September 8, 2014

Violating a Meme: Bike lanes can speed up traffic

Not news to many of you, since this has been widely circulated since appearing on CityLab.  But worth repeating – and repeating – since the meme that bike routes cause congestion is taken as a given in so many circles.

Here’s the report from Vox:

Bike lanes have actually sped up car traffic in New York City 

Since 2007, New York City has added 31 miles of protected bike lanes — that is, lanes protected by a physical barrier, such as a row of parked cars or a curb.

The main point of building protected lanes was to make biking in the city safer. But when the NYC Department of Transportation recently studied the impact of the lanes, they found a secondary benefit: on several different avenues in Manhattan, the lanes actually helped speed up car traffic.

On Columbus and 8th ave., car speeds increased significantly after bike lanes went in

The new report, spotted by Eric Jaffe at CityLab, found that on Columbus and 8th avenues, the time it took a car to traverse a specific distance dropped significantly after the installation of the lanes, while on 1st Avenue, it increased only slightly. At the same time, rates of bicyclist injuries declined steeply on all three streets, along with Broadway, 8th, and 9th avenues

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NYC bike 2

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Has this happened in Vancouver?  We know the delays on Hornby have been minor, and anecdotally I get a sense that traffic may be flowing more smoothly on Macdonald, perhaps Cornwall, maybe even Burrard, since the redesign has been completed.  No doubt the data will flow from all the measuring being done – and I can understand the reticence of the City to release anything before they’re absolutely confident.

But, folks, there’s an election coming up.  And false memes must be confronted with actual facts before they’re allowed to shape policy.

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Comments

  1. A similar effect was noticed in Calgary’s 7 St SW cycle track because the traffic signals were re-timed as part of the cycle track’s implementation.

  2. “…false memes must be confronted with actual facts before they’re allowed to shape policy”: yes, indeed, and citizens, let that be your mantra.

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