The Wrong Side of my Car

The blog that wants to go obsolete

There are tiers below Painted Bike Lanes

Paint-only bike lanes often cop a lot of flak. Sometimes for good reason, for instance the setup on Glenfield Road or Green Lane is ridiculous.

But still. When cycling in Auckland, most of the time, it is much worse than painted lanes. Are we throwing out the baby with the bathwater here?

So today we explore the abyss that lies below this level of infrastructure.

The Tiers of Bicycle Infrastructure

Tier 0: Painted Lanes

So, our reference for today. The humble painted lane.

Lots of advocates will pour scorn onto this. Because they are looking up:

Tier Unicorn: Protected or Separate Lanes

So these are real bike lanes.

Very good, but how fast do you think we can build these? You are going to break up every last road all at once? Even the Netherlands doesn’t break up roads to build bike lanes. Many of their upgrades happen with roadworks for maintenance or services. This avoids the extra expense and disruption of roadworks just for bike lanes.

So patience. The road maintenance machine will roll around one day.

So, when looking up, painted lanes look less than appealing. And it is true that they will convince less people to ride a bicycle than separate lanes. But still. Let’s look down to lower tiers.

Tier −1: The Big Roadway

So, what if we don’t paint bike lanes?

Yeah, it is kind of the same. The occasional parked car is not a super big issue because car drivers can usually pass you before or after it, and even then, our roadways are often so wide that things don’t get too cramped even with that parked car.

If you think of it, it really is the same. Paint is not a force field. It doesn’t isolate you in any way from cars. If you overtake a bicycle in a car, you probably still want to observe the guideline to leave 1.5 m passing distance. And so on.

From what I have heard, back in the 1970’s, when people in New Zealand still rode bicycles, this was the default arrangement, and it worked sort of OK. So what changed?

Tier −1000: The Big Roadway Full of Parked Cars

Ah.

Most of the same roads now have walls of parked cars on them. This is annoying even for car drivers. For cyclists, you are either constantly squeezed between the parked and the driving cars. Or alternatively, you have to constantly swerve between parked cars, but then possibly give way to cars coming from behind you. This makes riding a bike rather cumbersome, and dangerous.

The other things that has happened is painted meridians, which push traffic towards the edge of the road, closer to anyone riding a bicycle.

This is now the most common arrangement in Auckland. And a serious barrier to cycling. Even if a bike network with a decent reach is built on the main roads, most people still have to ride on this kind of stuff to reach it.

Bonus Tier: Murder Strips

These refer to the inanely dumb arrangements, like the one on Taharoto Road in that first picture. You get too narrow bike lanes (remember the 1.5 m passing rule, a bike lane is no good if car drivers still have to go in the next lane to overtake cyclists). Or sometimes you see bike lanes between parked cars and live traffic lanes. Yeah, do you know what a door zone is? If you paint bike lanes, you do still have to create a proper layout.

Back to Tier 0

All of a sudden painted lanes don’t look so bad anymore. You can’t possibly argue that this isn’t better than squeezing around parked cars all the time and not be trolling. Those lines of paint maybe don’t protect you, but being able to ride more or less continuously is a huge upgrade over constantly having to look over your shoulder when you have to go past the next parked car.

(And yes, we are ignoring the issue of enforcement for today. I know that this being a bike lane doesn’t stop people from parking in it, but even in Auckland we have had plenty of opportunities to observe that protected lanes don’t solve that problem either.)

Why painted lanes?

First of all, because they can be rolled out quickly. The number one problem with our bicycle network in Auckland, by far, is coverage. There are large parts without bike lanes at all, and only a handful of people have enough bike lanes nearby to actually be able to do most things by bicycle.

And yeah, maybe they won’t appeal to the masses. But if they can seduce the 10% or so of confident and enthused cyclists, you potentially already reach 3% or so mode share. Doesn’t sound like much? Take a look at a mode share map of Auckland. There are large areas where a 3% mode share would be a ten-fold increase.

These bike lanes also act like stakes in the ground. Here be a cycle route. If you rebuild an intersection a bit later it all of a sudden makes sense to continue the bike lane over that intersection in a dignified way. Otherwise, are you going to decry those inadequate paint-only lanes, while also mocking your transport agency for building 20 m of stranded bike lane in that new intersection?

And you get a much stronger case for building proper lanes when closing up road works. When your piece of bike lane is finished, it is immediately usable as part of your network.

And what if you change your mind about adding some protection? It turns out this is not actually that difficult, with Auckland Transport now adding protection to 60 km of existing painted bike lanes. Do you think we would have gotten any of those 60 km if we wouldn’t already have painted these lanes left and right?

So even though painted lanes are not ideal, there is such a thing as taking the win.

Why not?

Anyone following these discussions for any length of time knows what the real problem is. You don’t take away on-street parking. If your project removes even a single on-street parking spot, you are bound to get stiff resistance. Well, you are going to get resistance anyway because for many people, the very idea of having space set aside for bicycles is profoundly taboo. Some people are willing to literally spend their savings to help oppose any cycling project.

So most proposals to add bike lanes to a street will basically die in this stage. For the handful that somehow manages to get over the line, the extra effort of adding some proper hardware is trivial. The technical and logistical problem is easy compared to the political one.

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