Some Cities Try To Be Bike-Friendly
by Lloyd Alter, Toronto on 09.28.07
Some cities are trying hard to be bike-friendly; New York City just got its first physically-separated bike path inside the urban core. According to the New York Times, The city is planning to remake seven blocks of Ninth Avenue in Chelsea into what officials are billing enthusiastically, perhaps a bit hyperbolically, as the street of the future. “I think it’s a sneak peek at the future streets of New York,” said Janette Sadik-Khan, the city’s transportation commissioner. “It represents the kinds of innovative ideas that we can explore to make the streets more livable.” ::New York Times and ::Planetizen
In Boston, according to the Boston Globe,
Stung by national criticism and hoping to take a bite out of traffic and air pollution, Mayor Thomas M. Menino, A newly converted cyclist himself, Menino will announce today the hiring of a bike czar, former Olympic cyclist Nicole Freedman, and a first phase of improvements to include 250 new bike racks across Boston and an online map system.
In the next several years, Menino said, he plans to create a network of bike lanes on roads such as Massachusetts Avenue and Commonwealth Avenue in the Back Bay and the Fenway. Paths could also be constructed to connect the Emerald Necklace system of parks, and the mayor is looking at facilities like showers, bike storage areas, and automated bike rental systems that make wheels instantly available to anyone with a credit card.
"We need to get more people to take the bike around. It's good for their health, it's good for the environment, and there's less congestion on our streets," Menino said. "It's time for this issue to come to the forefront." ::Planetizen
Meanwhile in Toronto, Robert Oullette of Reading Toronto tangles with streetcar tracks, movie trucks and rude policemen in a posting entitled "To Serve And Protect - As Long As You Are Not A Cyclist"
As citizens and tax payers in this great city we all assume that everyone is treated equally. It is always painful then to discover that we are, in fact, not all equal. I am not talking about our famed egalitarian culture (it really is special). Nor am I discussing the equal access to a range of exotic foods from world regions a Babylonian King would have envied. No. What I'm talking about is how poorly cyclists are treated in this city. For anyone who has seen the cycling cultures of Europe - or even that perenial, so-called third-world city of Bogota, Colombia - the backwardness of this city is frustrating.
What is more frustrating is that cyclist put up with it. If ever there was a situation where the analogy of the frog in a pot of boiling water could be fairly used it is this one. You know, if a frog is put in a pot of room temperature water on a stove and the heat is gradually increased, the frog will not jump out until, well, it is too late.
Cyclists in this city are like that. In spite of the number of people who own bikes and would like to commute if they felt safe, city officials continue to dismiss us as just a bunch of disenfranchised bike couriers (no offense to bike couriers here who know exactly what I mean because they have to deal with city streets all day long). Yet we do nothing even with the potentially significant political force we represent.
In spite of the number of preventable injuries and deaths caused by policy decisions made by city hall, cyclists just sit back and take it. In spite of cyclists who get ticketed for riding the wrong way down streets they live on because traffic planners designed them for cars, not cyclists, they take it. Why? Because over time we have come to think that it can be no other way. Cars and their drivers are king or so we've come to accept.
Is it time for a serious cycling union comprised of a broad swath of the cyclists in the city from couriers to lawyers, teachers to dentists?
more from ::Reading Toronto
my first reaction was to know why the bike line was to the left.
"The most unusual aspect of the design, which will run from 16th Street to 23rd Street, is that it uses a lane of parked cars to protect cyclists from other traffic."
This seems like a good idea, in this way the traffic will be relatively slow next to the bike lane. It could be implented in both sides as well.
Many cities are already great at being bike friendly.
To name a few Tucson, Arizona, David, Ca, Boulder and Denver, CO. All have laws to create more and more bike firendly streets and paths.
We have some bike lanes in Los Angeles, and they are death-traps. Car drivers drive in the bike lanes, or worse, use them for unpredictable, erratic U-turns and maneuvering around stopped traffic. The LAPD doesn't do a damn thing to stop them.
In Amsterdam, they have color-coded two-level sidewalk pavements to keep bike traffic separate from pedestrian traffic and car traffic. The vertical separation is only an inch or two, but it's very effective at marking it as a separate space.
Of course, no one explained this to me, so I still had bells crossly jingled at me for walking in the bike lane.
I laughed at your comment, Russell, of getting bells "crossly jingled" at you :)
I'm afraid we North Americans just aren't ready for that kind of "politeness" on our bike lanes or streets (like the removing of stripes, traffic lights and such simply would not work on this continent.)
What I would love to see cities across the continent do, is to push the railroad, utility and pipeline companies to let them put in bike trails along those corridors. For example, Houston, Texas, is criss-crossed with these ROWs (rights-of-way) and the only thing I've ever seen allowed on them are parking lots.
They are wide expanses of cleared land, most often "used" as grazing land for horses. A system of bike paths would greatly increase the use of bikes in a town where they're considered a target. And talk about safety for the majority of your ride. I'd bike for things like running errands and such if I could use these ROWs. It would be simplicity at its best. And very little in the way of converting roads and intersections into bike-friendly thoroughfares.
I'd say we should all contact our city-planners and make the suggestion to acquire a ten-foot/3-meter width of ROW, fence it off and make a paved path. We could have a semi-private biking network :)
Unfortunately I do not see this type of bike lane being implemented more widely throughout the city. This is because only a few avenues- like 9th Ave., 3rd Ave. and parts of 1st would be wide enough to accomodate both a bike lane and a buffer.
That being said, I would love to see the median in the middle of Park Ave. developed as bike lanes.
"Unfortunately I do not see this type of bike lane being implemented more widely throughout the city. This is because only a few avenues- like 9th Ave., 3rd Ave. and parts of 1st would be wide enough to accomodate both a bike lane and a buffer."
In areas where this has been implemented, rather than providing a bikeway on every street, I think the idea has been to provide a major cycle arterial along main roads so that cyclists can get safely from one end of the city to the other. That said, your comment above makes me think: "wouldn' it be great if whole (narrow) streets were closed off to cars and open only to bicycles" (and maybe to local residents too through the use of traffic calming measurs). ... I know it's cheeky, but its nice to dream.
Minneapolis has fantastic cycing infrastructure - lots of on-street lanes that are for the most part well designed, miles of rails-to-trails off-street lanes that act as commuter freeways.
Having ridden those good lanes, it's highlighted the examples of poor design.
When lanes are totally separated from traffic (i.e. both directions on one side of the street, past a curb), cars are unaware that there are bike lanes and cut cyclists who have the right of way off in dangerous ways. (Two weeks ago I saw the remains of an accident where a car had hit a man pulling a small child in a trailer in just that situation. A bus did the same to me 50 yards later.)
The key is to ensure the design is good, and that cars EXPECT to see cyclists and know where to look for them. And that the design respects the ways drivers and cyclists actually behave, not the way traffic engineers wish they would behave.