Cycling for a Few or for Everyone

The April 2009 issue of World Transport Policy & Practice, a journal committed to sustainable transportation, is all about cycling.  It features an article by John Pucher and Ralph Bueler that takes on vehicular cycling, as well as smaller articles about how German mode share (also by Pucher and Bueler), the value of bicyclist education, as well as essays about the auto bailouts and reducing the speed limit to 30mph. The meat, though, is in the separated facilities piece (page 57) which is a response to vehicular cycling advocate Bjorn Haake.

At the outset, we would like to emphasize that separate cycling facilities should not be the only approach to encouraging more cycling and making it safer. Our research shows that such facilities are not sufficient but must be complemented by a host of other measures, such as:

• Improving roadway design to facilitate cycling on roads without separate cycling facilities (e.g. fixing potholes, clearing of debris, wide outside lanes, bike-friendly drain grates, etc.)
• Ample bike parking, including secure and sheltered facilities
• Full integration of cycling with public transport
• Comprehensive traffic education and training of both cyclists and motorists
• Severe penalties for motorists who endanger cyclists, especially in those cases resulting in serious injury or death
• Traffic priority for cyclists at intersections, combined with various intersection design modifications to mitigate car-bike conflicts at crossings
• Promotional, marketing, and informational events to generate enthusiasm and wide public support for cycling
• Restriction of car use, especially in residential neighbourhoods and city centres
• Greatly increased taxes and fees on car ownership, use, and parking to reflect the high social and environmental costs of the car
• Land use policies that discourage low-density suburban sprawl and foster compact, mixed-use developments that generate shorter and thus more bikeable trips.

Haake makes the claim that all that is needed is better cyclist education - of the on-road variety he teaches. Pucher and Bueler agree that cyclist education is important, but thinks the off-road training schoolchildren receive in Denmark, the Netherlands and Germany is better because it is so universal (but he thinks both have value). They also think motorist education is important.

Traffic education must be far more comprehensive, including both cyclists and motorists. And it cannot be limited to vehicular cycling training courses for adults but must start with schoolchildren

On separated facilities they restate Haake's case

Haake acknowledges the potential of separate cycling facilities between cities or in rural areas, and specifically cites the American River Trail near Sacramento, California. However, he opposes any sort of separate cycling facilities within cities, where almost all daily trips are made.

Similar to Forester (1992), Haake insists on one and only one way to bike: vehicular cycling.

The more general argument of Haake is that separate cycling facilities, by their very nature—even if well maintained—are intrinsically unsafe and inconvenient, and thus should rarely if ever be built,

Then they respond

In fact, the overwhelming evidence is that cycling is much safer and more popular precisely in those countries where bikeways, bike lanes, special intersection modifications, and priority traffic signals are the key to their bicycling policies.

If bikeways and bike lanes are so dangerous, slow, and inconvenient—as he claims—then why is cycling overall so safe and popular in the Netherlands, Denmark, and Germany?

Within the USA, Davis (California), Portland (Oregon), and Boulder (Colorado) are famous for their extensive systems of separate bicycling facilities. Davis, Portland, and Boulder all have high cycling rates (relative to other American cities) and excellent safety records. That directly contradicts Haake’s claim that separate facilities are slow, unpopular, and dangerous.

[Haake] does not provide any specific examples of cities in Europe or North America that have raised the share of bike trips to ten percent or more by focusing exclusively on vehicular cycling, while providing no separate cycling facilities at all.

They also talk of the social justice of separated facilities. Young men might be willing to mix it up with traffic, but not the very old or the very young.

Most Europeans believe that bicycling should not be reserved only for those who are trained, fit, and daring enough to navigate busy traffic on city streets.

In the vehicular cycling model, cyclists must constantly evaluate traffic, looking back, signalling, adjusting lateral position and speed, sometimes blocking a lane and sometimes yielding, always trying to fit into the ‘dance’ that is traffic. Research shows that most people feel very unsafe engaging in this kind of dance, in which a single mistake could be fatal. Children as well as many women and elders are excluded. While some people, especially young men, may find the challenge stimulating, it is stressful and unpleasant for the vast majority. It is no wonder that the model of vehicular cycling, which the USA has followed de facto for the past forty years, has led to extremely low levels of bicycling use.

In countries with separated facilities, women make up nearly half of all cyclists and cyclists are more evenly distributed among age groups.

Clearly, most people will not cycle without separate cycling facilities. They are not a panacea for cycling, but combined with the full range of pro-cycling measures listed at the outset of this paper, separate facilities are the key to raising overall cycling levels.

This reminds me of a study the FHWA did of bike lanes versus wide curb lanes (WCL) back in 1999. Some of the findings include:

• For bike lanes larger than 5 feet, cyclists rode farther from the curb or parked cars than did those in WCLs.
• Cyclists on a road with a bike lane were much less likely to approach the intersection from a sidewalk than those with a WCL.
• Overall, 75 percent of bicyclists obeyed existing stop signs. Proportionally more bicyclists obeyed stop signs at BL sites (81 percent) than at WCL sites (55 percent).
• 14 percent of bicyclists at WCL sites made motor vehicle style left turns with improper lane destination positioning compared with 3 percent from BL sites.
• Nineteen percent of the right turns made at WCL sites were non-standard (e.g., from a BL or WCL to a wrong-way position on the cross street)versus 10 percent of right turns at BL sites, and the differences were significant.
• Seventeen conflicts were coded as serious, 10 at WCL and 7 at BL sites. If “fault” had been assigned, 11 would have been the fault of the motorist and 6 the fault of the bicyclist.
• "Wrong way" sidewalk cycling was a frequent factor in crashes. There seems to be a prevailing feeling that this practice is more widespread in BLs, but in this study a higher proportion of the wrongway riding tended to occur at WCL sites, whether in the roadway or on the sidewalk. Proportionally more of the WCL wrongway riding took place on the sidewalk; however, eliminating sidewalk riding from the tabulation still showed significantly more wrong-way riding in the street associated with WCL sites. This may be related to the fact that WCLs are often associated with higher volume roadways and that maneuvering through intersections on these roadways can be a complex task. Thus, the bicyclist may choose what seems to be a safer route by riding the wrong way on an adjacent sidewalk or in the street. It may not be safer in actuality, as wrong-way riding either in the street or on a sidewalk is a frequent factor in bicycle-motor vehicle crashes
• clinical analysis showed several factors to be consistently related to the occurrence of conflicts: (1) presence of parked motor vehicles (either entering/exiting legal parking or illegal parking/stopping) in the BL or WCL, (2) presence of driveways or intersecting streets, and (3) provision of additional (usually turn) lanes at intersections that typically (but not always) resulted in a narrowing of the BL or WCL. Fortunately, these are factors for which some countermeasures are available.

And Finally

The overall conclusion of this research is that both BL and WCL facilities can and should be used to improve riding conditions for bicyclists, and this should be viewed as a positive finding for the bicycling community.

So, that should put an end to that argument.

Photo by Luton.

Comments

[ibc]

I don't doubt that if a) our municipalities were willing to create the kinds of separate facilities that are b) comprehensive enough to make utility cycling feasible, and to c) maintain them in rideable condition, then more people would ride, and things would be marginally safer for all cyclists.

Of course, that's a big 'if'.

As it is, municipalities construct something like the CCT, at which point drivers can't figure out "why in God's name there's a cyclist riding in the middle of the street on Independence Ave!"

I will say I feel a hell of a lot safer riding on, say, Pennsylvania Ave, or Wisconsin Ave, or what-have-you than I do riding on the Capitol Crescent Trail on a Saturday afternoon.

That thing is a death trap compared to urban roads.

[Jack]

This is going to come up big time in Montgomery County with the newly proposed redesign of Rockville Pike. One of the project's design consultants (hired by the developers, but with a lot of progressive bike/ped experience) is recommending "cycletracks", essentially hybrid bike paths/lanes that are separated from the street by a curb or landscape buffer, one on each side, each one-way.

Is the first quote in this entry Haake's or P&B's?

[washcycle]

P&Bs

[Erica]

I find the terminology used here very confusing. For example, most laypeople would not consider a bike lane on a regular street to be a "separate cycling facility" since it is not, in fact, separated from traffic by anything but a painted line and trust. A dedicated bike path far from the road or the "cycletracks" Jack refers to is what most people would call "separate." So perhaps in doing these studies, zero accommodation, paint-based accommodation, and real physical barrier protection should be treated as three different approaches.

[Scott F]

Jack, my immediate question (and I'm sure this has been covered to death somewhere, if someone has a link): How do you turn left from a cycle track? How do you avoid a right hook going straight?

Because of those problems, it seems as though a cycle track would be more dangerous and less convenient than a bike lane. But then, I have no experience with cycle tracks...

[Washcycle]

Erica, my fault.

The top part defends separate bike facilities. The second part (about bike lanes) seemed to me to be related, because Vehicular Cyclists also often dislike bike lanes. But Pucher and Bueler are not talking about bike lanes.

[Jack]

If you want to turn left, I believe you're supposed to go straight and then turn left when you get to the far side of the cross street. Or you can make a right turn and U-turn. The Rockville Pike design will have the cycletrack divider ending some distance before each intersection, so you might be able to cross into the left turn lane and turn left like a car. It doesn't let you do a lot of the things you learned to do as a vehicular cyclist. Things like merging with traffic at intersections so you don't get right-hooked.

[Mark]

Thanks for the summary of the journal article and for pulling that FHWA from the archive. In 2006 TxDOT (of all agencies!) did its own study of what effect the presence of bike lanes had on bike/car encounters.
This article contains a summary of the study and a link to the full report:
http://www.utexas.edu/news/2006/09/18/engineering/

Among its more interesting findings:
--When bikes lanes are present, bikers are less likely to choose the sidewalk.

And, good god, the sidewalk is --almost always-- the absolute worst place for a biker to be.

[Washcycle]

As a UT engineering alum, I'm positive I linked to that article.

[Washcycle]

Here

[chris]

While I don't think cycling on 45 mph six-lane arterial roads in the suburbs are exactly ideal, I don't look to the cycle path as a solution.

Just because the existence of cycle tracks in European cities coincide with high ridership, that doesn't mean that they *caused* it:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cycle_path#Segregated_cycle_facilities_and_transportation_cycling
"Between the late 1980s and early 1990s the Netherlands spent 1.5 billion guilders (US$945 million) on cycling infrastructure, yet cycling levels stayed practically the same.[81] When the flagship Delft Bicycle Route project was evaluated, the results were

not very positive: bicycle use had not increased, neither had the road safety. A route network of bicycle facilities has, apparently, no added value for bicycle use or road safety.[82]

In the UK, a ten-year study of the effect of cycle facilities in eight towns and cities found no evidence that they had resulted in any diversion from other transport modes.[83] A similar finding had been reported for Denmark in 1989, where it was found that there was no correlation between cycle facilities and increased cycling unless active traffic restraint measures were also present. In Denmark as a whole, the establishment of a huge cycling infrastructure has been accompanied by cycling levels that have stayed roughly stable (with minor fluctuations) since 1975. The construction of 320 kilometres (200 mi) of "Strategic cycle network" in Dublin has been accompanied by a 15% fall in commuter cycling and 40% falls in cycling by second and third level students. In contrast, in the late 1970s and early 1980s cycling underwent robust growth in Germany, the UK and Ireland while there was little or no investment in cycling infrastructure.

Some commentators argue that the "cause and effect" being seen is actually the reverse of that which is often claimed: that it is the presence of large numbers of cyclists that tends to precipitate the construction of segregated cycle facilities. For instance, bike planning in Davis, California was driven by the prior existence of a "dramatic volume" of cyclists in the 1960s.[84] Possibly the best that can be said is that the safety of cycling and the number of cyclists results from a complex interaction of spatial planning, population density, legislative environment, and wider traffic/transportation management policies. The evidence suggests that segregated cycle facilities can play either a positive or negative role, secondary to other factors - see utility cycling."

Regarding cycle tracks and safety:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cycle_path#Direct_safety
For urban roads with many junctions, accident analysis suggests that segregated cycling facilities are likely to produce a net increase in the number of collisions. These conclusions are supported by the experience of countries that have implemented segregated cycling facilities. In the United States,[35]UK,[36] Germany, Sweden,[37] Denmark[38]and Finland,[39] it has been found that cycling on roadside urban cycle tracks/sidepaths results in up to 12-fold increases in the rate of car/bicycle collisions. At a 1990 European conference on cycling, the term Russian roulette was used to describe the use of roadside cycle paths.[40]

In Helsinki, research has shown that cyclists are safer cycling on roads with traffic than when using the city's 800 kilometres (500 mi) of cycle paths.[41] The Berlin police and Senate conducted studies which led to a similar conclusion in the 1980s.[42] In Berlin 10% of the roads have cycle paths, but these produce 75% of fatalities and serious injuries among cyclists.[43] In the English town of Milton Keynes it has been shown that cyclists using the off-road Milton Keynes redway system have on a per-journey basis a significantly higher rate of fatal car-bicycle collisions than cyclists on ordinary roads.[36] Cycle lanes and bike lanes are less dangerous than cycle paths in urban situations but even well-implemented examples have been associated with 10% increases in casualty rates."