The Sunshine Blog, formerly known as Sunshine Weekly, is Raleigh Public Record’s effort to live up to it’s name and bring public records to light for the people of Raleigh. Want city, county, state or federal information, or have a question about government that you’ve been dying to ask? Click on the Contact page and we’ll do the legwork. We’re expanding the scope this week to include answering questions that our readers have. Send us your question and we’ll figure out the best person to ask and bring you their answers here.
Reader John Morris, the editor over at Goodnight, Raleigh! blog asked RPR via Twitter a couple weeks ago how cyclists were supposed to be able to get through the new roundabouts on Hillsborough Street and how that would work with the bike lane proposal for the street. Our off-the-cuff answer was along the lines of “wear a helmet and take the lane.” It turns out that we weren’t too far off the mark.
We put the question to Eric Lamb, manager of the transportation services division in the city’s public works department. Here’s his email reply:
There are no specific markings for cyclists in roundabouts. Cyclists are expected to center themselves in the lane and operate just like a car in these situations. Since the operation is pretty low-speed, I find that it tends to be pretty easy when I ride through them. Hillsborough/Pullen will be eastern NC’s first two-lane roundabout.
Here’s a decent online resource regarding bikes and peds versus roundabouts: http://www.walkinginfo.org/faqs/answer.cfm?id=3454
