Saturday, November 3, 2012

Sharrow Har

A-HA!  Victory is mine!!

Since I suspected this was some sort of weird Google-Apple fight, I checked to see if I could get Chrome for my iPad.  And because I only know thismuch about computers, I wrongfully assumed that I could not get Chrome for iPad.  Sure enough, there's an app for that.  And now my blog is working on my iPad, via Chrome.

So now what the heck are we going to talk about for the remaining 27 days of November?

Perhaps an investigation of Norfolk's new bike lanes, which seem likely to decrease the number of bicyclists in Norfolk:


Yes, that's one of the new "bike lanes," smack in the middle of a "car lane."  It seemed like some sort of trap to me.  Here, bikey bikey bikey....BAM! 

I did a quick google search.  ("Google" is rapidly becoming this month's inadvertent blog theme.)

Seems this isn't an accident -- or an accident waiting to happen -- at all. 

It's a "sharrow."  According to Bike Norfolk, a sharrow is a "shared-lane marking... [that] is placed in the center of a travel lane to indicate that a bicyclist may use the full lane. The name sharrow is a portmanteau of share and arrow."

Surprisingly and perhaps disappointingly, portmanteau is not a wine.

Something tells me it's going to take a minute or two for these symbols to catch on.  I have enough trouble surviving some of these streets on my Vespa, so I can only imagine what it's going to be like for a hairless, spandex shorts wearing man (or Danica) to just commandeer a full car lane in Norfolk.  I'm hoping these flattened bike images aren't soon joined by flattened bike and flattened human images, in chalk.

By the way, the victory I spoke of above was short lived.  I may have accessed my blog from my iPad, but I had to finish this bad boy up on the laptop again.  All because of the photo.  I won't go into it, but this teensy blog post took me about 2 hours, mostly due to the photo. 

Oh!  And trying to find a DONATE NOW widget to connect you fine folks to the American Red Cross.  My searching was futile, so I just added a link to the top right.  PLEASE donate if you can and then donate again in a few weeks.  The people of NJ and NY are suffering and will be for quite some time.  Any amount you can contribute will help and will be appreciated.

Thank you from a Jersey Girl.  :)





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