I really need to get a #PeerTube account for this kind of stuff, but in the meantime: A new stretch of protected two-way bike lane opened in #MadisonWI, completing a new E/W corridor through downtown. The Wilson St corridor was one of the first projects that Madison Bikes worked on, going back to 2017 (see e.g. https://www.madisonbikes.org/2017/05/whats-happening-with-wilson-street-action-alert/) . This last stretch completes the corridor. Hooray! https://youtube.com/shorts/idpjKvixwqI
#FediBikes #ProtectedBikeLanes

#orPol #transportation hearing needs written comment today for #ClimateAction #pdxBikes #ODOTGTFOpdx #TriMet funding #transit and #SafeRoutesToSchool #ProtectedBikeLanes #stuffInTheStreet #BikewayNetwork #Portland #pdx #NoMoreFreeways #BusLanes not #stroads #BikeTooter #OregonWalks #TheStreetTrust

https://bsky.app/profile/thestreettrust.org/post/3lrbps4ntsh2m

Taxis back in the bike lane. There were only two and the rest of the taxis that have gone past have gone to the proper taxi rank so I guess the narrowing of the entrance has mostly worked.

#bicycles #melbourne #ProtectedBikeLanes

Last night to backup an argument I was having I rode to measure the Elizabeth St bike lane and saw that someone on the street has trimmed their tree and dumped it in the bike lane.

The argument was about how wide the lanes are compared to the Wellington St lanes.

The result was that the Elizabeth St bike lanes are generally narrower than the Wellington St bikes lanes.

Wellington St bikes lanes are 240cm most of the way between Johnston St and Gipps St but narrow down to 210cm at some points after that.

The Elizabeth St bike lanes are 230cm at their widest point (but only for one block) and 215cm for the rest of it's length.

The Albert St bike lanes are generally 150cm wide, but have 2 blocks of 210cm at the Nicholson St end.

Both measurements included the gutter which isn't really ridable space.

#bicycles #melbourne #ProtectedBikeLanes

Houston Public Works removed cyclist safety protections, known as “armadillos,” that separated a bike lane from vehicular traffic along Heights Boulevard from Interstate 10 through Washington Avenue.

https://www.houstonpublicmedia.org/articles/news/transportation/2025/03/21/516616/houston-public-works-removes-protectors-along-heights-boulevard-bike-lane-because-of-safety-issues/

#CityOfHouston #Houston #HoustonMayor #Infrastructure #Local #News #PublicSafety #Transportation #AbbieKamin #BikeHouston #HeightsBoulevard #HeightsBoulevardBikeLane #HoustonPublicWorks #ProtectedBikeLanes

#Mönchengladbach: Verwaltungsgericht verpflichtet Stadt zu Rückbau von #ProtectedBikeLanes. Richter verweisen u.a. auf schon vorhandene #Fakeradwege
https://www1.wdr.de/nachrichten/rheinland/moenchengladbach-protected-bike-lane-verwaltungsgericht-eilbeschluss-100.html

Der Umbau der #Reventlowstraße erhitzte die Gemüter, eine sachliche Diskussion kam zu kurz.

Wir wollen zurück auf die Sachebene und wollen von euch wissen, wie gut ihr den Umbau findet.

Beantwortet dazu einfach unsere Fragen unter

https://clvr.ch/Umfrage_Reventlowstrasse

Dauer: 1 Minute.

#hhrad #verkehrswende #sicherradfahren #Altona #hamburg #ProtectedBikeLanes #umfrage

Out of all the bicycle infrastructure that we snuck in during the early pandemic my favourite is Heidelberg Rd.

I don't get to ride it often but it's amazing 😍

In February 2020, Heidelberg Rd was 3 traffic lanes in each direction with a peak hour narrow painted bike lane that became parking outside of peak.

By late 2020, 2km of it was down to 2 traffic lanes in each direction, no parking and a more than 3 metre wide quick build protected bike lane.

In the years since there have been many attempts to get it removed but they've been unsuccessful.

#melbourne #bicycles #ProtectedBikeLanes

The Yarra City Council wants to narrow the bike lanes on Elizabeth St in Richmond to add an additional parking lane.
They're justifying this on the idea that the lanes are overly wide.

The bike lanes are pretty wide by Melbourne bike lane standards but are still narrow by proper bike lane standards, they've got enough space for you to be riding your cargo bike and for someone else to overtake.

The geometry problem that the council encounters is that while there is space on the street for wide protected bike lanes, there isn't enough space to add a parking lane and have bike lanes of a usable width.

When you add an additional car parking lane you need to narrow the bike lanes to at most 1.4 metres (with probably <1m of usable space due to car doors).

The ability to overtake in bike lanes isn't an optional extra it's a complete necessity. Motorists will drive at very similar speeds on local streets, but cyclists will ride at a wide variety of speeds depending on the abilities of the rider (and whether they have electric pedal assist).

Narrow bike lanes make safe overtaking impossible which increases stress and discourages slower riders from wanting to use the lane.

A common response that came back from the Petal project survey was that young women felt uncomfortable riding on busy bicycle paths because they felt like they were in the way and received some level of aggression from faster riders because of it.

If you're in Yarra or ride through Yarra put your name on the petition.

https://form.jotform.com/yarrabike/yarra-council-dont-risk-our-safety

#melbourne #bicycles #ProtectedBikeLanes #yarra #richmond

@xtaran @ascentale @uxmark @meganL
We’ve noticed that the best way to find like-minded groups and individuals is through hashtags on topics that we care about, e.g. #ProtectedBikeLanes, #Tempo30, #CriticalMass – or unfortunately, #Natenom, may he rest in peace.

Wir haben neue #Sticker für euch!
▶️ https://changing-cities.org/shop/
Für mehr geschützte #Radwege - die vielen umgefahrenen #Poller zeigen, wie nötig sie sind.
#ProtectedBikeLanes

Watch me go down this hill at 42mph, glad PBOT seems to have finally swept #bhHwy somewhat. #pdxBikes

These "traffic separator" curbs have a gap between them that's not big enough to get out on a bike, but tends to send a stream of debris diagonally across the lane. Useless bike-containment patriarchal nonsense, needs a different design, besides not offering any protection from 45mph cars. #protectedBikeLanes

As a follow-up to a previous post, here is the finished on-street patio on the Government Street protected bike lane in Victoria, BC (just South of Chatham St). #yyjbike #placemaking #biketooter #protectedbikelanes

BikeLoud volunteers organized this gathering last weekend to honor victims of traffic violence, and invited newly elected city commissioners to join us in remembering *and* ending #TrafficViolence on #Portland streets. We can all try to be more careful, but people make mistakes, and that shouldn't be fatal. #ProtectedBikeLanes save lives for people walking, driving, and on bikes.

https://youtu.be/Y1hftZqy1SI
https://bikeportland.org/2024/11/18/powerful-day-of-remembrance-forces-reflection-and-resolve-391418

#VisionZero #WorldDayOfRemembrance

pdxreporter 2860850 The curbs on BH-Hwy are too close together for people on bikes (including trikes and kid trailers) to be able to get in or out except at the ends, making the "protected" lanes less useful when debris is allowed to pile up in the lane. The water runoff between the gaps also shapes piles of accumulated debris and sticks which cut diagonally across the bikeway, that would cause a fall as the stick rolls a rider's front wheel sideways...
#pdxBikes #BikeTooter #protectedBikeLanes

#Straßburg baut gerade an allen Ecken und Enden solche coolen #ProtectedBikeLanes . Ich wusste nicht, dass diese Stadt so krass auf Fahrräder setzt. Sehr cool!

#Fahrrad #fahrradweg #TraintoStraßburg

New section of Arden St protected bike lanes is almost done.
Between Curzon St and Abbotsford St.
They've moved the angled parking back to make room for a protected bike lane.

It's a good width and the car park chocks are far enough back that even long nosed or long tray utes hopefully won't be able to block any of the bike lane.

#melbourne #bicycles #ProtectedBikeLanes

This Is The Way:

#BikeLanes #ProtectedBikeLanes

Move Redmond: Add protection to buffered bike lanes in the city budget + A note on evolving bike lane terminology

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dv_-gR9ngQo

Move Redmond put out an action alert asking people contact the Redmond City Council and/or attend one of the upcoming public hearings on October 15 urging them to add enough funding to upgrade the city’s planned buffered bike lanes to protected bike lanes.

Now, I may be biased because Move Redmond’s Executive Director Kelli Refer is also my spouse and the love of my life (that’s her cheering as our cargo bike hits 10,000 miles). But it’s also a reasonable and worthwhile ask. Buffered bike lanes increase the space between the bike lane and the general purpose lane in order to better enforce a safer passing distance and make the bike experience more comfortable. But if you’re creating a buffer space anyway, why not add a barrier there and get more benefit out of the same road space? Sure, the barriers do cost more money, but the level of safety and comfort they provide are well worth it. You don’t want a Redmond community member to give biking a chance only to have to make a scary merge into traffic because someone parked in the city’s brand new bike lane.

“Redmond already has a beloved and widely-used bike trail network,” the organization wrote in their sample action alert text. “By adding physical protection to bike lanes, we can create a trail-like experience on our streets.”

The streets in question include Bel-Red Road, Avondale Road, Old Redmond Road and Red-Wood Road.

A note on evolving bike lane terminology

The terminology around bike lane types is getting a bit mixed these days. It used to be that “buffered bike lanes” only referred to painted buffers without anything in the buffer space, like much of Dexter Avenue along Queen Anne. This is how Seattle Bike Blog uses the term. But I’ve lately seen people start to refer to bike lanes with plastic flex posts as “buffered,” reserving the term “protected” for bike lanes with physical barriers that might actually impede a vehicle from entering the bike lane. I get the reasoning behind this shift in language, but it also introduces new complications. For example, there are many bike lane barrier materials that fall into the middle ground, such as those plastic posts mounted on a larger plastic curb or those zebra-striped “armadillo” things or even concrete curbs that people can drive over without too much issue.

My preference is to refer to any bike lane with something physically located in the buffer space as a “protected” lane, but then describe the level of protection and differentiate between using temporary materials and permanent materials. As SDOT’s Even Better Bike Lane project has demonstrated, there are great temporary options that offer various levels of protection. Using plastic posts or other temporary materials when building a bike lane that is not part of a larger road reconstruction project allows the city to move more quickly and more cost effectively, which should in theory allow them to build out more miles. When a road is reconstructed, however, the city should build permanent barriers.

It’s worth having a wide range of tools available at different price points, especially since the context of each bike lane will vary. We don’t need or want a big freeway-style barrier on a slower neighborhood street because it would make the street look and feel like a freeway, but we likely do need them on state highways, streets near freeway ramps and industrial streets with heavy freight traffic. Some streets might have long stretches where minimal protection is perfectly fine and key problem spots where more significant barriers are needed.

In general, I think the job of advocates should be to push for the desired result: A bike lane network that is safe and comfortable for people of all ages and abilities. Determining what kind of barrier meets this criteria for a particular project is a traffic engineer’s job. Ideally, advocates should not even need to go into technical decisions about bike lane barrier materials, but SDOT has not always gotten it right in the past. The good news is that thanks in large part to advocates, SDOT in recent years has been making good barrier decisions reliably. There are plenty of older bike lanes with inadequate protection, but bike lanes from the past couple years have been much better.

So at least for now Seattle Bike Blog will keep using the term “protected” to include essentially anything physically located in the buffer area, which aligns with how SDOT categorizes them for official purposes. We can debate about the level of protection, but even those flimsy plastic posts do provide a significant upgrade from no posts at all. Unless they are destroyed.

#SEAbikes #Seattle

Out for a ride, checking in on the Latrobe St works.
#melbourne #bicycles #ProtectedBikeLanes