The Wrong Side of my Car

The blog that wants to go obsolete

7 Sept 2021

Best practice or nothing

Is it OK to settle for painted bike lanes? Often, people will say no. Cycling advocates will point out that it is not real infrastructure and they’ll point at the Netherlands. Authorities make this argument, and then conveniently figure out that therefore the cost will blow out and they’ll cancel the whole thing.

Surely the Dutch don’t bother with just paint, right?

Well, this is a myth.

They’re forgetting that the Netherlands has been doing this for 50 years. They didn’t build all that stuff on day 1. And when they started, cycling was still a thing for a lot of people so there was broad grassroots support. Even today, after all this time, this is still work in progress.

I mean, they don’t exactly like painted lanes, but you can only rebuild so many of them per year.

Meanwhile, in Auckland we get our — woohoo — protected lanes, and then this happens:

@UltimeciaNZ on Twitter
Yes that is a bike lane on the left.

Ooof. Bad case of cars on the bike lane here. Usually when this happens, the chanting will start. Paint is not infrastructure. Paint is not infrastructure. Well? Not much chanting today, eh?

The actual problem

So imagine this happens somewhere near you:

An early attempt at a bike lane in Auckland.

Argh. A bike Gutter. But wait, don’t start chanting just yet. You think this lane would be better if it were separated from the roadway by a kerb, or if there were bollards on that line?

Of course not. If you’re squeezed this tightly between traffic and the road edge, it will be scary regardless of bollards.

It is the width.

The actual problem is getting enough width. That 1.7 m, at least. Preferably 2 m.

A bike lane should afford enough passing distance.
Image made with Streetmix

A bike lane must be wide enough so you can pass a cyclist at a safe distance without straddling out of your lane. (I have to admit I just made that rule up but I think it makes sense.)

This should be cheap and easy. Many streets are 11 or even 13 m wide, while you only need about 6.5 m for two traffic lanes. So much space. We just don’t know what to do with it. Why not have a painted meridian? Give it away for free to people parking their cars.

Now have you ever followed a project where even a single parking spot is removed. Oh boy, get the popcorn. Politics will get messy, and the cheap option all of a sudden becomes impossible.

The observant reader has already figured out that nobody builds protected bike lanes this narrow. Before we talk about ‘protection’, we need the basics — enough width. Once we digest the decision to actually allocate that space we can start talking about protection.

Compare this to why buses tend to be worse than trams. For some reason we’re always tempted to ruin the right of way for buses by cutting bus lanes short at intersections. This doesn’t happen for tram lanes — oh, sorry — Light Rail.

Intersections

Special mention goes to the design of intersections, something Auckland Transport does extremely poorly. I mean, this is so stupid that it is not even fun to point and laugh at it. This is supposed to be designed by professionals. What were they thinking? Did they actually try to make the bend smoother for cars?

Why does nobody seem to know bike lanes should actually continue across intersections?

Again, this is a layout problem, not a paint problem. If you ‘protect’ those bits of bike lane, crossing that intersection will still suck on a bicycle.

And, of course, Turning Lanes for Everyone*. Another political problem of allocating space. Instead of a small compromise for car drivers, this choice will make adding bike lanes later abnormally expensive.

(* in a car)

How to actually get Best Practice™ lanes

If you follow this Netherlands thing for a while, you learn something about when to improve bike lanes. Sometimes you see a mention of some suboptimal intersection. One that is not really up to scratch. One that will surely be improved the next time it gets major road maintenance.

That’s right. You don’t go ripping up streets nilly willy to install bike lanes. Why would you bother? The road maintenance machine will come along sooner or later anyway. What is it, once in 25 years? Do you think Auckland — all of it — can have a flashy bike network in 25 years?

The number one barrier to building protected or separated lanes (and many other nice street things) in Auckland is our idiotic like-for-like policy for reinstating after roadworks. And number two, of course, there exist no bike lanes yet to upgrade in the first place.

The most likely outcome of painted lanes not being good enough is getting nothing at all. Getting that space allocated would be a huge win, even if it is only painted for now. Resolve gnarly situations at corners with a few bollards or concrete blocks. If only a few percent will use them, fine. We’re below 0.5% in large areas right now.

The actual urgency

Short term we don’t need Best Practice. We need more coverage. More kilometres. If your plan costs 600 million dollars and still only gets you 150 km of bike lanes, then frankly, your plan sucks. Painted lanes are not the most comfortable, but they’re much better than being squeezed between traffic and parked cars.

We’ve got a huge political and cultural problem on our hands. Let’s not make our life more miserable by also making it expensive.

Bootstrapping cycling

This is a post which got split into 3 parts:

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