5 ms·

Based on the photo at the bottom they are going to fail the same way that many other US cities have failed when trying install bike lanes. You MUST put the par

by hyperion2010 11y ago

Based on the photo at the bottom they are going to fail the same way that many other US cities have failed when trying install bike lanes. You MUST put the parked cars between moving traffic and bikes. If you do not bikers are going to get hit and doored and will obstruct turn lanes. Pretty much everywhere in Europe gets this right. Traffic -> parking -> bikes -> peds. How did the US get everything completely backward?

TulliusCicero 11y ago
I agree with you. To a certain extent there's institutional inertia around it now. Another issue is actually pedestrians not liking the idea of cyclists (who are all reckless scofflaws, of course) being right next to them. What they don't realize is that a) the reckless cyclists are a tiny minority of the people willing to bike in good infrastructure, and b) even a reckless cyclist probably still poses less of a threat to a pedestrian than a car, so moving people out of cars and onto bikes is almost always a win for pedestrian safety.
- meatysnapper 11y ago
  Although i'm a fairly responsible biker, I'd say the amount of bikers I see totally ignoring traffic laws is very high- stoplights, riding fast on sidewalks, going the wrong way on one way roads, etc. Maybe 30%. Re sidewalks, I think most people feel very unsafe on bikes in demarcated bike lines, and I get that. The other stuff is totally crazy though.
  - TulliusCicero 11y ago
    > I'd say the amount of bikers I see totally ignoring traffic laws is very high- stoplights, riding fast on sidewalks, going the wrong way on one way roads, etc. Maybe 30%. Studies show that cyclists and motorists break the law at about the same rate: http://www.phillymag.com/news/2015/08/06/bikers-drivers-break-law/ http://www.phillymag.com/news/2015/08/06/bikers-drivers-brea... What's usually happening is that we're so used to motorists breaking the law that it doesn't even register. Tons of drivers, likely the majority, on my bike route to work go over the speed limit. When a light goes from green to yellow to red, do drivers correctly stop entering the intersection before it goes red? Nah, most of the time one or two more sneak in. But I doubt other drivers even notice these things (heck, a lot of the time I don't even notice it): that law-breaking behavior is normalized. People pick up on it more with bikes, because there aren't nearly as many bikes around, so it's more noticeable. I get the thing about sidewalks, and whenever I ride on sidewalks (which is when the road is wildly unsafe), I make sure to slow down, and I get off my bike if there are a bunch of pedestrians. The thing is, if we did invest in protected bike lanes, cyclists wouldn't ride on the sidewalk, because they wouldn't have to to feel safe.
    - hvidgaard 11y ago
      I am from Denmark and frequently drive in the largest cities. The main problem is not breaking the law as such, but the tendency to completely disregard the surroundings - in the last 5 years a lot bike with music as well (though this can be compensated for with proper use of your eyes). A lot of bikers doesn't look over their shoulder when biking past a connecting road. The majority does not defensively try to determine if a right turning car has seen them and just assume it has. Some are all over the place and bike on the left side of the cars. There are a ton of other examples I see on a daily basis. They do it simply because it's more convenient to them. Bikes and cars share the road, yet a great many cyclists act like they have priority. E.g when stopping at the red light, all cars waiting to do a right turn should have the right wheels close the the curb, and cyclists should queue up behind the car. They however almost always try to get past you, even jump off their bike and walk on the sidewalk if they have to and some give you the finger in the process - how dare you be in the way of how they think it should be? No matter how much motorists break the law, they're not putting themselves in nearly the same danger. Not even close.
      - Symbiote 11y ago
        > No matter how much motorists break the law, they're not putting themselves in nearly the same danger. Not even close. But motorists are absolutely putting other people in more danger...
jarcoal 11y ago
This is happening in Portland, OR in select locations. Admittedly I haven't seen a lot of progress in the last year, but they converted a few of the streets up by PSU rather quickly, so maybe it's not a huge obstacle to overcome?
- throw_away 11y ago
  Seattle as well. It seems to cause consternation in drivers at first because they don't expect it and end up still parking next to the curb in the bike lanes.
Pxtl 11y ago
That approach works in cities that have established massive cycling communities - the Montreals and Copenhagens. The mid-step approach for North American cities is an extra-wide bike-lane clear of the door zone with dotted zones that require drivers to shift into the bike-lane if they want to turn right. Basically, the bike lane is effectively a "bike lane and right-only-turn-lane". It's less protected than the parking-protected bike lane, but it avoids the right-hook problem. This way drivers will always see the cyclist when they wish to go right. In urban areas with established cycling communities where you have enough density that cyclists are expected? There you do the parking-protected lane. In that kind of environment, cyclists are common-enough that drivers expect them and know to look for them. My city (Hamilton, Ontario) uses both, and I get a lot more right/left hooks from cars on the protected lane than I do on the right-turn-plus-cyclist lane. The protected lane is a great endgame and we need to get there, but step one is "take the whole right lane and make it cycling/right-turn-only". It takes a lot of space but it's a great way to begin. The problem is the popular approach is completely half-assed: the glorified shoulder in the door-zone, with no information for drivers about pulling over into the lane to turn. That leaves both the right-hook open and the door-prize.
- mcv 11y ago
  If you require cars to use the bike lane, it's not a dedicated bike lane anymore. You bring cars and bikes together, and risk collisions between the two. It works only if car drivers are very aware of the presence of bikes, and trained to watch out for them. I think this is more likely to work in cities with an established bike culture than in car dominated cities. When cars dominate, give bikes their own bike path.
  - Pxtl 11y ago
    You bring them together regardless at every intersection unless you give the bikes their own crossing signal every block. The bike/turnlane makes turning into a two-step operation - first check for bikes, then second check if your turn is safe. That elevates the normal consideration bikes would get in a turn, which is none at all from most drivers.
arnarbi 11y ago
This, a million times (excuse the hyperbole). A low curb between the parking and bike path, and between bike path and pedestrian way is also very important. So is law enforcement that actively cites and tows cars that park on bike lanes, at least while building a culture around it. Add to that that bike paths in Copenhagen have a totally different, much smoother asphalt. Since it is only used for bikes it lasts a long time. Cars can't drive on it because it is too slick and wouldn't stand up to the use. But it makes biking a lot easier than on rough asphalt covered in repairs, cracks ans potholes.
odiroot 11y ago
I wouldn't say pretty much everywhere. Probably only in Amsterdam. In Berlin it's mostly: cars | bikes | parking | pedestrians (raised sidewalk). In Warsaw (for example) it's: cars | parking | bikes (part of the sidewalk) | pedestrians (raised sidewalk).
- idlewords 11y ago
  Warsaw is a pretty terrible example to follow. The bike lanes zigzag from road to sidewalk and back with no reason, and do things like deliver you into a huge roundabout where the bike lane ends without warning.
  - odiroot 11y ago
    As a fellow Pole you probably know that bike lanes are not a part of well-designed infrastructure here but a political tool for local elections.
- hyperion2010 11y ago
  Places I've been in the UK get this right, as well as Erlangen and Koln, and from google maps it seems like Munich gets it right as well. A rather small sample, but I suspect that the traffic engineering generalizes.
- TillE 11y ago
  You're wrong about Berlin. The vast majority of bike lanes are part of the sidewalk. They're really haphazard and frequently blocked (Amsterdam is probably the ideal, IMO), but cars are parked between them and the road.
  - odiroot 11y ago
    That's a bold statement. Probably it depends on the district. Most of my commute the paths are a part of the car lane.
- IkmoIkmo 11y ago
  Yeah it really depends to be honest. Born n raised in Amsterdam and if I look out the window, there's parking separated lanes, but if I cycle down my street and take a right, I get merely curb-separated lanes, and if I take another right I'd be sharing (without even dotted lines) the street with cars (although for these streets there are lots of speed bumps and speed limits and one-direction traffic, mostly for people living there to park their cars rather than actual travel). So it's far from 'everywhere' in Amsterdam. It's hard to say how much of the cycle lanes are parking separated. I feel like it's quite a bit but then I also look at streets like the marathonweg or stadionweg (check google maps street view) which have been peds | parking | bikes -dottedlines- cars, since forever and still are to this day, despite there being room to switch the middle two around. But it's quite clear that wherever possible, this is what streets are being modified to all the time, construction just finished infront of my dad's house to modify the street for improved safety for example. I wouldn't be surprised if say the marathonweg and stadionweg would look more like the apollolaan before 2020. In the case of the stadionweg it's a little tricky as it's often used to drive through, past the olympic stadium onto the highway, it's pretty damn packed during rushhour so construction isn't a bit tricky to plan.
rue 11y ago
There are two distinct things here: 1. Bike lanes, which are part of the road; and 2. Bike paths, which are often adjacent to the pedestrian sidewalk (and are often not structurally separated) There’s movement in Europe toward the former, though I think historically the latter has been the case. It has its own problems—especially when not structurally separated—because in the city, bikes are much closer in speed to cars than pedestrians. Also, people occasionally get out from the other side of the car too. The solution is merely to put the bikes far enough from parked cars, not a specific side per se.
bertil 11y ago
I lived for ten years in a street that had that design for historical reasons (rue de Rivoli, designed by Napoleon to fck over the aristocracy from the previous regime, and has an odd half-private status). For bikes, the result is that I got right-hooked into daily, got my bike crushed weekly (I used rentals), and ended up twice in the hospital. Unless you physically crush every car that tries to turn right, they will* T-bone every bike there is. This is, without exaggeration a way to kill a significant portion of your riders. Once again, the alternative is making turning right physically impossible to cars.
dragonwriter 11y ago
> Pretty much everywhere in Europe gets this right. Traffic -> parking -> bikes -> peds. Unless you also limit the length of the street that can be used for parking to keep it farther back from the corners, this would seem to substantially reduce the visibility of bikers to drivers (and vice versa), increasing the number of bike vs. moving car collisions. This seems intuitively likely to outweigh any benefit from reducing the number of bike vs. car door collisions.
- ItsDeathball 11y ago
  In Honolulu I commute on a recently opened bike lane with this design, and have two or three near-misses every week from cars turning into driveways without checking the bike lane. It's exacerbated by the sometimes steep curb, so driver will turn left into the bike path at full speed, come to a complete stop perpendicular to bike traffic, and then slowly move into their parking lot or McDonald's drive through too avoid scraping their undercarriage. It's maddening how drivers seem to prioritize potential damage to their vehicles over the risk of killing someone. The bike path is still new, though, so hopefully people learn to slow down and check their mirrors.
nickonline 11y ago
I'm in Sydney, we do not put parked cars between our bikes and roads but it works just fine with a gutter. https://www.google.com.au/maps/place/Wynyard/@-33.8687896,151.2043173,3a,75y,298.14h,53.71t/data=!3m7!1e1!3m5!1sWVoX5Y1W-43F_aYhcfUKZg!2e0!6s%2F%2Fgeo0.ggpht.com%2Fcbk%3Fpanoid%3DWVoX5Y1W-43F_aYhcfUKZg%26output%3Dthumbnail%26cb_client%3Dmaps_sv.tactile.gps%26thumb%3D2%26w%3D203%26h%3D100%26yaw%3D100.2565%26pitch%3D0!7i13312!8i6656!4m2!3m1!1s0x6b12ae40dc8e55a7:0x9e0b8f7e6f7d6883!6m1!1e1?hl=en https://www.google.com.au/maps/place/Wynyard/@-33.8687896,15...
- tylerpachal 11y ago
  I think this is what people are citing as an ideal scenario (where possible).

TulliusCicero 11y ago

I agree with you. To a certain extent there's institutional inertia around it now. Another issue is actually pedestrians not liking the idea of cyclists (who are all reckless scofflaws, of course) being right next to them. What they don't realize is that a) the reckless cyclists are a tiny minority of the people willing to bike in good infrastructure, and b) even a reckless cyclist probably still poses less of a threat to a pedestrian than a car, so moving people out of cars and onto bikes is almost always a win for pedestrian safety.

meatysnapper 11y ago
Although i'm a fairly responsible biker, I'd say the amount of bikers I see totally ignoring traffic laws is very high- stoplights, riding fast on sidewalks, going the wrong way on one way roads, etc. Maybe 30%. Re sidewalks, I think most people feel very unsafe on bikes in demarcated bike lines, and I get that. The other stuff is totally crazy though.
- TulliusCicero 11y ago
  > I'd say the amount of bikers I see totally ignoring traffic laws is very high- stoplights, riding fast on sidewalks, going the wrong way on one way roads, etc. Maybe 30%. Studies show that cyclists and motorists break the law at about the same rate: http://www.phillymag.com/news/2015/08/06/bikers-drivers-break-law/ http://www.phillymag.com/news/2015/08/06/bikers-drivers-brea... What's usually happening is that we're so used to motorists breaking the law that it doesn't even register. Tons of drivers, likely the majority, on my bike route to work go over the speed limit. When a light goes from green to yellow to red, do drivers correctly stop entering the intersection before it goes red? Nah, most of the time one or two more sneak in. But I doubt other drivers even notice these things (heck, a lot of the time I don't even notice it): that law-breaking behavior is normalized. People pick up on it more with bikes, because there aren't nearly as many bikes around, so it's more noticeable. I get the thing about sidewalks, and whenever I ride on sidewalks (which is when the road is wildly unsafe), I make sure to slow down, and I get off my bike if there are a bunch of pedestrians. The thing is, if we did invest in protected bike lanes, cyclists wouldn't ride on the sidewalk, because they wouldn't have to to feel safe.
  - hvidgaard 11y ago
    I am from Denmark and frequently drive in the largest cities. The main problem is not breaking the law as such, but the tendency to completely disregard the surroundings - in the last 5 years a lot bike with music as well (though this can be compensated for with proper use of your eyes). A lot of bikers doesn't look over their shoulder when biking past a connecting road. The majority does not defensively try to determine if a right turning car has seen them and just assume it has. Some are all over the place and bike on the left side of the cars. There are a ton of other examples I see on a daily basis. They do it simply because it's more convenient to them. Bikes and cars share the road, yet a great many cyclists act like they have priority. E.g when stopping at the red light, all cars waiting to do a right turn should have the right wheels close the the curb, and cyclists should queue up behind the car. They however almost always try to get past you, even jump off their bike and walk on the sidewalk if they have to and some give you the finger in the process - how dare you be in the way of how they think it should be? No matter how much motorists break the law, they're not putting themselves in nearly the same danger. Not even close.
    - Symbiote 11y ago
      > No matter how much motorists break the law, they're not putting themselves in nearly the same danger. Not even close. But motorists are absolutely putting other people in more danger...

jarcoal 11y ago

This is happening in Portland, OR in select locations. Admittedly I haven't seen a lot of progress in the last year, but they converted a few of the streets up by PSU rather quickly, so maybe it's not a huge obstacle to overcome?

throw_away 11y ago
Seattle as well. It seems to cause consternation in drivers at first because they don't expect it and end up still parking next to the curb in the bike lanes.

Pxtl 11y ago

That approach works in cities that have established massive cycling communities - the Montreals and Copenhagens. The mid-step approach for North American cities is an extra-wide bike-lane clear of the door zone with dotted zones that require drivers to shift into the bike-lane if they want to turn right. Basically, the bike lane is effectively a "bike lane and right-only-turn-lane". It's less protected than the parking-protected bike lane, but it avoids the right-hook problem. This way drivers will always see the cyclist when they wish to go right. In urban areas with established cycling communities where you have enough density that cyclists are expected? There you do the parking-protected lane. In that kind of environment, cyclists are common-enough that drivers expect them and know to look for them. My city (Hamilton, Ontario) uses both, and I get a lot more right/left hooks from cars on the protected lane than I do on the right-turn-plus-cyclist lane. The protected lane is a great endgame and we need to get there, but step one is "take the whole right lane and make it cycling/right-turn-only". It takes a lot of space but it's a great way to begin. The problem is the popular approach is completely half-assed: the glorified shoulder in the door-zone, with no information for drivers about pulling over into the lane to turn. That leaves both the right-hook open and the door-prize.

mcv 11y ago
If you require cars to use the bike lane, it's not a dedicated bike lane anymore. You bring cars and bikes together, and risk collisions between the two. It works only if car drivers are very aware of the presence of bikes, and trained to watch out for them. I think this is more likely to work in cities with an established bike culture than in car dominated cities. When cars dominate, give bikes their own bike path.
- Pxtl 11y ago
  You bring them together regardless at every intersection unless you give the bikes their own crossing signal every block. The bike/turnlane makes turning into a two-step operation - first check for bikes, then second check if your turn is safe. That elevates the normal consideration bikes would get in a turn, which is none at all from most drivers.

arnarbi 11y ago

This, a million times (excuse the hyperbole). A low curb between the parking and bike path, and between bike path and pedestrian way is also very important. So is law enforcement that actively cites and tows cars that park on bike lanes, at least while building a culture around it. Add to that that bike paths in Copenhagen have a totally different, much smoother asphalt. Since it is only used for bikes it lasts a long time. Cars can't drive on it because it is too slick and wouldn't stand up to the use. But it makes biking a lot easier than on rough asphalt covered in repairs, cracks ans potholes.

odiroot 11y ago

idlewords 11y ago
Warsaw is a pretty terrible example to follow. The bike lanes zigzag from road to sidewalk and back with no reason, and do things like deliver you into a huge roundabout where the bike lane ends without warning.
- odiroot 11y ago
  As a fellow Pole you probably know that bike lanes are not a part of well-designed infrastructure here but a political tool for local elections.
hyperion2010 11y ago
Places I've been in the UK get this right, as well as Erlangen and Koln, and from google maps it seems like Munich gets it right as well. A rather small sample, but I suspect that the traffic engineering generalizes.
TillE 11y ago
You're wrong about Berlin. The vast majority of bike lanes are part of the sidewalk. They're really haphazard and frequently blocked (Amsterdam is probably the ideal, IMO), but cars are parked between them and the road.
- odiroot 11y ago
  That's a bold statement. Probably it depends on the district. Most of my commute the paths are a part of the car lane.
IkmoIkmo 11y ago
Yeah it really depends to be honest. Born n raised in Amsterdam and if I look out the window, there's parking separated lanes, but if I cycle down my street and take a right, I get merely curb-separated lanes, and if I take another right I'd be sharing (without even dotted lines) the street with cars (although for these streets there are lots of speed bumps and speed limits and one-direction traffic, mostly for people living there to park their cars rather than actual travel). So it's far from 'everywhere' in Amsterdam. It's hard to say how much of the cycle lanes are parking separated. I feel like it's quite a bit but then I also look at streets like the marathonweg or stadionweg (check google maps street view) which have been peds | parking | bikes -dottedlines- cars, since forever and still are to this day, despite there being room to switch the middle two around. But it's quite clear that wherever possible, this is what streets are being modified to all the time, construction just finished infront of my dad's house to modify the street for improved safety for example. I wouldn't be surprised if say the marathonweg and stadionweg would look more like the apollolaan before 2020. In the case of the stadionweg it's a little tricky as it's often used to drive through, past the olympic stadium onto the highway, it's pretty damn packed during rushhour so construction isn't a bit tricky to plan.

rue 11y ago

There are two distinct things here: 1. Bike lanes, which are part of the road; and 2. Bike paths, which are often adjacent to the pedestrian sidewalk (and are often not structurally separated) There’s movement in Europe toward the former, though I think historically the latter has been the case. It has its own problems—especially when not structurally separated—because in the city, bikes are much closer in speed to cars than pedestrians. Also, people occasionally get out from the other side of the car too. The solution is merely to put the bikes far enough from parked cars, not a specific side per se.

bertil 11y ago

I lived for ten years in a street that had that design for historical reasons (rue de Rivoli, designed by Napoleon to fck over the aristocracy from the previous regime, and has an odd half-private status). For bikes, the result is that I got right-hooked into daily, got my bike crushed weekly (I used rentals), and ended up twice in the hospital. Unless you physically crush every car that tries to turn right, they will* T-bone every bike there is. This is, without exaggeration a way to kill a significant portion of your riders. Once again, the alternative is making turning right physically impossible to cars.

dragonwriter 11y ago

> Pretty much everywhere in Europe gets this right. Traffic -> parking -> bikes -> peds. Unless you also limit the length of the street that can be used for parking to keep it farther back from the corners, this would seem to substantially reduce the visibility of bikers to drivers (and vice versa), increasing the number of bike vs. moving car collisions. This seems intuitively likely to outweigh any benefit from reducing the number of bike vs. car door collisions.

ItsDeathball 11y ago
In Honolulu I commute on a recently opened bike lane with this design, and have two or three near-misses every week from cars turning into driveways without checking the bike lane. It's exacerbated by the sometimes steep curb, so driver will turn left into the bike path at full speed, come to a complete stop perpendicular to bike traffic, and then slowly move into their parking lot or McDonald's drive through too avoid scraping their undercarriage. It's maddening how drivers seem to prioritize potential damage to their vehicles over the risk of killing someone. The bike path is still new, though, so hopefully people learn to slow down and check their mirrors.

nickonline 11y ago

I'm in Sydney, we do not put parked cars between our bikes and roads but it works just fine with a gutter. https://www.google.com.au/maps/place/Wynyard/@-33.8687896,151.2043173,3a,75y,298.14h,53.71t/data=!3m7!1e1!3m5!1sWVoX5Y1W-43F_aYhcfUKZg!2e0!6s%2F%2Fgeo0.ggpht.com%2Fcbk%3Fpanoid%3DWVoX5Y1W-43F_aYhcfUKZg%26output%3Dthumbnail%26cb_client%3Dmaps_sv.tactile.gps%26thumb%3D2%26w%3D203%26h%3D100%26yaw%3D100.2565%26pitch%3D0!7i13312!8i6656!4m2!3m1!1s0x6b12ae40dc8e55a7:0x9e0b8f7e6f7d6883!6m1!1e1?hl=en https://www.google.com.au/maps/place/Wynyard/@-33.8687896,15...

tylerpachal 11y ago
I think this is what people are citing as an ideal scenario (where possible).