Ian Robertson is a regular contributor of items to PT – hence the recognition. Like this one:
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Guerrilla Bike Lane Made With Flower Pots Forces City’s Hand To Take Pro-Cyclists Measures
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A Boston cyclist was sick and tired of riding his bike all over town on dangerous stretches of road that were not built for cyclists and their needs. He decided to take matters into his own hands and the results are absolutely fantastic!
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Why not use parked cars instead of flower pots?
Speaking of exposed bike lanes, protected only by a line of paint which is often ignored…
Can anyone explain why it wouldn’t be possible to move all our painted bike lanes (where there is street parking) against the curb, swapping with the parked cars, so the cars, not cyclists, would be adjacent to moving traffic? That would create a no-cost parked-car barrier to protect cyclists.
We’re already doing this on the south end of Richards Street and on Union St.
Is there a danger from passenger car doors hitting cyclists? Then provide paint marking warning, as is done on Union St., and weigh it against more frequent car driver door openings into existing bike lanes.
Picture the sequence: sidewalks, then curb, then bike lane, then parked cars, then moving cars (sorry not to offer a graphic here).
This would instantly transform many kilometers of painted bike lanes into protected bike lanes– for the cost of a few cans of paint.
Is it fear of driver backlash (fear of getting out of a parked car too close to moving traffic) stopping us from doing this? Is this fear justified? Presumably the existing painted bike lane space is “safe” or it wouldn’t be dedicated to cyclists?!
If there’s enough roadway width to paint a bike lane, there’s no reason not to do as you suggest and use parked cars as the divider between cyclists and moving vehicles.
I would say the danger of passenger doors hitting cyclists is no higher (and possibly lower) than the existing risk from driver doors. Every car has a driver, but only some have one or more passengers. I believe average occupancy is less than 2.
I see no reasonable grounds for backlash. On almost every street in this and every other city in the world the parking lane is immediately adjacent to moving traffic. Blindly open your driver door on Broadway, Hastings, Main, or any other street without a painted bike lane and you’ll quickly have a car with one less door attached.
Biggest problem is lack of visibility at intersections. One needs to remove parking around intersections. Compared to Europe here you have higher cycling speeds, lower riding position and larger cars (and no good habit of shoulder checking), all contributing to safety problems at intersections. Much can be mitigated by better intersection design, but requires a lot more work than just flipping parking and bike lane. In Vancouver Dunbar between 16th and 41st might be a good place to do this, but Dunbar would have to shed a couple of parking spots on each block to improve visibility. The easy fix to simply better manage the parking (by charging the right price) will probably generate enough public outcry (by the sedentary folks) to kill the project.
Great option for roads with few or no intersections, like e.g. 16th Ave through Pacific Spirit. Only problem is that in the mind of planners bike lanes often have a dual (primary?) purpose as parallel parking maneuver space so that parking does not impact road capacity. For the example of 16th Ave flipping parking and bike lane requires a complete overhaul in thinking, with lower speed limits (parallel parking maneuvers and drivers entering/exiting cars in signed 70kmh travel lanes does not work). And when it comes to choosing between cycling safety an comfort vs 30 second time savings for drivers few planners will choose safety. At least not MOTI planners.
One parking spot near the intersection may need to be removed for better visibility but I don’t think that’s a big impediment. North Van City striped a bike lane protected by parked cars on one block and I’m not sure they even reduced parking. Visibility at the intersection isn’t bad. Cars rarely go faster than 50 though, often slower.
Hi Peter,
I think the flower pots and cones were Ian’s efforts to draw attention to the problem (unless I’m reading it wrong), so buying a bunch of cars to park was probably outside his budget 🙂
With regards to moving the bike lanes between parked cars and curbs: I have asked engineers the same question, and the answer is about bike lane widths. With a painted lane between parked cars and a car travel lane, you can make the bike lane narrower because a bike that wants to pass another bike can pull out into the car lane. If you put the bike lane between the parked cars and the curb, the bike lane needs to be wider to give space for passing.
I’m not entirely convinced of the merits of this answer, but that’s what I’ve been told.
This isn’t my project but one which I think is interesting, there are many instances where bike lanes are co-opted by cars for use as turning lanes, as the discussion on another page about Marine Drive bike lanes also mentions, without something which makes it difficult to enter bike lanes, cars will.
The bike lanes on Carral are a good example of this, they are AAA for the most part, except at the intersection, where the combination of the bike having to swerve toward the driving lanes, combined with unkempt plantings, means that drivers have impaired visibility to see cyclists. This is coupled with the attractiveness of using the bike lane to pass around a car turning left. The ironic thing about the “AAA” Carral street lanes is that I can honestly say I have almost been hit more times in the three blocks on this lane, then I have on the rest of the commute along Pender whilst playing with traffic in the bus lane. In effect, the added width provided by the bike lane is an incentive to take the corner faster as it has a greater radius.
The Richards Street bike lane has similar issues at the intersections, the maneuvering required by bikes near the intersections acts to make the intersections significantly more dangerous, while making the areas between the intersections safer. Unfortunately most accidents did, and do occur at intersections, so the safe bit got safer, and the dangerous bit got worse.
The Slow Streets proposal for the Pender/Abbott Street intersection has good recommendations.
https://slowstreets.wordpress.com/2015/09/18/major-report-intersection-repair-pender-st-and-abbott-st/
Jens:
Parking close to intersections is a hazard for pedestrians and all road users on side streets. If a street is deemed wide enough and important enough for a dedicated cycling lane then some form of intersection visibility improvement is already warranted. While sidewalk bulges are expensive, I’m quite certain “No stopping” signs are significantly less so.
The question is then one of increased safety versus the loss of parking. I fear the Dunbar BIA would scream bloody murder at the loss of “dozens” of parking spaces.
As for that short stretch of 16th Avenue, the roadway was already narrowed to just one lane outside Hampton Place (something I never thought I’d live to see) and the 70km/h zone shortened. I don’t see why the remaining 1km of “highway” couldn’t be tamed.
As for allowing parking on 16th Avenue in the first place I’m definitely of two minds. I don’t want to dissuade hikers, bikers, and dog walkers from using the park, but I’m quite certain that the majority of cars parked on 16th are people using it as a free UBC parking lot.
No Stopping signs are cheap, but also next to worthless if put in locations where drivers would like to stop. On 16th, while the signed 70kmh stretch was shortened the measured 85 percentile speeds clock in at over 70 at Hampton place in both directions (https://bikewalkubc.org/moti/sixteenth). MOTI recently insisted on widening 16th to 4 lanes west of Wesbrook Mall which has significantly lower traffic volumes, signalling that any changes that reduce road capacity are every unlikely. UBC and UNA have been asking to reduce speed limit on 16th to 50 for a while now, I doubt anything happened. Not before MOTI radically changes how they think of highways in urban areas.
Yap, 16th, as well as the recently installed parking along SW Marine primarily serve as park and ride lots for UBC. MOTI put that into their project description when they built the SW Marine Dr parking (with money earmarked for bike infrastructure). HUB tried to stop the SW Marine madness and talked to parks about their parking needs, they said they preferred 2h parking so that it’s available for park users and not all taken up by UBC. I am sure something could be worked out for 16th. Better parking management at the existing parks lot on the north side of 16th might also help.
You are darned right that the majority of cars on 16th are using it as a free parking lot. It has now become UBC park ‘n ride because a lot of faculty and staff can’t afford the cost of parking at UBC. People will park their cars and cycle the last few kms to UBC. Why do I know this?, because I used to do it myself until I switched to cycling the whole way from my home, about a 34km round trip commute.
I like the way that Richards St. is configured.
I see the point regarding intersections, but all parties just need to approach with caution.
Cars shouldn’t spin around corners, and cyclists should ride defensively and not assume cars will see them.
The danger also derives from the “benefit”.
The “separation” of the cyclists from the cars means than a driver may not see the cyclist.
If a cyclist is in an adjacent bike lane (however designated) the driver will “register” that he/she is “passing” another road user. If the driver and cyclist are visually separated from one another, then that creates the need for additional time (or thought processes) to remember to shoulder check plus the potential difficulty is actually seeing a bike from the head-on perspective – both during the day – and worse at night.
That’s one of the issues with the right turn from Cornwall to Chestnut at the south end of Burrard Bridge. Bikes come peeling from behind the tree on a curving bike path and drivers not familiar with the turn may not turn their head around far enough around to judge the clearance properly when making a shoulder check (it requires a near 180 degree head turn).
A “slow down” marking on the bike path may help as a cautionary measure so that both drivers and cyclists approach with caution.
In my experience using the parking protected bike lanes on Union and Richards, there is no danger with passenger side car doors being opened because you’re usually in the right side of the lane anyway. Not to mention that passengers are rare nowadays.
You still have to pay attention and ding your bell if you see someone getting out of their car and going to be walking across the bike path to get to the sidewalk.
The way the intersections are designed is very important (as always.) Richards and Union have been done well with those.
Maybe there should just be a standard policy that anywhere that’s wide enough to do this to, has it done. Some people would gripe about it for awhile but then get over it and then it would just become accepted as normal.
Richards works as a protected lane partly because of the care that has been taken with intersection design. Curb bulges and cross hatched areas non driving areas define the spaces for both bikes and cars.
This Streetview shows it.
https://www.google.ca/maps/@49.2761433,-123.1238332,3a,84.8y,234.94h,90.04t/data=!3m6!1e1!3m4!1s_z_fEkb_XG1DxSzDxgtL9g!2e0!7i13312!8i6656!6m1!1e1
Peter, a bike lane either inside parked cars or outside parked cars takes the same space, but both require a cross hatched area for opening doors to be safe. Most bike lanes on the traffic side don’t get this feature; cars end up opening doors into bike lanes. Newer bike lanes on the inside, as on Richards, have a door zone separate from the bike lane.
Yes, basically a minimum width bike lane between curb and parked cars requires more width than a minimum width bike lane between parked cars and moving cars.
The problem is that bike lanes between parked and moving cars are even allowed. Some jurisdictions (Denmark, Netherlands, others?) don’t even allow them because they are so dangerous. I guess planners and technicians often think it’s better than nothing, but it’s an lazy way out to create “cycling infrastructure”. Often the vehicle lane widths could be reduced to create bike lanes between curb and parked cars.