What "Bike Friendly" Looks Like
What if cities had no sidewalks and everyone walked on the road? Or, for urban recreation, they walked on a few scenic trails? What if the occasional street had a three-foot-wide “walking lane” painted on the asphalt, between the moving cars and the parked ones?
Well, for starters, no one would walk much. A hardy few might brave the streets, but most would stop at “walk?! in traffic?!”
Fortunately, this car-head vision is fiction for pedestrians in most of Cascadia, but it’s not far from nonfiction for bicyclists. Regular bikers are those too brave or foolish to be dissuaded by the prospect of playing chicken with two-ton behemoths. Other, less-ardent cyclists stick to bike paths; they ride for exercise, not transportation. Bike lanes, in communities where they exist, are simply painted beside the horsepower lanes.
Cascadians react reasonably: "bike?! in traffic?!" And they don’t. "It’s not safe" is what the overwhelming majority of northwesterners say when asked why they bike so little. (As it turns out, it’s safer than most assume—on which, more another day.)
So what would Cascadia's cities look like if we provided the infrastructure for safe cycling? What does "bike friendly" actually look like?
Good bicycling infrastructure is something few on this continent have seen. It doesn’t mean a “bike route” sign and a white stripe along the arterial. It doesn’t mean a meandering trail shared with joggers, strollers, and skaters.
Bike friendly means a complete, continuous, interconnected network of named bicycle roads or "tracks," each marked and lit, each governed by traffic signs and signals of its own. It means a parallel network interlaced with the other urban grids: the transit grid on road or rail; the street grid for cars, trucks, and taxis; and the sidewalk grid for pedestrians. It means separation from those grids: to be useful for everyone from eight year olds to eighty year olds, bikeways on large roads must be physically curbed, fenced, or graded away from both traffic and walkers. (On smaller, neighborhood streets, where bikes and cars do mingle, bike friendly means calming traffic with speed humps, circles, and curb bubbles.)
Picture a street more than half of which is reserved for people on foot, bikes, buses, or rail; on which traffic signals and signs, street design, and landscaping all conspire to treat bicycles as the equals of automobiles. This is what bike friendly—what Bicycle Respect—looks like.
Such "complete streets" are common in Denmark, the Netherlands, and other northern European countries. This photo is from Copenhagen, which has more than 200 miles of “bicycle tracks" and another 40 miles planned or under construction. (Photo courtesy of Jayson Antonoff, International Sustainable Solutions. See more photos here.) These tracks, which are typically above street grade and below sidewalk grade, can move six times more people per meter of lane width than motorized lanes of Copenhagen traffic. That’s right: because cyclists can travel close together, bike tracks have higher traffic "throughput" than do car lanes. Copenhagen has even synchronized its traffic signals—for bikers. An average-speed bike commuter going downtown will rarely see a red light.
What does bike friendly look like? It looks like a 60-year old and her granddaughter on two wheelers, getting the green light at each intersection they approach, while drivers brake to stay out of their way.
Continue reading this article from the Cascadia Scorecard Weblog:
What Bike Friendly Looks Like
