Cycletracks? No, thank you. I want safer roads.

I've not seen much traffic on local blogs regarding the Lexington Road Corridor proposals (http://louisvilleky.gov/government/advanced-planning/lexington-road-corridor-transportation-plan), although there has been some (notably Broken Sidewalk's bereft-of-critical thinking post cheering for the cycletrack option a bad idea).

In short, the proposal is to do a road diet on the stretch of Lexington Road between Grinstead Drive and Baxter Avenue.

Good idea, so far, in that road diets in general reduce motorist-vs-motorist crash frequency. We've seen drops in crash frequency in the two road diet installations for which data are available, and expect to in the other more recent installation.

However, there remains the question of what to do with the "extra pavement" left when changing from two lanes each direction to one lane each direction plus either a two-way left turn lane or buffer between the opposing-direction lanes. The length of the project area (~1.7 miles), coupled with the result of one travel lane and no good sight lines for passing (especially along Cave Hill Cemetery) all but forces the city to consider bike lanes to the outside of the general travel lanes, as it's hard to imagine that motorists would tolerate being limited to bicycle speeds for that distance.

So, despite my well-known antipathy regarding painted bike lanes (90% of which give the rest a bad name), I'm sort-of okay with edge-of-pavement painted bike lanes in this case.

Sadly, though, there is another proposal on the table, and this one is very problematic. It's called a cycletrack, and as the illustration at the top of the Broken Sidewalk blog shows, it's a two-way bike lane to one side of the rest of the road.

When I was actively riding club rides, the most common routes for the Sunday afternoon ride and many of the Tuesday evening rides involved this very stretch of Lexington Road. Let's face it, many who enjoy those rides treat them as social opportunities, if not informal races, which results in fairly large groups of cyclists occupying an entire travel lane (all eleven feet of it). Imagine, if you will, such groups confined to a five-foot-wide lane (by law, in fact), with opposing traffic to each side. There is NO room to pass other cyclists without likelihood of head-on collision with either another cyclist or a motorist.

Those in favor of the "cycletrack" option would have you believe that, instead of a five-foot-wide bike lane to the outside of the primary travel lane, you would have a ten-foot-wide bike facility (never mind that it's a two-way street that is only two and a half times the operating width of a cyclist). Cycletrack proponents barely acknowledge the increased crossing-type hazards that such facilities create at intersections, and if pushed to recognize them, dismiss the dangers by saying that additional phases of a traffic light cycle can be added (reducing through-put for motorists who are already anxious about perceived loss of service related to the road diet), or signage and green paint (with magical properties) can be put in place to alert people of the additional hazards created (how many such fixes--and fixes of problems caused by successive fixes---does it take to satisfy Rube Goldberg?). These "fixes" do one thing well: Add complexity that leads to poor compliance and poor safety ratings. That these types of "fixes" have allegedly worked in other cities is more a reflection of a lack of tracking of close calls and lack of understanding of crash causes than of the efficacy of the fixes. Happily, cycling is pretty safe even when done wrong.




Most of the arguments I've heard in favor of cycletracks have focused on "how potential cyclists would feel safer using them than the regular travel lane." There is a conflation at work here: "Feeling safer" is more accurately said as "it's quieter for me." It isn't safer, as has been found by countless cyclists who have tens of thousands of miles of crash-free bicycle driving without such facilities have documented. And what of those potential cyclists? How many of them would simply find other excuses for not using bicycles once the cycletrack has been installed? It reminds me of a game of "Whack-a-mole." The whole "potential cyclists" and "many bicycle users feel better in these" bit comes from a taxonomy devised by Roger Geller in Oregon. Geller's model tells us that there are four types of transportation cyclists (strong and fearless, enthused and confident, interested but concerned, and no-way, no-how!).

Let's look at that taxonomy for a moment: First, how is a person who says "No way, no how!" a transportation cyclist? The people in that group wouldn't ride a bike for transportation on a bet! Second, at the other end of Geller's spectrum, there are two groups that he essentially dismisses as irrelevant--the two groups that have some subject matter expertise when it comes to cycling as a transportation option.

Geller would likely put me in the "strong and fearless" group, based on how I answer the questions in his survey.

I resent that pigeonholing, as I consider myself risk-averse. I am not interested in being hit and am hardly a daredevil. I have instead looked at how crashes happen, where they happen, and why, and have used that knowledge to inform my own cycling style so as to enhance my demonstrable safety rather than do "what feels like it might possibly keep me out of the way."

I urge all who enjoy cycling in our city, and especially on Lexington Road, to go to the site I've linked above and learn more. I suspect you will find that, if you consider your own safety of any importance, you will dislike the cycletrack option being considered. Please make that position known to the people who are making these proposals.