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London's Plan to Move Cyclists to Side Streets

Read More: http://www.theatlanticcities.com/com...-streets/8598/

After years of planning, London is finally poised to witness a quiet revolution for two-wheeled transport: an exhaustive citywide network of new cycle routes. This overhaul will nonetheless be coming with a substantial twist. As a visitor to the city, you might possibly never come across a single one of the new routes unless you really try. That’s because outside of the center, so many of them will be squirrelled away on streets where people other than residents and delivery vans rarely venture. Dubbed Quietways, these routes (due to start their staggered launch in September and being constructed right now) will stick almost entirely to the back roads.

It may sound like a cop-out, but there’s some intelligent thinking to the scheme that makes it more than a ruse to tidy cyclists away under the carpet. For a start, London’s unique street design suits the idea brilliantly, which is why many London cyclists have used their own, unofficial versions of the networks for years. In the city’s core, streets are often too narrow to allow smooth flowing car traffic anyway, while London’s early love affair with streetcar suburbia means that it has nearly endless leafy streets for cyclists to weave through. The purpose of the routes is not to give users a tour of English domestic architecture, of course, but traveling these roads can be a revelation, opening up a handsome, less familiar London full of peace and elegant moderation.

The idea behind making these streets more cycling-friendly is simple, but impressive. As this excellent Cyclists in the City piece from last year details, London cyclists often get snarled up in traffic control systems designed to prevent cars from turning side streets into rat runs. The new Quietways are designed to help bikes avoid these issues by turning one-way streets for cars into two-way streets for bikes, beckoning cyclists along lanes blocked to cars with bollards. Old barriers that sometimes force riders to dismount will be smoothed away, while road markings will be made clearer.

The lanes’ creators are also thinking about how bikes will interact with other traffic. To lessen the jarring screech and surge typical of city cars hitting intersection after intersection, traffic lights will be reduced in favor of raised, speed table pedestrian crossings (possibly with Belisha Beacons), which are thought to be better at slowing cars while keeping streets free flowing. Yet to be finalized, a provisional, flawed map (posted below) of the lane plan for central London alone shows that, even without fully segregated lanes, there’s ambition at work here. Intuitive, step-by step improvements like this are the sort of thing that make city cycling tenable.

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Remove a lane to improve traffic? Expert explains his Calgary cycle track proposal

Read More: http://blogs.calgaryherald.com/2014/...rack-proposal/

The guffaws were deafening. Remove a lane on a busy road, and traffic chaos won’t ensue? Riiiiight. --- That has been one of the more common (and polite) reactions to part of a proposal that will go before City Council in April to build a network of downtown cycle tracks.

- Doubts about the idea turned to outright skepticism when a traffic study was presented as part of the proposal that said the cycle track would lead to an increase in travel time on 1st Street by a mere 30 to 60 seconds during the evening commute. Many people who ride their bikes to work downtown have said that small increase in time is a reasonable cost to pay for a safe route in a prime location. But they aren’t the ones sitting in traffic: Many motorists have expressed doubts about the report.

- Rock Miller works as a transportation planner and traffic engineer with Stantec in Irvine, Calif., and is a specialist in designing for cars, pedestrians and bicycles. He spoke in Calgary last summer as part of a panel of of visiting bicycle experts at an event hosted by the City of Calgary. He was hired by the city to create the traffic report (here’s some information on his report). He seems to be a very nice guy, and took some time this week to explain the thinking that went into it.

- Miller said he understands the skepticism around the report, but he defended the study. In fact, he went even farther, saying that estimate of a 30-60 second delay may be too conservative. He thinks travels times may actually improve once the cycle track is put in. Seriously.

- First of all, the road has the capacity for more traffic. If you don’t believe it, Miller recommended going to stand on the corner of 1 Street S.E. somewhere around 6th or 7th Avenue during a typical rush hour. Watch cars moving through the green light, and count the seconds between the time the last car goes through the green light and it turns red. I did this on Thursday, and counted four or five seconds most times. That’s extra capacity. That means the road can handle more cars. The backups in traffic in this area tend to be caused, not by the volume of cars on the road, he said, rather by the red lights.

- “When traffic fills up a block (at a red light), people assume it’s because there’s a lot of traffic, but when it goes green, the traffic moves right through,” Miller told me. “How many more cars could go through (a green light) after the last car gets through? Quite a lot.”

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Braving the Deep, Deadly South on a Bicycle

Read More: http://www.theatlanticcities.com/com...-bicycle/8590/

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According to a benchmark study, released last year by the National Alliance for Biking and Walking, the states of the southern U.S. are the most dangerous per biker, and per bike mile traveled, by a wide margin. If you bike in South Carolina you are 10 times likelier to be hit and killed by a car than if you bike in Oregon, one of America’s safer states for cyclists. In North Carolina, eight times more likely. In Louisiana, seven. If you bike in Mississippi, that number is close to 13.

- Warm, flat, and scenic, the south should be a bike rider's dream. But its palm trees and hanging moss stand watch over roadways badly in need of dedicated bike lanes, generous road shoulders, and more navigable urban centers. Beaux Jones, a Louisiana bike advocate, explained that apart from New Orleans, the cities in his state have inherited a structure, "that is somewhat antithetical to biking for pleasure or other purposes." In contrast with compact cities like San Francisco or Portland, Baton Rouge “is a city that stretches across 35 miles,” he points out. Few choose to bike it.

- A report on transportation spending by Advocacy Advance, a partner of the Alliance for Biking and Walking, found that the southern states spend the least on biking and walking safety infrastructure as a percentage of their total spending. Over the last few years, Massachusetts directed more than 5 percent of its transportation spending to bicycle and pedestrian facilities. In that same time period Louisiana, North Carolina, Florida, Alabama, South Carolina and Mississippi each devoted one half of one percent.

- How do you increase safety before you increase bikers? Many southern states are rolling out or expanding driver education programs. In North Carolina, representatives from the Department of Transportation say they’ve already seen significant “improved yielding” or road sharing across the Research Triangle as a result of their expanded program, Watch for Me NC.

- But Wilborn insists that education alone will never be enough to make the streets safe for bicycles. “Cycling fatalities are inversely proportional to the amount of money spent on bike infrastructure,” he says. “This is well documented. There is a number of what a state spends—and that number correlates almost exactly with its ranking on fatalities.” If you want to know reason why South Carolina is unsafe, he says, look at how it doesn’t spend its money. Frankly, he adds, “South Carolina does as little as possible.”

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