By Benedict Wright, Bicycle Colorado Education Manager

Are bike lanes a good idea? While the answer may be an obvious and intuitive “yes” for many bicyclists and even non-bicyclists, for some bike advocates the answer is not so simple.

Some advocates argue that bike infrastructure—especially separated paths or lanes—is often counterproductive. Bicyclists fare best, these advocates say, when they are asserting themselves, taking the lane, and navigating the road just like a car. They claim that creating segregated spaces for bikes and other non-car users leads to confusion, increases potential hazards, and makes it more difficult for cars and bikes to share the road under the same rules and expectations.

I bring up this perspective because it recently surfaced in the opinion pages of the Colorado Springs Gazette, but the argument presented was nothing new. The idea that bikes should only be considered vehicles, just like cars, dates back at least to the 1970s when John Forester coined the term “vehicular cycling.” Vehicular cycling has been the subject of both admiration and controversy in the bike advocacy world for many years and its proponents, as the Gazette opinion pages remind us, are still active today.

The Gazette essay’s author, an avid adventure cyclist, long-time bike commuter, and bike advocate argues that apologists for bike lanes, while they may think they are making cycling safer and more accessible, actually fail to reckon with the “hard evidence” (evidence the author does not much provide outside of anecdote) that suggests otherwise. While bike lanes may feel safer to some inexperienced riders, he says, they introduce other points of conflict and danger on the road.

The author questions the promises of health and sustainability made by bike lane advocates. He argues that bike lanes fail to address “root causes of urban mobility challenges”—which again the author does not illuminate for us beyond his claim that “at the end of the day, [cycling] is just not that practical a form of transportation for most people.”

Rather than infrastructure change (fraught with trade-offs and unfulfillable promises), the author’s preferred solution to making cyclists feel safer and encouraging more people to ride is education. Particularly, he supports educating bike riders and drivers to treat each other as vehicles with the same rights and responsibilities on the road. With this education, the author assures us, even timid riders may soon join riders like himself in confidently navigating the roads without the need for the false security of a bike lane.

As someone who works for an organization that champions funding for protected infrastructure, including bike lanes, I take issue with this argument.

First, the author fails to address the evidence that bike lanes and other protected infrastructure for vulnerable road users actually do work to reduce crashes. For instance, a 2021 Federal Highway Administration study found that bicycle lane additions can reduce crashes up to 49% for total crashes on urban 4-lane undivided collectors and local roads.¹ Bike lanes also have been shown to have a traffic calming effect², reducing speeds and improving safety for all road users, especially vulnerable road users. While bike lanes are neither a perfect solution nor appropriate in all cases, they are far more effective than the author suggests. Bike infrastructure not only makes people feel safer, it actually makes them safer.³

The feeling of insecurity many riders experience—which the author dismisses as a growing pain in one’s development into a proper vehicular cyclist—is in fact real and warranted. Our Colorado roads are more dangerous than they once were for people outside of cars.⁴ Cars are bigger and deadlier than they used to be.⁵ Smartphones have made distracted driving a nearly ubiquitous occurrence.⁶ Concern for one’s safety around cars is a leading reason why people (very rationally) hesitate to ride their bike.⁷ It’s not fair or reasonable to tell someone to just get over it and learn to ride in traffic.

Like the author, I, too, ride my bike a lot, and my bike has been my primary mode of transportation and recreation for years. After all that time, I find I prefer to take routes that feel calmer, less stressful, and safer. Those routes are typically marked as bike routes and feature special infrastructure, from protected bike lanes, to multi-use paths, to sharrows, to buffered bike lanes. Imperfect as it is, that infrastructure helps keep me comfortable, sane, and riding my bike on pretty much a daily basis.

That said, I’m no stranger to riding in traffic and taking the lane. Sometimes the kind of riding I do demands it, especially in a rural or mountainous context. But would I take my mother who is dipping her toes back into riding on a route like that? Would I tell a group of 12-year-olds they really should buck up and get out of the bike lane? Of course not.

This brings me to my core criticism of vehicular cycling: it tends to ignore the needs of people who can’t—or don’t want to—ride bikes in a certain way. Are those people not real bike riders? Is their experience on two or three wheels any less real or important than anyone else’s? I would argue no, but I fear the vehicular cyclist advocate would tend to disagree. I worry that vehicular cycling advocates care little about getting more people riding and care a lot about getting certain people to ride a certain way.

In my view, vehicular cyclists often overlook the real “root causes of urban mobility challenges,”, such as the legacies of sprawl and auto-centric land-use and transportation design. The result is a world where it is often unsafe and inconvenient to do anything but drive despite all of the negative consequences for our health, air quality, greenhouse emissions, and in many places the affordability of housing. Instead of trying to change this reality, the vehicular cyclist sees the attempt as either unwarranted or futile. I disagree.

There is nothing inherently natural or rigorously scientific about the way many of our cities and streets have been designed to prioritize the speed and volume of car traffic. As folks like Wes Marshall in his 2024 book Killed by a Traffic Engineer have demonstrated, inertia and ideology have played greater roles than science, reason, or some innate American preference for driving.⁸

I am in this work as an advocate because I think we can—and should—change things to make our streets safer and more accessible for all users.

As a bike educator at Bicycle Colorado, I recognize that many of the principles touted by vehicular cycling, such as riding predictably, being visible, and following road rules, are important. However, I never downplay the fact that bikes are different from cars both in their capabilities and their vulnerabilities. I don’t believe that education alone will get significantly more people riding bikes or significantly improve the safety of those on the road. Nor do I believe infrastructure designed to protect people outside of cars is futile or counterproductive.

Ultimately, my role is to help people choose, utilize, and advocate for the infrastructure that best fits their needs and goals as a rider, rather than imposing my view of how and where a “real cyclist” should ride a bike. For many, bike lanes and protected routes are essential to making cycling a viable, safe, and enjoyable option.

Sources:
1. https://www.fhwa.dot.gov/publications/research/safety/21012/21012.pdf
2. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2667091724000013#bib0008
3. https://highways.dot.gov/safety/proven-safety-countermeasures/bicycle-lanes#psc-footnote
4. https://www.codot.gov/news/2023/june/pedestrian-fatalities-hit-all-time-high-in-2022
5. https://www.iihs.org/news/detail/vehicles-with-higher-more-vertical-front-ends-pose-greater-risk-to-pedestrians
6. https://www.codot.gov/safety/distracteddriving
7. https://usa.streetsblog.org/2022/10/05/three-reasons-that-people-dont-bike-that-policymakers-should-pay-attention-to
8. https://islandpress.org/books/killed-traffic-engineer#desc