Many people think that separated bike lanes, or cycleways, are a new idea. In fact they are not; Carlton Reid, in his book Roads were not built for cars, pointed out that in the late 1800 bikes, and bike infrastructure, were all the rage and there were even elevated separated bike highways in the sky.
Modern Mechanix/via
As this clipping from the November 1928 edition of Modern Mechanics shows, separate bike lanes parallel to highways were common in the Netherlands. While doing research for his new book, Bike Boom, (review coming next week) Carlton Reid discovered that the British ministry of transport was imitating the Dutch and building bike lanes parallel to new highways. He writes:
Bike Boom/via
Engineers working in Britain between the wars were often seriously far-sighted in their planning; witness the expansion of the London Underground out into the suburbs long before there was the traffic needed to support it. Making cycleways part of the specification for building highways makes so much sense; as a proportion of the cost of the whole project, it’s relatively cheap. They now do it where I live, in Ontario Canada; when they changed the policy the Transportation Minister noted:
But unlike the Field of Dreams, if you build it, it doesn’t necessarily mean they will come. Feargus O’Sullivan, writing in Citylab notes:
They were also controversial; According to Reid in Bike Boom, cyclists fought against separated bike lanes, believing them to be a motorist plot to ban them from the roads. It was political, even a class struggle. Reid writes:
So there are many different reasons that the lanes fell into disuse, the biggest being the decline of bikes and the explosion of the automobile dominated culture after the war. But in his research, Carlton Reid has found hundreds of miles of these cycleways, but is looking for more. He raised a lot of money on Kickstarter and now is extending the campaign for those who missed it the first time (like me).
It’s remarkable to think that so much bike infrastructure actually exists and was buried, or just misplaced or misidentified. And as O’Sullivan concludes, “if Britain managed to find money to produce state of the art bike lanes during the Great Depression, it can definitely do so again.”
Lloyd Alter/ new highway in China complete with bike lanes /CC BY 2.0
But there is a real lesson here for modern road builders. It should once again be standard practice, part of the specification for highway and road builders in Britain and America: bike lanes are part of the road design, period.
