Painted bike lanes are not uniformly bad. They can be valuable, provided they're wide enough and actually connect up with each other enough that you don't just end up with "can't get there from here" syndrome. Except for the idiots who think they're double-parking lanes, they do a pretty good job of marking a "watch out, cars" zone.
Sharrows, on the other hand, are largely slaps in the face. They're put on slow residential roads where I was perfectly fine riding anyways. Or they're half-assed "look we support bikes" icons slapped right in the door zone onto a stretch of potholes that cars run at 45mph. (My personal favorite is when a perfectly nice marked lane dumps you into sharrows right before a confusing intersection.)
Painted bike lanes are useful for only a tiny slice of the population: cyclists who are both confident and okay with a fair amount of risk/lack of safety. Most people aren't that; most people are open to the idea of cycling, but only if it feels relatively safe and comfortable, and you can't get that with no physical barrier between you and cars. Nobody puts their eight year old in painted bike lanes on arterials.
Agreed that sharrows are essentially useless though. It's not that the idea of mixing traffic has to be bad, but it only works if you have serious traffic calming measures that pretty much force drivers to slow down and drive more safely. Most of the time when sharrows go down, there's absolutely nothing functional changed about a car-dominant street.
Hmm, very fair point. I admit that, biking support overall being what it is, I'm mostly stuck on making things better for those who already bike (e.g., people like me, obviously). Expanding ridership to other groups seems like another level entirely most of the time, although it would be great! I should try to keep that aspect in mind more.
