Should We Put Bikes in the “Slow Lane”?
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NextCity.org Should We Put Bikes in the “Slow Lane”? SANDY SMITH AUGUST 12, 2020 (Photo by Mr.PMCP / CC BY 2.0) Welcome to “The Mobile City,” our weekly roundup of noteworthy transportation developments. In addition to encouraging more people to ride, bicycle advocates of all stripes seek to get motorists to accept bikes and their riders as legitimate users of road space. But they split into two camps over the best way to do this. The dominant camp since the 1980s promotes what’s been dubbed the “Amsterdam” or “Scandinavian” model, which promotes protected bike lanes separate from motor vehicle and pedestrian traffic as the best way to make cycling safer for more people. A dedicated minority, most prominently the late cyclist-engineer John Forester, advocate instead for “vehicular cycling” — having bikes operate in the general traffic stream, with bicyclists behaving like drivers of non-motorized cars. Forester, who successfully overturned a law in Palo Alto, Calif., that would have relegated bicyclists to the sidewalk, was an implacable foe of separate bike lanes right up until his death this past April at age 89. His opponents, while acknowledging the need for vehicular cycling where dedicated facilities don’t exist, nonetheless pointed to higher bike ridership and fewer crashes wherever such facilities had been built. One might have thought this should settle the debate. But the city of Madrid, which took a different course, has reopened it. Lacking the money to build a bike-lane network, the city instead marked regular travel lanes in city streets as restricted to vehicles operating at 30 km/h (18.6 mph), and it says that these “slow lanes” actually lead to even fewer crashes while boosting bike use. Somewhere up there, Forester is no doubt smiling while taking the lane in order to make a left turn. Madrid Says It’s Found A Way to Promote Safer Bicycling on the Cheap Protected bike lanes remain the gold standard for promoting greater bicycle use for basic transportation. A large body of research now exists that shows such lanes reduce the incidence of injuries and fatalities among bike riders and lead more people to take basic trips by bike. But building such bike lanes costs money, and when the city of Madrid faced potential fines from the European Union for failing to reduce transportation emissions in 2013, money was something it lacked. So the city simply stocked up on white paint and opted for a different approach. Now the city is touting its approach as just as effective as protected bike lanes, leading even Streetsblog USA to ask “Is It Time for the U.S. to Try the ‘Madrid Model’ of Vehicular Cycling Infrastructure?” Those familiar with Betteridge’s Law of Headlines (“Every headline that ends in a question mark can be answered with the word ‘No.’”) might be surprised to find out that the answer Streetsblog gave is “Maybe.” The article lays out the case for the Spanish approach thusly: After marking lanes on city streets with a restricted speed of 30 km/h (18.6 mph), the share of trips taken by bike gradually rose, peaking at 6 percent in July 2018. (Even with an expanding network of both protected and unprotected dedicated bike lanes on U.S. city streets, bikes account for only 1 percent of all trips taken.) Madrid’s “slow lanes” follow the traditional rules of the road in that they are located as far to the right as possible on a multi-lane thoroughfare. Their use is restricted to low-speed vehicles, which are required to take the lane by law, and cars can use them only if they observe the low speed limit. Those that do not face stiff fines. And at the same time that the city started marking slow lanes, it launched an e-bike-share program to encourage more Madrileños to bike their way around the hilly city. The approach appears to work. By 2018, the article states, Madrid had the third-lowest rate of bicycle crashes per million trips in Europe, behind only Amsterdam and Copenhagen — both poster children for the opposite approach. And its fatality rate tied with Oslo, another protected-bike-lane city, for the lowest. This, the article suggests, should be good news for American bicycle advocates who want to see more two-wheeled, human-powered vehicles on the road. John Allen of Cycling Savvy pointed out the advantages of the Madrid approach in a blog post quoted in the article: “[Most people] don’t understand the consequences of riding on the edge [of the street]: The close passing, insufficient buffer space, inconsistent available width, debris hazards, and lack of vantage around corners,” he wrote. Dedicating an entire vehicular traffic lane away from the curb and parked cars to slow-moving vehicles eliminates these problems. But the Streetsblog article also goes on to wonder whether the approach actually expands the population of bike riders. John Forester had advocated vehicular cycling because it enabled more athletic bicycle riders like himself to operate at their top speed; increasing the pool of bike riders was a secondary concern for him if it was one at all. Noting that “the success it has had is something of a happy accident,” the Streetsblog article goes on to note that data on both bike use and cycling fatalities in Madrid are spotty at best. “Nor does the scarce data address the crucial question of who is using the new lanes, aside from able-bodied, fearless, disproportionately male and white cyclists who are more often willing to bike while surrounded by traffic,” it continues. But, it concludes, even if the data that exist show that the Scandinavian model is actually safer, the Madrid model has its advantages. One is that it reminds motorists that cyclists have an absolute right to use the road. Another is that it’s much cheaper to implement, which will make it a contender for adoption by cities long on ambition but short on money, a condition that will be more widespread thanks to the COVID-19 pandemic. The advocacy group Madrid Cyclista throws down the gauntlet in a brief for the Madrid model posted to its blog (the following translated from Spanish): “The advantage of the late incorporation of the bicycle in Madrid is that it allows us to learn from the mistakes of those who started earlier and adapt their successes to the sustainability of a large city of the 21st century. The models, basically central and northern Europe, made sense in the era of automobile expansion, when it implied progress. Now society has realized the unsustainability of this conception of mobility and therefore this scheme has become obsolete. Cities like Amsterdam are in this sense slaves of their past and cannot renounce the model that defines them, that is why they will be the last to join the trend that Madrid is setting and which will be the majority in Europe in a few years.” To which Streetsblog adds, “It’s up to Americans to decide whether such a future would be a dream, a nightmare, or, more likely, simply better than what we have now — which is next to nothing.” .