Public Transportation and Smart Growth

Riding my bicycle downtown, I generally avoid sidewalks. There are some streets with well-defined bike lanes; in other cases, to ride in the street basically means to take up a car lane. While I'm OK with doing taking up a car lane, I do sometimes go on a sidewalk if I can clearly see that there are no or few pedestrians, and when I do this, I slow down a lot, coming to a very slow speed when near a pedestrian, giving a wide a berth.

As a pedestrian downtown, I've noticed that some bicycle riders appear to me to habitually use the sidewalk.

There are a few streets that have one-way traffic - some of them have two lanes of traffic and some of them have three lanes of traffic. In the latter cases, to ride in the street basically means taking up a lane. It might be better to turn those into two-lane streets, and then creating a distinct bicycle lane. I wouldn't like to clog up car traffic by reducing the lanes, which might not be a big impact if bicyclists are already closing off one of more lanes.