Greg Raisman was one of many gracious people I met in Portland, Oregon last week. He's a Traffic Safety Specialist for the City of Portland, and he gave me this tip for those interested in advocating for bike lanes in their own towns. There are likely roads in your own community that you suspect are already wide enough to accommodate a bike lane-- They just need stripes to mark the lane. You can check road widths yourself by using a measuring wheel, found for about $10 on E-bay. A measuring wheel measures distances as you walk. To measure the road width, you just have to walk across the road while rolling the wheel. Keep in mind these details and do the math to determine if you've already got room for bike lanes:
| Road Element | Width |
|---|---|
| Standard through traffic lane | 11 feet |
| Standard parking lane | 8 feet |
| Standard bike lane | 5 feet |
| Standard center turn lane | 12 feet |
| Possible gutter | 1.5 feet |
| Possible buffer* | 3 feet |
There are cases where narrower minimum lane widths for all cases may be acceptable. Check the federal standards for details.
Armed with these calculations, you can make a much stronger argument to City Hall if you can show definitively that no costly road width expansion will be needed, and you can say with certainty that bike lanes will fit.
But you may also find that there is in fact no room to simply stripe a bike lane on roads you check. There are still possibilities to make roads more bikeable by using a road diet or the bike boulevard concepts. I expect to write more about these in future posts.
I ordered my measuring wheel tonight. I'll be interested to see what I learn about my city streets!
Nice job, Mark.
The one thing that comes to mind immediately is that it's not unusual for 12 feet to be standard lane width for city streets. Many of ours are 11 feet, though. 10 feet is very narrow on a collector type street, but common on residential streets. A lot depends on the travel speed. Generally, the wider the lanes, the faster the traffic.
If you're going to use a buffer, it should be an buffer - not just "blank" space. Here's a photo of a buffered bike lane http://www.milwaukee.gov/ImageLibrary/User/milbtf/Water_St._Buffer_Lane_lores.jpg The buffer is usually placed between the motor vehicle traffic and bike lane, not between the bike lane and parked cars.
Most of our bike lanes are 5-feet wide. We now prefer a 6-foot wide lane to allow people to ride comfortably side-by-side. 5-feet works though. More than 6-feet and you have to start worrying about people driving in it.
If there's enough room for a bike lane, there's enough room to ride a bike without a bike lane, with little or no conflict with other user groups.
We have a frustrating phenomenon here of short lengths of useless bike lanes. On sections of main road where there's enough room for a bike to ride without being harassed by cars, a white stripe is drawn. Every few blocks where things get a little bit uncomfortable, the white line is discontinued, the "end bike lane" signs are erected, and we are left to fend for ourselves through the intersection (or whatever). 50 feet beyond the intersection, the bike lane starts again. I assume there's been a council target to add however much distance of bike lane per year, regardless of how useful it is.
These discontinuous bike lanes do more harm than good in my view. They tend to be on main roads, which have a wide easement and some degree of hard shoulder. They provide a perception of safety on the sections where they exist, leading inexperience cyclists directly into the busiest and messiest intersections in the city where they are left to their own devices, with no protection or consideration. It's easy to imagine an inexperienced cyclist getting put off.
Meanwhile, running parallel to the main roads with their broken bike lanes, we have smaller backstreets. They've been given the backstreet treatment to minimise vehicle traffic - alternating priorities at cross streets, speed humps, traffic calming. They would make perfect bike routes, in the spirit of Portland's bike boulevards.
Painting on-road bike lanes where it's convenient to do so gives nothing to cyclists that isn't already there.
tim
Tim,
I agree with your comments about bike-lanes-only-when-convenient as well as use of side streets. Thanks for adding your perspective!
One of the photos you've uploaded depicts a side path, diverting bicycle traffic to a wide sidewalk. Traditional traffic planners love this as it doesn't actually interfere with traffic or parking and puts bicycles "where they belong" on the sidewalk with pedestrians. Of course the downsides to it are that average bicycle speed is slower, intersections are still dangerous and you are twice as likely to have an accident on the side-path than you are riding on an unsigned road. Hopefully the city of Richmond won't pressure for side-paths, but it is a tempting low-cost way to placate bicyclists. My dad has been trying to fight off attempts at it in Cincinnati for a while now.
Thanks for the feedback, Dan. I just wrote more about sidewalks vs sidepaths in a new post.