Islander Feels Roadside Riprap Unsafe for Cyclists

Marco Island Bill Van Glabek said the riprap that was placed on the roadside of the street he lives on after a recent road paving makes bicycling dangerous, especially given its location adjacent to the Gulfstream Road entrance to the popular Marco Island YMCA.

“A lot of times,” Van Glabek said, "given the traffic, whether it's pedestrian or the cars, you have to go off the edge of the road. I specifically bought this bike because it's called a gravel bike and it has wider tires. So if you do have to go off the road, you stand a fighting chance of avoiding a crash. But with that riprap, even with these tires, I think you're in trouble now.”

Van Glabek is not new to bicycling.

“I’d call myself an experienced recreational cyclist,” he said. "I ride around town. I haven't done any races or anything like that, just as a means of local transportation rather than taking the car a lot of times.”

Van Glabek feels strongly that a cyclist wouldn't fare well if they encountered the riprap on the side of Gulfstream and other sites around the island.

"They're going down,” he said flatly. "They’re falling down. And besides falling down, you're going to fall on that riprap, which is going to tear you up, too.”

He isn’t sure what the solution is, but he feels strongly that the riprap is a dangerous solution.

“To be honest,” he said, "I don't know. But to me, the riprap is a dangerous alternative. And to be honest, I'd like to see something where you've got maybe a fighting chance to stop without falling. A lot of people use this as a way to get to the Y. It’s a heavily traveled road.”

“It’s a vacant lot, number one,” said Justin Martin, City of Marco public works director. "Number two, the vacant lot has a big drop-off from the newly paved asphalt surface to the existing ground surface there. So given that elevation difference, the purpose of the riprap is to protect the pavement from trucks driving off of it and then damaging the newly paved areas. So you don't have chunks of asphalt coming off because trucks are making the turn and they're not staying on the asphalt pavement. So the purpose of the riprap is to protect new asphalt pavement. That's not in the bicycle traffic area. It's off of the paved area.”

“If we left it without the riprap, they would have the same issue where you'd have a drop-off from the asphalt to the ground surface next to that,” continued Martin. “So if you have a bicycle wheel that comes off the asphalt and there is no riprap there, they're likely to not stay on the bike because of that drop-off because there's a great elevation difference there.

Martin explains that process is used around cul-de-sac circles. “If you look at all the newly paved cul-de-sac streets where you have the cul-de-sac circle, the new pavement raises the elevation of the road. However, the cul-de-sac circle grassy area stays the same. And there you have garbage trucks which need to maneuver around those cul-de-sac circles. So the riprap is to protect the pavement so that you don't have the tires coming off, falling off quickly and then taking out chunks of the new asphalt.”

Martin sees the riprap as the only option. 

"In this case, yes,” he said. "Because the city is not going to go in and put in additional dirt and sod and all that to raise the elevation of the roadsides in those areas. This is just part of the annual paving. You end up with some asphalt that's higher than the surrounding ground elevation. And then to protect that, where you have more than a four-inch drop-off, this is what we do to protect the pavement in those areas. And eventually trucks will ride on that riprap and they will start pushing that into the ground. And it actually starts to even things out a bit. When you first put it in, yeah, it's as rough as it's going to be, but it smooths out over time. It's not in a bicycle area, but if we didn't do it, you'd have a drop-off, which you're more likely to have a bicycle accident with a drop-off rather than some rough riprap in the area.