Boulder needs standards to keep bike lanes safe

The brand new northbound bicycle lanes on North Broadway are a fatality waiting to happen. The question for the city’s current transportation department and city council is not whether they or their predecessors are to blame for this deathtrap design, but what they will do about it. The city must take action before a cyclist is sent down a poorly designed sloping curb and into car traffic.

The northbound bike lanes put bikes in the “door zone,” where car doors are likely to swing open as drivers exit their parked cars. This is a terrible design in itself and was responsible for 20% of all reported bike crashes in a 2011 Chicago study.

But this design is made worse by the sloping inner boundary of the bike lane, a “mountable curb” dreamed up by Boulder’s planners as an experimental alternative to a fully protected bike lane. The downward slope from the path to traffic creates a physical boundary to the bike lane with considerable peril to cyclists who cross it.

In addition to the yearround hazard from doors, the winter months during which the lanes opened have revealed cars parked well into the bike lane due to snow accumulation extending a foot or more from the curb. This leaves little to no space for bikes to pass.

The death or injury to even one cyclist is simply too high a price to pay to subsidize a relatively small number of free curbside parking spaces for drivers. The current situation makes driving the only safe vehicular option for traveling along North Broadway. In a neighborhood planned to reduce the trap of car dependence, that is a travesty. The city must prohibit parking with the northbound bike lane immediately, and adopt design standards for bike lanes throughout Boulder.

— Mike Mills, Boulder