I’m going to call it as it is: sharrows are the answers from cities that simply don’t care about cyclists but want to “show they are doing something” to silence

I’m going to call it as it is: sharrows are the answers from cities that simply don’t care about cyclists but want to “show they are doing something” to silence the complaints from what they think are niche groups. My hometown (and where I work now) is in an LA suburb and it and two adjacent cities recently implemented their “master plan”, and what they ended up doing was making arterial roads with heavy auto traffic traveling at 45-50mph into Class III bike paths. How do you expect a cyclist to “share the road” with cars going 3-4x their speed, or encourage novice cyclists? I think they just added sharrows to the busiest roads in the city and called it a day. The planners were clearly not cyclists, or more realistically with one of the cities I sent a complaint to, had their hands tied and couldn’t devise any other way to get cyclists safely from one side of the city to another due to the car-heavy infrastructure the city already had. “Bicycle boulevards” like I saw while living in Berkeley and Cupertino where there were literally roadblocks, bollards, and speed bumps installed would be laughed out here. One city planner told me that city council just didn’t see it as a priority, and that the councilmen just thought cycling was a “recreational activity” and didn’t see it as a serious commuter activity even though the planner himself was a bike commuter. Meanwhile car traffic is getting progressively worse and traffic lights still aren’t timed properly.