BIKE: Dedicated bike lanes -- a mistake?

[Mike Dahmus]

Lane Wimberley wrote:

>A while back, we learned that UTC commissioner Carl Tepper feels that
>Shoal Creek  Blvd. was better off with the original striping, and that
>the debacle that unfolded and the undesirable results were the result
>of "bicycle activists" fighting for change on SCB, namely dedicated
>bicycle lanes.
>
>Interestingly, that seems to be the consensus on at least one
>sport/racing forum.  They believe that SCB was never broken, and so
>should never have been fixed.  (Obviously, the views on that list are
>decidedly myopic, with a bias towards racing and/or recreational
>riding by experienced/expert riders.)  They believe that what has been
>done to SCB is bad (to put it mildly).  And, they place blame on
>activists who fight for dedicated bike lanes.  They see this fight as
>politically untenable, and likely to result ultimately in worse
>conditions for cyclists rather than better.  (Or, at least, they see
>it as a waste of political capital that would be better spent
>elsewhere.)
>
>I've always held that unobstructed bike lanes were worth fighting for,
>both in the interest of safety and also in the interest of
>legitimizing cyclists' rights to the road.  Maybe this view isn't
>quite right?
>
 From my experience arguing this very issue (on USENET among other places):

Most of the people who argue that bike lanes are almost always bad tend 
to be in one of these groups (or combinations thereof):

1. focused with laser-sharp precision on the needs of current 
(experienced) transportational cyclists (i.e. don't think or care about 
kids, novices, elderly) - tend to be people who live in areas where 
cycling just tends to happen by itself and doesn't need promotion or 
encouragement.

2. inexperienced with suburban cycling conditions (i.e. why would you 
ever need a bike lane or marked shoulder if roads are laid out in a grid 
pattern with design speeds of 30 mph) - tend to be disproportionately 
European, some Amercan adherents among Forsterites mainly in the 
northeast or midwest United States - areas which haven't seen much 
growth since the 1960s or so. IE - these are people who never have to 
ride on roads like Jollyville to get where they want to go.

3. careless about the needs of the city to ensure good traffic flow for 
all users of a corridor - i.e. sometimes the bike lane exists to 
increase the likelihood that motorists can maintain some reasonable 
level of speed, and this isn't necessarily a bad thing. IE, these are 
people who think the city shouldn't care that automobile traffic would 
often and suddenly be restricted to 10 mph or so on any given street 
since some motorists don't effectively know how to pass cyclists without 
the help of a stripe.

They also tend to neglect statistical thinking in their arguments - 
focusing, for instance, on the average passing distance they get from 
motorists in wide curb lanes vs bike lanes, rather than looking deeper 
to the 10th percentile case. See 
http://www.io.com/~mdahmus/trans/bl-wcl-pd.html for more details.

Those of us in the real world note that many Shoal Creek corridor users 
are very young or very old, and that it tends to attract novice cyclists 
of all ages (me, for instance). It, while theoretically a low-speed 
corridor, has an apparent design speed of 40 mph or so, and serves as a 
transportation spine which can be an alternate for Burnet Road and Mopac 
for cyclists (improving conditions for cyclists and drivers if it 
succeeds in attracting most cyclists away from those two corridors). It 
also functions as a minor arterial itself (even though bogusly 
reclassified as a collector) and thus needs to worry about flow of cars 
in addition to bikes.

- MD