City installs 'sharrows' as part of cycling, driving experiment

Anyone driving, walking or cycling down Guadalupe between MLK and 4th Street Monday may have seen them being installed and wondered what they were.City employees from the Austin Public Works Department spent the better part of Monday installing 13, 3x2-foot symbols of a man on a bicycle into traffic lanes called sharrows.

The lanes are to be shared between cars and cyclists, but neither the city of Austin nor the University of Texas Center for Transportation Research will go into the details of how they're supposed to work because the sharrows are part of a nationwide experiment.The U.S. Department of Transportation chose Austin as one of six cities across the country to try out the sharrows to see if drivers and cyclists can figure out on their own how they work. The City of Austin and UT have installed cameras in strategic areas around the sharrows to collect video to be shared with the federal government to see whether or not the sharrows are working.