John Massengale and Victor Dover, in Better! Cities & Towns, are critical of the separated bike lanes (or cycle tracks) used in New York City and other places. (This is adapted from their new book, “Street Design: The Secret to Great Cities and Towns”.)
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In 2009 the city’s Transportation Department redesigned the section of Eighth Avenue in Manhattan:
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The protected bike lane in the left side of the photo is sometimes referred to in America as a Copenhagen Lane; the street-level lane is sandwiched between the sidewalk and a buffer lane that runs along a row of parked cars.
In Copenhagen, where 36 percent of the population commutes to work or school by bicycle every day, the form is better: the cycle track is raised above street level, with a curb separating it from the street. Below is a similar example from Amsterdam.
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In New York, bicycle lanes are wider than in most cities (so that garbage trucks with snow plows mounted can clear the lane when it snows). Bold striping more appropriate for a freeway than for a city street surrounds them. The usual delaminating plastic sticks are used in New York, too, and the crosswalks have an ungainly concrete pad in the street where pedestrians can wait to cross. …
Even cyclists have some problems with New York’s Copenhagen Lanes. Early designs like the Eighth Avenue one shown above have signal lights for left-turn lanes. When the cars get a green light for turning left, bicycles are held back by a red light. The timing on those means that cyclists have to stop every 400 feet (two New York blocks) and wait for two light cycles: first the turn-lane light and then the light for the cars going across the avenue.
Later designs got rid of the left-turn lights, substituting “mixing zones,” where bold diagonal triangles alert drivers to watch out for bicycles. In reality, few duffers (and there are many of those now that New York has bike-sharing) are going to cross in front of the two-ton gorilla behind them on the road.
The mixing zones add another level of machine-scale ugliness to the streetscape. New York had few turn lanes before these new Complete Streets, because they are anti-urban elements that favor the car and traffic flow over other functions of the street.
Unfortunately, many engineers, bicycle advocates, and even pedestrian specialists have adopted America’s so-called Copenhagen Lane as a Best Practice. …
In the long run, there will be better, more holistic solutions than these transitional Copenhagen Lane streets. It’s not too early to start looking at better solutions, as long as we acknowledge the understandable tensions in the conversation.
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Complete article here.
In my opinion the worst part of the “Copenhagen” style protected bike lanes I’ve seen and used in the U.S. is that they are modeled just like the road (as if they’re building them for cars) when bikes are fundamentally different from cars.
One case is that in Chicago the signal for the bike lane is the same size as the one for cars. It can be blocked by trees, and forces your gaze upwards when you should be looking straight ahead/slightly downward, to look at pedestrians and small, potentially dangerous items on the road. Also (and this is hard to fix), there are often utility covers where the bike lane is, and they get trapped with debris, cause potholes, and can send cargo like groceries flying. They clearly didn’t think of how they impact bicycle tires differently from car tires when it was designed, nor was anything done to fix it.
When you go to the Netherlands you see that the bike infrastructure in many cases has been designed with the bicycle in mind, and nothing else. In the US it’s like they’re building smaller car lanes.
The Amsterdam example definitely looks nice, but it isn’t ideal. Just ask anyone who uses a wheelchair to get around our False Creek seawall. Brick or cobblestone surfaces make for a teeth-rattling ride.
These authors don’t actually seem to have a problem so much with the separated bike lane as with the rest of the road. They complain that too much of the road is still devoted to automobile through traffic. Some of the actual lane designs are lumpen, like the downtown bike lanes in Vancouver, but I think we are all assuming that the “temporary” bike lanes will be replaced with a more finished product.
@jmoulins. You’re right about cobblestones. That surface is actually very smooth, with carefully laid pavers that stay flush. I saw the same thing in Newport, Rhode Island yesterday. They had a few streets with flush stone pavers that were comfortable for bikes and pedestrians (although they were mainly giving them to cars—you’re right too, yvrlutyens). Here and there they had patched with cobblestones, which distrupted the street.