The Wrong Side of my Car

The blog that wants to go obsolete

Protected bike lanes: what they do, and don’t

You often hear talk about protected bicycle lanes. How we need them. How they will keep parked cars out. How we need them to fix left hooks. Spoiler alert: they won’t, and they won’t. Let’s try to clear up some misunderstanding.

Protect the bike lanes

Often, the Dutch are used as an example of how to do bike lanes. They have been doing this for a long time. Bicycle Dutch has lots of posts and videos documenting all sorts of bike trips. *2 Just pick any of them. The last one with a lot of bike lanes is “Two fast north-south cycling routes to pass Roermond”. Read a few more while you’re there, and then come back.

Did you notice the barriers against cars — oh wait

It turns out there are no such barriers. There is very little stopping you from driving onto those bike lanes. Cars can easily mount kerbs and cross grass berms. Some utes can even go over the concrete barriers of that image in the top.

You will occasionally see bollards on the more tempting off-road paths. However they are not common, and what do we read here? Less bollards on bicycle tracks (Dutch), they say. Turns out bollards in the middle of bike lanes are dangerous.

Or what about that other fancy bicycling city, Copenhagen? With their Copenhagen lanes? How easy is it to mount those little kerbs with a car?

This lack of physical barriers is a feature, not a bug. If you live on a street with bike lanes, how do you get on the bike lane across the street? Not so easy with concrete blocks, is it?

But still, aren’t they supposed to be protected?

Maybe we are taking this too literally.

Protect the bike lanes (bis)

There is a saying in aviation on staying safe. Give yourself margin.

And this is what we mean with protection. Make sure there is some safety margin for the mistakes that will inevitably happen. The Dutch spend a lot of time and effort figuring out which designs makes mistakes less likely and less deadly. Protected means providing safety even when people slip up. This is often visible as literally creating space between cars and bicycles. Not only is this safer, but also much more comfortable.

If you see cars outright driving or parked in a bike lane, you’re dealing with a different problem. Those cars did not end up there by mistake.

We have to talk about user behaviour

Now the cries come in. Sacrilege. Relying on user behaviour is how we ended up in the current unsafe mess! Nothing will ever change.

But no matter how you look at it, you need those users to cooperate. Let’s look at some type of infrastructure that is actually common in Auckland — these concrete bits at the edge of our streets:

Do you think this look like:

1. parking spots
2. a footpath?

For sure, anyone of driving age will get this one right. If people still park in footpaths you have a different problem. Protected infrastructure does not protect against users who do not cooperate.

This already limits what we can achieve with infrastructure. Look at the new bike lane on Karangahape Road *3, which by any reasonable definition counts as protected. Well, we have parked cars on it anyway. And it being separated makes it hard to ride around parked cars so you end up riding the entire stretch on the road.

We know the solution. Hand out tickets like Halloween candy. A fine should cost more than one week of rent on a parking spot. Roll tow trucks. We can do it for clearways, why not for bike lanes or footpaths?

Left hooks

Ah yes. I mentioned that. Some people argued that the lack of protected bike lanes causes left hooks, or causes drivers to fail to give way to a cyclist. How did the Dutch fix that?

Well, sorry to disappoint, but they didn’t. The Dutch drive on the right hand side, so they have right hooks.

Think about this for a second. Maybe you were thinking about a barrier. How would that work?

There are once again two superficially similar but very different problems. One is that sometimes a driver fails to spot a cyclist and hooks him. Second, a driver spots a cyclist, but hooks him anyway because of reasons I don’t know for sure. Very different problems.

Both are mitigated by making high speed turns difficult and uncomfortable. Don’t be stupid with turning radii. Don’t flatten those cycleways and footpaths to street level. And the design should make it as obvious as possible that those cyclists (and pedestrians) have priority *4.

But that second problem, again, is worse, and all the protected infrastructure in the world will not solve it.

Infrastructure or enforcement?

You need both. Infrastructure is quite obvious — otherwise where are you supposed to ride?

But if you watched a video on Bicycle Dutch, you probably noticed something else — you don’t have to go around a parked car every 50 m over there. Despite the apparent lack of barriers. Could it be that you may actually get fined or towed if you park on those bike lanes?

Fixing this user behaviour is not sufficient, but it is necessary.

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