The struggle against bike lane has turn into an all - out acculturation warfare here in the U.S. , with NIMBYs shrieking about ceding a few feet of precious asphalt while squawking about the apocalyptic over-crowding that change will fetch . But here ’s a bass , data - drive investigation into the truth about wheel lane and dealings .
Two researchers from statitician Nate Silver ’s new siteFiveThirtyEight , Gretchen Johnson and Aaron Johnson , tackle the age - old question : When city tote up lanes to make lifespan better for bikers , do they also end up make life worse for driver ? To investigate , they wait at Minneapolis — which is often cited as one of the expert cities in the land for biking — specifically , 10 miles of its newfangled bike lane where a lane of auto traffic was remove .
Using Minneapolis’sAverage Annual Daily Trafficcounts on those streets , they were able to calculate the number of car trip in the meddlesome direction during peak traveling prison term and divide that by the total route capacitance for a mass - to - capacity proportion , or V / C ratio . A very low V / century ratio imply no congestion . As the V / deoxycytidine monophosphate proportion approach 1 , or 100 percent , you ’ll be adhere in traffic . Anything over .75 is endure to impact your commute .
As you could see for these 10 lane , the V / C did go up , but not up enough to actually make heavy or even severe over-crowding . But what ’s interesting to note is the comparison of the V / C ratios before and after : The street that already had low V / C proportion saw the minuscule increment in traffic volume . This is central , according to Johnson and Johnson :
This is an important item : bicycle lanes do n’t get a wad more congestion if you put them on the correct street . If you trim down the sizing of streets that are already near capacity , you ’ll create severe over-crowding . But if you start with road that are well under capacity , you ’ll only increase the over-crowding a little bit . And it may not even be obtrusive . Slimming down these road that are too “ fat ” is known as a road diet — and yes , that is the expert term .
To prove their possibility , they looked at correlations between the Minneapolis data and one exceptional reaching of street in Brooklyn that ’s currently home to some of the mostvehemently controvert wheel lanesin the history of motorcycle lane . Here , New York City ’s DOTcollected its own head trip data , measure traffic bulk before and after the lane were establish :
chart the Prospect Park West lanes using the same prosody , you ’ll see that the magic V / C proportion only hit about .5 — not enough to cause additional congestion . And that ’s because they were instal on a street that was already perform under capacity .
But that ’s not the only ripe news :
The number of cyclists using the road endure up , and speeding car , cyclists riding on the pavement and wound - make stroke went down . The road dieting is n’t just creating a blank for bikers ; it ’s also seduce the street dependable for other types of user .
award the data to prove that bikes are not obturate traffic might be helpful to commute someone ’s judgement , but this almost makes a better casing for why bike lanes are a good idea : Bike lanes are actually helping to build safe streets . [ FiveThirtyEight ]
Photo by Spencer Platt / Getty Images ; chart via FiveThirtyEight
BIKESCitiesNew York Cityurbanism
Daily Newsletter
Get the best tech , skill , and culture news in your inbox daily .
News from the future , bear to your nowadays .
You May Also Like
