The following is a response to an article entitled Streetscape Safety on LandscapeOnline.
Be sure to see Streetscape Safety for a description of the bike boxes I discuss below.
We are seeing a distressing tendency to use paint to create, and then “solve” a behavior problem.
There has been a spate of fatal collisions between bicyclists and right-turning trucks in Portland, Seattle, Washington DC, and Amsterdam (yes, THAT Amsterdam — they had four in one year). There has been a dogged refusal to look at the actual causes of these accidents, and Portland, unfortunately, has led the pack in this refusal. (A few months ago, I was on a radio talk show with Portland’s bicycle coordinator, Roger Geller, and I was harping on this safety lapse. Geller’s reply: “It’s not all about safety.”)
These cities all have bike lanes that direct cyclists to the right side of right-turning motorists. Imagine if you found traffic control devices for motorists that had right-turning motorists turning across the path of motorists who were headed straight. You’d consider that to be a bad design. It’s no better for bicyclists.
Portland has special laws, which contravene the laws almost everywhere else, that state when there is a bike lane that leads to an intersection, the bicyclist should indeed ride straight in the bike lane, and motorists turning right should scan their mirrors while executing the turn, and be ready to jump on their brakes to give those bicyclists the right of way. This is a policy guaranteed to have a high failure rate. It diverts the motorists’ attention from the critical task of executing a safe turn, to look for someone who is hard to see. Portland’s own city government has conducted a study which shows that this puts the cyclists in truck driver’s blind spots.
Moreover, most of Portland’s streets don’t have bike lanes, so the legal practice changes from one intersection to the next. Inconsistency is dangerous in traffic control devices.
The bike boxes in Portland can have a beneficial effect part of the time. But they only function when the traffic light is red, and when bicyclists use them in a particular way. They serve no function during a green light; they raise questions that they may create hazardous behavior when the light goes from red to green, and they will not prevent the right-hook collision if a bicyclist does not use them to move directly in front of motor vehicles at the intersection.
The bike boxes were installed in clear violation of the Federal Highway Administration’s regulations for experimental traffic control devices, and then, under pressure from a congressman, authorization to experiment was retroactively granted. The paperwork had to be recalled because in the first go-round, no engineer had signed it. Portland found an engineer they could persuade to sign it.
There is much the landscaping community can do to make conditions better for bicycling — but your expertise is not in the causes and countermeasures of bicycle accidents, nor in the design of traffic control devices. Don’t get snowed by Portland’s public relations machine.