Gordon Chaffin: To increase bike safety and ridership, DC needs protected bike lanes

Adding bike lanes to existing roads is a decades-old practice nationally and internationally. And there has been a push to improve the DC area’s street features for cycling since at least the early 1970s, when the regional cycling advocacy group Washington Area Bicyclist Association was formed. But bike lanes aren’t all the same. They don’t all provide the same improvement to safety and comfort to novice riders.

Transportation planners design bike lanes differently depending on features of the road or block. Then there are policy objectives, such as reduced traffic, that must be weighed relative to stakeholder preferences and held up to planning best practices that advance over time. The nerds at Transportation Research Board, the U.S. Department of Transportation’s National University Transportation Center and other entities evolve in their thinking and our roads get changed to reflect it, if slowly.

In the Washington area, cyclists benefit from a large network of off-street trails providing 8- to 12-foot-wide paved paths shared among bike commuters, recreational joggers, scooter riders, and pedestrians out for a refreshing walk. On the street, cyclists and bikeshare users have a large network of bike lanes. DC, Arlington County, Alexandria and urban clusters in Montgomery County rank high among cycling-friendly communities.

The City of Alexandria — plus Fairfax, Loudoun and Prince George’s counties — have many fewer facilities. Those areas resemble the majority of American suburbs, with bike lanes and trails funded and overseen as nice-to-have recreational amenities rather than essential transportation routes.

While DC’s denser areas rank highly, this is in comparison to the very low bar of unfriendly, deadly designs of almost every American street. Those roads are designed to maximize car travel efficiency rather than the safety of any user of the road: driver, pedestrian, cyclist, scooter operator, Big Wheel pilot.

Almost all the DC-area on-street bike facilities are unprotected bike lanes. These are 4- to 6-foot-wide lanes, most often along the curb or shoulder, identified only by white paint and that cycling dude stencil. There’s no protection or buffer space separating cyclists from cars that are traveling much faster. Nonetheless, this type is the most common by far because it takes the least space from cars within a road of limited width. Most projects try to stay within the existing curb-to-curb width, so sparing eight to 12 feet — about one car travel lane — minimizes parking loss and other firestarters for resident backlash.

Unprotected bike lanes may be the oldest design concept for active infrastructure, but they are now discredited by decades of research — empirical and theoretical. For one, unprotected bike lanes encourage little-to-no additional cycling because only the most confident, experienced riders are willing to use them.

Unprotected bike lanes don’t modify the design of the road drastically enough to change behavior. Modifying driver behavior is necessary to reduce the most frequent, dangerous car-bike impacts. With unprotected bike lanes, there’s a limited safety benefit. Also, as more vehicles (and more varied vehicles) fight over limited curb space, drivers park in unprotected lanes constantly. A sampling of curb conflict includes Uber/Lyft drop-offs and pickups, package deliveries, and double-parking to grab a sandwich or whatever. Unprotected bike lanes add 5-plus feet of usually empty road, inviting double parking by road users who would normally refrain from the move if they were blocking the full curbside lane.

DC area jurisdictions should instead be putting in protected 5- and 6-foot-wide bike lanes to encourage more than the most determined bike commuters. Depending on the context, a two-way cycle-track with a width of 13 to 16 feet is best, providing hardened protection and 3 or more feet of buffering from car travel and parking lanes on both sides. The last five to 10 years of research and best practices favor this design to maximize the number and type of active commuters.

However, look around the DC region and you’ll find streets under construction and near groundbreaking that add inert unprotected lanes. They’re essentially paved shoulders that will not meaningfully increase cycling or make scooter riders feel safe riding in the street rather than the sidewalk.

Why are government agencies such as the District Department of Transportation putting in these out-of-date, proven-ineffective designs? For one, it takes years and years to plan and execute projects. That bogged-down process means concepts have become archaic by ribbon-cutting time. Second, because governments operate on the policy objective of doing the least harm to car travel and storage, bike lanes and pedestrian improvements get the leftover scraps of space.

In DC over the past few weeks, several projects near groundbreaking have included only unprotected bike lanes: New Jersey/New York Avenue reconstruction, Maryland Avenue NW improvements, a contra-flow lane on 8th Street NW, and curbside unprotected lanes on Franklin Street NE. They’re old designs in terms of best practices for safety. DDOT, the DC Water and Sewer Authority, the DC Department of Public Works and others succumbed to angry car users lobbying to preserve car travel and heavily subsidized vehicle storage on public space.

Sixty percent of Americans are interested in bike travel for commuting and recreation, according to a recent study, but many avoid riding because they’re concerned about safety. DC-area public officials will not meet many of their stated goals if they start bike and pedestrian planning with a goal to improve safety only if car users aren’t inconvenienced in the process.

Many, many people need to stop driving if we’re to improve the quality of life in DC and elsewhere, and they fit into that majority who won’t bike on outdated street designs proven to be a failure. To achieve regional climate goals, to get to zero traffic deaths, to revitalize car-dominant, decayed neighborhoods, jurisdictions throughout the DC area need economic activity from newly walkable places.

The only policy objective that builds best-practices active-commuting infrastructure is to intentionally reduce car travel and storage space. Leaders should want to make driving inconvenient and eliminate cheap parking. As a full-time transportation reporter, I say with expertise that the vast majority of drivers claim to need their cars when data suggest only a small minority do. Let’s work to build mobility infrastructure so even the families who really are car-dependent will feel comfortable giving up their second car — or possibly even adopting a lifestyle without car ownership.

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Gordon Chaffin is a reporter for Street Justice, a daily email newsletter covering transportation and infrastructure throughout the Washington region.