More on bicycle lanes
Portland had a bicycle accident on Thursday that resulted from a right turning cement truck hitting a cyclist who was going straight in the bicycle lane. This has prompted a response from many of my favorite blogs.
Beth Hamon wrote a great piece questioning the use of bicycle lanes on very busy arterials. This resonated with me:
Striping West Burnside — one of Portland’s busiest streets — with a bike lane is a bad idea. Allowing bicyclists to occupy a driver’s blind spot (alongside the car) means they run the risk of getting hit if the driver doesn’t see them. This is not a question of fault. This is a question of poor planning that can and should be fixed. Lose the bike lane, post a lower speed limit and instruct bicyclists to *take the lane* in front of or behind the motor vehicle so that they can be seen. If this doesn’t work — either because cars and bikes won’t play nice there, or because West Burnside eventually becomes the higher-speed backdoor to Beaverton known as Cornell Road, then reconsider the function of such higher-volume, higher-speed roads. Bikes belong some places better than cars do. Cars belong some places better than bikes do. This isn’t rocket science. It’s planning, and until there are no more cars in the world that planning has to work both ways.
Portland is in a unique position (for a medium/large city in the US) of having bicycle lanes everywhere. Perhaps they have too many? Does it do a disservice to cyclists to try and isolate them from all car traffic? I’d argue that it does — cyclists need to understand how to safely get through intersections. Bike lanes don’t help here.
Kent Peterson followed up with an entry coining the term suicide slot:
If you look at Michael Bluejay’s spot (and I really hope I’ve convinced you to take the time to look at it), you’ll see that several of those ten common crashes involve the cyclist being where the driver isn’t looking and/or being in the driver’s blind spot. I call this the “suicide slot”, being to the right of a right turning car.
Now you may say “suicide slot” is a loaded term, that I’m blaming the victim, that the driver should see the cyclist. Well, we can talk about what drivers should do, but as near as I can tell not everybody does what they “should” do. So even even they “should” look to the right,I’m thinking some won’t. And if I’m off to their right anyway,well that strikes me as suicidal. But maybe it is a loaded term. Loaded like a gun. And like a gun, it can kill you.
A couple of months ago John Speare posted a photo of a great sign in Redmond that tries to warn about the Suicide Slot:
I like this sign. It is better to have the lanes properly stripped (or not there at all), but this gets across the message in a easy to understand graphic. I don’t think that having this sign everywhere would help, but having it at a few key intersections will pass along some education in an easy to digest form. I’d like to see this sign at Eastlake and Furhman.
At work we have an internal mailing list that cyclists communicate on. Yesterday someone posted a slide deck from New York City showing their new bike lane plan. It puts parked cars as a buffer between the bike lane and car traffic. This is a common practice in some parts of Europe too.
I don’t like this design. It assumes that there are no intersections.
My first observation when I see this graphic is that the bike lane just before 18th is lining up to put bicycles in the suicide slot to the left of left turning cars. My second observation is that bicycles are completely trapped if they want to turn right onto 19th.
The deck says that NYC solves this problem with bicycle only signals. That is a solution that doesn’t scale. When you start having roads with this design intersect other roads with the same design you end up with twice as many signals. For every car signal (straight, turn only in each direction) you end up with a bicycle signal.
It isn’t practical to isolate bicycles from cars in most situations. Bicycle Paths (like Seattle’s Burke Gilman Trail) work because they are generally located on rights of way that already had few intersections and where most of the remaining intersections are at different grades (the bike path passes above or below the road). That isn’t something that can be built along every road.
Drivers and cyclists need basic education on how to ride safely on the same roads. Bike lanes need to be striped to avoid the suicide slot. Speed limits need to be enforced so that 30mph arterials don’t turn into 50mph highways.
Ride safely out there.
Nice post.
I would argue that, along with the suggestions in your last parargaph, cyclists need to act like other slow moving vehicles and pull over if a large queue forms behind them. I rarely need to do this, but sometimes if I”m taking the lane during a rush hour, I do.
I”ll pull over if there is a queue behind me and it is safe for me to pull over. If I”m approaching an intersection then it is unlikely to be safer. If the road has two lanes going in my direction, or little traffic in the other direction, then it is better to just let the cars pass.
I think that Michaal Bluejay’’s bicyclesafe website is really good and covers the basics. Kent links to it from his post.
I”ve gotten hit or bumped at least half a dozen times in the ‘’suicide slot” in years past, even on striped bicycle lanes.
I started moving into the lane near rolling intersections, and stopped rolling past waiting cars. When stopped or slowing at intersections along with cars, I *always* take the full lane. I haven”t been hit since I started doing that, though I have gotten puzzled looks and occasional yelling from drivers.
I don”t like that NYC design, either, but it does look like they put some thought into how bikes should turn right onto 19th. It looks like bikes are supposed to turn and come to a stop with traffic on 19th and wait for a green light to cross 9th Ave. There is a little bike graphic at the intersection for bikes on 19th next to the little island. But I must say, if I was riding there, I would still be in the main travel lanes, not in the bike lane.
And I like that sign. I wouldn”t mind putting something like that up in a few intersections around here.
Thanks Andrew. I hadn”t noticed that extra bike graphic.
It shows that bicycles are second class citizens to me. A car that is turning left doesn”t need to wait for another light cycle (they can turn when they have a green light). A bicycle needs to wait for a green to get to the intersection, then wait for the green on 19th when they want to make their left.
the new york graphic is interesting, especially when you think about how the signal will operate. when mentioning the extra signal, I would view it as a positive, and it would not have to be linked to a bike lane.
Another example of a situation like this would be bus priority at signals. this is where there is another signal indication for the buses, to give them a head start of the stopped traffic. if this would be the same thing for the bike signal, it wouldn”t necessarily create more signals, but rather utilize more of the existing system.
does this make it either more efficient or safe? no and maybe yes. a cyclist still has to stop, and now you”ve increased the amount of green time for that phase, which either makes the time a car has to wait on the other approach longer. in terms of safety, a cyclist now has their own phase, which might create a false sense of security that a car would remained stop and not confuse the cyclist signal for their own. that’’s a might, not a definately.
the only application the above example could be useful would be either on 2nd or 4th in downtown seattle, since those are the only multilane one way streets with parking on both sides, that i”m aware of. this application would be more useful to avoid getting hit by a passenger getting out of a car. this as i understand it is a problem, since most passengers can”t see out of their side mirror, and aren”t paying attention to people coming down the road.
if these existed on 2nd, I”d still ride in the middle of the road.
Where it’’s practical, I think one of the best solutions, at least for right turns is to have a dedicated turn lane to the -left- of the bike lane, with the traffic lane clearly marked as crossing the bike lane, so that the cyclists going straight have the right of way. There are quite a few of these where I live in Boulder, CO, and they”ve worked very well for me. The only times I”ve been hit are at separate bike path / road intersections. The idea of a line of parked cars between me and the usually oblivious drivers (a la the NY sketch) would do nothing to make me feel any safer.
In those situations I actually think it is better to have the bike lane cross and go to the left of the right turn lane. It doesn”t make sense to have cars turning across cyclists.
There are some reasonable examples in Seattle, I”ll take a photo when I see one and post it. The problem is that this design isn”t consistently used.