Using Bike Lanes to Help Reduce Traffic
Adopting a well-planned bicycle network can create a reduction in vehicle traffic in busy areas
Dover is getting ready to unveil its bike plan for the city and my group is excited to see the plan because we believe that there is so much opportunity in building a strong, bicycle-focused network. Right now, choosing to bike around Dover typically means biking in 30MPH+ traffic. Even near our schools, streets are designed for 30MPH traffic, but have flashing lights meant to notify motorists to pretty please consider their speed. This mix of movement speeds creates an uncomfortable, frustrating, and dangerous scenario where cyclists are in the way of faster traffic, but have no where safer to be. This is probably why you see fewer cyclists than you might expect. A safe, clear lane or path for cyclists is missing. Today I want to cover one of the reasons why we believe bike lanes are a fantastic value for cities looking to improve their transportation network and even how motorists would benefit!
2025 March Meeting Details
Monday, March 10 6:30PM - 8:00PM
Juniper Kitchen
6 Third St,
Dover, NH 03820
We will be reviewing a bike plan. I’ve asked Dover city staff for early access to their recently finalized plan. So hopefully we can familiarize ourselves with its goals and see if there is room to advocate for changes. If Dover does not have the plan ready for review by the time of this meeting, then we will review Portsmouth’s Bike Plan so that we can at least familiarize ourselves with how a plan is laid out and come up with ideas for feedback for Dover’s plan. I would love it if people showed up with some ideas in mind, because I want that the be the driving force of the discussion.
Building Bike Lanes in Good Places
There is a lot of bottled up opportunity waiting to be tapped into with bike lanes. There might be pushback against this saying that there aren’t enough cyclists for bike lanes, so why build them? Well, I want you to imagine judging the demand for a bridge by how many people choose to swim across a river. Imagine if you went into a restaurant that only sold burgers and judged the demand for a tacos based on how often one was ordered. Do you think that would be a fair way to determine market demand? Studies show that if you build it, people will use it.
Ideally, our cities and towns would be bike friendly, either with dedicated lanes or traffic that moves slow enough that we feel safe biking next to it. However, that is not our current situation. We have built a transportation system that prioritizes a single form of transportation, motor vehicles, at the expense and comfort of all other forms and there will be some design challenges involved in creating a productive cycling network. So, how do we find routes where bike lanes can give us great value?
Sticking with that word “productive”, helps us find key routes that biking infrastructure could benefit us. Strong Towns suggests the following line of questions:
Where do people now bike for transportation and not merely for recreation?
Where are those trips most difficult or dangerous?
What is the quickest and cheapest way to alleviate that difficulty or danger?
The first question focuses on transportation, not recreation and that is key. Let’s be honest, if you could only drive your car to sightseeing destinations or along highways, but not to pick up groceries or any other daily routine you engage in, how often would you drive? Making biking a productive choice is the key to unlocking the benefits of bike lanes.
Bike Lanes Get Drivers Off of the Street
When cars are your only comfortable option to get places, then more people will choose that path and as your travel lane capacity fills up, those same people will suffer the traffic. Traffic means pent-up demand for access to transportation. However, people want access to transportation itself, not just one form of it. By choosing routes where we can connect lots of residences to lots of nearby economic activity centers, we can simultaneously decrease the vehicle traffic, and reduce the demand for parking at those destinations.
This tactic can work great when you look at what state governments call collectors or minor arterials and reconfigure them to include the missing bike lanes. The reason this choice is usually so valuable is because these infrastructure investments were made to connect lots of smaller, slower traffic streets to economic centers in town. Unfortunately, these wide collectors regularly have high speed traffic that is unsafe for cyclists without dedicated infrastructure. These high speeds are codified in the posted speed limits, but are also a driver’s natural response to the streets physical design.
However, there is a challenge here in the form of available space. Street widths are relatively fixed, so where do we put these bike lanes? Current street designs are usually overbuilt in favor of vehicles to prioritize traffic flow and speeds. Each street is a unique challenge, but if we are willing to make some changes to the design of the street, we can typically find space for accommodating other forms of travel by minimally reducing the amount of street dedicated towards vehicles. This is really a matter of priorities, and it is my hope that this article makes the case that only prioritizing vehicles creates problems, and that by balancing our priorities we can alleviate those problems.
Let’s take Broadway Street in Dover up to Oak Street, it connects to 10 residential streets directly, and all of the streets between those. This section of town is actually listed as an upcoming project in the CIP and will be receiving around $23 million in investments, an opportunity for the city to make improvements such as bike lanes. According to Google Maps:
Middle of Ham Street:
10 Minute Walk
3 Minute Bike Ride
2 Minute Drive
Middle of Oak Street:
17 Minute Walk
5 Minute Bike Ride
2 Minute Drive
Considering that the difference between walking and biking is so drastic, but the difference between biking and driving is so minimal I think this could be a winning route. There a lots of people living here who might choose to bike into town if there was a safe path to do so, especially if it meant they didn’t have to fight or pay for parking once they arrived.
By implementing this, we can take people who would choose to drive by car and give them the additional choice of bicycle. Every person who chooses to go into town by bicycle reduces the number of vehicles creating traffic in downtown. We did lose parking in the process, but it was low-demand parking that we are trading for a form of transportation that lets us preserve the more valuable parking in downtown.
Most Cities Can Do This Quickly and Affordably
The above proposed solution is a relatively cheap solution. It simply repaints some lines and adds a few bollards. The repainting is done pretty regularly and is an expected expense. We are just moving or adding another line. That’s not that costly of a solution and if bollards are too expensive, put up some big flower pots, jersey barriers, or parking curbs. Something that prevents vehicles from entering into the dedicated bicycle zone. The takeaway that I want you to have is that if your city is talking about investing in widening a street, adding lanes, or building more parking to combat vehicle traffic and demand, bike lanes are almost certainly a significantly cheaper option.
Conclusion
This article is only focusing on a single benefit that biking can provide for a community, but there are so many more. I could have written a lot more to this article, because studies have shown economic benefits to places with bike lanes, health benefits for a community, social benefits, and safety benefits. There really is a lot for a community to gain when it focuses on movement of people, instead of vehicles. It helps us move the needle in the direction of building a transportation network that works for nearly everyone, not just those who are able to drive. We should care about that outcome and it should bother us that people feel that car ownership is a necessary expense to participating in American life.