(Williams:) "There may be a car coming
at any moment. I'm gonna pay attention!". So what do you think? You like this bike lane? And no, this is not a one-way
street. This is a two-way street. Picture this: Just ONE LANE
for cars— and no yellow center. Well, if you do like it, you better enjoy it here
in this video. Because by the time you watch it, it's going to be gone.
And it's not even a week old! About a week ago, the city of San Diego finished
up resurfacing this street here in Mira Mesa. And they put in these new bike lanes that we've
never really seen in Southern California before. A narrow neighborhood street like this
doesn't have enough room for bike lanes. So, people riding have to share the full
lane with cars. So, San Diego went back to the drawing board and replaced it all with these:
Two "edge lanes" for bicycles to use and one lane in the middle for cars going in both directions.
So the shared center lane is not wide enough for two cars to pass each other without using one of
the edge lanes. In fact, it's only 12-feet wide. The same width is a freeway lane. One car going
in one direction. And a lot of people hated it. They didn't tell anybody in
the neighborhood they were going to do it and people were really confused.
(Milton:) "I appreciate the intention of somebody who made this decision. All of a sudden here are
the lines in a way we've never seen them before." Milton and Pinh live around the corner.
Even three/four days into the new lanes, they were still too scared to go for a drive on.
(Milton:) "I'm in disbelief, just talking about how it looks so crazy."
(Pinh:) "How do you drive it?" They joined neighbors worried ahead
of crash was an inevitability. The lines went in before the
signs. That's not great, is it? (Pinh:) "Right. The signs are there now though.
But you have to take time to read the signs." And local media coverage was merciless.
(TV:) "A bike lane redo!" (TV:) "These lines popped up overnight"
(TV:) "Really just confused" (TV:) "Not knowing where to turn."
(TV:) "This tragedy waiting to happen." In the city got an earful.
(Resident #1:) "You trash our communities with this crap."
(Resident #2:) "You put up 15 traffic signs over 1200 feet of road."
(Resident #3:) "You're going to have bright lights heading towards you.
That's going to confuse the drivers." (Resident #4:) "Everybody thinks
this is all great. I don't agree." Okay, so San Diego tried something really weird.
But I don't want to dog-pile onto the media coverage— I want to learn something!
So, I decided to ask somebody. How does this work?
(Williams:) "Hi there. My name is Michael Williams. I'm a national
champion of the 'edge lane' road treatment..." An engineer and researcher. He makes the case
that bike lanes, as we know them... are bad! (Williams:) "I'm not saying that."
Okay, I will. (screaming in traffic terror)
You're sandwiched between cars zooming down the street and parked cars that
at any moment somebody could open their car door— and WHAMMO!
(Williams:) "An 'edge lane' road treatment is superior to standard bike lanes."
Especially in places where there's not enough room to build a beefy bike lane like these.
Think about everything a road has to do: Cars get first dibs because,
well, they're paying the bill. But, space permitting, we'd
add good buffered bike lanes. Space to park on the street.
Space for sidewalks. And of course, people like having a front yard.
Usually we don't have this much room, and the bike lane is always the cheapest
and easiest thing to cut out— eh, just let them ride with the cars. It'll be fine.
(Williams:) "If a car comes up behind you, you've got someone who is slowed. "And no one
likes being at the head of a parade, right? You feel like you're holding everybody up behind
you. Not the most comfortable riding environment." So not enough space. Try something
new. One that might help drivers, too. On a normal street, the kind that's "MURICAN"
with the double-yellow line and the shared arrow here for the bicyclists— to ride in your
lane and make you have to wait behind them? You legally can't cross that double
yellow to pass them and go around them. Even if nobody's coming the other way. But if
you get rid of that double yellow, you can! That's the secret sauce behind "edge lane"
roads. You can safely (and legally) pass bikes. (Williams:) "This is really a shared street
format. Drivers are allowed in the 'edge lanes.' The vulnerable road users are
allowed in the center lane as well." Instead of locking people between two solid
lines, which they can't legally leave, there is flexibility in how we use the road.
(Williams:) Maybe there's a couple of people riding their bikes side by side. You can actually
move into the "edge lane" on the left, provide them more room, make it safer, more comfortable
for them— Pass them, come back to the center lane. That may still sound really weird
to you. But think about this. Every neighborhood street is set up this way! There might not be any lines, but people
are driving down the middle of the street. Cars are parked to the side. Kids
playing both on and off the pavement. Neighborhood streets are chaos— on purpose!
(Williams:) "Ambiguity, I believe, is a benefit. We drive almost unconsciously. That's
why we can talk. We can daydream. We can listen to the radio. We can do other
cognitive tasks while we're driving." Lane markings and curbs kind of do some of the
thinking for us. And on high-speed roads like freeways, that's a good thing.
But in neighborhoods? (Williams:) "If I'm on the street and I believe
there may be a car coming at any moment, by golly, I'm paying attention.
(Williams:) "This type of driving happens every day with millions of drivers
all across the country. Slowing down, negotiating with other drivers, other road
users. You do it on these neighborhood roads, you do it in crowded parking lots."
(Williams:) "And so this treatment is really just codifying that kind of driving
behavior. I've got over 60 million motor vehicle trips that tells me this treatment
is safer than a standard two-lane road.". Now, you'll notice Michael doesn't talk about
bicycles. He talks about "vulnerable road users.". Now, I don't own a bike right now,
but I wanted to give this a try. So, I bought something that'll make me a vulnerable
road user. The clerk asked me whether I had a niece or nephew who was having a birthday, and I
lied and said "yes" because it was just easier. Data that Michael and researchers like him have
collected show this type of street has 40% fewer crashes than a normal street with a double yellow
line. Not enough data yet on pedestrian crashes, but he's optimistic, and I can see why.
Everybody seemed to be passing me cautiously. It just didn't feel like the tragedy waiting to
happen that one local TV station claimed it to be. (TV)
Not really. I mean, I was there. The FedEx
truck had room. I had room. Even the cars passing me had room. Yeah, you
had to slow down a little bit, but it was fine. Here's what I mean: You have San Diego here.
The "edge lanes" are up here in the suburb of Mira Mesa, and when the freeways back up, people
cut east and west on local streets— like Mira Mesa Boulevard. But when that backs up, people will
cut through the neighborhood on Gold Coast Drive. But Mira Mesa Boulevard is a big arterial street.
Lines, stoplights, medians. It's designed for it. Gold Coast has people backing out of their
driveways onto it. If you really want it to be a through street connecting you to the
freeway, it's going to have to change a lot. (Williams:) "The cheater routes you do tend to get
higher speeds, and that's bad for any street, no matter what configuration you're talking about."
Unmarked neighborhood streets only work well because they're slow and they're quiet.
(Williams:) "Volume is the enemy. If there are too many people on the 'edge lane,' the cars won't
have a place to pass another car successfully." And since they share lanes, this problem can
come from too many cars and too many bikes. But that's not hard science, at least
not yet. Here's what the Federal Highway Administration has sorted out thus far:
Research indicates that if you stay below that 3,000 (cars per day) mark, with
drivers traveling slower than 25 mph, an 'edge lane' road can work wonderfully.
There are also some successful examples of streets with twice that much traffic
or cars traveling as fast as 35 mph. So, that's kind of the maybe range.
And 'edge lanes' might accommodate more traffic than that. But cars really need to slow down.
Streets that are fast and busy? That's a no no. So could Gold Coast Drive be exceeding that limit?
Could that be why all the neighbors are so upset? So, let's throw the drone up in the air.
The city's average daily traffic count is just beyond that 6,000 (cars per day) mark. And what
I experience here at 06:00 p.m, looks very sedate and reasonable. But neighbors tell me traffic
really spikes when the elementary school gets out. (Old man rant:) Back in my day,
the 1990s, we walked to school! But that's another discussion for another time.
As for speed, the speed limit is posted 25 mph. But people hustling to work might
drive 10 mph faster than that or more. So, all of this makes me wonder is there
a mismatch between the data the city has and the perception residents have? So really,
they're both imagining two different roads. One acceptable for an 'edge lane'
treatment and one that isn't. (TV:) "Workers removing those confusing
street signs this morning which was a welcome sight to a lot of the residents here
along Gold Coast Drive. Crews painted over the bike lanes this morning getting rid
of the dotted lines. We were here as they drew the double yellow line down the center..."
If you want to learn more about "edge lane" roads, check out the paper that Michael helped
author. San Jose State University publishes it. I'll put a link in the comments.
For instance, did you know some rural areas are playing with edge lanes?
And they seem to be working well. It's really too bad that the edge lanes
turned out to be a bust here in Mary Mesa. The question you're probably wondering is:
Should my town try it? And that really comes down to what your town wants. If you have one
of these medium sized streets and you want to slow it down, make it more neighborly,
this is a good option. You should try it. But make sure the city talks to residents
first! Otherwise you can end up with a media circus and a bunch of angry people.
And have history repeat itself. [Closed captioning made possible
by Patreon supporters. Thank you!]
