A new design guide for bike facilities, developed by transportation officials from the largest American cities, should be a valuable resource for cities throughout the region which are working to embrace and accommodate cycling. The National Association of City Transportation Officials’ Urban Bikeway Design guide, released last month, features best practices for bike lanes, “cycle tracks,” and bicycle signals, intersection treatments, and signs. The manual was developed after a detailed review of design in bike-friendly cities around the world.
Like the Federal Highway Administration’s Manual on Traffic Control Devices and the American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials’ design guidelines, the guide’s developers hope local and state governments will formally adopt the design manual as guidance for planners and engineers — or that the guide’s recommendations will be adopted by FHWA and AASHTO.
While New York City’s recent implementation of cutting-edge cycling improvements is well known, smaller cities like Hoboken, New Haven, and New Rochelle have also added bike infrastructure in recent years. The design guide is a product of NACTO’s Cities for Cycling initiative, a clearinghouse of best practices launched by the association in 2009. NYCDOT Commissioner Janette Sadik-Khan is NACTO’s president.
While I’m glad that someone has the “fortitude” to experiment with new bicycle facility designs, I think people need to take the NACTO guide with a grain of salt and some reasonable skepticism, including independent advocates like Tri-State.
I find it curious that you choose to picture probably the most controversial, radical and arguably most dangerous bicycle facility from the NACTO guide in your blog post. I’m all for well engineered protected bike lanes or cycletracks and feel that some of the cycletrack designs in the NACTO guide are a fantastic starting point. That said, I have real issues with the one side, two-way cycletrack design you pictured. This might (might!) work in Europe where drivers are held to a much higher standard of fault and driver training (even though I’ve NEVER seen any thing like this used in Germany) or in Montreal where the locals just got accustomed to this 1970’s design. Or maybe it might work on a road with VERY limited if NO cross traffic like on Prospect Park West. Elsewhere, however I feel that not only are American drivers not competent enough to anticipate cyclists coming from two directions as they turn in our out of roads or driveways but I fear that American cyclists themselves are too inexperienced to anticipate where deadly hazards could be coming from.
God! Just imagine trying to pull a box truck out of a driveway with heavy bike traffic and motor traffic that rarely has a gap! I could see a driver focusing so much to his/her left for a gap in motor traffic that they never see the cyclist coming up on their right. Pulling into such a driveway / roadway from the one-way arterial could be equally dangerous as this design breaks down when cyclist travel faster (at 20 mph a cyclist would cover that 30 foot no parking zone in 1 second!). With the possibility of multiple cyclists traveling at various speeds, from multiple directions, that becomes just too much for even the best drivers to calculate!
Many of the designs in the NACTO guide have merit but I fear that some of their designs could never pass an FHWA experiment trial. I also feel that in the wrong hands (i.e. someone who is not intimately familiar with the intricacies of bicycle facility design), these design guidelines will produce facilities that are of extreme hazard to the cyclists they are intended to protect.
[…] by a collection of American city transportation officials, the Urban Bikeway Design Guide was recently released to aid cities in bicycle related planning. The guide features best […]