Research emphasizes bike lane importance

Waterloo tool helps city planners choose best location for bike lanes

WATERLOO — A new tool being developed at the University of Waterloo could help city planners pick the best spots to install bicycle lanes.

Data collected using sensors and handlebar cameras as researchers pedalled hundreds of kilometres around Waterloo and Kitchener showed bike lanes dramatically decreased the frequency of vehicles passing cyclists too closely.

“Drivers will provide adequate separation distance when the facilities are there to enable that,” said Bruce Hellinga, a civil and environmental engineering professor at Waterloo. “And that’s good for both cyclists and drivers.”

Bike lanes make it clear for drivers and cyclists where they should be, boosting safety for and reducing stress for both road users.

On two-lane roads without bike lanes, passing motorists came within a metre of cyclists 12 per cent of the time. With marked bike lanes, that dropped to 0.2 per cent.

“It virtually eliminated the problem,” Hellinga said.

Unsafe passing on four-lane roads was cut from almost six per cent with no bike lanes to 0.5 per cent with bikes lanes. The study used one metre as the threshold for safe passing because that’s the requirement by law in some jurisdictions in North America, now including Ontario.

After collecting the data, they looked at the factors that made drivers feel constrained and unable to pass bikes with a safe distance. Those factors, including traffic volume and flow, are being used to create software that estimates the likelihood of unsafe passes on a particular roadway.

Urban planners could use the tool to evaluate different roads and prioritize adding cycling lanes to where it would have the most impact.

The research was sparked by his own experience cycling to work, the most direct route along busy University Avenue with a bike lane on only a portion. Although Hellinga considers himself a confident cyclist, there were close encounters with cars.

“My perception was vehicles were getting very close to me,” Hellinga said. “It doesn’t feel very good. You feel quite vulnerable.”

Bike lanes, along with improving safety, make cyclists more comfortable and willing to cycle — giving people more options for getting around, he said.

“If they don’t feel safe, that’s a huge barrier.”

While the discussion around bike lanes is often confrontational, Hellinga said the infrastructure is good for all road users. “Everybody benefits. It doesn’t have to be an ‘us vs. them’ thing.”

Hellinga collaborated with graduate student Kushal Mehta and former post-doctoral fellow Babak Mehran. Their paper on a predictive model appears in the journal Accident Analysis and Prevention.