In the taxonomy of city streets, the cycle track is the platypus.
Sandwiched between the sidewalk and the parking lane — neither a trail, a
sidewalk, nor a travel lane — it defies the conventional spectra of
classification and challenges where the sidewalk ends and the street
begins.
In spite of their curious and (as of now) sporadic cameos on American
city streets, cycle tracks have long tradition in Northern Europe, and
have more recently emerged on streets from Seoul to Seville. Since 2007,
when New York City cut the ribbon on its inaugural Ninth Avenue cycle
track, the movement for separated bikeways has accelerated in the United
States; and culminated in 2011, with the publication of the National Association of City Transportation Officials’ (NACTO) Urban Bikeway Design Guide, a catalogue of innovative bikeway design concepts for US cities.
The NACTO Guide heralds a new era of thinking about our streets and
public spaces, discovering in the asphalt tundra of the American
metropolis an unlikely well of creative potential. Along with a growing
cadre of city street design manuals, the guide beckons the twilight of
the motor century and upholds the growing sentiment that the antidote to
traffic congestion is neither highway nor tunnel, but an imaginative
repurposing and reallocation of the street itself. Today, as an emerging
generation of designers and engineers rise to challenge the traditional
rubric and protocol of traffic engineering, the first highly visible
struggle will be that of the cycle track.
What follows contextualizes the cycle track in the lineage of
transportation in the United States. Three persistent themes stand out:
the tension between rural and urban transportation policy; the question
of dedicating versus sharing road space; and the interpretation and
limitations of conventional design standards and criteria.
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| photo by aprilshowers2462 |
more about bicycle planning:
Good post!!
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