If you ride a bike with any frequency, you've probably, at some point, encountered a sharrow. That's when a bike+arrow symbol is painted onto a standard street or road to indicate that cyclists should travel there.

A recent article from Momentum Mag highlights a new study out of Chicago that demonstrates the useless nature of sharrows:

Sharrows are what cities install when they want to appear as though they care about bicycling, but can’t or don’t want to muster the political will to actually change anything significant in its favor.

It has long been assumed by bike advocates and everyday riders that sharrows do very little, if anything, to increase road safety for people on bikes. As it turns out, those assumptions were correct.

A recent study undertaken by University of Colorado Denver researchers Nick Ferenchak and Wesley Marshall examined safety outcomes for areas of Chicago that received bike lanes, sharrows, or no bicycling infrastructure at all. The study was conducted before Chicago had much in the way of protected bike lanes, so in this case no distinction was made between types of bike lanes. The study concluded that, while bike lanes encourage more people to ride and lead to increased safety for people on bikes, sharrows do neither.