Important: I’m thinking out loud here! The title is a question because I don’t have answers and am not proposing anything.
Now that we have scooters sharing bike lanes, I wonder if we’ll need to think more clearly about the different kinds of lane on a street and what their real defining features are. This could lead to different words.
We separate traffic types for two reasons:
- Speed, so that faster vehicles aren’t often stuck behind slower ones,
- Width, so that we use less space to serve the needs of narrower vehicles, thus using scarce space more efficiently overall.
Sarah Iannarone and I were chatting about this on the bus this morning, and after that she went straight to the whiteboard and drew this:
The idea here is that a street with a speed limit over 30 km/hr will need to separate these three kinds of traffic, because they differ in both speed and width. At lower speeds you can mix them more.
Where speed and width come apart, however, speed has to be the defining feature. You can’t ride a motorbike at 30 km/hr down a “bike” lane, even though it may be narrow enough. You have to ride it in the traffic lane, even though that’s a waste of space.
All this came up because I was trying to think of the correct new term for “bike lane” as we proliferate more vehicle types that run more or less at the speed and width of bicycles but are clearly not bicycles, such as electric scooters. The two logical terms seem to be narrow lane or midspeed lane. One way or another the two concepts will need to track with each other.
I wonder if this kind of language can make our sense of the role of these lanes more flexible, and thus less divisive.
There is a lot of room for individual choice here about which lane to use. Cyclists, for example, already choose between midspeed “bike” lanes and full-speed traffic lanes, depending on their preferred balance of speed and safety. Meanwhile, an 8-year-old learning to ride a bike should probably be on the sidewalk. Another reason that “cycle lane” may be a misnomer.
This isn’t easy. The things that might go in a midspeed lane have very different acceleration and stopping characteristics, all of which will cause friction. When I raised this thought on Twitter, I got lots of responses expressing concern about different kinds of vehicles sharing a lane. But even with just the few lane types that we already have, it’s hard to make them all fit. We’ll never have a separate lane for every type of vehicle that needs a slightly different speed, acceleration, or stopping distance. So again, I’m asking a question, not answering it.
Finally, Sarah assigns transit to the full-speed, widest lanes, but of course that leaves open the question of transit priority within that territory. Where there’s demand and room for a bus lane, it should be automatic in my view. It doesn’t even need to be “constructed” necessarily. Just paint the lane red.