Scope of bicycle programs

Bicycle programs consist of four major elements, commonly called "the four E's."

The four E's

The four E's are Engineering, Education, Enforcement and Encouragement. Since this report is based largely on a facilities inspection tour, it emphasizes engineering. I will add some general comments about education, enforcement and encouragement here.

Generally, enforcement must be coordinated with education and engineering. Enforcement is not practical unless bicyclists understand the laws that apply to them, and is not welcome unless bicyclists know that riding lawfully is in their own best interest. Police often also must know what bicyclist behaviors are appropriate as targets for enforcement. In this report, enforcement of the traffic law is treated briefly in the page on the City of St. Louis, whose police department has a bicycle patrol.

Enforcement depends on good engineering. If, for example, traffic signals are actuated by vehicle detectors which do not respond to bicycles, enforcement against bicyclists' running red lights becomes problematic. An officer could instruct bicyclists to use pedestrian pushbuttons, if these exist, but even so, the delays this imposes on the bicyclists make this enforcement unwelcome. I was pleased to find that the vehicle detectors I observed in the St. Louis area are of a type capable of responding to bicycles; actuators are discussed in the page on St. Louis County. However, there are other engineering issues (including, for example, use of sidewalks) which can affect enforcement. I have posted a longer discussion of the traffic signal actuator issue on my personal web site.

Education is not the same as enforcement. While enforcement can provide an incentive for education, merely knowing and observing the traffic law is not enough to produce a competent bicyclist. To ride a bicycle confidently and correctly, it is necessary to have specialized bicycling skills, just as it is necessary to have special skills to operate any other vehicle. The majority of Americans who ride bicycles have not learned how to pedal efficiently, how to use hand signals to negotiate right of way, or even how to mount and dismount for traffic stops. Without these skills, it is as impossible to operate a bicycle correctly as it is to drive a car correctly without knowing how to operate the controls.

I have devoted a page of this report to education, since I was able to determine the status of bicyclist education in the St. Louis area by observation.

Encouragement occurs through bicyclists' being made to understand that bicycling is welcome in a community. A government publicity campaign can help, but bicyclists need to feel that the government is following up its words with actions, and that the public at large accepts bicyclists in the traffic mix.

Encouragement and facilities

Encouragement is often misunderstood as depending on the construction of particular types of bicycle facilities. Ten or twenty years ago, bicycle paths were regarded as essential. Then, in 1992, the U.S. Department of Transportation's National Bicycling and Walking study showed no meaningful correlation between the number of bicycle path miles in an urban area and the amount of bicycling for transportation.

The same study shows a correlation between bike lane mileage and bicycling for transportation, but even this correlation raises a chicken and egg question: do people choose to ride bicycles because of the existence of bike lanes, or did the popularity of bicycling in a community lead to political support for the construction of bike lanes?

Though the answer probably lies somewhere between the two extremes, many advocates of bicycle and pedestrian transportation have seized on bike lanes as a means to encourage bicycling. The advocacy for bicycle lanes often drowns out questions about what type of facility is appropriate -- or even feasible -- in a given situation. The standard width for a bike lane is based on the assumption that all bicycle travel will be in the bike lane, even when one bicyclist must overtake another. This assumption is appropriate when both bicycle and motor traffic are very heavy. Under all other conditions, bicyclists can merge into gaps in the stream of motor vehicles to overtake other bicyclists.

A single-minded insistence on bike lanes can result in no improvement whatever, even when enough road width is in fact available to accommodate bicycle/motor vehicle lane sharing. A wide lane for side-by-side bicycle/motor vehicle lane sharing need be only 14 feet of usable width to meet AASHTO guidelines ⁽¹⁾. A bike lane must be at least 4 feet wide (or 5 feet wide when adjacent to a parking lane, curb or guardrail) to meet those same guidelines, and this width is in addition to that of the adjacent travel lane, which is 12 feet if to MoDOT standards (or a minimum of 11 feet if to St. Louis County Highways and Traffic Department standards).

Bike lanes also lead to conflicts in crossing and turning movements. This problem has largely been avoided in the few bike lane treatments I observed in the St. Louis area, but is a very real issue if bike lanes are placed inappropriately. The issues of widening the roadway, striping, and designation as a preferred bicycle facility should be examined separately, since any combination of these alternatives may be the best one.