Bicycle Facilities in Marin County (and California)

If you’ve been following all of the work that the MCBC has been doing in Marin County, you may have noticed that we use some bicycle terminology that you might not hear in “regular conversation”. Explanations are below! (Note that Class I, II, and III facilities are terms used in the State of California, so if you’re talking to your friends in Oregon, they probably won’t know what you’re talking about!)

Class I facilities are completely separated from traffic. These are two-directional road for bicyclists, and may also include a dirt or gravel path to the sides of the pathway for walkers, joggers, etc., in which case it’s also called a Multi-Use Path, or “MUP”. Class I paths are usually 8-10 feet wide. Examples around Marin County include the Mill Valley-Sausalito pathway, Tiburon multi-use path, and Sandra Marker Trail.

Class II facilities are otherwise known as bike lanes. We’ve got them all over the place here in Marin. Center Boulevard in Fairfax is a great example of some recently installed bike lanes. Bike lanes are separated from traffic with a 6-inch white stripe and are typically 4-6 feet in width.

Class III facilities are streets that are signed as bike routes where automotive traffic and bicycles share the road with no separation of any kind.

Sharrows are also known as “shared lane markings” and is a combination of the words “share and arrow”. Sharrows are relatively new pavement marking that has started to appear on Class III routes in Marin. Sharrows are designed to be used on Class III facilities where the pavement is too narrow to stripe a bike lane, and where there is parallel parking to the right of the lane. This helps to move the bicyclist out of the “door zone” as they are painted far enough in to the lane to discourage riding too far to the right. In addition, studies show that streets with Sharrows tend to slow traffic by 1-2 miles an hour.

Video Detection Pavement Markings are now being found in some intersection in the County. A white stripe with a small bicycle in the middle shows a bicyclist where to be positioned in the intersection so that a small video camera mounted on a pole can detect them. The video detection is more effective than traditional in-pavement metal loop detectors (metal detectors) that sense metal over the asphalt and trigger a signal phase change in the intersection.