Dave Mabe, The Rational Carrborian

Much to my surprise, my article Do We Overvalue Bike Lanes? got quite a bit of traffic in the few days since I posted it. As best as I can tell the article was picked up on Tyler Cowen’s excellent Marginal Revolution blog, Robin Hanson tweeted it, Arnold Kling blogged about it, got re-tweeted a bunch of times, shared on Facebook a lot, and posted to Reddit here in the bicycling subreddit and here in the cyclingculture subreddit.

Being a contrarian opinion, I thought the article would be somewhat controversial but the overwhelming response was very, very positive. The vast majority of responses were very supportive and agreed with pretty much the entire premise. There were even plenty of cycling advocacy groups, who I thought would find something to object to, were pretty much in total agreement.

However, there were several responses that were negative. These responses generally fell into the following categories:

1. “But I ride my bike to work on a road with a bike lane and I love it!”
2. “You obviously haven’t seen study X that shows that bike lanes reduce accidents by 90%!”
3. “You used such a poor example of a bike lane that it’s hard to take your argument seriously.”
4. “You are obviously one of the ‘fearless’ cyclists and are therefore out of touch with the 8 and 80 year old bikers. Leave your opinion out of this and defer to the real experts.”

I’ll address these objections one by one.

1. But I love my bike lane!

Of course my argument wasn’t that all bike lanes are bad or that your favorite one is bad. My argument was that we end up with too many bike lanes for the reasons I outlined. I suspect that the bike lane that you have in your mind as you read the article is further to the right on the continuum in the graphic I posted. In that case, you most likely agree with my premise! It also might be that there are few if any of the particularly poor bike lanes in your area. That doesn’t mean they don’t exist.

2. Studies show that bike lanes reduce accidents by 90%, therefore a bike lane can’t be bad!

This could also be referred to as the “You just haven’t read the study I have – the important one that settles it for good” objection. When someone refers to a study that shows overwhelming evidence that bike lanes reduce accidents it shows me that you haven’t thought about the issue deeply enough and you are, in fact, supporting my premise by pointing out a major reason why we end up with too many bike lanes. I believe that many of the studies you reference (like this one) do prove something – they gathered data that they didn’t come up with out of thin air. My objection is not to these studies in and of themselves – my objection is to how they are referenced and cited as if they are quantifiable proof that we should use bike lanes in all circumstances. This is the confirmation bias and social desirability bias on full display.

If you’ve formed a confident opinion based on a study or two and haven’t looked at counter arguments then I think you’re very likely going to have a flawed viewpoint on this complex topic.

3. You used a poor example of a bad bike lane therefore it’s hard to take your argument seriously

The general idea of this response was “Of course that’s an example of a horrible bike lane, but these aren’t the kind of bike lanes that are used now – we’ve learned and do it better now.”  To some extent I think this is true.  In our town if a similar road is built I don’t think this type of design would be chosen.  However, there are many miles of similar bike lanes all over town, some of which were built fairly recently.  The common thinking is that these bike lanes aren’t hurting anybody – people feel safe.  I feel that there is, in fact, more danger by having the lanes there and our continued tacit endorsement of them sends a bad message to the community.

4. You’re a “fearless” cyclist so your opinion actually doesn’t matter

This is probably the most commonly used tactic and one of the main reasons we end up with more bike lanes than is optimal. One group was apparently so threatened by even the suggestion that not every bike lane is good for cycling that they circled the wagons on Twitter. They quickly try to categorize me as one of the “strong and fearless” cyclists on this continuum:

Labeling someone as “strong and fearless” is often used within the cycling community as a subtle ad hominem way of ignoring an inconvenient perspective.  My article was quite tame and I thought very reasonable given the fact that I wasn’t born “fearless” – a very short time ago I was very new to bicycling having it basically forced upon me via a running injury.  I find it strange that in the cycling advocacy community the more experience a cyclist gets, the more others within the community feel they have license to stereotype that person and safely ignore what they have to say precisely because they have more experience.  I’ve seen this on multiple occasions on a local and national level.

It seems to me that there’s some sort of inherent insecurity in some parts of the cycling advocacy community that the overall community of cyclists is more diverse than their united front implies.

Other Minor Points

One comment suggested I use the term “crash” instead of “accident”.  There’s some people in the cycling community that strongly push for this and it’s easy to understand why.  The term accident implies that “well, golly, there’s not much we can do to prevent this – these things just happen!”  This group insists on the term crash since in a lot of cases there is fault and something could have been done to prevent it.  I totally understand this point but I’ve never been convinced that this semantic argument matters as much as the proponents think it does.  Maybe a commenter can convince me that it’s worth it!

This person suggested that my continuum was possibly the “worst infographic ever”.  I guess that’s possible but I thought it was pretty good – in fact, one planner asked if he could use it for social media/presentation purposes.

Any comments?  Leave them below.

I’ve been a cyclist for several years now.  Although my wife has a car, my primary mode of transportation is a bike for most trips.  I accidentally came into cycling in my thirties when a knee injury as a runner forced me to look for an alternate mode of exercise.  I very reluctantly started cycling.  I hated it!  Riding a bike on the road with cars?  That’s too dangerous!  As a new cyclist, my natural instinct was to push for more segregation from cars through bike lanes.

Over time and riding experience I’ve become convinced that a lot of well-intentioned bike lanes create MORE danger for cyclists and in the long run are detrimental to cycling.

First let me say that I believe there are roads where a segregated bike lane is the best solution.  On the spectrum of types of roads, the more a road looks like a highway the more likely it is that a segregation (bike lane) will be a good solution.

However, what we typically end up with is excessive implementation of bike lanes on roads that look more like quiet neighborhood streets.  These are at best totally unnecessary and at worst create dangerous situations where none existed before.  Here’s a graphical representation:

OK, I see it’s unnecessary but it can’t be worse!

It actually is worse to put bike lanes on streets with low car volume and/or low speeds.

• They segregate cyclists lowering their status and making them “second class” citizens on the road
• Ensure that cyclists ride in the least visible and most dangerous part of the road – often quite literally “in the shadows”
• A line on the edge of the road makes motorists feel more comfortable and end up causing increased vehicle speeds than they otherwise would
• A bike lane on neighborhood streets with driveways and intersections introduces more conflict points (as cars back out of driveways they tend to look in the middle of the road where cars would be – a bike lane purposefully takes bikes out of that high visibility area!)
• Bike lanes are routinely dotted with obstacles (3 times a week where I live): trash day, recycling day, and yard waste day
• The existence of a bike lane causes buildup of road debris that would otherwise be naturally pushed to the side of the road by car traffic – you end up with a worse riding surface for bikes

Here’s a particularly poor situation that is not uncommon.  The bike lanes are almost completely in the shadows and a yard waste bin in the bike lane.  This is a very quiet neighborhood street that motorists can’t use as a cut through.  The number of vehicles per day on this street is tiny yet even on this road we have a bike lane.

Why do we end up with more bike lanes?  Inherent biases and Incentives

There are reasons we end up with too many bike lanes.  Across the board there are incentives and biases that cause us to prefer more bike lanes even when it ends up being worse for cyclists.

• Beginning cyclists (I was one not long ago!) naively push for a bike lane because they are scared of being hit by a car from the rear.  Although this is a natural fear, this type of accident is by far the rarest type.  Bike lanes INCREASE the chance of the most common types of accidents involving bikes: the left cross and right cross (a car travelling the opposite direction turning left and car travelling same direction turning right)
• Town officials want to signal progressiveness by putting in bike lanes (imagine an alderman saying “I’m pro-bicycling which is why I’m not putting a bike lane on your street.”  Often that’s a correct argument but it’s hard to make.  Much easier to just paint a line on the road and signal “I care about bike safety”.
• Cycling advocates push for more cycling infrastructure and are susceptible to the social desirability bias: “Just think about all the kids who will bike to school!”
• As a cyclist I routinely encounter anti-cycling motorists who yell things like “Roads are for cars!” and “See that sign – it says Share the Road so move over!”  These anti-cyclists are ironically mostly FOR more cycling infrastructure which allows them to signal “bike safety” when their real motivation is motorist convenience.

What about study X or Y – it shows that bike lanes are safer!

I have looked at a lot of these studies and they are notoriously flawed for one reason or another.  Bike safety is a difficult thing to measure in part because accidents are so rare.  Most studies will study roads that are more towards the right side of the continuum in the image above where you would expect bike lanes to be safer.  A lot of the danger from bike lanes won’t appear on crash statistics.

Here is one study that DID look at speed limits of the roads.  This is from Belgium and the numbers represent accident risk (higher = more risk).

This shows that in general the more similar a road is to a highway the more safety benefit you get from separation.  It confirms, though, what I’ve learned from experience – bike lanes on roads with low speed limits are in general way worse than no infrastructure at all.

What cycling advocates tend to end up with is the “safety in numbers” argument which says: “OK, these bike lanes might not be needed for advanced cyclists, but that’s not who they’re for. We’re trying to get the 8 year old and 80 year old cyclists out there and we know that they need more infrastructure before they’ll FEEL safe. Once we get more out there they’ll be more numbers and motorists will see more and more cyclists and be aware of them.  See – everybody wins.”  The problem with this line of thinking is that we’re going out of our way to lure the most vulnerable new riders by creating a bike lane that although feels safe, in actuality is MORE dangerous.  That is not an argument that I’m comfortable making!

Long term effects of bike lane-itis

I think the excess bike lanes are bad in the short term due to the immediate danger but the long term effects are not good either.  When we paint bike lanes on quiet neighborhood streets what does it say to the community?  It says that the town has looked at this quiet street with hardly any traffic and 20mph speed limits and concluded that it is SO dangerous that we need bike infrastructure on it.  Beware!  And when you see other streets without bike lanes the message is: you shouldn’t even ride on them at all!

Of course a large number of streets in towns all across the country are reasonably safe with no bike lanes or facilities at all.

As more bike lanes go into place I think hostility towards cyclists has and will continue to increase.  Many motorists and even cyclists mistakenly assume that if there is a bike lane that cyclist must ride in it by law.  If a cyclist doesn’t ride in the bike lane (for as simple a reason as making a left turn!) a lot of drivers view this as law breaking or just arrogance.

Imagine anti-cycling motorists (trust me – as a lot of cyclists know first hand – they are out there!) coming upon cyclists on roads without bike lanes.  What will go through his mind?  “Why did we put in all those bike lanes on roads throughout town – these jerk cyclists aren’t even using them!”