How to Pick Your Next Bike Lane Battle

Image via Unsplash.

Bike infrastructure is one of the most high-return investments a city can make. It allows people to get around town at a very affordable price point while helping residents stay healthy at the same time. And the wear-and-tear bikes create on roads is a tiny fraction of the wear-and-tear caused by cars, meaning that a bike-friendly city can spend far less on routine maintenance. Bike access is also good for businesses, with several studies showing that businesses see a jump in profits when bike lanes are added.

So you’re on board with the benefits of biking. But what’s next? How do you move your city in the direction of greater bike access, without getting bogged down in arguments about biking vs. parking, or where to put the next bike lane?

The key is choosing your battles wisely. In most places, the shift toward greater bike access is going to be a gradual one, where changing hearts and minds is an important part of the process. In order to build a culture of biking, we have to be thoughtful about where we build the next bike lane.

Click to access your printable how-to guide.

At Strong Towns, we suggest asking three important questions to help determine the best spot for a future bike lane:

1. Where do people now bike for transportation and not merely for recreation?

2. Where are those trips most difficult or dangerous?

3. What is the quickest and cheapest way to alleviate that difficulty or danger?

We’ve created a handy printable guide to help walk you through these steps. We also offer a one-hour online course all about picking your next bike lane battle, if you want to go deeper. Sign up for the course here.

An Example of How to Use This Guide

Let me walk you through a quick example from my own city of Milwaukee, Wisconsin, to give you an idea of how to apply these three steps.

There’s a main east-west thoroughfare near my house called Oklahoma Avenue. It’s a busy and active street that many people on the south side of the city use to travel. When I’m biking along it, I regularly see other people biking, and they’re not dressed in spandex for a morning exercise jaunt. They’re wearing cook's uniforms or coming out of the metal-working plant or towing kids home from school. So, we’ve answered our first question: Where do people now bike for transportation and not merely for recreation? This street, for sure.

Now onto question #2: Where are the trips most difficult or dangerous? There are painted bike lanes on many parts of the street, but there are some particular areas, especially when Oklahoma passes under a nearby highway, where cars are traveling very fast and the bike lanes disappear. I usually have to pay extra attention when I’m biking here and I’m always nervous about cars swerving too close to me or zooming past me. This stretch of Oklahoma would be a prime place for better bike infrastructure.

Finally, question #3: What is the quickest and cheapest way to alleviate that difficulty or danger? There’s already ample space on the road for bikes to travel. Most of the road is effectively four lanes wide, but with only two lanes of travel, so the space for bike lanes is there. Some ideas for quick and cheap interventions include:

• Painting bright green bike lanes onto the street.

• Striping in some buffer area between the bikes and cars.

• Putting up simple cones or straw bales along the road to mark off a space for bikes.

• Finding some spare concrete barriers in a public works warehouse and using those to create a bike lane.

Check out “Picking Your Next Bike Lane Battle” at the Strong Towns Academy!

And you can find many more “tactical urbanism” ideas for cheap and fast street redesign on the Strong Towns Action Lab.

The point is to identify the places where safer, better biking can make the most impact, and then get out and implement the change immediately. That’s how we build a culture of biking and turn our communities into strong towns.

Download the printable how-to guide and make sure to check out our online course, “Picking Your Next Bike Lane Battle,” featuring Ashwat Narayanan, Executive Director of Our Streets Minneapolis, and Charles Marohn, President of Strong Towns.

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