User:JMyles/Why Car Lanes Divide Us

Bike lanes are a sudden topic of cringey controversy. I say good riddance - they were never an effective surface anyway, and it's time for us to take the lane.

Whatever else the recent hullabaloo regarding "bike lanes" is, it's certainly mystifying.

One of the loudest examples - the government of Ontario ordering the removal of 19 km of Toronto bike lanes, including in commercial areas, over the city's objection - has been met with seething rage on reddit (in particular /r/fuckcars). The underlying impetus of /r/fuckcars - namely, fuck cars - is a principle with which I find myself in enthusiastic agreement. But I have to ask: is defending "bike lanes" a meaningful strategy?

I ask that you permit me an observation to inform the rest of this essay, and I think that it's sufficiently obvious to any urban cyclist as to be taken as read: the chief function of "bike lanes" is to present an urban plan where cars are the default, and bikes are relegated to a subsection of the roadway. In this sense, bike lanes are really just car lanes seen from the other side of the paint. Although no reliable measurements are available at present, I think it's reasonable to conclude that something like 99% of the 'bike lane' mileage in the USA consists solely of paint and no infrastructure, and a significant portion is also commingled with a door zone.

However I'm also prepared to make the argument that even the 1%-or-so that are buffered and have some form of barrier protection, while perhaps safer for individual cyclists during the transit of that mileage specifically, an antipattern for safer cities, and promote even worse car behavior.

A standard 5-foot painted bike lane, drawn to scale. An opening car door reaches 2 feet into it, for the whole length of the parking row. What remains is 3 feet, which has to hold a 2½-foot rider and the 3 feet of passing clearance the law requires.

So let me stick my head above the parapet and say: bike lanes suck. They fail to fulfill the most important role of urban infrastructure: to calm traffic. Not only are bike lanes not a step toward urban joy, they are a step away from it - they serve to entrench the auto industry subsidy that is the contortionist dance needed to accommodate cars near and even in the centers of our cities, at the cost of our comfort, our health, and our lives.

Separation and calming are two different questions, and most of what gets built answers only the first. Paint, buffered paint and parking-protected lanes rearrange the bicycle; the car keeps its speed, its width and its priority — as the streaks behind it show.

Moreover - and especially evident in the hostile dialogue on reddit and elsewhere, where the focus seems entirely on castigation of 'carbrains' and not at all on the comparative efficacy of various solutions and strategies - this style of dialogue allows us to politely avoid saying what must by now be the obvious and unstoppable conclusion of the e-bike age: cars do not belong in cities anymore.

Perhaps the history of urbanity will look back on car roads as an important part of the economic development in the 20th century... but certainly not for the next century.

So I offer a simple, actionable approach for the bold and strong among us: take the lane and ride at speeds and in formations which encourage and protect the meek, young, and elderly among us. That's it - that's all I'm gonna importune.

The same street three times. Riding the paint costs the driver nothing. Taking the lane makes overtaking a decision. Riding in formation turns that decision into shelter for somebody slower — here, a cargo bike with a kid aboard.

While taking the lane is the most important direct action we can take in the wake of disappearing bike lanes (in my view, in order to best leverage the positive development of their removal), this is not to say that there aren't other obvious urban infra solutions which are available and helpful - and most are cheaper than bike lanes. As many of y'all know, unimproved roads are, to me, the most important solution. That's right - stop paving some of the roads. Let them degrade so that cars will have to behave with greater calm. Create and utilize routes of these unimproved roads, connected by streets featuring natural chicanes and historic surfaces such as brick, gravel, and rail trails. This toolchain represents a superior vision to bike lanes, and one which requires in many cases less government intervention and funds than the status quo.

Notes on the figures

The three figures are drawn to scale from standard US dimensions: an 8-foot parking lane, a 5-foot bike lane (the AASHTO minimum), and an 11-foot travel lane. A parked car is taken as 6 feet wide, sitting 6 inches off the curb; a driver's door is taken to reach 3½ feet from the body; a rider with handlebars and ordinary wobble is taken as 2½ feet wide. The bicycle drawn is a front-loading cargo bike, to Riese & Müller Load 75 proportions — about 8½ feet long, with the box between the rider and the front wheel — because that is what carrying a child looks like. These are typical figures rather than worst cases — narrower lanes, wider vehicles and larger doors are all common, and every one of them makes the arithmetic worse.

Figures drawn by Magent.