Incrementalists vs Completionists

[mstone]

@lordofthemark 107062 wrote:

At what speed?

Generally one drives over a curb at low speed to keep from screwing up one’s car. If you don’t care about your car your can go as fast as you’d like.

@lordofthemark 107061 wrote:

If you care to oppose such lanes in Fairfax, I cannot stop you.

I think you’re confused–the only thing I’ve objected to is calling them “protected”. I already stipulated that there are reasons to prefer flex-post lanes to non-flex-post lanes, protection just happens to not be one of those reasons. What I’ve been saying is that I think that it would be cool to keep the term “protected” available to refer to lanes with, I don’t know, some sort of feature that actually protects cyclists from being run over. If we need a special term for a lane with flex posts I guess we could call it a “noticeable bike lane” or an “obvious bike lane” or “bike lane that’s even harder to miss than the one with the white lines and the green paint and the mushroom guy”. In practice I’m not sure I’ve seen a flex post lane that wasn’t a buffered bike lane and I’m not sure we really need a separate term for one. (Maybe the regs should just make the flex posts mandatory for buffered lanes–is there ever a good reason not to have them?)

[Tim Kelley]

Time out!

I just wanted to say that I am thoroughly enjoying the fact that the forum has evolved over the past 5 years to the point that we can now be debating the semantics of what exactly a protected bike lane means.

There something to this bike thing!

[Tim Kelley]

@mstone 107072 wrote:

G(Maybe the regs should just make the flex posts mandatory for buffered lanes–is there ever a good reason not to have them?)

Buffered lanes are used in areas where flex posts would make parking and entering/exiting driveways difficult.

[mstone]

@Tim Kelley 107075 wrote:

Buffered lanes are used in areas where flex posts would make parking and entering/exiting driveways difficult.

IOW, don’t put the putative otherwise mandatory posts in where it’s impractical to do so?

[Tim Kelley]

@mstone 107079 wrote:

IOW, don’t put the putative otherwise mandatory posts in where it’s impractical to do so?

Here’s an example:

https://www.google.com/maps/@38.889856,-77.166033,3a,75y,112.62h,61.09t/data=!3m4!1e1!3m2!1s7nGM7PghEZpSFgFeKbvLBg!2e0

Also, buffered lanes can be used where flex-post installations are prohibited due to overall lack of lane width.

[dasgeh]

@mstone 107072 wrote:

Generally one drives over a curb at low speed to keep from screwing up one’s car. If you don’t care about your car your can go as fast as you’d like.

I’ll assert that most people care about their car enough to not want to hit fixed objects. Most people also instinctively get that hitting a flexpost is not going to do as much damage as hitting something more solid. So I think solid barriers will make people drive more carefully (more slowly) than flexposts, but flexposts will make people drive more carefully than paint. In other words solid barrier > flexpost > paint.

Honestly, I question whether paint is better than nothing, and given the reality that we face around here, that may be the more relevant question. For example, should we support the neighborhood complete streets process in Arlington if its suggestion is to install only painted bike lanes on roads like Quincy Street?

[Tim Kelley]

Flexposts:

[jabberwocky]

I think anything that improves things is good. Paint is (generally, if done in a non-stupid way) better than nothing, flex posts/curbs are better than paint, fully divided infrastructure (walls, large swath of grass, etc) is better than posts. I see it as anything that makes it easier to get around will get more people riding. As more people ride, the case for better infrastructure gets stronger.

There are, in my mind, two levels of “protection.” There is actual physical protection, where it isn’t possible for a car to enter the lane (like walls or totally separate infrastructure). Then there are visual cues, like curbs and flex posts, which won’t actually stop a car from entering the lane, but at least make it pretty obvious cars aren’t supposed to enter.

[PotomacCyclist]

I think the nature of the road makes a difference too. Not just the speed limit. Some roads appear to be more like highways than others, which tends to encourage faster driving in general. On those roads, a more sturdy barrier would be best (jersey barriers) or a separated bike path (with parked cars or other substantial objects between the path and the car lanes). On roads that tend to have slower speeds, flex posts would seem adequate (with the exception of an out-of-control drunk driver or criminal speeding away from the police). On streets that have even slower traffic, bike lanes may not be necessary at all, such as on local neighborhood streets with frequent STOP signs and no straight connections to major routes.

The bikeways in Pentagon City/Crystal City are a mix, I believe. Part of the path is marked only with flex posts, but other sections are separated from car lanes by parked cars.

The dispute in the thread title boils down to the common tension between good and perfect. Perfect may be better, but not if the insistence on perfection means that nothing ever actually gets accomplished. One could counter that subpar bike infrastructure could lead to higher rates of accidents and general discontent with the cycling experience, both of which could turn off casual cyclists, but has that been the case? If more people cycle, then the network effect results in lower rates of injury and crashes, because more people get used to seeing cyclists and expecting to see them, so they alter their behavior. This seems to be the case with bikeshare. Bikeshare is not perfect. Many users are inexperienced, both with bike handling and with proper road etiquette. They rarely wear helmets. (I’m not trying to bring up that topic here, but for the sake of argument, I’m assuming that non-mandatory helmet use is generally a good thing.) Bike infrastructure is inadequate in many areas with bike stations. And yet, the presence of bikeshare in a city tends to lower accident and injury rates for all cyclists, bikeshare users or non-bikeshare users. I think this has been a recurring phenomenon in bikeshare cities. If so, then I won’t be as concerned about what people like that Copenhagenize guy says. Fortunately, most of the people in charge of bike programs and infrastructure don’t think like him. If they did, we would almost never see any bike infrastructure or even something like Capital Bikeshare.

[PotomacCyclist]

Friends don’t let friends drive scooters while drunk.

[lordofthemark]

@mstone 107072 wrote:

Generally one drives over a curb at low speed to keep from screwing up one’s car. If you don’t care about your car your can go as fast as you’d like.

In contrast to white paint, which one can cross at speed without damaging one’s car. That is my point. A car going over a curb at a low speed is a lesser danger to pedestrians or cyclists than one going at high speed, ergo curbs ARE protection, whether that is the intent of putting them in or not.

I think you’re confused–the only thing I’ve objected to is calling them “protected”. I already stipulated that there are reasons to prefer flex-post lanes to non-flex-post lanes, protection just happens to not be one of those reasons. What I’ve been saying is that I think that it would be cool to keep the term “protected” available to refer to lanes with, I don’t know, some sort of feature that actually protects cyclists from being run over. If we need a special term for a lane with flex posts I guess we could call it a “noticeable bike lane” or an “obvious bike lane” or “bike lane that’s even harder to miss than the one with the white lines and the green paint and the mushroom guy”. In practice I’m not sure I’ve seen a flex post lane that wasn’t a buffered bike lane and I’m not sure we really need a separate term for one. (Maybe the regs should just make the flex posts mandatory for buffered lanes–is there ever a good reason not to have them?)

I think in general battles over the name of the rose are pointless, and in this case particularly so – I thought you said above that you dislike the PBL terminology for lanes with flexposts BECAUSE it impacts what gets built. If you are not opposed to building more lanes like that, I do not see what changing the terminology buys you. Maybe you think it will accelerate the time at which jurisdictions ignore AASHTO standards on inflexible barriers? Or lead to AASHTO changing standards? I doubt that a change in what we call particular types of bike lanes will have that impact. Indeed, I suspect in our local jurisdictions assimilating such lanes to buffered lanes will only result in buffered lanes be kept as they are, with white paint and no flex posts.

By the way, I am still not clear if you think flex posts do or do not deter drivers from crossing them (sorry I do not know of a study on that) I note again that they are used in many instance where cyclist are not involved – for example to get drivers to make wider turns at certain intersections. I suppose it could just be for the visibility, but I think the other reasons I mentioned (drivers don’t know, or dont process that they are flexible, or do not want the audible cues of a violation, and just avoid them)

[lordofthemark]

@dasgeh 107084 wrote:

Honestly, I question whether paint is better than nothing, and given the reality that we face around here, that may be the more relevant question. For example, should we support the neighborhood complete streets process in Arlington if its suggestion is to install only painted bike lanes on roads like Quincy Street?

Vs a sharrows on a wider general travel lane? The advantage of a sharrows is it does not encourage people to bike in the door zone (except of course where the sharrows is painted in the door zone- City of Alex says they will not do that anymore, IIUC) and gives drivers a hint to tolerate folks taking the lane – the disadvantage is that newbs will be less likely to ride in the road at all (and will either ride the sidewalk or avoid that street altogether) but more important to the jurisdiction, is that they want to narrow the lanes anyway, to calm traffic (which generally benefits cyclists whether bike lane addicts or VCers) Now they COULD in theory widen the sidewalks instead, but that’s more money than striping a bike lane. Plus a bike lane makes filtering easier. There are many issues, including how active the parking users are. I have found dooring to much less of an issue in door zone bike lanes than I expected from reading about it – partly cause I ride slowly, but also cause I find in many areas there just is not as much entry/exit activity from parked cars, plus a lot of people actually do look for cyclists esp where there IS a striped bike lane.

[dasgeh]

To PotomacCyclist’s good points — I generally agree with you, but recognize that the kind of infrastructure installed will effect demand. If people see lots of “regular” bike lanes on busy streets – i.e. lots of bike infrastructure they wouldn’t feel comfortable biking on – they will be less inclined to go searching for infrastructure (like routes through neighborhoods) that they would feel comfortable biking on. Instead, they’ll just stay in their cars. As such , bad bike infrastructure can discourage new people from cycling.

@lordofthemark 107094 wrote:

Vs a sharrows on a wider general travel lane? […]

Possibly. One issue I have with “regular” bike lanes is that drivers seem to ignore the 3 foot passing rule (or even a reasonable passing buffer) when bikes are in “their” lane and cars are in “theirs”. In my experience,* cars seem to pass as close as they want to / have to when a cyclist is in the bike lane, while they would have passed with wider berth, or waited a beat until there was room to pass with greater berth when there’s no bike lane.

*I ride down Quincy often. It has a traditional bike lane, at times to the left of parked cars, at times with a small median in the center of the roadway. There are stretches where the I’m riding in the left side of the bike lane, because of said parked cars, and driving cars in the travel lane buzz me (less than 3′) because they’re squeezing between me and the median. Given how drivers act on other streets in the area, I suspect they’d wait until after the short median to pass with wider berth if they didn’t get the visual cue that there’s room to pass (because I’m in one lane and they’re in another).

[jabberwocky]

@lordofthemark 107093 wrote:

In contrast to white paint, which one can cross at speed without damaging one’s car. That is my point. A car going over a curb at a low speed is a lesser danger to pedestrians or cyclists than one going at high speed, ergo curbs ARE protection, whether that is the intent of putting them in or not.

The question is whether we are looking to protect against casual lane infractions (like, people drifting over while distracted, or trying to cut into/across a bike lane to avoid traffic or similar), or whether we are looking to protect against more violent accidents (like someone losing control of their car).

In the first case, I really don’t know how much better a curb is than posts. Its a better physical barrier (in that its slightly harder to drive over a curb than a flex post), but its also a less apparent obstacle (so someone who isn’t totally paying attention might run up a curb before they would go through something more obvious like flex posts). I personally put them about equal, but thats pure conjecture on my part and it would be interesting to know what the data actually says.

The second case, both are about equal, in that they do basically nothing. An out of control car will go over a curb with almost zero loss of momentum, and will obviously go right through flex posts.

[dasgeh]

@jabberwocky 107105 wrote:

The question is whether we are looking to protect against casual lane infractions (like, people drifting over while distracted, or trying to cut into/across a bike lane to avoid traffic or similar), or whether we are looking to protect against more violent accidents (like someone losing control of their car).

I would add that, in addition to your points, we’re looking to minimize the harm inflicted when “casual lane infractions” happen. In other words, slowing down traffic so that when someone does make a mistake, the risk of death or serious injury is lowered.

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