Bike Friendly w/o Appearing Bike Friendly 2: Traffic Calming

Earlier today I rode through the Back Bay to The Pour House. More specifically, I crossed the Mass Ave bridge and continued to take a left on Boylston St. For those that don't spend much time in the Back Bay, most of the streets are three lanes one way and most intersections are controlled with lights. There is no bike infrastructure anywhere to be found. When the light turns green, even a competent and strong vehicular cyclist must crank the pedals as hard as he can just to try to keep up with traffic. The worst part is knowing that every driver around has their foot heavy on the gas pedal, in a hurry to wait at or possibly beat the next light. It is certainly an uncomfortable situation, even before the cyclist has to make a left turn. Beginners and most intermediate cyclists will certainly avoid this area or choose to use the sidewalk.

What can be done to make this area more bike friendly? Traffic calming. By that I mean a couple things. The first would be raising the intersections to the sidewalk level, forcing drivers to slow for the sidewalks even when there are no pedestrians. In the back bay, raised crosswalks could be added mid-block on the long side of the block. Second, chicanes or slight bends could be added in the road to eliminate the drag strip feeling in this area. The combined effect of these treatments would make it much more difficult to accelerate hard out of every light when in a car. It would also lower the top speeds cars attain on the road without seriously impacting average travel time through the area.

Those two effects would combine to make bicycles fit into traffic much better. Bikers would no longer need to strain just to keep up. There would be less road rage since the speed and acceleration difference would be smaller. The improved pedestrian crossings would increase pedestrian traffic and safety. Drivers would be forced to play nice with pedestrians and likely with bikers as well.

There would also be a few nice side effects. By lowering the top speed and bringing it more in line with the average speed and the street grid, the sound and pollution effects of stopping and accelerating hard would be reduced. This would be especially nice for people enjoying the mall on Commonwealth Ave, and for residents of the area. Pedestrians would certainly take advantage of improved and mid block crossings. The increased bike and pedestrian traffic combined with lower vehicle speeds would also likely be a boon for businesses in the area, even though they are certainly already doing well.

In the near future, I will attempt to create a series on my strategies for making Boston Bike Friendly, neighborhood by neighborhood. The first will likely be the Back Bay.

Bike tracks and turn lanes in NYC

New York City has taken the initiative to install bicycle tracks on a number of the streets as you can check out in this video:

But if you look closely at 0:30, 0:52 and 1:05 in that film, you'll notice the straight through bike lane is to the left of the left turn pocket. I believe NYC is installing bike traffic lights in these locations so that the obvious conflict is avoided. However, at one point early in the film, a taxi is parked in the bike path in the intersection, obviously confused as to what to do. Bikers are riding in front and in back of him because they feel like they should rule the world and pedestrians are doing what they do in NYC.

I don't feel that installing a second roadway and signaling network will ever be as effective in the US as it is in Holland. I believe many if not all of these situations can be effectively avoided by rearranging the bike and turn lanes as shown below. I would like to see the bike track and turn path cross before the intersection. This would certainly require well thought out designs to allow drivers and cyclists sufficient time, visibility and slow speeds to make this work. The benefits would be the cyclist is then placed in a correct position at the intersection, and bike traffic lights are no longer required since the regular lights would function just fine (except for the issues they pose for cyclists anyway, which I'll cover in another post).

Awesome

The Evils of Traffic Lights

I believe traffic lights are one of the biggest obstacles to creating bicycle and pedestrian friendly areas. The fundamental function of a traffic light is to allow car drivers to pass through an intersection with some confidence that they won't get hit by crossing traffic. While of course this is a nice feature, there are some serious drawbacks:

• Traffic lights are designed to tell drivers when to go, when not to, and when their time is running out.
• When drivers are told when they can and can't cross an intersection, they naturally drop their awareness level.
• Because drivers are told how to behave and drop their awareness level, many things become a surprise that shouldn't be a surprise, like a pedestrian "jaywalking", a driver running a red or a car acting out of the ordinary.
• Because common, simple things such as pedestrians and drivers waiting for an opening to turn left have become a surprise, drivers sometimes struggle to accept the situation and respond by beeping or with general road rage.
• Lights allow vehicles to pass through intersection at a high velocity (30+ mph).
• This speed is typically well above a maximum safe pedestrian speed of 20 mph
• This speed is almost always too fast for intermediate and often advanced bikers to feel comfortable in the intersection, which is a car speed of about 20 mph max, possibly a bit lower.
• It has been shown that the slower someone passes in front of a store, the more likely they to stop at the store.
• In some cases intersections (particularly the "squares" of Cambridge and Somerville) are destinations for shopping or transit in some way or another. Facilitating "getting through/past" these areas seems counter intuitive, especially at high speeds.
  
• While cars pass through the intersection at high speed, opposing cars sit idle and waste gas and time at 0 mph.
• Although cars pass through signaled intersections at high speed and travel at high speeds between intersections, their average speed is much lower due to waiting times at red lights.
• Many times, even with sensors or cameras, cars must come to an unneccessary stop to wait for a green even when there is no crossing traffic.
• As anyone who was biked in the city knows, stopping and starting requires an enormous amount of energy. This is true for cars as well, but with cars it also involves much more noise and pollution (especially for trucks).
  
• Signaled intersections depend on drivers clearing the intersection in a certain amount of time.
  
• When the light turns green, drivers typically step on the gas.
• When drivers are stepping on the gas, it is more difficult and takes longer for them to stop or slow for obstacles like pedestrians or bikers.
• Drivers feel like they must get out of the intersection as soon as possible.
• On yellow lights, drivers are basically told they must speed up to clear in time.
• Traffic lights add an element of time to the driving experience that is otherwise lacking from the road. This probably subconsciously encourages people to drive fast in general.
  
• The feeling of having to get out of the intersection asap puts drivers at odds with pedestrians in crosswalks who may have to or want to take their time.
• Think about a driver turning right during a green who stops to wait for a pedestrian crossing the road he is turning onto. There may be more pedestrians and the driver might want to wait for them to cross, but the driver knows or thinks he must continue asap so that the queue behind him can also make it through the intersection. Thus the driver will creep up on pedestrians slowly and sometimes cut them off.
  
• Red lights cause vehicles to queue up into bunches. When there is a red, the road beyond the red is quiet and when the light turns green the pack is off to the races. This creates waves of vehicles on the roadway, quiet then busy then quiet then busy.
• Vehicles moving as part of a bunch creates a small region of heavy traffic which sometimes requires or creates the need for a larger than necessary road (Alewife Brook Parkway - Rt. 16).
  
• Cars moving as a cluster, which is basically traffic, along with the wider roads that are neccessary, create an uncomfortable situation for both bikers and pedestrians.
  
• Since bikes are supposed to stop for red lights, they are forced to stop and wait with the pack of cars that they would like to try to avoid.
• When bikers are stopped at red lights and they see open road on the other side of the intersection and they see their pedestrian comrades crossing at will, they quickly realize it seems crazy to stop for red lights on a bicycle. Add to this the vastly increased field of vision and maneuverability of a bike, and the chances of a biker stopping until green drop dramatically.

I'll probably edit this post more in the next few days, but as you can see I'm not a big fan of traffic lights. Since removing traffic lights seems like a crazy idea, I'll be sure to post some thoughts on how to do that in the near future.

Good Bike Lanes 1

This article includes this picture of a bike lane:
Notice that there is a buffer between the outside edge of the bike lane and the parked cars. Also notice that while the biker is riding down the middle of the bike lane, he seems to be out of the door zone since the lane is positioned properly. The buffer next to the car lane also seems fine in this case since the biker obviously won't be turning left at this spot.

This design requires a fair amount of width on the road. However, if need be, the bike lane itself could be made narrower if a similar buffer is kept on either side. The buffer between the bike lane and the car lane could also be narrower to save some space, however narrowing either would certainly see a slightly smaller number of bikers because of a higher perceived risk.

The only thing I wonder about in this image is the design of the moving car/bike buffer. An ideal buffer would indicate to cars that they should only use the bike lane when turning right and when parallel parking. However it should also indicate to bikers that they are vehicles on the road and if a car is double parked or if the biker needs to turn left, they can and should merge into the wider left lane. I think almost everyone in the United States knows the basic rules of the road since we are so fond of automobiles. Why make infrastructure that contradicts that knowledge?

Continuation of previous post

The follow up to the article linked below.

This time somebody used some measuring tape. Again, it seems to me the bike lane should only cover the part that the guy measured with his tape. Even if that means a narrower bike lane.