Bike advocates are plumbing new depths, with a growing trend toward placing plungers to act as separators for bike lanes.
Bike commuter activists have struck another city with an improvised bike safety solution. The latest city to discover its bike lanes demarcated with toilet plungers, is Providence, Rhode Island. "Last week, Jeffrey Leary—part of an advocacy group called Reasonable RI—created a protected lane on Fountain Street with 72 Dollar Store toilet plungers wrapped in reflective tape for visibility,"Molly Hurford writes for Bicycling.
As Hurford points out in his summary statement, these lanes are illegal, though these three acts have not been followed by arrests. The Providence Mayor's Office has released a statement saying that so long as plungers don't "impede" traffic they will let them stay.
Previous demonstrations took place in Omaha, Nebraska and Witchita, Kansas, where the city actually replaced the plungers with a protected bike lane. It seems that cities all over the country want a nice clean flow.
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UCLA Lewis Center for Regional Policy Studies
Mpact (formerly Rail~Volution)
Chaddick Institute at DePaul University
City of Piedmont, CA
Great Falls Development Authority, Inc.
HUDs Office of Policy Development and Research