What's happening to the bike lanes

Barely a year old, the bike lane markers in Cedar Rapids are fading, in some places to illegibility. This is particularly worrisome on streets like H Avenue NE, which not only bears a lot of on-off traffic from I-380, but is the designated connector between the Cedar Lake Trail and the CeMar trail.

 

The street is the same width it always has been, but was re-striped last year to accommodate bike lanes in each direction. The lanes now look like this:

How has this happened? Cedar Rapids mayor Ron Corbett told Coe's Political Science Club in April that the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency recently changed its regulation concerning road paint. The oil-based paint cities and states have always used is no longer permitted; water-based paint is safer for the environment. However, as the above pictures show, it's not notably durable.