About 8 or 9 months ago, they reduced the 3-lane thoroughfare through my part of town to 2-lanes with a bike lane, and narrowed the lanes to about 10 feet. People slowed down at first, but now people go just as fast as they used to, typically 5-10MPH over the speed limit, and some 15 MPH over (that's 50MPH). The radar signs installed as part of the project always read 40, 42, 45 and not just for my car.

As a cyclist, the bike lanes don't really make me feel safer. There is a good margin of space between the bike lane and the car lane, but the bike lanes are really only in effect for half of any given block. The second half of the block, the line between the car/bike lanes is dotted, and cars can legally enter the bike lane, to make right turns. And then of course, anyone parallel parking on the street has to cross the bike lane to do so.

Making the lanes narrower did not make pedestrian crossings any safer, as the road is actually the same width, and you still have to travel the same distance to cross the street. What did make it safer for pedestrians, the installation of flashing yellow warning lights at certain crosswalks, that pedestrians can turn on before crossing the street. Motorists see them and stop for people crossing, and that is a new and welcome effect.

The bike lanes would have been much MUCH better implemented one block south of the main drag on a residential street that runs parallel. Much safer for cyclists. Healthier too, not having to breath as much vehicle exhaust. And probably a more optimal allocation of resources for the citizens. As much as everyone wants to be PC and become friendly advocates of human-powered transport, it really doesn't make sense in this part of town, to increase trip times and emissions for thousands of motorists daily, so the 50 people who choose to ride their bike can have a marginally safer lane to ride in. In Downtown L.A., it is completely different. Downtown, the bike lanes make sense because hundreds if not thousands of people use them. You always see a bike in the bike lane over there. But outside of the heart of the city, many people commute to work and carpool their kids to school and ballet and such. They're not going to ride bikes 5 hours a day to make that kind of commute.

Oh, and where the traffic engineers failed to account for, and accommodate heavy traffic on a couple of heavily-traveled segments of the road, motorists now drive their cars illegally in the bike lanes during periods of congestion.

IMO the project is mostly a failure. The safer pedestrian crossings are a great improvement. But the bike lanes such as they are, and the narrower lanes, just a waste of money. Putting the bike lanes on a side street would have been really great, a win-win for both cyclists and motorists.