds and rivers that aren’t adequately bridged. Many of the State’s worst pinch points come where traffic is thereby forced together, such as Apponaug and Hoxie. Also, airport and train surrounds cut off all flow except motoring in a discriminatory way.

Sure, bring on the sharrows, but use them to make complete routes that don’t simply stop, like the sign in Governor Francis that reads “Bicycle Route Ends” just shy of Hoxie, when a cheap culvert covered span on Landsdowne St could connect cyclists to the Bike lanes on West Shore Rd. Designating some reasonable percentage of transportation dollars to bicycling infrastructure will preserve roadways better than any other paln. Adding motoring lanes just encourages more traffic.