I can see why the sidewalk would be preferable there.
1.
It's on a highway. It's not a low-speed urban street with tons of peds, but rather a suburban highway with high speed cars and
very few peds. Regardless of the presence of a cycletrack, that inherently makes the street less comfortable for cyclists and the sidewalk more comfortable.
2.
The cycletrack intersections are dangerously under-designed. Cars turning off the Baseline Rd main lanes onto a side street are more dangerous here than on usual urban streets because the speed of the road plus lower than usual crossing treatments to remind drivers to watch for cyclists. The result is surely a lot of cars whipping through turns at pretty high speeds, without looking to see if there are any bikers. Compare the street crossings
on this Baseline Rd cycletrack with the street crossings on a typical cycletrack in
Chicago,
Seattle,
Vancouver, or even
Denver and you'll see the difference. Or
here's the engineering standard if you prefer technical guidance to examples. For a layout like this you ideally should have a separate turn signal phase for cars, and really really need to at least paint the intersections. The fact that it's a high-speed suburban arterial makes it even more important here than a lower-speed urban street.
It might've made more sense to figure out an off-street trail for that corridor, using some combination of Baseline's sidewalks and frontage roads. But ease-of-implementation and affordability are key factors in all bike planning, and I can see how easy it was to slap some cheap flexposts to an existing bike lane and basically call it a day. I'm 100% in favor of easy things like that. But I'd still like to see something at the intersections. That's exactly what green paint is for, but even some dashed white lines would be better than nothing at all.
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