I know I’m in the minority, but I liked the center-running bike lanes on Valencia, and I was always worried the parking protected bike lanes weren’t going to work because of the significant amount of bike traffic during the morning commute. Unfortunately, I have turned out to be right.

The main issue with the parking-protected bike lanes is that they’re too narrow. During the morning commute (8 to 9, approximately), there are a lot of bikes going north on Valencia, and they’re a mix of “regular” bikes, the clunky rental e-bikes, and regular e-bikes. All three of those move at markedly different speeds, and when we’re all trying to get to work, we can’t just all choose to move at the slowest speed in the group. That means bikes have to pass each other quite a bit.

Most sections of the lanes are too narrow to pass safely, and even when passing in the wider sections, there is a significant contingent of men on road bikes who get aggressive when passed. That means the only opportunity to pass is at intersections, where to do so you basically have to swerve out into car traffic coming from multiple directions.

To make things worse, when everyone is stopped at the light, rather than just letting the e-bikes wait in front so they can get out of the way, some non e-bike riders will insist on getting out in front of the e-bikes, forcing everyone to execute the difficult passing maneuvers again. I found myself going as fast as I possibly could just to stay ahead of the people I had already passed, which makes it more dangerous if some clueless pedestrian wanders into the bike lane on their way from the sidewalk to their car without looking, which happens at least once a day and is another problem with the parking-protected bike lanes.

With the center-running lane, the north and south directions were side-by-side, so you could clearly see if it was safe to pass by briefly moving into the opposite-direction bike lane. As an added bonus, there were almost never pedestrians blithely wandering into the bike lane without looking.

This is all less of a problem during the evening commute, when people tend to leave work at different times, so the lanes are not as crowded. So my new route is to add about 8 minutes to my commute and take Cesar Chavez to Folsom in the morning, then return home on Valencia in the evening.