For a long time the cyclists of London have been asking for 1000 miles of bike facilities. Now we seem to be getting them, and it serves us right. The bureaucrats, being good public servants, and thrifty with our tax money, are giving us exactly what we want: maximum milage of facilities at minimum cost. They are doing this by giving us lots of bike lanes, and by leaving all the difficult bits until later.
This is good, no doubt say the bureaucrats. Leaving out any particular difficult bit subtracts negligible mileage from the miles completed, and as for any particular hazard, nobody is interested except those living within a couple of miles of it.
What we do get in between the unfixed hazards is thriftiness. We get the lowest cost bike facility that can be built, bike lanes. Some people love bike lanes. I don't. Bike lanes "give cyclists their own place on the road and show that cyclists are legitimate road users. " They also show motorists that most of the road is not a legitimate place for cyclists, thereby giving the motorist a legitimate reason to harass any cyclist who puts a wheel outside the cyclists' ghetto in the gutter.
The technical buzz word for what bike lanes do is "channelization". In other words the motorists run blindly along the white lines like a tram, knowing they have always been given implicit permission to overtake any bikes. Personally, I would rather that motorists thought before deciding to overtake me. Too close overtaking is especially a problem in London because bike lanes in London are always of substandard width, one metre wide. British standards, like those of other countries, say that bike lanes should be one and a half metres wide as a minimum. The result is that motorists always pass me half a metre - one foot eight - too closely, whenever there is a bike lane, unless I foil them by riding along the bike lane's outer paint stripe, or even further out.
Even bike lanes meeting the standard have flaws in their conception. Bike lanes assume that cars never turn left, that bikes never turn right, and that the British never drop any litter.
The left turn problem, how motorists should turn left at a bike lane, is not well treated in the Highway Code. Paragraph 98 of the Highway Code seems to imply that motorists should stay out of the bike lane and then cut sharply across the bike lane as they turn. This is certainly how British motorists actually behave. In the USA this style of turn has generally been made illegal, or rather never made legal, for cars, because it is too dangerous to cyclists. [See for example the California Motor Vehicle Code, viewable on the Internet at http;//www.leginfo.ca.gov/calaw.html. Look at Division 11, Rules of the Road, Chapter 6, Turning and Stopping and Turn Signals. para 22100 - (a) refers]
The right turn problem is with cyclists turning right from a bike lane. Bike lanes encourage novice cyclists to turn right straight out of the bike lane, rather than merging to the centre of the road first, or making a pedestrian style crossing. Such novice cyclists often also have the novice problem in looking behind as they make their right turn. In fact, thanks to the common emphasis on hand signals in cyclist training, many cyclists, especially those who do not drive a car, believe that a hand signal changes the right of way rules, and entitles a bike to turn right, even right in front of a car.
The litter problem makes bike lanes worse for cyclists even when no bikes are around, because cars keep out of the bike lane even when no bikes are around. When cars drive along a road their tyres sweep the litter off the road, to the edge. If there is a bike lane the cars sweep the litter into the bike lane and never sweep it out again. This means that bike lanes are far more likely than average to contain broken glass, and that therefore a bike in a bike lane is far more likely than average to hastily swerve right under the wheels of a car.
Bike lanes are obnoxious along ordinary streets, but where bike lanes get really dangerous is when they are extended into roundabouts. Paragraph 200 of the Highway Code says that cyclists "may feel safer" keeping near the kerb at roundabouts, rather than following "the correct procedures". Note the careful weasel wording here by the Highway Code. The Highway Code avoids saying that you will be safer, and strongly implies their method is not "the correct procedure". This is hardly surprising. Keeping to the left puts the cars in your blind spot, puts you in the cars' blind spot and makes both of you cut across each others path. Bike facilities at roundabouts always put the bikes into this dangerous position. Making the edge of the roundabout into a separate bike track is no different in concept from an on the road lane, except that a separate path gives motorists a bigger shock when cyclists cross their path. Cars and bikes still have to cross each others' paths in exactly the same unsafe way. The bad arrangement on the ground is usually coupled with a bad arrangement in the rules. Usually with bike lanes the the right of way laws are changed from the normal rules at roundabouts, by abolishing the cyclists' normal rights of way when they are in the bike lane. This conveniently makes all the accidents legally "the cyclist's fault", concealing the reality that the fault is of those who pushed for and built the dangerous facility in the first place.
I have heard it said that dangerous bike facilities do not matter. What matters, supposedly, is what the advocates call "perceived danger" not real danger, in other words danger as perceived by ignorant and innocent novices, rather than danger as it really is. If a bike facility looks safe to innocent novices and thereby attracts new cyclists out on to the road that is good, even if it encourages behaviour by those new cyclists which puts their lives at risk.
I doubt the wisdom of such a policy. Its not only immoral, it will not work. Dangerous facilities won't increase cycling. When the first car passes the new cyclist fifty centimetres too closely the novice will give up cycling in town and become one more of those who say "How can you cycle in London, Don't you find it dangerous" Actually I don't find cycling in London dangerous, or I wouldn't do it, but that is the subject for a different article.
Jeremy F. Parker, August 1997