But if not Lanes - What?

Jeremy Parker
from Barnet LCC Newsletter
Oct 1997

Fortunately there is an answer. The answer has been in use successfully in the USA for more than 20 years, is generally preferred there by cyclists with experience of it, can be installed anywhere where bike lanes might be installed, is now a recommended technique in British standards as well as US standards, and is beginning to be installed successfully in Britain.

The answer is the `wide curb lane.'

Imagine a bike lane + a car lane, and then take away the white dividing line, and any funny paving colouring, so you end up with one wide lane. Essentially you have an invisible bike lane built into the car lane. The bikes and cars still have the same width that they had before, but there are lots more advantages:

• drivers overtake bikes using their common sense, rather than blindly running along the line like a tram, assuming that they always have permission to overtake without deviating, no matter what. (This is especially important in the case of buses and HGVs)
  
  
• if no bikes are around, the cars use the space nearer the curb, thereby keeping it swept clean of litter
  
  
• if bikes want to move right, to pass a parked car, a stopped bus, or a patch of broken glass (but there is less broken glass), motorists are more ready to let them do so - cyclists don't lose their right of way by having to cross a white line.
  
  
• wide lanes don't encourage poor behaviour by left turning cars or right turning bikes, or straight through bikes where there are lots of left turning cars - they don't 'channel' bikes and cars into the wrong position on the roadway at intersections
  
  
• a not quite wide enough facility is still useful, and not actually dangerous, as is the case with bike lanes
  
  
• wide curb lanes cost almost nothing to install, if the installation is done during normal repainting - it is just a matter of shifting the white line(s) over a bit.
  
  
• wide curb lanes do not encourage novice cyclists to get in over their heads on busy roads
  
  
• wide curb lanes do not encourage the belief that cyclists must be kept to their own bicycle bantustans, not the belief that for their own good bikes can only be allowed on normal roads if given their own ghetto in the gutter.

Wide curb lanes are pretty common in the USA, about as common as bike lanes, and have been for 20 years. Cyclists in the USA know about bike lanes, and therefore tend to oppose them (as do I). The only argument used in the USA in favour of bike lanes over wide curb lanes is that anti-bike traffic engineers (does that cover Barnet?) might be prepared to give cyclists bike lanes, when they would not give wide curb lanes - the militant motorists like the bike bantustan effect.

Cycle-friendly Infrastructure, the new British standard, released just over a year ago jointly by the DOT, CTC and IHT, talks about wide curb lanes, and says that wide curb lanes do exist in England, in Birmingham, but I do not know whether they exist anywhere else here. If they do not, they should.