Denmark has an entire social and political engineering program going (as do other European cities) that couple treating bicycles as serious transportation with sky-high gasoline prices and other government efforts to drive down (pardon the pun) the use of the private car and has done so since the oil embargos of the seventies. Not to mention, most of these nations are small, compact, and pancake flat.

Until we see that level of total war on the car in the U.S. (fat chance), you just can’t make that simple a comparison. Its not simply a case of cause and effect with bicycle infrastructure alone.

Cycling infrastructure should be built so it encourages cycling and if there is a market for it, but more importantly, so it encourages competent cycling. Until more people in the cycling advocacy movement start paying attention to folks like John Allen (see his recent blog post about an intersection in Washington, D.C.), I am worried. You sure don’t see support for the John Allens of the world in the People for Bikes web site.

Where there are no bike lanes in a city, almost no one bikes, and doing so safely requires skill, respect, and attention from both cyclist and driver. If only one of every three hundred drivers is either unskilled, disrespectful, or inattentive, the cyclist’s life will be threatened many times on the morning commute.

Where there are bike lanes it’s a little better and a few more brave cyclists will come out to ride in the city, but not very many.

In places where there’s an extensive network of interconnected separate bikeways (or cycle tracks), as many as half of a city’s commuters bike to work (Copenhagen: 55% commute by bike within the city, 37% of commuters from the suburbs go by bike).
When a city installs cycle tracks, the number of cyclists just explodes. This is what happened in Copenhagen and other northern European cities when they installed cycle tracks, and it’s happening now in a few North American cities, including New York.

I understand the desire to make bicycling safer, but I wonder whether this is the right way to do it.

Separated facilities such as the ones highlighted in this post are intended to make room on the road for bicyclists, as if they didn’t belong in “car lanes.” But the only “car lanes” are on highways, such as some freeways, on which bicycling is prohibited. Elsewhere, bicyclists are allowed to use travel lanes just like any other driver.

On streets with two lanes in each direction, the right lane should act like a wide bike lane when a bicyclist is present. Since drivers of faster vehicles have another lane to pass, there should be no problem.

There is a common misconception on our roads that bicyclists must “stay out of the way of cars.” But if bicyclists simply asserted their right as drivers to use the right travel lane and if motorists treated bicyclists as drivers of vehicles, then there would be no need for separated bicycle facilities.

However, if these facilities are transplanted to locations with uncontrolled intersections and driveways, there may be operational and safety issues. Signs and markings may not be sufficient to change road user behavior to anticipate and react to cyclists in unexpected locations which may be hidden from view, depending on design. Using a layout similar to the one in New York City (where the path runs separated up to the cross street and to the outside of dedicated turn lanes) in locations without signals at each intersection or driveway could be problematic.

Whether it’s their innovative facilities, breadth of their education programming or sheer numbers in many of their encouragement efforts, NYC has some wonderful examples for all of us that seek to accommodate or encourage more and better bicycling.

Nonetheless, my main gripe is still with the statement I quoted in my first comment. I bristle when I hear someone say that facilities have made it *possible* to safely bicycle. My specific objection is to the use of the word “possible”. This implies that it was not possible before. As an LCI, I don’t believe that, and I hope that you don’t either.

We could argue all day about operational safety issues, perception, and the safety in numbers effect, to try to determine to what extent the facilities may or may not have made it safER (or easier or more comfortable) for various bicycling populations, but I’m sure neither of us wants to that. I know I don’t.

But those questions are to some degree independent of just whether it is aquately safe to bicycle *without* the infrastructure, and I say it is. Yes, you should know what you’re doing (and I think infrastructure doesn’t really change that very much, certainly at intersections), and it is sometimes less comfortable, but is it POSSIBLE? Emphatically YES, through visible and predictable participation in the traffic flow as a vehicle driver.

The knowledge level around this point is so low in our culture that anytime we say that facilities make it *possible* to bicycle safely, implying it was not possible before, we are doing all bicyclists a disservice, by reinforcing the culture’s bias (including that of many bicyclists) that “bikes and cars don’t mix” and thereby decreasing their perception of our right to the road. We can and do discuss (ad neauseum) whether facilities make it relatively safer, or more comfortable, or increase numbers, but let’s at least not say facilities make it *possible*. That’s going too far. I think it’s a false and harmful statement.

As for Education, Transportation Alternative’s ‘Biking Rules!’ campaign (www.bikingrules.org) is reaching cyclists in a new and exciting way that I think we could all learn from. Likewise, Bike New York’s extensive list of courses (http://www.bikenewyork.org/education/classes/index.html) should make any bicycling educator a little jealous!

The reality is that it does take a lot of work across all of the E’s to be a truly great place for bicycling, and NYC is making strides across the board. Their Evaluation shows that while ridership numbers continue to climb, the indexed crash rate has dropped. The new facilities play a role in that. With Manhattan Borough President Scott Stringer calling for tougher enforcement, hopefully the NYPD will take notice and we can see those numbers decline further.

Meanwhile, education and compliance are important. LCI Neale Pickett and I have both seen cyclists doing some alarming things on our new bike lanes. The League needs to tout good behavior and competence as much as it does facilities development.

It’s always been possible to safely bike practically anywhere, acting as a driver and following the standard rules of the road. Much more safety comes from between the bicyclist’s ears than from the road design. Statements like this reinforce the false perception that bicyclists and motorists cannot safely share the road without special infrastructure, and undermine LAB’s education program. Please refrain from perpetuating this falsehood.