The California Bicycle Coalition Seeks to Demystify Building Protected Bike Lanes for Californian Cities

In 2016, CalBike rolled out a campaign to demystify and promote a type of bike lane that was, at the time, still relatively new to the United States but rapidly gaining favor across the country: the protected bike lane, officially called a “Separated Bikeway.” Cities around California and across the world are building these new, safer bike lanes that protect bicycle traffic from car traffic with physical barriers such as planter boxes or parked cars.

These “Separated Bikeways” have been standard procedure in European countries for decades but are still rare here. While California actually leads in the number of protected bike lanes built (tracked in reporting by People for Bikes), the state is far from having enough of these protected bikeways as networked systems. The California Bicycle Coalition wants to rectify that by making it clear that this infrastructure is not only vetted and approved by Caltrans, but is also compliant with both CA HDM (CA Highway Design Manual) and MUTCD (Manual on Uniform Traffic Control Devices).

“Protected bike lanes are a key reason why it’s so safe, comfortable and convenient to ride a bike in cities like Amsterdam and Copenhagen,” said Dave Snyder, the Executive Director of CalBike. “We can have that here too, but first we need to build them.”

The following California cities from North to South had already built separated bikeways by 2016: Davis, Emeryville, Oakland, San Francisco, Alameda, Modesto, Palo Alto, San Jose, Santa Cruz, Carpenteria, Oxnard, Temple City, Santa Monica, Los Angeles, Redondo Beach, Long Beach, San Jacinto, Murrieta, and Carlsbad. Since then, many more cities have adopted this safe infrastructure.

To call attention to the tremendous opportunity to create safer streets for everyone across the Golden State, CalBike contacted elected officials and Public Works Directors in the 50 largest cities across the state and distributed a concise 4-page brochure developed in collaboration with Alta Planning & Design.

The brochure demystifies the process of creating a protected bike lane, showing that Caltrans has approved the design and that it can be inexpensive to build. Any city can build them. Santa Ana partnered with youth at a local KidWorks nonprofit to successfully apply for grant funding for their first separated lane in an area where it’s very dangerous for kids to bike to school. The city was so inspired it went on to successfully apply for further separated bikeway funding.

“In our work planning, designing, and implementing Separated Bikeways across the country, we have seen the many positive benefits including economic, health, and safety firsthand,” said Bryan Jones, Principal of Alta Planning + Design, who helped develop the brochure. “Implementation of separated bikeways in cities throughout California will be key to the success of achieving Caltrans’ vision of tripling ridership on bicycles.”