Shouldn’t bike lanes be relocated to the centre of the roadway? It would position the cyclist in a better place to be seen. At an intersection, only left-turning traffic would be affected and an advanced left turn arrow would eliminate the risk to the cyclist. – Jason, Vancouver
There’s not much middle ground when it comes to centre bike lanes – cycling experts generally agree that they make less sense than side-running or curbside bike lanes.
“Centre-running lanes are a bike-hostile traffic engineer’s dream,” Mikael Colville-Andersen, an urban design expert who hosted a TVOntario series called The Life-Sized City, said in an e-mail. “They do nothing to promote or grow cycling, they prioritize cars, they are insanely unsafe, [and] they are cheap to slap onto a street.”
In most cities, bike lanes – whether they’re delineated by painted lines or a physical barrier between bikes and traffic – are on the side of the road between traffic and the sidewalk.
A few cities – including Washington and San Francisco – have streets with bike lanes in the middle of the road.
But, because centre-running lanes are so rare, there’s little research on their safety.
San Francisco’s version, a pilot in the city’s Mission District, was designed to replace painted side-running lanes between traffic and parked cars – and to appease merchants who worried that a side-running protected lane would reduce street parking.
But since it was installed last summer, it has faced criticism from cyclists and merchants – and in the five months after it was installed, there were 20 collisions on the street, compared with 12 in the five months before.
After collisions between cars and bikes in the unprotected centre-running bike lane on Washington D.C.’s Pennsylvania Avenue, the district eventually banned U-turns and installed parking barriers to keep cars from making U-turns through the centre bike lanes.
“In an urban grid environment like Vancouver, I generally do not see any safety benefits with centre-running bike lanes,” Chris Darwent, associate director of transportation design with the city of Vancouver, said in an email. “That said, there may be some contexts, like when there is a large centre median and low-intensity land use, where centre-running bike lanes may be a good solution.”
While Vancouver has never had centre-running bike lanes, there was a rejected concept to have protected bike lanes down the centre of the Granville Bridge.
The idea was abandoned because of “costs, concerns of it not being a comfortable walking and riding environment and challenges getting cyclists to and from the middle of the roadway,” Darwent said.
Centre-running lanes can make it more dangerous for cyclists to turn at intersections, Darwent said.
If a cyclist were turning right, for instance, if a cyclist was turning right from a centre bike lane, they would have to cross lanes of traffic – which “motorists may not be expecting,” Darwent said.
A centre-running lane would eliminate situations where a right-turning car might clip a cyclist going straight through in a side-running lane – but there are other solutions to that problem, he said.
“In areas where there are large numbers of right-turning vehicles and cyclists going straight, a more common way to reduce conflicts is to introduce separate signal phasing [where you have] a separate light to allow right turns and bikes to travel at separate times,” Darwent said. “Or [you can change] the geometry of the intersection to force slower right turns.”
Centre-wrong?
Plus, centre-running bike lanes make it tougher for cyclists to get to and from the bike lane – and to places in the middle of a block, Darwent said.
“If a cyclist was heading to a midblock location, they would have to navigate across the adjacent vehicle lanes to get to it as opposed to just stopping and walking their bike onto the sidewalk,” Darwent said.
Generally, side-running bike lanes have been shown to boost local businesses in many cities because cyclists can easily stop to check out a store or restaurant.
“[In North America], engineers and the politicians who listen to them have some bizarre perception that cyclists are migrating caribou – they just need to move through a city,” Colville-Andersen said. “In cycling-friendly cities, we know that bicycle users are more like bees – pollinators – boosting the profits of shops and businesses.”
Centre-running lanes are also daunting to many riders because there’s busy traffic passing them on both sides, said Kay Teschke, professor emeritus in the school of population and public health at the University of British Columbia (UBC).
“People do not like to ride beside the noise and air pollution of motor vehicle traffic,” Teschke said.
Well-designed, side-running protected bike lanes appeal to bike riders who don’t consider themselves hard-core cyclists and who worry about cycling safely, Vancouver’s Darwent said.
“As more people are comfortable cycling and the number of people cycling increases, there is a corresponding reduction in the number of collisions per rider,” he said.
Overall, research shows protected bike lanes are safer than unprotected bike lanes – or none at all – “by far,” Teschke said.
‘Fast-moving pedestrians’
Colville-Andersen said European cities including Copenhagen, which has had physically separated bike lanes since 1915, see cyclists as “fast-moving pedestrians” requiring different considerations than cars.
“Every bike lane on a city street needs hard, physical protection. They should run parallel to the curb,” Colville-Andersen said. “Bi-directional bike lanes were thrown out of Danish best practice decades ago. They, too, are unsafe and don’t prioritize cycling – or benefit shops on the lane-less side of the street.”
Canadian cities “don’t get much right” when planning for cyclists, he said.
“No cohesive networks of protected bike lanes, no prioritizing cycling as [transportation], no vision for improving [transportation] or public health,” Colville-Andersen said. “Just reluctantly squeezing those pesky bikes into a car-centric matrix.”
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