personal safety & signed bike routes in residential neighbourhoods

[Eden]

Ah - I think that's the article that I remember referencing the Dutch abandoning bicycle facilities the put bike traffic facing against the flow of traffic - which is unfortunately what planners here in Seattle have somehow decided is appropriate…

I will not go anywhere near a 2 way cycle track that puts me on the wrong side of the road. Call me strange, but I find even the one way segregated cycling paths very, very stressful to ride in because I know that they limit my line of sight (especially those that have parking between the bike lane and the traffic lane) and they limit my visibility to motorists. I also know that out of sight is out of mind. If a motorist doesn't have to make a conscious movement to pass you it's very easy for them to not even notice that they just passed you and turn in front of you - bam right hooked. I've also seen no decent transitions from segregated lanes to regular traffic lanes - even with unsegregated bike lanes transitions tend to be rather abrupt and unless you've ridden or driven there before they easily take both motorists and cyclists by surprise. I know the argument is that separated facilities make cyclists feel safer and make motorists feel more secure, but to tell you the truth I think that's a bad thing… the last thing we need on our roads is complacency and good feelings… While I'm not advocating being a nervous wreck while driving or cycling, feeling too safe and comfortable simply leads to inattention and that leads to collisions. Please… don't ever assume that you are safe or that others are safe. Always pay attention to what you are doing when you are on the road.

[ny biker]

Here's some stuff about the Pennsylvania Ave bike lanes in downtown DC:

http://chasingmailboxes.com/2013/05/...-lane-dilemma/

[rebeccaC]

We have some of those around here and it works very well. No issues I have seen so far and we use them a lot.

Montreal has been in the forefront of bike lane design for a number of years. The Brebeuf and Maisonneuve bike lanes are standouts for increases in both safety for riders and substantial increases in rider use. Anne Dusk at the Harvard School of Public Health did an excellent study on the safety of Montreal's two way bike lanes on one side of the road and her findings are a lot more positive than some comments in this thread.

The National Institute of Transportation and Communities at PSU concluded an excellent study of protected bike lanes in th U.S. just last summer. The pdf for those interested.

Some interesting statistics from people for bikes with links to further info. The generational difference in support makes me feel good about the influence emerging majorities will have on bike infrastructure

Personally I prefer, in positive ways, to support and work on giving people, especially low income women, a transportation method that is safe, cheap and healthy….hopefully a lot of us as caring communities....will also. I met a woman this past weekend who commutes on an old bike because she needs the money she would spend for transit, not even thinking about a car, to just help her and her daughter live.

[OakLeaf]

Has there been any study that addressed the effect of the existence of segregated bicycling facilities, on rider and motorist behavior on integrated roads?

That's overwhelmingly the biggest issue I have with them. Not just that it gives motorists something to point to when they say "you don't belong here," regardless of whether there's a segregated facility leading to the same destination. But also that the riders use segregation as an excuse to refuse to learn/obey traffic laws when they're on integrated roads or the sidewalks beside them, which endangers everyone.

[Crankin]

I agree, Oak. I wouldn't trust the drivers around one of these lanes, but even more, I wouldn't trust the behavior of the cyclists! And, when I used one, it was just totally disorienting to me.

[shootingstar]

I have gone to several presentations where there were Dutch cycling educators and engineers that gave presentations here:

*Cycling safety education is mandatory for all Dutch schoolchildren by the time they are 9-10 yrs. old. We don't have any North American jurisdiction that requires this by law.
*Liability of car drivers vs. cyclists is reversed in Netherlands. The driver must prove that they didn't do anything wrong.

Separated bike lanes aren't necessarily for cycling fast if that's what you're accustomed. The more popular /well-used they are, then your cycling speed needs to slow down. That's the dichotomy. If you don't like it, cycle elsewhere on the/another road. I do if I can, when a MUP is too crowded.

Yes, there are cyclists that are negligent in their behaviour.

I honestly don't see how just having roads and no marked bike lanes, is any better. Seriously. It's old John Forrester thinking that assumes everyone, even children are competent cyclists and that drivers are reliable, competent. He was promoting his method...before the ubiquitous use of cellphone while driving --despite the efforts of some police for crackdowns.

I live in a city which is further behind than Vancouver or Montreal. The cycling mode share only started to increase when we started to have more bike-pedestrian bridges.. and a separated bike lane. In fact, this was seriously proven when a major 2013 river flood damaged several bridges in our city that the municipality had to be completely rebuilt ....millions of dollars. Now rebuilt, many people are using them...back to normal and now more since the bridges have been built wider to accommodate more users.

I don't see how a lot drivers not want a marked bike lane in the shoulder area. Sure, it may lull some cyclists, but for drivers it's a clear pavement indicator....to give space to cyclists.

By the way, let's not get into the driverless car scenarios in the future --if that terrible idea occurs in the future.

[Jolt]

In my experience, visibility is key, not separation from other traffic. But visibility depends on terrain and speed as well. On larger roads with higher speed limits, drivers don't have as much time to spot you and react to you as on city streets at lower speeds. And of course there's other traffic, intersections, the number of lanes etc. On the other hand, on quiet residential streets people can be very wandery and inattentive, so that fast bike riding is not a good choice. And my choice of route is usually a compromise between the fastest and the safest route. All in all i can't say that in general I would choose a bike lane over the road, depends on too many factors. Really good and separate and efficient bike paths are wonderful, and about as rare as white rhinos.

Here's an article with a table comparing the relative risk of accidents with different types of facilities on different types of roads: https://janheine.wordpress.com/2013/...rlds-together/. According to this, separate bike paths are safer on higher-speed roads with few intersections but not in any other case; on low-speed roads with lots of intersections any "facilities" appear to increase the risks. Makes sense to me, and would help city planners pick the best places to focus their efforts in terms of adding bike lanes/paths in places where they will be helpful while not putting them in places where they will be counterproductive.

[Jolt]

I have gone to several presentations where there were Dutch cycling educators and engineers that gave presentations here:

*Cycling safety education is mandatory for all Dutch schoolchildren by the time they are 9-10 yrs. old. We don't have any North American jurisdiction that requires this by law.
*Liability of car drivers vs. cyclists is reversed in Netherlands. The driver must prove that they didn't do anything wrong.

Separated bike lanes aren't necessarily for cycling fast if that's what you're accustomed. The more popular /well-used they are, then your cycling speed needs to slow down. That's the dichotomy. If you don't like it, cycle elsewhere on the/another road. I do if I can, when a MUP is too crowded.

Yes, there are cyclists that are negligent in their behaviour.

I honestly don't see how just having roads and no marked bike lanes, is any better. Seriously. It's old John Forrester thinking that assumes everyone, even children are competent cyclists and that drivers are reliable, competent. He was promoting his method...before the ubiquitous use of cellphone while driving --despite the efforts of some police for crackdowns.

I live in a city which is further behind than Vancouver or Montreal. The cycling mode share only started to increase when we started to have more bike-pedestrian bridges.. and a separated bike lane. In fact, this was seriously proven when a major 2013 river flood damaged several bridges in our city that the municipality had to be completely rebuilt ....millions of dollars. Now rebuilt, many people are using them...back to normal and now more since the bridges have been built wider to accommodate more users.

I don't see how a lot drivers not want a marked bike lane in the shoulder area. Sure, it may lull some cyclists, but for drivers it's a clear pavement indicator....to give space to cyclists.

By the way, let's not get into the driverless car scenarios in the future --if that terrible idea occurs in the future.

I would love to see bike safety education (rules of the road and bike handling skills) made a part of phys ed in the schools. So many kids aren't taught how to ride safely as part of traffic, because most often their parents don't know how either, so we have kids riding to school etc. doing unsafe things just because they don't know better. Besides, learning how to ride a bike safely on the road will only help them when it comes time to start driving a car--they will already be familiar with the basic rules of the road and how to interact with traffic.

[rebeccaC]

on low-speed roads with lots of intersections any "facilities" appear to increase the risks.

According to the article that's a street with a speed limit of 20mph or lower. The article also says those streets can be excellent candidates for the bicycle boulevards he likes which could be even better than protected bike lanes. His conclusion is also that better facilities bring out more cyclists...that should be the goal.

A focus on intersections is important in good bike infrastructure design and a number of good solutions are found in Europe and Canada. Since that article came out two years ago NACTO’s urban bikeway design guide and others have done some good work researching intersection treatments for bike lanes and protected lanes. One thing helping is the signalized separation in some U.S. cities, Chicago’s Dearborn St. and Seattle’s Second Ave are two good examples. The Anne Dusk study I referred to earlier is also an important look at how Montreal has done it.

shooting star….isn’t Calgary doing a new educational program in conjunction with the new cycle lanes being done in the city centre?

[Eden]

I can't agree that the Second Ave bike lane in Seattle is an example of a good road treatment… granted 2nd Ave has *always* been bad if you were foolish enough to use the "facilities" put there, but the best option, as tempting as it is to pass by all of the traffic, is still to take a lane- the middle of it. Downtown especially, it is easy, super easy to move as quickly as any of the traffic. Lane control puts you in a position where you are visible and you have room to react.

The old configuration, I'll admit, was suicidal. It was a single direction left hand bike lane next to parked cars (2nd Ave is one way) that put cyclists at severe risk because no one was expecting cyclists to be passing them on the left, and passing is what they were usually doing as downtown traffic is normally quite slow. Problems arose when left turning motorists would turn across the path of cyclists proceeding straight. Problems arose with people exiting parking garages. Few people pulling away from the curb parking on the left ever expected fast moving cyclists to be approaching them from behind *and* because the driver ends up on the far side when parked on the left hand of a one way street their field of view can be severely limited - just what they can see in their right hand wing mirror and of course there was the door zone… It had an accident rate of about 1 person per month. It needed to be ground from the pavement.

Unfortunately the new treatment is really not much better. It is still on the left… now it is bi-directional and the parking has now been moved to the right of the "protected lane" The only good thing about it is that at very least users are no longer subject to the door zone or parked cars pulling out from the curb, which they were in the old configuration. There is probably some signalization to try to prevent conflicts at left turn intersections, but now motorists not only have to be aware of cyclists coming up from behind on their left, they also have to be aware of cyclists moving against the flow of traffic on the left too!… and not all turns are made at intersections, nor do all motorists follow the new signals - there has been a big problem with people still making lefts on red (which you can do from a one way street onto a one way street if it is not signed "no turn on red"). There have been more than a few cyclists hit while using this new "safe" lane - often from motorists turning into or exiting parking garages because visibility is poor. It's almost ironic… September with much cheers and lauding the new lane opens. October… the new *safer* lane is already undergoing reconfigurations because of a rash of accidents. So much for one a month and the illusion of safety.

[shootingstar]

Rebecca:
shooting star….isn’t Calgary doing a new educational program in conjunction with the new cycle lanes being done in the city centre?

Well, the city uses the cycling advocacy organization (and gives them money) to run Canbike cycling skills program in the summer. Past few years. It's not a ton of people taking up on it. I'm talking about 10-15 people per course. Same sort of program in major Canadian cities in the past 20 years. It's strictly only up to the municipality and only if there's going to be funding. Sometimes from city or province.

The cycling education I think that you might have read for this summer, would be also outreach general public education with more marketing. The city will also hire student cycling ambassadors to be in certain downtown areas...

Of course all of our new separated bike lanes over the next 2-3 yrs., are not for the suburban areas. The emphasis of new separated bike lanes for the next 2-3 years, are only in the downtown area...not in the suburbs. I guess for negative response of some TE forumites here, that would meet their needs: no separated on road bike lanes in the suburban areas since people seem distrust/dislke them intensely.

So for the suburbs: put all the cyclists on just the park MUPs and they will not be encouraged to use bicycles for transportation since our paths rarely lead to schools, all major shopping centres, etc.....I'm being facetious. Have a few marked bike lanes but not separation barriers, right? My city is doing exactly this. Why bother wasting money on separated bike lanes in suburbs? The reality is that people in the suburbs have chosen to have a car-dependent life and many prefer that, no matter what I/we may think. Many people in the suburbs continue to get furious about the city wasting money on downtown separated bike lanes or any cycling infrastructure.

Cycling education combined with expanded, detailed awareness of bike routes that people cycle with experienced commuters, is helpful. Looking at a bike map still does NOT cement understanding in wannabes that our city does have some lengthy off-road MUPs that connect to a major linear park but also will take cyclists right by several major shopping malls in the suburbs via a MUP without inference of shopping mall car traffic. I cycle these routes weekly on weekends....and I don't see hardly any cyclists!! These same long park MUP routes connect up to the city's zoo and science centre, other local attractions.

Cycling for transportation attitudes is different from Toronto or Vancouver.

I cannot complain about crowded MUPs in our city: there are whole sections of a 700 km. parks system of connected MUPs. Only 25% of the whole system is busy and crowded enough to slow down cyclists at certain times from spring to fall. Most of the time, it's...empty on a beautiful sunny weekend when I'm on it. It continues to floor me but indicates the city where I live, a huge % of locals don't cycle often at all. But this system needs to be connected to on-road safe cycling routes.

Some of the crummy connections is that transportation engineers normally aren't trained on human behaviour aspects for cyclists and drivers. I've met transportation engineers...who don't cycle. They don't take mandatory courses at university on this. The push in their training is transportation efficiency, technical construction of infrastructure, technical understanding of materials and coping with volumes.

It's then not surprising, the shocking excitement by some people of driverless cars. It's like children playing in a fantasy world of model cars with mathematical calculations without babies and children (human beings) who make independent decisions --both logical and illogical with different human response rates on action as they travel.

[Eden]

Of course all of our new separated bike lanes over the next 2-3 yrs., are not for the suburban areas. The emphasis of new separated bike lanes for the next 2-3 years, are only in the downtown area...not in the suburbs. I guess for negative response of some TE forumites here, that would meet their needs: no separated on road bike lanes in the suburban areas since people seem distrust/dislke them intensely.

That's actually sound like the complete opposite of what people have been saying here… the slower and busier the road and the more intersections it has the less desirable it is for it to have a separated cycle track - that's when the cycle track carries the *highest*risk to the cyclist and vehicular cycling the lowest…. Not only that, in higher density areas it's impossible for cycle tracks to actually go to all of the places where cyclists would need to travel. The higher speed more suburban streets with few intersections and less on street parking and fewer destinations lend themselves better to the creation of safe bike lanes and separated trackways.

As far as driverless cars go… well I expect I'd never experience a punishment pass from one of them…

[shootingstar]

Eden:

Not only that, in higher density areas it's impossible for cycle tracks to actually go to all of the places where cyclists would need to travel. The higher speed more suburban streets with few intersections and less on street parking and fewer destinations lend themselves better to the creation of safe bike lanes and separated trackways.

Well, is this happening in Seattle? In Portland? In Washington DC? More separated bike lanes in the suburbs vs. in the denser, core/downtown areas?
What people like in residential areas is the convenience of free on street parking....but there's a cost borne by the municipality to keep that space "free" and not always used. Unless the resident living in the neighbourhood pays an annual parking fee for the right to park on that street....which is what happens in Toronto for homes that do not have a driveway or garage at all. It's been going on for the last few decades.

I don't agree that separated bike lanes don't go to places where people live. It is possible in some rare cities in North America. In the core areas of Vancouver, more people are moving into the downtown areas. There are 2 new public schools being built. This has been going on for the last 10 yrs. We live in the downtown area of Vancouver.... condos, townhouses and (a lot less) semi-detached homes.

Sure some suburban streets are great candidates....some of them are shockingly wide (what for?) with very little car traffic because it's purely residential area and it's not even arterial road. I remember yelling at my partner in a pleasant suburban neighbourhood on a peaceful street where a car appeared every 5 minutes..."This is 4 car lanes wide!" Just stupid but of course, a side road lane is for the occasional car park on street..for visitors or pure homeowner convenience when they have their own driveway. There's no other reason for that width.

Keep in mind, I grew up on a lovely one way, 2 lane street with historic detached homes and leafy trees in the downtown area off a major aterial road that hummed with traffic and transit. I think I know what I'm talking about after growing up on an inner city street where the traffic was naturally calmed because it was a single lane one way for cars. Car drivers wouldn't be using our street for a shortcut, that's for sure because they had to slow down.

[OakLeaf]

thinking that assumes everyone, even children are competent cyclists and that drivers are reliable, competent.

I'm not assuming that at all. I'm saying that able bodied adults need to behave like competent drivers when they operate vehicles, and if people willfully refuse to do so, the appropriate response isn't to spend hundreds of millions of dollars so they don't have to.

Children need to learn to drive cars and motorcycles too, but we don't create a whole parallel system of roads for them to do so. I think we all recognize what a disaster that would be!

[OakLeaf]

separated facilities make cyclists feel safer and make motorists feel more secure, but to tell you the truth I think that's a bad thing… the last thing we need on our roads is complacency and good feelings… .

Exactly. The "magic white line." I've had drivers actually tell me that they get nervous when riders are too close to the line. Like it absolves them of any effort to pass at a safe distance. And I've obviously seen plenty of riders acting as though it's a force-field, too.