AusTexMurf

https://momentummag.com/features/the-...ted-bike-lane/
....
Protected bike lanes, “green lanes,” or cycle tracks, as they are sometimes called, like the Prospect Park West bike lane are upsetting the transportation status quo in more and more cities across North America. Similar treatments have transformed Dearborn Street in Chicago, IL; Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington, DC; and Market Street in San Francisco, CA.
In fact, it’s getting to the point where if your city doesn’t have a protected bike lane yet, it’s being left behind. Last year alone, the number of protected bike lanes in the United States nearly doubled from 62 to 102. This year, the number is expected to double again. Protected bike lanes are now in place in 32 cities across the United States, according to Martha Roskowski, director of the Green Lane Project, a nonprofit project of bike advocacy group Bikes Belong. The organization is working with six US cities to install protected bike infrastructure.....
- See more at: https://momentummag.com/features/the-...ted-bike-lane/

fietsbob

some cities have moved parking out , so bike lanes are near the sidewalk..

then you only get doored by passengers, not drivers. but the parked car is between you and the traffic.

alan s 

Pennsylvania Ave in DC was never a dangerous street for cyclists. Why build a separate bike lane?

droy45

I hear large cities are getting them put in. I'll probably never see it here, I think I'm the only one cycling, (almost). No large cities here anyway but it would be nice to get better access through some portions of our cities. I have been modifying my new commute route constantly lately to make it easier because of not having infrastructure for safe riding. I have been working on virtually elliminating all left hand turns in multilane routes because it just doesn't seem to work for me. I try to turn left before any of my major intersections into residential areas that link me back onto the street I needed to be on. The cars are just too fast and they hit the brakes hard when they finally see me even though I have a green left arrow to go. It would be nice to see how a protected bike lane would work.

PatrickGSR94

I personally am not a fan of the whole protected bike lane concept, unless extra special attention is paid to what happens at intersections. The biggest problem is when cars pull out from minor streets and driveways, but they pull all the way out past the protection barrier to see car traffic without even watching for bikes in the bike lane.

IMHO it would be better to have the bike lane adjacent to the regular lanes, with a buffer between parked cars and bikes to keep bikes out of the door zone.

floatsinwater

There are some limited roads in downtown San Jose that have these things too. In some cases they had to close a lane specifically or close down parking on one side to make the lane for us.

I kind of have mixed feelings about this. On one hand, it's great to have a dedicated bike lane, especially in downtown at nighttime when it can be extremely dangerous. However, people already seem to hate cyclists enough, and closing down lanes/parking seems to add fuel to the fire. Not only that but the most dangerous cyclists aren't the commuters but the students and homeless that weave in and out of traffic without a helmet. I see more of them using the bike lane, but for the most part they just go wherever they please.

Mr. Hairy Legs

Protected bike lanes seem to really help in getting people to try out bike commuting. The main issue I have with them is that drivers will then expect you to use them even when they are full of impediments and make it impossible for you to turn left anywhere.

CommuteCommando

Old Hwy 101 through Encinitas CA. https://goo.gl/maps/vA4k4 This is a "before" image. The "Bike Lane" was bone jarring, and out in the lane was not much better. It is now a single automobile lane, and a very wide bike lane. This is an extremely popular bike route.

DX-MAN

Just like locks are effective at keeping away the harmless, bike lanes and sharrows are a way to alert the cautious. All the gathered attention, though, HAS had an impact on drivers where I live. It's been two years since anyone has hollered at me to get on the sidewalk (which, ironically, is legal to do here!). I still get the occasional horn or buzzing from a loose nut behind the wheel, but they are isolated incidents, not a weekly or daily thing.

The motorist's mindset is the biggest danger cyclists face, especially in " 'Murica". Between aggressive assertions of personal freedom and 'compensating' for other inadequacies, too many drivers have too little regard for other people. In my usual "hope for the best, prepare for the worst" mindset, I hope that mutual respect will someday become "cool", all the while looking for places on my bike and person to fasten defensive weapons. If I get plowed by a motor vehicle, it's all academic, anyway, but I've encountered more road rage than anything else.

dbikingman

IIRC our city spent $600,000 implementing bike lanes or lanes with sharrows. It is a patch work effort. The lanes start and stop in odd locations. I was riding in bike lane the other day and the entire bike lane had a crown and two seams from where a ditch had been dug. I rode in the lane.

My other gripes are the bike lanes end as you approach intersections, the bike lane becomes a turn lane. And the intersections with traffic lights aren't marked or set up for bikes to activate the traffic light.

But, it is a start.

rex_kramer

I noticed some green bike lanes on E. Hedding, but these aren't what I would call protected...just green-colored lanes.

Papa Tom

So great to see all this activity. At 50 years old, though, I only hope to be around long enough to experience a truly bike-friendly world.

bikemig 

No. 1. Good article and good to see all the positive energy happening in different parts of the country.

rolliepollie

In San Francisco, There are a couple blocks of parking removed to place a green bike lane. Not protected, but it's a start. Annoying thing is, after those couple blocks you run smack back into narrow roads with crowded traffic... Sometimes I wonder why even bother with these "dotted" lines of bike lanes in the city.

cyccommute 

Or stupidly designed. The protect bike lane in the link is an awful design that traps the cyclist between the curb and the passenger's side door as well as having to deal with people crossing the lane to enter their cars. Denver just installed one of these stupid things along a major downtown street that requires you to cross 2 lanes of traffic to enter on the left side of a 3 lane street, runs for about 7 blocks and then has you cross to the right across those same lanes to get back on the right side of the street before the one way street turns into a two way street. I can't see any problems arising with that design

B. Carfree

In my opinion, so-called protected bike lanes have much larger downsides than upsides, especially when compared to standard two meter plus bike lanes (NOT door-zone bike lanes). Apparently Munich, Germany shares my opinion. They have been removing their protected bike lanes and cycletracks and replacing them with two meter wide bike lanes and this has led to a large (from 7% to over 17%) increase in bike use.

For those who haven't dealt with them, the downsides of protected, two-way bikeways are:
1. Cyclists are often trapped between parked cars whose doors open and curbs
2. Intersections fail. Either cyclists are coming and going from unstandard places/directions, which puts them at risk, or the signals have to add extra cycles, which unnecessarily delays everyone. Add in non-signalized intersection failures (no one is looking contraflow as they run the stop signs) and driveways, and it is no surprise that once a cyclist has some experience with these things s/he will come to loathe them.
3. Unexpected failures. My city transitioned one of these onto a sidewalk that was never redesignated as a bike path. State law considers a bike path to be a road. Federal law dictates that rail crossings of roads shall have appropriate warning devices. Since this was not a road, it was allowed to have a blind railroad crossing without any warning devices. This led directly to the death of a cyclist.
4. Crowding. These are often built with no provision for success. If a community develops a reasonable number of cyclists, there is no room to pass. Thus, everyone has to ride at the pace of the slowest cyclist. One of the benefits of urban cycling is that it is faster than driving. This is lost when one must ride at the pace of the obese new cyclist.

Mr. Hairy Legs

The selfish part of me (most of me) actually doesn't want more people cycling from my neighborhood across the bridge every day for this very reason. Being stuck behind someone going 5 mph is about as much fun as driving.

Giant Doofus

Memphis is one of the six "green lane" cities. I acknowledge all of the downsides others have pointed out about these protected lanes, but I still support them. Memphis has been one of the most bike unfriendly cities in the country and the result is that very few people would even consider transportation cycling. The easier and safer cycling seems for people considering trying it, the more likely they are to do so. This has certainly been true for me. After years of riding only for fun, I recently began commuting after some (really inadequate) bike lanes were added to a road near my home. For some reason those white paint lines suddenly made riding to work seem doable. It's almost entirely psychological, but so what? It worked.

A quick note about the slow, inexperienced cyclists who sometimes slow me down. As frustrating as that can be, I'm rooting for them! Memphis is the obesity capital of the US. We can begin to change that, one slow cyclist at a time.

spare_wheel

We have plenty of so-called protected bike lanes or "cycletracks" in Portland.

They are universally complete rubbish (and this is an opinion shared by many daily cyclists):

1. They are built in lower-traffic locations that had decent, but not perfect, bike lanes.
2. They uniformly involve a dramatic increase in right-hook risk at intersections, drive-ways and parking lot outlets.
3. They are typically engineered with blind corners, cross-overs, mixing zones, and S-curves which impede and slow down cyclists.
4. They are often narrow and are built with "design-features" (e.g. planters, bollards, parked vehicles, and trees) which inhibit passing of slower traffic.
5. They are frequently used by pedestrians and in some cases have resulted in huge increases in pedestrian-bike conflict.

In fact, one of these crap facilities was built on my commute to work. Instead of riding in a decent 5 foot wide bike lane I now am forced to take the vehicle lane and deal with the occasional irate motorist. This is, however, preferable to constant pedestrian conflicts and right-hook risk at the terminus.

Here is the terminus of this pathetic bicycling sidewalk:

https://goo.gl/maps/lVDJA (maps image was taken on a weekend when parking spaces were not fully occupied by university students)

The cycle track is on the right and continues on into a bike lane. A wall of parked cars complete obscures cyclist as they approach the light. 3 years ago I came within milliseconds of death when a fast-moving garbage truck nearly right-hooked me. Right hooks were not a problem with the previous bike lane since it was not obscured by a wall (think SUVs and commercial vans) of parked cars.

contango 

Cycle lanes are great when they are put there for the benefit of cyclists rather than motorists.

Here's an example in London (which allegedly wants to become more bike friendly) showing pretty well how not to do it:

https://maps.google.co.uk/?ll=51.361...79.09,,0,19.45

The bike lane is narrow enough that a bike is very cramped in it (and that's on the road bike, which is narrower than the mountain bike). Then you've got the recessed drain covers in the bike lane. On a road like this I ignore the bike lane and just deal with the fact motorists behind me might get impatient, but it's only a 30mph limit and I can normally hold somewhere around 20 for long enough.

The road was recently resurfaced, and now it's got a very nasty rough surface, the narrow bike lane is back, and the drain covers are recessed more deeply. I don't know what imbecile thought it was a good facility for cyclists.

Mr. Hairy Legs

We have some ridiculous new "improvements" in my neighborhood, including bike lanes that go straight into shrubs and pedestrian islands, and sharrow signs hidden underneath parked cars. It's like they just had to spend a certain amount of money on "cycling infrastructure" but really didn't care about whether or not it was practical because nobody on city council actually rides a bike.

jputnam

The "protected bike lane" terminology is problematic. There's a good chance in many states that they aren't "lanes" at all -- where a roadway is defined as the right of way maintained for vehicular travel, a segregated path is not part of the roadway. The legal status of cyclists on such facilities, and of motorists and pedestrians crossing such facilities, is far from clear. Here in Washington State, the Supreme Court has explicitly held that multi-use paths are not "roadways" for the purposes of traffic law (Pudmaroff v. Allen). I am not a lawyer, but I haven't been able to find any convincing legal analysis that cyclists on cycletracks are covered by the rules of the road.

This is important mainly because cycletracks in urban street grids significantly increase accident rates at intersections -- see data from Lusk et. al. earlier this year. If we're going to build mode share with comfortable but dangerous facilities, the users of those facilities need a legal leg to stand on.

contango 

A while back Chris Boardman produced a video asking who bike lanes were really there for. He showed examples of a nice designated bike lane that disappeared every time there was a traffic island in the road, bike lanes that broke away from the road only to go over a very rough and narrow section of path and then feed back onto the road barely 100 yards later (at which point the cyclist had to yield to traffic in the road), and suggested ways of navigating roundabouts that involved leaving the road, crossing each exit from the roundabout (yielding priority at every crossing) to then be fed back into the flow of traffic having to yield again.

I've seen a few where there's an island in the road and a marked bike lane appears to guide cyclists off the road, along the pavement for maybe 50 feet, then back onto the road right after the island.

tcs

Mr. Bob Mionske related some cycling accident statistics in his blog. Looking over the information he provides enumerating actual, real world accident causes/categories, it's hard to envision how protected bike lanes will have a long term, positive impact on cycling safety.

tcs

Reading the linked article in the original post, I was amused the author laid the blame for today's USA not having anywhere near the percentage of cycling in the overall transportation mix as The Netherlands and Denmark at the feet of John Forester. Yes, I understand Mr. Forester's philosophy, work and influence, but wow - somebody slept through geography class!