In many North American cities, there is much talk about improving and increasing bike lanes and bike ridership. All movement forward, however, can stall at the implementation stage. Here are 3 tips to jump start bike infrastructure in cities where it has stalled.
photo credit: Sarah Rose Robert
Most cities now have at least some bike lanes, typically the painted lanes or ‘sharrows’ that indicate cars and bikes should share a lane. Meanwhile, they struggle with finding the political will and public understanding to take more significant strides forward.
Safe cycling, we have seen in Europe and are increasingly seeing in forward-thinking cities, depends on separated bike lanes. Pedestrians, cars, and bikes do not mix well (an exception being narrow streets engineered to permit only the slowest vehicle movement). Yet cities get caught up in the years of planning, and the millions of dollars in capital expenditures, required to implement separated lanes. The result, unfortunately, is often status-quo streets and a regular round of promises to biking advocates that the 10 or 15 or 20 year plan will include bike lanes.
It need not be so.
3 steps will help move cities forward. Now.
1. Paint
No, paint doesn’t protect cyclists. Any car can drive over a line of paint anytime. The rationale for a vigorous program of painting, though, is in creating awareness and momentum.
In cities where bike lanes are just two lines of white paint, I dare say that most car drivers cross the bike lanes totally unaware. Whether making a right turn across a bike lane or pulling out from a parking spot (see #3 below on parking changes), cars assume the right-of-way.
Use paint to pump up awareness. Paint lanes a solid colour at the points where they start and end, and at intersections or areas like driveways where vehicles are entering from the side.
Ideally, a paint program can be accompanied by a public awareness campaign. Engage your local police force, downtown businesses and bike advocates to collaborate on some street-corner education, teaching motorists and cyclists alike about how to signal and cross lanes. Remind cars turning right to do that oft-forgotten right shoulder check to see if a bike has come up in the adjacent bike lane.
Such awareness-building requires, as a minimum, that bike lanes be clearly visible, especially at intersections. In most cities, most of the time, lanes are simply not visible.
2. Pilots
The two great benefits of an aggressive program of bike lane pilots: getting new riders to try out routes, and building public awareness.
A side benefit, of course, is that a good pilot truly tests what works and what doesn’t. While engineers like to work within design standards, almost every street situation is a unique case. Pilot projects do real world testing on the real ground of urban streets.
Often, a pilot will show that we have excess capacity dedicated to cars: four lanes, in many cases, where two function well. The pilot shows what car congestion would or would not occur with a permanent change, and gives bike riders a chance to try out a safer, protected environment.
In our car-oriented society, we regularly tolerate street disruptions for paving, lane painting, or underground infrastructure repairs. Why not create a system of roving bike lane pilots, using the simple tools of a few barricades, pylons, and public education signage?
Photo: Dakota Medical Foundation
Let’s put those construction barriers, pylons and planters to creative use. Plan a series of bike lane pilots throughout the city.
3. Dividers
While permanent, attractive dividers are ideal, there are quicker, cheaper options. Plastic bollards. Moveable planters. Low construction detour curbing. Or, perhaps my favourite: a row of parked cars.
Move the row of parallel-parked cars from their cozy spot at the curb and place them between the bike lane and the moving traffic lanes.
Start with what you have available while working on that 3, 5 or 10 year plan to bring out the heavy equipment and create permanent changes. Temporary dividers combined with our #1 and #2 suggestions of highly visible Paint and Pilot projects once again contribute to real world testing of design features. There is nothing more disappointing to cycle advocates and citizens who simply want a safe biking environment to show up when a new, expensive, bike infrastructure project opens only to fine that minor design details were fumbled. Sure, national and international design standards exist but they are not a be-all and end-all: local input can almost always tweak designs to make them even better.
3 Steps: not the whole answer, but a start
Will the pursuit of these interim steps postpone development of the ideal, comprehensive, network of separated bike lanes? Quite the contrary. By jump starting bike ridership with Paint, Pilots and Dividers, cities will help create both an appetite for cycling and a broader awareness that good cycling infrastructure is the new normal on urban streets.
As a recent post on StreetsBlog noted, ‘One-Day Plazas and Bike Lanes Can Change a City Forever.’ It’s all about showing how real change can work, right now.
illustrations courtesy of Tanya Gatsby, Drawing Out Ideas
Totally agree with the three essentials for bike lanes. Here in Oakland, we have had a mediocre bike lane system until the city started installing green paint in select areas. There are still some issues but it has done so much for helping get respect from cars.
I think it’s a mistake to do a lot of these pseudo bikelanes. They just end up becoming permanent, and the hotchpotch approach suggested will lead to all kinds of confusing, slow, unsafe, and just plan dumb designs. Since it’s well known what “doing it right” looks like (visit Copenhagen, Amsterdam, etc), why not just do that?
Rather than waste time and energy on confusing initiatives, pick roads one at a time, by order of importance for commuting or safety or whatever criteria you have – and then build real, quality bike paths. One at a time. Yes, it will take years. No, it will not cost a fortune (compared to building roads for cars), but it will require a budget and a will. And over time, it will build momentum and give you a dependable, reliable, quality infrastructure.
The bike lanes of Copenhagen didn’t appear overnight, either.
Separated bike lanes are good at one thing, and one thing only: Keeping cyclists out of motorists’ minds until the moment of impact, usually at the extra-convoluted intersections that separated bike lanes require.
Witness the cycletrack recently opened in Seattle (I think), that resulted in four cyclist injuries in the firts week or two after it was opened, due to poor sight lines for motorists trying to cross it (and the sense of invulnerability that too many cyclists attribute to such features).
Such bike lanes as you recommend further the mistaken notions that: a) cycling is so outre and so dangerous that it must be done in its separate place, b) cyclists are inferior road users, and must be corralled like children. A direct result of this is increased harassment of cyclists who DO know how to safely manage their bicycles in traffic and who eschew the bike lanes as being “Not Feasible” (for a host of reasons).
Far better to encourage the populace to consider a lane-controlling cyclist as a respected, expected, normal participant in traffic systems.