Mini Exasperation #16
A Pattern Language, For Sure. Protect These Lanes or Don't Bother.
Kea Wilson’s reporting is always excellent, but this piece caught my eye this morning for a few reasons. First: I’ve been harping about this idea for years. Sometimes, and not all times, a poorly designed bike lane makes cycling less safe than simply no change to the road infrastructure at all. Like most concepts in transportation, this idea is counterintuitive and is harder to communicate without diving into data and building an entire campaign around challenging the narrative from the right and the left side of the “biking issue,” or whatever we’ll call it.
Second: the reported piece could use some additional editorial comment, taking nothing away from Kea’s reporting, and in fact, hoping to add to it. The comment is this: unprotected bike lanes confound the shared language of the street. What do I mean by that?
Every street—and sometimes road—is its own micro-ecosystem. The businesses, homes, and offices are necessarily different from one another, block by block. How the right-of-way (basically, curb-to-curb, but I’ll also hear building face-to-face, depending on whether we want to plan sidewalks with cars in mind) operates is a function of the street’s planned use, its observed use, and the needs of the people who live and work nearby. Every street—and sometimes road—should be planned with safety and dignity in mind first and economics second.
The shared language of each street is a social contract inherently agreed to by road users. We use design and enforcement to nudge road users—all users—into patterns that can be contextualized and applied to situations on other streets. Some people might call this “learning.” There are established “rules,” like “Stop at red lights,” “Wait for pedestrians to cross the street,” and “Don’t kill cyclists,” based upon how we design our streets. There’s an expectation that people will follow these rules; we engage in little behaviors to signal that we’ve learned and adhered to them.
Pedestrians wait for clear streets to cross. It’s never a pedestrian’s fault when a driver hits them, but it’s the rule that drivers and pedestrians know to foster a safe intersection or crossing. Markings, traffic lights, and eye contact all help.
Drivers know to maneuver their vehicles in between drawn or carved lanes. Car operators, and bus and truck drivers know this. They know to stay within the lines—like coloring?—and operate their vehicle at safe speeds. They know to park where they’re told. Or do they?
Drivers also know that a bike lane means a lane for bikes and not parking. There are clear markings for where bikes should have free-and-clear access to part of the right-of-way.
Here’s the problem. Modes are not made equal, and even if they were, there’s a clear difference in size and killing power between a car and a bike. Even if there’s a breakdown in the language—a pedestrian could never do the damage to a car that a car could do to a pedestrian. That’s the difference. And that’s why it matters that the language can’t break down (and why good design helps to mitigate when it does), why we need protected bike lanes, and why unprotected bike lanes don’t work. If too many drivers just…leave their cars parked in a bike lane, there can’t be a language that all street users know. If a cyclist has to dart into traffic—how should a driver react? And what should a cyclist expect?
We shouldn’t need bike lanes—because we should be designing our streets for safety—but if we do, they must be protected. If not, we’re inviting a breakdown in the pattern language that governs how we move. It’s safer to not build a bike lane—and give the right-of-way to all modes at slow speeds. I’ll stand by this.
Anyway, the reporting and the report itself go into some of the (correct) technical details and findings based on (limited) data. Go see for yourself.