One Simple Trick to Add Bike Lanes

The City of Toronto has plans for 20km more bike lanes, pushing back on Premiere Ford’s wishes to rip them out to appease car drivers. To get around any prohibitions and limits, the city will reduce car lane widths in order to give bikes more space, technically within the mandate that the number of vehicle lanes not be reduced.

It seems that officials won’t push back too hard as they feel that the total number of lanes matters more than the space cars are given, which is fine. But I wonder what would happen if states here in the US with preemption strategies would go along with the narrowing of lanes and whether they would heed the research on the topic.

We had Dr. Shima Hamidi on the podcast about two years ago to discuss how narrower travel lanes for motor vehicles are significantly safer.

“We found that 12-foot lanes have actually significantly higher number of crashes than nine- or 10-foot lanes, which is counter to the street design practice and most policies and lane width standards that you see currently happening in the US.”

What she also found was that speed limits mattered when measuring the safety of narrow streets. Streets limited at 25mph didn’t see a big difference, but when the speed limits went over 35 miles per hour, the lane widths at 12 and 11 feet had a significantly higher rate of crashes compared to ten foot lanes.

If cities are in fights over more bike lanes and need more space, a three lane road with 12 foot lanes could probably net 6 more feet of space if reduced. Then when the rules eventually change, there will be a whole ten more feet to take another lane if needed in the future.  Win-win.

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