I've come across an interesting The Atlantic blog article about bike lanes.
Its author, Steven Higashide, reports that when he first started working in New York City, in 2007, "bicycling seemed like an activity best left to the pros" like one of the city's "stock characters", a bike messenger with "a heavy chain lock around the waist" could be seen "whipping through traffic with supreme confidence."
Now, he says, he regularly uses Citi Bike for "short trips to and from the subway, after-work rides to friends' apartments and fun rides on sunny days." He attributes his willingness to pedal to the 98 miles of protected bike lanes the city has constructed during the past decade.
He briefly describes the developments that made bike lane construction happen in New York, and other US cities. Chief among them is something the National Association of City Transportation Officials (NACTO), a forum started in 1996 for big-city transportation planners to swap ideas, did around the time Mr. Higashide started cycling in the Big Apple. Its members researched the standards set out in design guides traffic engineers and urban planners were consulting. Not surprisingly, there was little mention of how to integrate bicycles into urban traffic and transportation systems, and what little was mentioned had mainly to do with painted on-street bike lanes and pleasant, if impractical, off-street paths along waterfronts and in parks.
Then NACTO researched the protected bike lanes that had already been part of Northern European cities for three decades. NACTO adopted their designs--well, somewhat. NACTO's recommendations fall into the "something is better than nothing" category: The standards in the Netherlands, and other countries, were still more bike-friendly: their lanes are wider (on narrower streets) and the Dutch lanes offer even more protection from traffic, especially at intersections, where for Americans it is still minimal to non-existent.
But perhaps the worst aspects of NACTO's guidelines is that they still incorporate most of the principles (or mistakes, as I've come to think of them) espoused by American traffic engineers and planners over the past century: the speed and flow of automobile traffic are valued over walkability (On roads with medians, traffic signals are timed so that pedestrians have only enough seconds to get to the median rather than to cross the entire road.), cyclability or livability.
And, worst of all, too many of those lanes--as I've pointed out in other posts--are poorly-designed, -constructed or -maintained. Or they are simply impractical: They start and end abruptly. Even for a recreational cyclist, this is a disincentive to use them: For transportation cyclists, it makes them simply useless. Moreover, even the protected lanes are too often blocked by pedestrians, food vendors--and, at times, even the motor vehicles that supposedly aren't allowed on them.
What NACTO's guidelines do, mainly, is to provide legal and political cover. When then-Mayor Ed Koch had bike lanes built along 5th, 6th and 7th Avenues, and Broadway in mid-town Manhattan, he was guided only by his memory of "a million cyclists in Beijing", not any guidelines or principles of transportation planning. That is why taxi and trucking interests, among others, didn't need to do very much to pressure the Mayor to remove those lanes only a few months later. A quarter-century later, when New York and other cities started to build bike lanes, they could at least say that they were following guidelines set forth by professionals in the field, however misguided they may be. NACTO guidelines were further legitimized in 2013, when the Federal Highway Administration endorsed them in a memo.
To be fair, NACTO's guidelines were an improvement on previous standards for bicycle infrastructure in American cities, such as they existed. And NACTO is furthering its research and issuing new, and in many cases improved, guidelines. But the way planners see cyclists, pedestrians and vehicular traffic--and motorists' awareness of cyclists and pedestrians--still needs to evolve. Otherwise, the construction of more bike lanes, however pretty or "protected", will not result in safer cycling or entice more people to get out of their cars and into the saddle.
Its author, Steven Higashide, reports that when he first started working in New York City, in 2007, "bicycling seemed like an activity best left to the pros" like one of the city's "stock characters", a bike messenger with "a heavy chain lock around the waist" could be seen "whipping through traffic with supreme confidence."
Now, he says, he regularly uses Citi Bike for "short trips to and from the subway, after-work rides to friends' apartments and fun rides on sunny days." He attributes his willingness to pedal to the 98 miles of protected bike lanes the city has constructed during the past decade.
He briefly describes the developments that made bike lane construction happen in New York, and other US cities. Chief among them is something the National Association of City Transportation Officials (NACTO), a forum started in 1996 for big-city transportation planners to swap ideas, did around the time Mr. Higashide started cycling in the Big Apple. Its members researched the standards set out in design guides traffic engineers and urban planners were consulting. Not surprisingly, there was little mention of how to integrate bicycles into urban traffic and transportation systems, and what little was mentioned had mainly to do with painted on-street bike lanes and pleasant, if impractical, off-street paths along waterfronts and in parks.
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| A "protected" bike lane in Washington, DC. |
Then NACTO researched the protected bike lanes that had already been part of Northern European cities for three decades. NACTO adopted their designs--well, somewhat. NACTO's recommendations fall into the "something is better than nothing" category: The standards in the Netherlands, and other countries, were still more bike-friendly: their lanes are wider (on narrower streets) and the Dutch lanes offer even more protection from traffic, especially at intersections, where for Americans it is still minimal to non-existent.
But perhaps the worst aspects of NACTO's guidelines is that they still incorporate most of the principles (or mistakes, as I've come to think of them) espoused by American traffic engineers and planners over the past century: the speed and flow of automobile traffic are valued over walkability (On roads with medians, traffic signals are timed so that pedestrians have only enough seconds to get to the median rather than to cross the entire road.), cyclability or livability.
And, worst of all, too many of those lanes--as I've pointed out in other posts--are poorly-designed, -constructed or -maintained. Or they are simply impractical: They start and end abruptly. Even for a recreational cyclist, this is a disincentive to use them: For transportation cyclists, it makes them simply useless. Moreover, even the protected lanes are too often blocked by pedestrians, food vendors--and, at times, even the motor vehicles that supposedly aren't allowed on them.
What NACTO's guidelines do, mainly, is to provide legal and political cover. When then-Mayor Ed Koch had bike lanes built along 5th, 6th and 7th Avenues, and Broadway in mid-town Manhattan, he was guided only by his memory of "a million cyclists in Beijing", not any guidelines or principles of transportation planning. That is why taxi and trucking interests, among others, didn't need to do very much to pressure the Mayor to remove those lanes only a few months later. A quarter-century later, when New York and other cities started to build bike lanes, they could at least say that they were following guidelines set forth by professionals in the field, however misguided they may be. NACTO guidelines were further legitimized in 2013, when the Federal Highway Administration endorsed them in a memo.
To be fair, NACTO's guidelines were an improvement on previous standards for bicycle infrastructure in American cities, such as they existed. And NACTO is furthering its research and issuing new, and in many cases improved, guidelines. But the way planners see cyclists, pedestrians and vehicular traffic--and motorists' awareness of cyclists and pedestrians--still needs to evolve. Otherwise, the construction of more bike lanes, however pretty or "protected", will not result in safer cycling or entice more people to get out of their cars and into the saddle.
