Bike module: Encouraging cycling while upholding urbanism

How can communities get more people onto bicycles, and yet make sure that the space for biking doesn’t undercut good urban design?

Helping communities answer that question is one of the aims of the SmartCode Bicycle Module recently produced by Mike Lydon, principal of The Street Plans Collaborative in New York, with assistance from Tony Garcia of The Street Plans Collaborative and urban designer Zachary Adelson.

The bike module, available free at the website of the Center for Applied Transect Studies (www.transect.org), provides a guide to bicycle planning within the overall framework of New Urbanism. It offers advice on where and how to use 18 types of bikeways, bike parking facilities, and other elements that are beneficial to cyclists.

Bike planning is not a one-size-fits-all endeavor, Lydon emphasizes. It requires balancing a number of considerations, some of which are in conflict. Bike lanes, for example, are a good idea in some circumstances but a bad idea in others.

Let’s say you have an existing, overly wide thoroughfare. It may make sense to take some of the excessive pavement and convert it into bike lanes. On the other hand, if you’re in a new urbanist community, the thoroughfares presumably were designed from the start to make motorists drive more slowly. Consequently, in that situation, carving bicycle lanes out of part of the roadway would generally be unnecessary. It’s better practice, in a setting like that, to have cyclists mix with vehicular traffic.

If you’re designing a thoroughfare from scratch, it’s usually unwise to widen the pavement to provide bike lanes, That’s because a wider road will be harder for pedestrians to cross, making it more dangerous. Also, increasing the width may reduce ”the sense of spatial enclosure that slows down motorists.”

The module therefore takes pains to distinguish between what should be done on existing roadways and what should be done in places already constructed. The various techniques are analyzed by Transect zone as well, to help planners understand what to do where.

Among the other instruction and information offered by the module:

• Conversion of underused railroad rights-of-way to shared-use bikeways is increasingly common because of the rails-to-trails movement, but it should be regarded with skepticism. The module advises that “rail infrastructure should be preserved for future use as transit.” 

• Wide curb lanes “unnecessarily expand roadway width, thereby encouraging automobile speeding, while not meaningfully attracting bicycle use — probably for that very reason.”

• A bicycle trail is most appropriate for rural environments, where it is used mainly for recreational purposes.

• A bicycle path “is more urban in character, is almost always paved with asphalt or concrete, and is used for utility and commuting as well as recreation.”

• Provision of bicycle parking has received too little attention in the planning, urban design, and development process, but it will become more important as the number of people cycling to work and other destinations grows. The goal should be to provide suitable ratios of bike parking for each of the various land uses in each Transect zone. Bike parking should be based on the building’s function (for example, a gym needs more bike parking than a lumberyard) and on quantitative indicators such as unit count, number of employees, or the square footage of the building. A table in the module explains how this is calculated across the Transect.

• A good bicycle parking plan should “require long-term parking for all workplaces, transit stations and multi-unit residential or mixed-use buildings, and require adequate short-term parking for almost all other land uses. Such plans or codes should also provide site planning standards that include rack/locker design and placement requirements, especially within the public frontage.”

• “Municipalities should create and oversee bicycle parking plans at the scale of the city,” but should implement and maintain them at the scale of the neighborhood.

Bike planner lingo

At a time when bike planning is on the rise, one of the useful things offered in the module is a series of definitions. Among the terms defined are these:

• Contra-flow bicycle lane: a designated bike lane marked to allow cyclists to travel against the flow of traffic.

• Buffered bicycle lane: a bike lane separated from vehicular travel lanes or parking lanes or both by striped pavement markings which function as a buffer.

• Peg-a-track: parallel dashed pavement markings that continue a bicycle lane through an intersection.

• Bicycle box: a section of pavement designed to give cyclists using a bike lane a head start at signalized intersections. A bicycle box (synonym: advance stop line) is often colored and includes a standard white bicycle pavement marking. It makes it easier for motorists who are turning right to see cyclists who are traveling through the intersection.

• Diverter: a design intervention that limits cars and trucks from entering all or part of a thoroughfare but enables bicycles to pass through.

• Shy zone: a painted buffer between parked cars and a bike lane.

• Bicycle inductor loop: a coil of wire embedded in a thoroughfare surface that detects the presence of a bicycle and prioritizes an intersection signal for it.

• Bicycle boulevard: “a thoroughfare with shared vehicular lanes that introduces traffic calming and wayfinding solutions to give movement priority to bicycles.” That definition may be one of the module’s murkier efforts. To clarify, we checked Wikipedia, which says a bicycle boulevard is a roadway where the traffic volumes are low; non-local motor vehicle traffic is discouraged; free-flow travel for cyclists is provided “by assigning the right-of-way to the bicycle boulevard at intersections whenever possible”; traffic control helps bikes cross major arterial roads; and there is a distinctive look or ambience, alerting everyone to the fact that the roadway is a priority route for cyclists.