Angie wrote that the NACTO guide “…contains templates for bikeway designs widely deployed in Europe…”

Kevin’s comment:

Really? I have not been in all of Europe (that would be nice!) but the NACTO guide certainly contains templates for bikeway designs that are rightly rejected in The Netherlands because they are insanely dangerous.

For example, bike lanes in the door zone of parked cars, so that the most dangerous place on the entire road to ride a bike… is in the bike lane. Insane!

NACTO also features bike lanes that are dangerously narrow, and sub-standard intersection designs that pose a lethal hazard to cyclists.

The NACTO guide is, quite frankly, an inferior design standard that should be rejected.

The proper traffic engineering design guide to use is the Dutch CROW “Design Manual for Bicycle Traffic.” The government of The Netherlands has conveniently translated it into English and it is available at:

http://www.crow.nl/publicaties/design-manual-for-bicycle-traffic

Let’s learn from the cycling infrastructure experts who have built the safest and most-used bicycle infra in the entire world. 27% of all trips in The Netherlands are by bicycle, and the infra is so safe that 24% of all trips by people over 65 year old are by bicycle. Even people over 75 years old make an average of two trips per week by bicycle. See:

http://www.aviewfromthecyclepath.com/2011/02/who-cycles-in-netherlands.html

Is the CROW publication only available for purchase? I couldn’t find an online pdf or anything of it anywhere.

And not to be picky to the original article, but I recently came back to the US after living in the Netherlands and traveled quite a bit around Europe during that time and let me just say that nothing even remotely approaching the amazing Dutch bike infrastructure is “widely deployed in Europe.” Most other European countries are way behind the Dutch in that regard.

Not that it really matters, but just wanted to further underscore Kevin’s point that it is the *Dutch* we should specifically be looking to for much guidance (honestly, I even found that Denmark’s bike infrastructure–while still leagues better than is found typically in the US–is not up to par with the Dutch “gouden standaard”).

I guess it’s certainly another step in the right direction, though, that protected bike lanes now have FHWA support.

I would have been happier to read Angie’s article, but then read Kevin Love’s comment. Indeed, as John Allen has said elsewhere, let’s not claim to be copying good European designs but instead do it badly, thus offering American cyclists the worst of all worlds–high expectations and poor delivery.

I read through the NACTO guide a few months ago and found some things that disturbed me deeply. While it endorsed protected lanes, it listed as optional some of the critical intersection controls that are required to protect cyclists who are entering intersections. Let’ make sure we dot all our i’s and cross all our t’s as we move forward.

Meanwhile, I’ve seen many of the installations that our traffic engineers (or somebody!) have apparently signed off under the present U.S. guidelines, and they can be downright awful, such as those coffin corner bike lanes that seem to escape a good P.E.’s red pen. We need to do better, if we are to do it at all.

Alas, the CROW standard is only available for purchase. And not cheap either, at 87 euros.

And yes, The Netherlands is by far the world leader in how to do cycling infra right. Which is why their traffic design engineering cycle standards should be the ones that we adopt.

Let us benchmark proven success and follow the experts who have achieved that success.

Yes, intersections are of vital importance. For example, Ontario’s Ministry of Transportation has found that 63% of injuries due to people being hit and crushed by car drivers happen at intersections.

Here is a video showing how to do intersections right. Note how at the beginning of the video it explicitly criticises the NACTO guide!

And here are some examples in real life of this design being used:

It is important to see the videos and imagine what it would be like to have this infrastructure in our own cities and towns. What a transformation for the better in our lives!

To each his own! My thoughts on Copenhagen’s infrastructure are basically summed up here:

http://www.aviewfromthecyclepath.com/2010/07/not-really-so-great-cycle-path-design.html

Things like the “Copenhagen Left” and insufficient separation from roads to me are indicative of less sophisticated design techniques, and bad infrastructure elements like those do in part explain Denmark’s lower cycling levels than those found in the Netherlands. Of course Denmark is still quite good compared to the rest of the world, but as that blog post rightly (I think) points out, it does seem silly to make all the effort just to copy second-best.

Note that in the video, the reader points out that each mode has its own yield and allowed phase, i.e. green light phasing protects each mode in the intersection. Sure, it means you have to obey the light. But that is enforced in some parts of Europe by draconian fines, ensuring a higher degree of compliance.

By “stodgy” do you mean a scientific research, evidence based process? The AASHTO Bike Guide was/is developed under the NCHRP, part of TRB, which is part of the National Academy of Sciences.

Copenhagen has been fitting bikes into a 150 year old infrastructure, and has even has to deal with auto oriented “suburbs” of the 1950-70s that are not so different from some of the US. Strangely, Holland has had some extensive de-novo construction opportunities that will be far superior to retrofitting cycletracks into spaces they weren’t designed for. But as you all noted, both Denmark and the Netherlands “average” far exceed AASHTO guidelines, and both are infinitely better than what’s on the ground in the USA.

Yeah, it’s funny you mention 50s-70s auto-centric development, as the Netherlands’ occasional surviving experimentations in that grain are stark reminders of what could’ve been if they hadn’t changed course starting in the 70s-80s. If you’re curious, one such example close to my old neighborhood:

http://goo.gl/maps/Js0ZG

The relatively high-speed IJtunnel approach road rudely bisects and separates otherwise quaint and livable Rapenburg street, with no pedestrian crossing really nearby (in fact there’s a freeway-style guardrail in the median making pedestrian crossings even more difficult). I remember my first mad dash as a pedestrian across the road at Rapenburg and it felt so wrong and…weird. I then realized it was because this kind of infrastructure is incredibly rare in the Netherlands so I’d never had to do a mad dash before.

Of course the pre-tunnel street there (Valkenburgerstraat) still has a protected cycletrack, so it’s much better than most US equivalents, but I did notice that it was in general an unpleasant road even to cycle along since cars would always be speeding up in anticipation of the uninterrupted high-speed straightaway in front of them (or from which they had just come). This shows that it’s not some saintly Dutch driving nature, but how their carefully engineered infrastructure usually inhibits such behavior to the extent that the example I posted above is the rare exception.

The NACTO bikeways guide section on one-way protected cycle tracks does have some guidance on dealing with bus stops. Here is an image from that section, with the relevant info as #15: http://nacto.org/wp-content/gallery/2012_guidance_images/2012guidance_protectedcycletrack.jpg

What is an “intersection bus stop”?

The bus stops at, or directly before, an intersection. As opposed to far enough away from an intersection so as not to interfere with the protected intersection’s protection of cyclists.

There are various examples available. See, for example, graph 1.7.4 in the Irish manual at:

http://www.cyclemanual.ie/manual/thebasics/mixed/

Note: it is not the number of cyclists that pushes the requirement for a protected cycle lane, but the number and speed of car drivers. Otherwise you would have a “blame the victim” situation where car drivers threaten and intimidate cyclists off the road and that is used to justify not providing cycle infra.

We had been incredibly inspired to find this site. This is because this really is this educational write-up.

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