Cars and Bikes Have Different Needs

 While biking around the Quad Cities and considering what is wrong with our streets, I have had a lot of thoughts about how bikes and cars have very different needs from the streetscape. This is probably why more bike-friendly countries don't herd them into the same spaces in the first place. But rather than just say "build it Dutch style" I thought it might be helpful to think about why that separation is valuable in the first place.

1. Bikes Need Smoothness

Bikes (at least commuter and road bikes, not BMX) need smooth surfaces in a way that cars don't. 

This, by the way, is why "bike on the sidewalk" is terrible advice, besides hitting pedestrians, since sidewalks often have these kinds of divides between tiles, and a bike will have to go over each and every one of those bumps.

Or this guy, of course. But also look at those horizontal lines across the sidewalk (I was walking, not biking, here for the record).

It's bad in the road, too. Yes, cars do not like giant potholes, and pothole repair is a major expense for many cities, but there's a very different scale to what kind of thing counts as a problem.

Take this, for instance. The main hole in the middle is a problem for everyone. In fact, I think they may have filled it in since I took this a couple weeks ago. But the longer cut across the road is one that cars don't really care about; their tires are big, their bodies are heavy, and they just roll over it. Bikes bump, and in some cases worse, on streets like these.

Then there's this:

No one likes this when they look at it, but bikes like it less. I have actively lost at least one tire tube and literally rattled part of my bike light off the bike on this street. But I also drive a car over it very frequently, and I barely notice this. Some of that is that the streets in the QC are not wonderful, so this doesn't necessarily stand out, but also the car just doesn't care about it in the same way.

The flip side of this, and the thing that sometimes makes me particularly annoyed as someone on a bike, is that my bike is not actually the one causing these issues. The weight of my bike is literally 1/50 of the weight of my car--and I bike a heavy bike (Aventon Abound) and a relatively light car (2013 Nissan Leaf). Sure, some of pothole creation is from thaw/crack cycles, but vehicle weight is the biggest factor we can control. 

And cars crack roads that bikes have to bike on.

Fun times.

2. Bikes Get Ghettoed

This is part of a broader set of symptoms where the edges of streets, where bikes have to operate, are worse than the centers.

Cracks in the road are the start--look at the wrecked edge of the sidewalk in my photos above. But it goes beyond that. Next time you walk or drive or bike down a street, look at how much detritus from cars is in the gutter or on the edge of the street, and realize that that is the part of the road left for the bikes.

Also, when they do bother to fix a road, they often leave the edges unaffected, so you don't actually get an improvement as a bicyclist.

Water, of course, isn't something cars leave on the road, but it's still concentrated by design in the edges of the road. Good luck biking through that--and enjoy the spray when cars pass you!

See: edges.

3. Bikes Need Less Space

Now, that sharrow above is way too small of a space if you're next to cars. That's a big issue, by the way, in discussing this last point. Bikes do and should have the right to take the whole lane if they need it, next to cars, because cars are so dangerous to be next to.

But if you're not next to cars, bikes need less space. 

A two-way cyclepath can take one lane of car traffic, as here (Vancouver)

Or here (Toronto)

A one-way cyclepath can be less than a lane, as it is here in Boston. 

And if you just completely separate them from cars, you can just use a smaller space, as they do on this bridge in Amsterdam.

The basic point is that where cars have to take as much space as will make them vaguely safer than they naturally are, a bike can take up substantially less space due to weight, size, speed, maneuverability, and vision. So a bike lane that  isn't part of a street lane can just adapt to that, and one that is protected (as some of the above examples are) can do so better than an unprotected lane or a lack of a bike lane entirely.

And that's not even mentioning parking.

That forest of bikes is probably 5 or 6 parking spaces for cars. Maybe less for US SUVs.

Basically, bikes are in fact a different kind of vehicle than cars, and have fundamentally different needs--needs that are in some cases literally not compatible with the way cars affect streets and street design. 

Build bike lanes. Separate bikes from cars. And suddenly bikes become a much more viable solution for everyone.

Speed and Streets

Recently, the City of Davenport held a community meeting about what to do with traffic that speeds off River Drive onto River Street in the neighborhood around McClellan Heights. This feels like a good opportunity, then, to talk about how we design our roads around speed and cars. While my thoughts are inspired by this discussion around River Street, I'm not going to focus directly on that because I'm not a traffic engineer and wasn't present for the meeting. Rather, I want to talk more broadly about how traffic speeds are managed around Davenport and the QCA.

1. Too much reliance on speed limits alone 

The article linked above mentions that the speed limit on River Street is 25 mph but cars have been measured up to 68 mph. This is emblematic of the general way speed is "controlled" in the QCA: all speed limit, no street design. The proposal to actually redesign some of the street with bollards may not be perfect, but it's a step in the right direction, because any direction of actually changing street appearance from "giant open asphalt stretch" is the right direction. 

Basically, the speed limits and the street design don't match: roads with slow limits don't look any different from roads with high limits, and so drivers just drive fast.

2. Lane and speed limit mismatch

This gets worse in places like Brady and Harrison Streets, which can be as low as 25 mph while still having 4 lanes of one-way traffic. No wonder people zoom on through! It's as wide as the interstate. 

Does this look like a 25 mph road to you?

When the speed limit drops, lanes should drop out; and honestly some of these streets should just be fewer lanes. Give us some bike lanes or a bus lane or a tram or something. Parklets. Anything but a giant stroad. And the same goes if the speed doesn't drop but just is lower than the road is designed for.

3. Distinguishing roads and streets would help

The overly fast traffic on roads like River Dr, Brady, and Harrison is because these are among the main throughfares for the city. And there's nothing wrong with those roads being fast! But there isn't sufficient distinction between these roads used for fast movement of cars and streets, which should be more about people using the street for things other than moving through. In other words, we have a bunch of stroads. There's actually good potential here for distinguishing them, since we have a clear set of E-W and N-S routes in Davenport in particular and the QCA more generally. But this work hasn't been done; the roads and streets are designed basically the same and don't feel that different to drive on.

This is why people get so wrought up about road traffic going into their neighborhoods: because the cars will treat their streets like roads. And while they're not wrong that that's a problem, the issue is bigger than one intersection at a time. The problem is that we don't have clear design differences and visual (or even physical) cues to drivers that they're in a space they shouldn't be tearing through. Yes, some places have speed bumps, but that's an extreme and usually ad-hoc approach; comprehensive street design on every street is more helpful. That creates a consistent understanding by drivers of what is expected of them, and a larger set of non-driving options for transportation as well, making it more likely that traffic will actually both reduce in volume and in speed.

It's good to see Davenport considering options for River Street off River Drive--but it would be even better to see some more general overhaul of how we treat speed in the city and the QCA.