Surprising Result of NYC Bike Lanes: Faster Traffic for Cars

A report at vox.com says that the implementation of bike lanes in traffic-heavy New York City has one possibly non-intuitive result: car traffic was sped up as a result. The bike lanes have caused the lanes for cars to be narrowed, but as a result of the street redesign to accomodate bikes, one big change has especially helped to keep cars moving forward more steadily: Although narrower streets can slow traffic, that doesn't seem to have happened here — perhaps because traffic in this area was crawling at around 11 miles per hour to begin with. Instead, the narrower lanes were capable of handling just as much traffic, and one major improvement to intersection design helped them handle more, while also letting bikes travel more safely. This improvement was something called a pocket lane for left-hand turns: a devoted turning lane at most intersections that takes the place of the parking lane, which gets cars out of the way of moving traffic when they're making a left.

Comments

Re:Simple change. What about round abouts

[neo-mkrey]

Roundabouts work. A recent Mythbusters proved it: http://www.wimp.com/testrounda...

Re:Bikes lanes are nice

[FreeRadicalX]

NYC cyclist here. The parking lane is still there. They just narrowed the motor lanes a few feet, swapped the bike lane to be on the sidewalk-side of the parking lane ("Parking protected"), and put a left turn pocket at left turn intersections (Every other intersection, since our streets are one-way). The turning pocket only takes up 3 to 4 car lengths, the rest of the parking is still there. There's also parking on the other side of the street.