I live in corktown and recently we got all kinds of bike lanes and routes and such like this.

My question is, on my street bagley, we do not have bike lanes but we got signs indicating it's a 'bike route'. What exactly does this mean and how is it different form a normal street? It seems they did this on streets that were not wide enough for striping.

Another thing I noticed is it seems that the signs are black if there are lanes and green if there are not lanes. Is this true? Is there meaning behind this?

In other cities the routes get numbers designated to them so you can follow a given route, but so far these 'bike route' signs seem kind of random and like they don't serve a propose. Can anyone shed some light on this?

-dh