A street design that has been used in cities in Europe but never in New York City:
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.
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.
It does this by placing the bike lane directly next to the sidewalk on the western edge of Ninth Avenue, which is the left side of the street for those facing north, in the direction of traffic. The plan also takes a lane from cars, creating more room for pedestrians and for the bicycle lane.
Full story here. Thanks to Ron Richings.
I think that’s a brilliant idea. Speaking from Eastern European expereince where bike lanes are completely physically separated from traffic (in configuration – sidewalk – bikeway – road) this makes things much safer for cycling…They shoulld have done that in Vancouver – isntead they chose to put bike lanes in the middle of the street without any kind of physical separation…This does not make cycling very attractive especially on busy downtown streets….
I hear it over and over and over again! People want separated bikepaths! I want separated bikepaths! So why don’t we here in North America have damn bikepaths already?!
I don’t care what some stupid economist or planner says about bike lanes. We want separated bikepaths. They will be used. Look at the bloody seawall if you want the perfect example of a successful separated bikepath.
Budapest has a major avenue that includes a combination of curbside bikelanes, separated from traffic by a line of cannonball bollards sunk in the pavement and then a line of parked cars, that transitions into a fully separate bike path in a planted central median. I can’t recall the name of the Avenue, but it heads east from the centre past the opera house. Another interesting example of this is in Montreal, where the bikelanes run counterflow to one way traffic along the curb, separated from traffic by removable concrete curbs (taken up in winter) and a line of parked cars. This seems to be their standard on all the major routes downtown.
Interesting.
I guess the buffer zone is so car trunks do not protrude into the bike lane when parallel parking.
One question would be whether the parked cars act as too much of a barrier for the cyclists – i.e. on the one-way street pictured (with the bike lane on the left), what does the cyclist do when he/she wants to make a right hand turn? Ordinarily if the bike lane were outside the parked cars or if there were no bike lane, you would weave through traffic to the right hand lane and execute the turn from the right-hand side of the street (i.e. the bike as a vehicle). The above configuration would prevent you from being able to get to the right side of the street mid-block and suggests that you would have to wait at the intersection and turn right from the left side of the street in time with the cross-traffic (i.e. next to the crosswalk).
BTW – the Carrall Street Greenway uses this bike lane configuration (which I think works well for a recreational route, but less so for a commuter route where cyclists would enter and exit the route frequently)
I can’t help but think of the ill-fated attempt at installing dedicated bicycle lanes in Victoria in the 1970s. One ran parallel to the sidewalk on the wide boulevard of Vancouver street and can still be seen between Fort and Bay streets or thereabouts. It is completely useless for anything but slow, leisurely pedaling.