Take a good look at this illustration; it’s supposed to represent good street design (source).
From the same source, here’s another illustration.
This is not a joke. These illustrations show bicycle lanes beside parked cars on narrow urban streets.
These lanes are dangerous. And they are designed to lure beginners.
Such lanes are supposed to, among other things, lure people out of their cars — a worthy goal. But are we really willing to lure them out of their cars at a cost to safety?
I’m not put at risk by these bicycle lanes because I’d be riding right down the middle of those nice narrow streets.
As I have said before, I have no problem with fully separated bikeways as long as intersections with roads have appropriate traffic control, i.e. bicycle-superior traffic lights.
Here’s a photo from Portland published recently on Portlandize.
Yikes. This is just insane. I would ignore this lane and ride in traffic on this street. I have no desire to get squeezed between traffic and parked cars.
This next picture, also from Portlandize, represents a much better design.
I’m not sure how necessary this lane really is. The street looks perfectly inviting to me. But at least we can see that the designers made an attempt to separate riders from parked cars. This represents a more ethical design standard.
What we have here is a lane dilemma: On the one hand, we want to give people real transportation choices that encourage them not to drive cars. On the other hand, we owe all road users a system designed to be safe for the least skilled user. Nothing is perfectly safe. We must accept a certain amount of risk as part of living.
But we don’t have to accept street designs that add risk to achieve a worthy goal. We call that Machiavellian.
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Comments 10
Andy, you would feel intense pressure to ride in that first bike lane. You’d have a lot of honks and profanity to report on. I tried riding as you describe, on the road used for my blog masthead. I quickly gave up and rode a couple of blocks north where such nonsense does not exist. BTW, even Chipseal rode in the bike lane on this road. Fortunately it is a gratuitous bike lane and not particularly dangerous.
Posted 09 Apr 2010 at 4:28 pm ¶Steve… I stay out of those lanes or I use a different route. We have some lanes like that in Springfield. Mostly, I avoid them. But, yes, the pressure is there. And the honks follow. Those lines are telling drivers that the lane is our place. The vast majority of them have no idea how dangerous it is to ride next to parked cars.
Posted 09 Apr 2010 at 4:48 pm ¶Andy,
Bravo. You seem a lot like myself. We are not against ALL bicycle specific infrastructure like some like to paint us. We are against all inherently DANGEROUS bicycling infrastructure.
Posted 09 Apr 2010 at 8:09 pm ¶Robert… Exactly. I’m happy to use appropriate infrastructure. I’m happy to use the street. But fercrissakes can we please stop painting these dangerous lanes? BTW, I saw that Bicycling Magazine left Columbia off its top 50 bicycling cities list. Which, of course, calls into question the entire list.
Posted 09 Apr 2010 at 10:48 pm ¶I’m not sure the design shown in the second pictures is really good.
Posted 10 Apr 2010 at 4:09 am ¶First, pedestrians may use the bike path (may depend on your country).
Second, at junctions car drivers won’t see you, as you’re too far away from the road. If you have to nearly stop at each junction it’s just painful !
loz… Yes. That’s why I confine my remarks to the lane we can see in the photo. Intersections can be a big problem.
If I were designing that lane, I would create a merge for the intersection. I’ve also seen this handled well by the Dutch in David Hembrow’s videos — many intersections have separate traffic control for bicycles.
Posted 10 Apr 2010 at 8:42 am ¶The second bike lane is just as bad. It hides cyclists behind parked cars and set them up for right hooks and left crosses. How do you make a left turn from that bike lane?
Posted 11 Apr 2010 at 8:52 am ¶Mighk… It all depends on how it’s handled at the intersection. A few of David Hembrow’s videos show this handled very well in the Netherlands with separate bicycle traffic lights. Now, obviously, we’re not going to do that here in the U.S. Again, I’m confining my comments here to what I can see in the photo. And my approval is lukewarm at best.
Posted 11 Apr 2010 at 8:58 am ¶Andy,
Thanks for the link! That cycle track on SW Broadway in Portland is on a pretty busy street, one that links to a freeway (so people tend to drive fairly fast), and it’s uphill almost the entire length of the street (it’s a one-way), so I think it’s a pretty appropriate street for separated infrastructure.
I think with street designs as they are in Portland, this type of treatment would make sense on large arterial streets with street parking – it’s a much better solution than the typical bike lane is anyway – rushing cars and parked cars only a couple feet away on either side.
Our neighborhood streets as they are accommodate bicycles quite well, as almost all car traffic migrates to main arterial streets, but eventually, as the number of cyclists increases, I can see there needing to be some more minor accommodations for cyclists (maybe not as major as a cycle track, but some way of separating them a bit from car traffic, or at least delineating some specific space for them).
@Mighk Wilson: if you click through to my post, I show how you make a left turn from the cycle track.
That cycle track may not be a be-all-end-all solution, but at least it’s a step in the right direction. Unfortunately, there is not the political will here yet to just do a full treatment with bicycle-specific signalization and all of that, so we have to do smaller steps, show that they are beneficial, and then move on from there.
Progress is slow, but it’s happening.
Posted 11 Apr 2010 at 2:37 pm ¶Dave… Thanks for the clarification.
Posted 11 Apr 2010 at 3:14 pm ¶