Mandaue to designate 1st bicycle lane in Cebu

MANDAUE City will open in two weeks the first bicycle lane in Cebu to help ease traffic congestion.

Architect Florentino Nimor, Jr., city planning officer, said one of the four lanes of  S.B. Cabahug St. –  the two-meter left inner lane from City Hall to the “bagsakan center” near Pacific Mall – will be designated  a bicycle lane.

Concrete barriers will be installed to delineate the bicycle lane. The barriers and reflectorized traffic paint are ready,  Nimor said.

Lane markers will also be installed along the entire stretch to prevent vehicles from switching lanes.

“We noticed that making it (S.B. Cabahug) one-way has helped a lot in decongesting traffic flow but upon reaching Rizal Highway, there’s a bottleneck, thus, we are constrained to place lane markers to prevent vehicles from criss-crossing, loading and unloading passengers,” said Nimor.

Last August,  S.B. Cabahug was declared a  one-way street for northbound vehicles as part of a rerouting scheme.

With the left inner lane designated for bicycles, the loading and unloading areas will be limited to the right side of the road, Nimor said.

Glenn Antigua, operations chief of Traffic Enforcement Agency of Mandaue (TEAM), said they will  strictly enforce  no-stopping signals in certain areas. If the experiment works, another bicycle lane will  be designated along A. del Rosario Street, another one-way stretch.