Why Bike Lanes Are Popping Up in Every City

Let’s uncover why bike lanes are appearing everywhere – Ottawa has had a massive transformation over the last several years, and many other cities in Canada and the United States are also seeing this trend.

Some common arguments against bike lanes:

Chapters
0:00 Introduction
0:42 Induced demand
1:21 Why bike infrastructure?
2:40 How bike lanes get built
3:52 Construction
4:32 How Paris is solving this
4:58 Build faster with Green Bonds
5:34 Edmonton’s plan
5:59 Conclusion

Resources:
Give Yourself The Green Light (1954): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ltrxz0foAI8
Ottawa: Protected Intersection Design Guide: https://documents.ottawa.ca/sites/documents/files/protectedintersection_dg_en.pdf

Sources:
Distance travelled per trip: https://www.energy.gov/eere/vehicles/articles/fotw-1230-march-21-2022-more-half-all-daily-trips-were-less-three-miles-2021
Adults’ self-reported barriers and enablers to riding a bike for transport: a systematic review: https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2022.04.22.22274159v1.full
Un nouveau plan vélo pour une ville 100 % cyclable: https://www.paris.fr/pages/un-nouveau-plan-velo-pour-une-ville-100-cyclable-19554
McKenney pledges to build 25 years’ worth of cycling infrastructure in 1 term if elected: https://ottawa.ctvnews.ca/mckenney-pledges-to-build-25-years-worth-of-cycling-infrastructure-in-1-term-if-elected-1.6058690
Edmonton 132 Avenue Renewal: https://www.edmonton.ca/transportation/on_your_streets/132-avenue-renewal
Strandherd Drive widening: https://ottawa.ca/en/city-hall/public-engagement/projects/strandherd-drive-widening-maravista-drive-jockvale-road

So you’ve probably noticed new bike lanes appearing in your city. Sometimes they’re up on the sidewalk, and sometimes they’re down in the road. Bike lanes are appearing much more often than we’ve ever seen them before, and this is a trend you’ll find in a lot of cities across north America.

But what’s changed and why now? One of the purposes of a road is to move people, and people can choose to get around in many different ways They can drive their car, they can take public transportation, or they can take their bike. But over the last several decades, cities have mostly prioritized

Investing in car infrastructure. We’ve widened roads, we built additional lanes, even cut highways through the middle of cities. We’ve done all the things that the car industry told us would solve traffic [Announcer voice] “We’re running out of roads” ‘We didn’t dream big enough”

But no matter how many lanes we throw at the problem we just can’t build our way out of it. This is because the additional capacity created by road widening simply creates additional trips that wouldn’t have otherwise happened before,

Negating the benefits to traffic flow caused by the road widening in the first place. This is called induced demand, and is experienced by road widening projects all across the world. So instead of building additional lanes to get more cars on the road, and repeat

The cycle, cities are trying strategies to reduce the number of cars in the road. Some of the strategies involve building ammenities closer to you, where you can access your needs without even needing to get into a car. Or expanding and improving public transportation, as it can move much

More people with way less space. And thirdly to the topic of this video- bike lanes. Bike infrastructure is one of the cheapest forms of traffic infrastructure that can alleviate traffic congestion by providing a way to get around without owning a car.

A recent U.S. study found that half of the trips that people take are under three miles. You could travel this distance in 15 minutes by bike. And on top of that, 28% of trips are just under one mile- this is a five minute bike ride, or a 20 minute walk.

So by simply shifting the existing use of space on our roads to allow for safe bike lanes, you give motorists additional options to get around so they don’t have to drive and you also create additional trips by bike as well.

But for people to actually want to use bike lanes, they have to take them to places they want to go, and do it safely. And when built correctly, it can be great. For example, some of the new lanes in Ottawa are fantastic.

The bike lane is elevated above on the curb, away from cars. Intersections are clearly marked. The turning radius is are tight, requiring vehicles to slow down before turning. But not all roads and intersections look like this- a lot of them look like this.

Roads without cycling infrastructure are dangerous and downright hostile to cyclists. You either have no protection from vehicles and have to ride in the shoulder, and if you’re lucky, you might even have a strip of paint on the road, that vehicles will still proceed to drive through.

So we know that the lack of safe infrastructure is the main barrier that people face when choosing to get around by bike and if we want to make cycling a serious alternative to getting around by car for shorter trips, we’re going to have to fix this.

The first step is to have cities actually acknowledge that this is important and that they should be building bike infrastructure. And thankfully, across north America, even in some really car dependent places, you’ll find the cities have acknowledged this and bike lanes have found their way into most transportation codes.

That’s why you’ll find most new roads accommodating bikes in some way. Now the quality of what’s considered infrastructure will vary a lot. We know that the quality of infrastructure is important. Painting something on the road isn’t enough to keep cyclist safe. Transportation codes need to incorporate good design in bike lanes,

Like keeping them off the road and up on the curb, like having protected intersections. These are driven by the design guidelines used by your city. Ottawa recently created this design guide for protected intersections which is a massive improvement from what we had before.

Cities can also update the priorities that city planners use when they’re designing new roadways to accommodate for things more than just a throughput of cars. Ottawa recently started officially recognizing induced demand when it plans it to roads. [Shawn Menard] “GHG emissions that will be a metric in evaluating those scenarios”

“as well as induced demand, which is, you know,” “if you build more roads, more people will use them” “and so they’ll evaluate that as a concept in new roads to be created” Now step two is where we actually start to see this in practice. All roads have a shelf life.

This is due to the surface of the road itself, but also due to things under the road, like sewer and storm water. So when the city goes into do it scheduled maintenance and tears up the road surface. Instead of building them back up to the old standards,

They update them to the new standards. And this is one of the main reasons why you’re seeing bike lanes show up everywhere. The time to do this maintenance varies from region to region. In Canada, the range goes from around 20 to 30 years.

This is a very long time to wait to see meaningful change in ridership and take advantage of what cycling infrastructure provides. Thankfully there are ways to expedite this. Many cities across the world are trying to close this link sooner. Paris recently rolled out an entire network of bike lanes pretty much overnight.

These are mostly really quickly put together low cost bike lanes, and in some cases just use concrete blocks to keep them separated. The center really strong message that the mayor is taking this seriously, and fit in with their plan to roll out over 180 kilometers of permanent protected bike lanes by 2026.

Another strategy is to leverage green bonds to build a network of bike lanes right away and pay it back over time with money that was already allocated to build them anyways. This cost neutral plan was proposed by one of the mayoral candidates in Ottawa,

But their opponent, and now mayor, claimed it was prioritizing bicycles over cars [Mark Sutcliffe] “They want you to walk or ride a bike, no matter where you live” “My transportation strategy doesn’t declare a war on cars” which is really frustrating to hear because it’s actually balancing

The amount of space that’s on the road, and it’s preying on the fact that people don’t fully understand the benefits that cycling infrastructure provides to them, even when they’re not on a bike. The third way is to advocate for specifically closing key corridors.

Edmonton has been in the news recently for allocating a hundred million dollars in funding for this purpose. This includes plans to update this stroad to become a protected corridor and identify missing links to get the cycling network connected sooner. Some people might criticize this price tag.

However, when you consider that the cost of a single road widening project can exceed this amount it’s a pretty small price to pay for having a completed, connected bike network. So to go back to our original question: this is why bike lanes are being built.

We’ve acknowledged that continuing to build car infrastructure isn’t going to get us out of traffic, and we need to take a more balanced approach to transportation. I didn’t even mention some of the other benefits of cycling. Active transportation just keeps people healthier than driving,

And it gets incorporated into your regular routine. When you build environments that people want to be out in and enjoy, it gets more people out on the streets, people live healthier lifestyles and the city is just overall a nicer place to be in.