The place for bike lanes

The following is adapted from “Completer Streets with Bicycle Lanes” in John Massengale and Victor Dover’s new book, Street Design: The Secret to Great Cities and Towns, published by John Wiley & Sons.

Bicycle lanes are good for both our health and our carbon footprints. “Ten bikes can park in the space of one car,” Jeff Speck points out in his book Walkable City, “and the typical bike lane handles five to ten times the traffic volume of a car lane that is double the bike lane’s width.” For these and other reasons, bike lanes are an essential element of design for many streets today.

But like Complete Streets, bicycle lanes are in a transitional phase in which weak, monofunctional designs are frequently touted as best practices.

In 2008 the New York City Department of Transportation introduced, on First Avenue in Manhattan, a multimodal Complete Street that is first and foremost a suburban-style arterial for suburbanites to drive in and out of the city. The design divides the public realm into pieces, most of which are given to the car.”

Used with permission of John Wily & Sons, John Massengale and Victor Dover, Street Design

Used with permission of John Wily & Sons, John Massengale and Victor Dover, Street Design

In 2009 the city’s Transportation Department redesigned the section of Eighth Avenue in Manhattan shown in the above photo. In Manhattan, most public life takes place on the wide north-south avenues, but the design of Eighth Avenue gives most of the public realm to cars and throughput. The protected bike lane in the left side of the photo is sometimes referred to in America as a Copenhagen Lane; the street-level lane is sandwiched between the sidewalk and a buffer lane that runs along a row of parked cars. In Copenhagen, where 36 percent of the population commutes to work or school by bicycle every day, the form is better: the cycle track is raised above street level, with a curb separating it from the street. Below is a similar example from Amsterdam.

Used with permission of John Wily & Sons, John Massengale and Victor Dover, Street Design

The track is usually attached to the sidewalk, which is often slightly higher still, so that there is another low curb between the bicycle space and the pedestrian space. Cars may or may not be parked next to the cycle track, depending on the width of the street.

When there are no parked cars, the cycle track provides a buffer between pedestrians and moving cars. Because the cycle track is attached to the sidewalk, the odd appearance of cars floating in the street is avoided, and the parking lane is not encumbered with the auto-scaled turn lanes, striping, and concrete pads.

In New York, bicycle lanes are wider than in most cities (so that garbage trucks with snow plows mounted can clear the lane when it snows). Bold striping more appropriate for a freeway than for a city street surrounds them. The usual delaminating plastic sticks are used in New York, too, and the crosswalks have an ungainly concrete pad in the street where pedestrians can wait to cross. Like the formulaic suburban bumpouts, this ugly island is unnecessary in the city: New Yorkers rarely stand on the curb while waiting to cross. Instead they wait by the corner of the parked cars, knowing that the car will prevent drivers from straying into the space where they wait.

Even cyclists have some problems with New York’s Copenhagen Lanes. Early designs like the Eighth Avenue one shown above have signal lights for left-turn lanes. When the cars get a green light for turning left, bicycles are held back by a red light. The timing on those means that cyclists have to stop every 400 feet (two New York blocks) and wait for two light cycles: first the turn-lane light and then the light for the cars going across the avenue.

Later designs got rid of the left-turn lights, substituting “mixing zones,” where bold diagonal triangles alert drivers to watch out for bicycles. In reality, few duffers (and there are many of those now that New York has bike-sharing) are going to cross in front of the two-ton gorilla behind them on the road. The mixing zones add another level of machine-scale ugliness to the streetscape. New York had few turn lanes before these new Complete Streets, because they are anti-urban elements that favor the car and traffic flow over other functions of the street.

Unfortunately, many engineers, bicycle advocates, and even pedestrian specialists have adopted America’s so-called Copenhagen Lane as a Best Practice. Long Beach, California, a walkable city that sometimes promotes itself as the Brooklyn of Los Angeles, has been one of the most proactive American cities in the construction of bicycle lanes. In the heart of its downtown, Long Beach adopted new auto-centric streets similar to New York’s Second Avenue. As in New York, the one-way streets, staggered lights, turn lanes, and aggressive striping clearly show that the primary purpose of the Long Beach streets is to smoothly move traffic through the downtown. Very little, as can be seen in the photo is done to make the sidewalks attractive places to walk.

Used with permission of John Wily & Sons, John Massengale and Victor Dover, Street Design

That serves many of the residents of Long Beach badly. Almost 40 percent of the residents in car-crazy Southern California (and the rest of the country) don’t drive, because they are too young, too old, too poor, have a disability that prevents driving, or simply choose not to own a car or get a driver’s license.

In the long run, there will be better, more holistic solutions than these transitional Copenhagen Lane streets. It’s not too early to start looking at better solutions, as long as we acknowledge the understandable tensions in the conversation.

Reprinted with permission of John Wiley & Sons, Inc.: John Massengale and Victor Dover, Street Design: The Secret to Great Cities and Towns, 2014.

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