PARMA, Ohio — Growing pains in Parma as people get used to a new road configuration.
The city just installed new bike markings on Pearl Road causing some people to post on Facebook questioning the safety.
“It’s nasty, nasty, nasty, nasty,” said Steve Fesko.
Fesko rides his bike down Pearl Road in Parma three to five times a week bracing for dear life.
“If you want to die, take the bike lane on Pearl Road in Parma,” said Fesko. “It is really dangerous, no one is looking out for you, and there’s no break. There’s no space for you to ride on. There’s just a marking on the pavement.”
If you’re not careful when driving down Pearl Road in Parma, you may not realize this is now a shared road, meaning bikers now have the right of way too.
“What we did, is we added a sharrow of pavement markings for bikes,” said Mayor Timothy DeGeeter.
DeGeeter says Pearl’s Road sharrows, or bike pavement markings, is a first for Parma after the city received inspiration from surrounding cities.
“Mostly it’s just been a car lane, but again Cleveland a number of years ago have done that, then Parma Heights having it, it would look very bad if we didn’t put that in there,” said DeGeeter.
Bike Cleveland advocates for communities to thin about bicyclists as they’re planning their streets, so we reached out to them to find out what they think.
“From our perspective, we would have loved to see the bike lane treatment continue from Parma Heights through Parma to connect into Cleveland which has a bike lane on pearl road, but this is a decent start to notify motorists that this is a priority bike corridor,” said Bike Cleveland’s Executive Director Jacob VanSickle.
But the mayor says that wasn’t possible right now.
“Moving forward, we will look to see if it’s a right fit to do those sharrows, but I don’t think we would take a look at trying to narrow the lanes on that. That’s where the controversy comes in,” said DeGeeter.
This leaves people like Fesko with a tough choice.
“Have you ridden on the sidewalk? It’s tough, and then when you get on the sidewalk, when you can pass the side street, the cars coming on don’t give you much mind. It’s treacherous,” said Fesko.
According to Bike Cleveland, there are several types of bike lanes. You can learn more on each one here.
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