Incrementalists vs Completionists

[PotomacCyclist]

I don’t understand why that Chicago bikeway is considered to be so much worse than the Amsterdam bikeway in those photos. Am I missing something? Maybe the lack of bike parking in the Chicago block? But maybe there aren’t many destinations on that block, or the bike parking is hidden around the corner. I guess it would be better to have all that bike parking, but that wouldn’t be needed on every single block of a bikeway, would it?

[lordofthemark]

@PotomacCyclist 107011 wrote:

I don’t understand why that Chicago bikeway is considered to be so much worse than the Amsterdam bikeway in those photos. Am I missing something? Maybe the lack of bike parking in the Chicago block? But maybe there aren’t many destinations on that block, or the bike parking is hidden around the corner. I guess it would be better to have all that bike parking, but that wouldn’t be needed on every single block of a bikeway, would it?

While I agree that was probably not the best example (the Chicago separation is great for a US PBL, there are no driveways visible, and the likely big advantage of the NL PBLs, better bike specific signaling is not visible) I would hazard a guess at what is visible that makes the NL PBL better.

A. The separation is a bit more. The sidewalk/bike parking in the NL appears slightly wider than the single lane of parked cars in Chicago. And for a portion of the Chicago PBL, there are no parked cars, only paint and flexposts, while the NL lane is protected by a raised curb between the (very narrow) general travel lane and the sidewalk/bike parking area that protects the bike lane
B. The better part of the separation in Chicago is parked cars, which can produce visibility issues.

[mstone]

It’s the hip new american definition of “protected”, which means “a post specifically designed to bend when a car runs over it is all that stands between the cyclist and traffic”. The bendy feature is critical, because a solid post could pose a danger to a motorist who flies out of his lane in an uncontrolled fashion, and that is strictly prohibited by AASHTO guidelines. (Note that AASHTO simply doesn’t care about pedestrians and cyclists, though they’ve signaled that might change as early as 2018, but probably not substantively before 2025 or so.) The irony of wanting to protect motorists who are running over sidewalks and bike lanes more than the people using the sidewalks and bike lanes is completely lost on the traffic engineers.

[lordofthemark]

I have never driven over a flex post, but I am told they make a sharp noise when you do so – which would at least get the attention of a driver who is texting or falling asleep, and likely would draw attention from LE. VDOT relies on flexposts to keep people from cheating on the I495 express lanes, and that works AFAICT. So I think as a cyclist I am justified in seeing white paint plus flexposts as better than just white paint. Though of course for protection from the most reckless and/or inebriated drivers, something more solid would be better.

edit:BTW, I guess that makes me an incrementalist.

[Tim Kelley]

Even the most solid of barriers don’t always keep vehicles from going through/over:

[PotomacCyclist]

Never underestimate the ability of a reckless driver from getting through any barrier or crashing into something you wouldn’t expect. Like crashing into a police car. Or a parked police car. Or a 7-Eleven, which aren’t usually moving on their own. All of this is just from Arlington.

[mstone]

@lordofthemark 107026 wrote:

I have never driven over a flex post, but I am told they make a sharp noise when you do so – which would at least get the attention of a driver who is texting or falling asleep, and likely would draw attention from LE. VDOT relies on flexposts to keep people from cheating on the I495 express lanes, and that works AFAICT. So I think as a cyclist I am justified in seeing white paint plus flexposts as better than just white paint. Though of course for protection from the most reckless and/or inebriated drivers, something more solid would be better.

I don’t really care if someone drifts out of the express lanes or is woken up as they run over someone in a “protected” bike lane…

[mstone]

@PotomacCyclist 107035 wrote:

Never underestimate the ability of a reckless driver from getting through any barrier or crashing into something you wouldn’t expect. Like crashing into a police car. Or a parked police car. Or a 7-Eleven, which aren’t usually moving on their own. All of this is just from Arlington.

exactly. there’s a page on the internets devoted to cars crashing into dunkin donuts. (it happens weirdly often.) hence my extreme skepticism of the notion that pedestrians are in any way “protected” by flex posts or paint. and my extreme skepticism when police departments do “public safety” campaigns yelling at people who don’t stay on the sidewalk–it’s not like the cars stay off the sidewalk.

[PotomacCyclist]

I still think flex posts are better than no flex posts, but I still try to keep an eye out for nearby traffic. At least on the 14th Street bikeway, when you are riding north closest to the car lanes, you can see the cars heading in your direction. If a driver should happen to get out of control, you should be able to see him or her. Of course, if the driver is speeding at 40 mph and driving erratically, there’s only so much you could do. But the traffic there tends to be calm, partly because of the police and security presence near the White House.

[lordofthemark]

@mstone 107036 wrote:

I don’t really care if someone drifts out of the express lanes or is woken up as they run over someone in a “protected” bike lane…

I am pretty sure the posts on 495 are to keep people from going IN to the express lanes, though I guess a lane change out of them would be dangerous (but also would mean wasting the toll money)

I would hope someone woken up as they drift into the bike lane would quickly swerve out of it or slam on the brakes to avoid hitting a cyclist. The flexposts work better if drivers actually do not want to hit cyclists, or are at least afraid of LE, so alerting the driver and alerting everyone else is helpful. In that they are like white or green paint, which also is not a physical protection. However it seems they could be more effective in doing that than paint.

But clearly a driver who really WANTS to kill cyclists, or who is so out of it that they will ignore both the visual and auditory ques of flex posts, can easily drive over them. That is why they are not the optimal treatment.

I suppose if the word “protected” is at issue, we need a new word for bike lanes that have flexposts, but not “real” protections. Given that we already have conventional bike lanes, buffered bike lanes, and PBLs, a fourth category sounds confusing to me. I suppose we could lump the flexpost lanes in with buffered lanes. I wonder if there is any data on whether they are closer to buffered lanes or to ‘real’ protected lanes in terms of actual safety outcomes.

[lordofthemark]

@mstone 107038 wrote:

exactly. there’s a page on the internets devoted to cars crashing into dunkin donuts. (it happens weirdly often.) hence my extreme skepticism of the notion that pedestrians are in any way “protected” by flex posts or paint. and my extreme skepticism when police departments do “public safety” campaigns yelling at people who don’t stay on the sidewalk–it’s not like the cars stay off the sidewalk.

Some should tell safety researchers about internet blogs devoted to weird events as a data source

I mean think of how much localities could save on curbs, since apparently curbs provide no protection – lets just make every road a woonerf.

Frequency matters. As bad as many drivers are, most don’t drive onto sidewalks, even when they are totally unprotected, and many more do not ehwn the sidewalk is protected by nothing more than few feet of grass.

[lordofthemark]

a lot of interesting stuff here,

http://ppms.otrec.us/media/project_files/NITC-RR-583_ProtectedLanes_FinalReportb.pdf

but I do not see an analysis of outcomes, only survey data on cyclist preferences, which shows

“12.3.1 Buffer Designs
The survey assessed bicyclists’ perceptions of different buffer designs based upon their stated
preferences for the actual facilities where they rode and some hypothetical designs presented
through diagrams. Both methods reveal that bicyclists have a preference order in terms of the
degree of protection that affects comfort.
• Designs with more physical separation had the highest scores. Buffers with vertical physical
objects (those that would be considered protected lanes – e.g. with flexposts, planters, curbs,
or parked cars) all resulted in considerably higher comfort levels than buffers created only
with paint.
• Flexpost buffers got very high ratings even though they provide little actual physical
protection from vehicle intrusions— cyclists perceive them as an effective means of positive
separation.
• Any type of buffer shows a considerable increase in self-reported comfort levels over a
striped bike lane.”

[mstone]

@PotomacCyclist 107039 wrote:

I still think flex posts are better than no flex posts

Oh absolutely, both for intrinsic and pragmatic reasons: they add visibility to the bike lane, and they generally aren’t installed unless there’s even more space for the post itself (wouldn’t want the cars to get scraped on a post; scraping a cyclist isn’t as much of a problem). But “better” != “protecting”.

Take a look sometime at just about any roadside jersey wall and see how beat up it is. It’s hard to argue that the motorists couldn’t see the wall.

@lordofthemark 107044 wrote:

I am pretty sure the posts on 495 are to keep people from going IN to the express lanes[/quote]

True. I suppose in some cases they “protect” revenue.

@lordofthemark 107045 wrote:

Some should tell safety researchers about internet blogs devoted to weird events as a data source [/quote]

Well, it’s certainly more efficient than digging up all of the news stories on your own. I made no claims that it’s useful for statistical purposes, I do think that it’s useful to counter the notion that sidewalks have some magical property that keeps cars off of them–and in a more humorous fashion than pointing to specific instances where people were killed while on sidewalks. (Generally with no penalties for the drivers in question because car accident.)

Quote:

I mean think of how much localities could save on curbs, since apparently curbs provide no protection – lets just make every road a woonerf.

In general, curbs aren’t there for protection, their purpose to channel rain water. They also provide a visual separation and help to delineate space, but they certainly aren’t expected to stop any kind of a car–in many places cars routinely drive over the curb to park on the sidewalk.

Quote:

Frequency matters. As bad as many drivers are, most don’t drive onto sidewalks, even when they are totally unprotected, and many more do not ehwn the sidewalk is protected by nothing more than few feet of grass.

Do you have actual statistics to indicate that curbs are safer than a wide uncurbed grass median? I’d personally rather have a couple of feet of grass than be right next to traffic with a curb. IIRC, current engineering guidelines require a median between a high speed road and a sidewalk, because they expect that the curb won’t stop anything.

I’m not sure what you mean by “frequencies matter”. People get killed because cars leave their travel lanes and run over people that aren’t in cars. We seem to think that’s infrequent enough to be ok? What is the frequency? People get killed because cars leave the travel lanes and impact solid objects, killing the people that are in the car. We seem to think that’s frequent enough to require engineering guidelines prohibiting solid objects within a certain distance of the travel lane, unless they’re designed to deflect a car. What is the frequency? Why do we spend a lot of money on one of those cases and the other is chalked up to “accidents” and ignored? If this was due to some sort of science around “frequencies” I’d expect there to be a lot more solid research and a paper trail surrounding the decisions about what the acceptable frequencies are. Maybe that exists, but I’ve never seen it.

This stuff matters, and the “protected” language matters, because it affects what kind of facilities we get. I’m thinking of one case where a local roads department decided that particular stretch of road was dangerous, so they protected a bike lane with bollards. But they had to use breakaway bollards to protect the motorists. If you were a cyclist looking at that facility, would the solid looking metal bollards make you feel secure about riding next to the highway-speed traffic because they bikeway was protected? Would you feel more or less secure knowing that they were designed to snap off if hit by a car? Do you think that making people think that they are protected is a good way to address peoples’ demands for more protection?

[lordofthemark]

@mstone 107054 wrote:

Do you have actual statistics to indicate that curbs are safer than a wide uncurbed grass median?

No I don’t. Though I am sure there are vehicles that cross uncurbed grass.

I’m not sure what you mean by “frequencies matter”.

I meant that if cars jumping curbs and driving over flexposts is infrequent, then curbs and/or flexposts can be worthwhile. I am not certain, but I do not think all the PBLs in the NL are protected by solid physical barriers.

People get killed because cars leave their travel lanes and run over people that aren’t in cars. We seem to think that’s infrequent enough to be ok? What is the frequency? People get killed because cars leave the travel lanes and impact solid objects, killing the people that are in the car. We seem to think that’s frequent enough to require engineering guidelines prohibiting solid objects within a certain distance of the travel lane, unless they’re designed to deflect a car. What is the frequency? Why do we spend a lot of money on one of those cases and the other is chalked up to “accidents” and ignored? If this was due to some sort of science around “frequencies” I’d expect there to be a lot more solid research and a paper trail surrounding the decisions about what the acceptable frequencies are. Maybe that exists, but I’ve never seen it.

This stuff matters, and the “protected” language matters, because it affects what kind of facilities we get. I’m thinking of one case where a local roads department decided that particular stretch of road was dangerous, so they protected a bike lane with bollards. But they had to use breakaway bollards to protect the motorists. If you were a cyclist looking at that facility, would the solid looking metal bollards make you feel secure about riding next to the highway-speed traffic because they bikeway was protected? Would you feel more or less secure knowing that they were designed to snap off if hit by a car? Do you think that making people think that they are protected is a good way to address peoples’ demands for more protection?

I am not here to discuss the inconsistencies in AASHTO standards. The OP asked if we are incrementalists or completionists in terms of adding bike infrastructure. I am presuming that was addressed to us as people who lobby local govts on bike infra – not to AASHTO. I do not think that leaving paint only buffered bike lanes, and parking protected bike lanes, as the only tools for establishing lanes with more protection than a conventional bike lane unless and until AASHTO changes its standards (are you lobbying for that change? do you have any idea how realistic that is, or what the time frame is?) is a good idea. I think the breakaway posts are a benefit, because they are more visible to motorists than white paint alone, because many MOTORISTS do not realize they break away and avoid them for that reason, because when a motorist DOES hit them they have audio cues not provided by white paint, audio cues available to the motorist (who can take corrective action) to LE (which can pursues the motorist, and if they suspect DUI may even be likely to) and available to cyclists in the bike lane. And they are also a benefit because greater perceptions of safety will lead to more biking, and the critical mass effect (which is multidimensional – more cyclists means drivers are more aware of cyclists, more cyclists means more drivers ARE cyclists, more cyclists means a larger constituency for improvements to infra AND to law, more cyclists means more officials and engineers are cyclists, and more cyclists evidently means safer behavior by cyclists) matters.

So yes. I live in the City of Alexandria. Where we have the opportunity to create a flex post protected bike lane (and a parking protected lane is not an option) I intend to support those, in lieu of only a paint protected lane. If you care to oppose such lanes in Fairfax, I cannot stop you.

[lordofthemark]

@mstone 107054 wrote:

In general, curbs aren’t there for protection, their purpose to channel rain water. They also provide a visual separation and help to delineate space, but they certainly aren’t expected to stop any kind of a car–in many places cars routinely drive over the curb to park on the sidewalk.

At what speed?

[Author]

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