Cycletracks. Seattle wants one. Badly!
The latest push is a suggestion to reconfigure Broadway on Capitol Hill with the streetcar line work, remove the center turn lane and add a cycletrack on one side.
That is great! Anything that gets more people bicycling safely, Seattle Likes Bikes supports.
The trick is to do it safely. We’ve seen a couple proposals from around the country recently that boggles our mind. The proposals for sidewalk-level cycletracks. The idea is basically to add 8 or 10 feet to the width of the sidewalk, and put a few lines of paint to indicate which part is for walking and which part is for cycling.
So, now what happens when a blind person is wandering along the sidewalk trying to find the crosswalk and meanders into the bicycle part of the cycletrack?
A cycletrack is a great idea, but there are hundreds of details that all have to be done right. We need to carefully consider the human factors and design interaction of cars, trucks, parked cars, loading cars and trucks, slow cyclists, fast cyclists, new cyclists, experienced cyclists, wheelchairs, skateboarders, pedestrians, runners, children, the blind, and everyone else who uses a sidewalk and a road. We need to consider all of them in concert with the cycletrack and we need to consider every one of their movements, from car to sidewalk, from cycletrack to left turn across the travel lane at an intersection, etc. and we need to consider each movement midblock, at each intersection, and at each end of the cycletrack.
There are a LOT of details here and we really need a lot of eyes carefully considering and explaining each detail so that we don’t screw this one up.
We aren’t one for silver bullets. Everyone wants the one thing that solves the problem, but problems are more complex than that. Cycletracks do make people feel safer because they take people out of the flow of cars…but they can also make people be less safe by complicating the conflict boxes.
As the saying goes, the devil is in the details.
[...] few notes. As Michael Snyder at SeattleLikesBikes points out the, cycletracks are more complex than bike lanes, and all the details need to be [...]
[...] few notes. As Michael Snyder at SeattleLikesBikes points out the, cycletracks are more complex than bike lanes, and all the details need to be [...]