Bike lane rants are fig leaves covering up serious traffic safety concerns

A while ago, I was numbly scrolling through Facebook when I came across a comment that annoyed me. Someone had written this in my local Frogtown Facebook group:

“When you’re sitting in that long line of traffic on Dale Street just remember it used to be two lanes. It’s almost like the city planners have no common sense but at least there’s a bike lane. [clown emoji][poop emoji]”

This, to me, is a red cape to a bull. The Dale Street road diet that provoked the commenter’s rant had been enacted earlier this year, changing the arterial road from four to three lanes. The change was a long time coming, one I’d been following closely having lived near Dale Street for almost 20 years. A decade ago, a single Ramsey County Board member had repeatedly killed traffic calming measures on Dale. It wasn’t until her ouster in 2018 that the possibility of change dawned. 

Related: New Lyndale Avenue reconstruction plan foregoes separate bike lane, fails the test for non-motorized users

Dale Street was one of many remnant four-lane undivided arterials — what I call “four-lane death roads” — notorious street designs that create large speed differentials and dangerous weaving. These predictably deadly designs have persisted in our cities for generations, as traffic engineers are fond of them because they improve the “level of service” at intersections.

The change to Dale Street is an obvious safety improvement backed by countless studies, but instead of the public conversation centering on traffic safety for drivers and neighbors, everyone seems to be talking about bike lanes instead. This is a phenomenon that I call the “bike lane fig leaf,” where culture war rants about bike lanes cover up more meaningful discussions about vehicle safety. 

In the Dale Street case, the bike lanes soak up Facebook outrage from drivers, though the main reason for the new design is that the street had been extremely dangerous. Today’s bike lane is almost an afterthought, a marginal five feet that isn’t really up to contemporary “protected” standards.

Rondo Avenue bike lanes

You’ll find the most extreme example of this fig leaf phenomenon in another recent St. Paul project. As part of a regular mill and overlay repaving, city engineers painted wide “buffered” bike lanes along Rondo and Concordia avenues just south of Interstate 94 through St. Paul. The result is another traffic calming change to one of the city’s most dangerous streets in the city’s most famous historically Black neighborhood. 

Before the new design, Rondo/Concordia had been a two-lane, one-way road running directly past people’s front yards. Years ago, one neighbor took a radar gun and clocked people at speeds as high as 57 miles per hour in front of their house. Today, along what was once a de facto frontage road with drivers escaping traffic, there’s a wide space striped for bicycles where the extra driving lane used to be.

It’s another long overdue safety improvement, but to me it’s unfortunate that the bicycle facility is masking the engineering logic that’s at work. The city isn’t much help in clarifying what’s going on here, either. According to Lisa Hiebert, a spokesperson from St. Paul Public Works: “The St. Anthony/Rondo project is a good example of how St. Paul leverages planned street maintenance projects to make additional traffic calming, pedestrian and multimodal improvements where possible.”

That’s a lot of vague words that mask the underlying reality: the new design is overwhelmingly a traffic calming safety improvement, while the bike lane itself is almost unusable. Every half mile, the buffered bike lane disappears into tiny strips of green paint as it crosses wildly dangerous I-94 on-ramps. Theoretically, cyclists would have to make their way through these chaotic turn-lane intersections with cars flying by on their way to I-94. That’s something I wouldn’t wish on anyone, and if I ever see a cyclist using this new bike lane, I’ll be surprised.

Unofficially, though, the “bike lane” is a great idea if you judge it solely as a traffic calming project. The change reduces speeding, speed differentials and lane changes and will likely save lives. 

In a sense, the “bike lane” here is a cheaper, faster solution to a larger engineering problem. It would have been more honest if the city had simply installed Jersey barriers or bollards, and used the space for literally anything else: a hydrangea garden, storage for impound vehicles, or a sculpture garden. Instead of the unusable bike lane, the city could put up signs saying, “This Infrastructure Change Made For Critical Safety Reasons.”

Related: Has Minneapolis spent billions of dollars on bike lanes?

This same “fig leaf” principle applies for many more urban street design efforts, where cyclists get blamed (or, more rarely, praised) as the focal point around larger, more nuanced safety improvements. The most high-profile example is the seemingly interminable Summit Avenue Regional Trail saga, almost always framed by the media as a “bike lane” project. In fact, it’s a dispute over infrastructure timing, and the bike lane portion of the project is almost a marginal cost, a small adjustment within a needed, expensive street reconstruction project. 

My suspicion about why this happens is that it’s easier for most people to argue about whether you can bike in November in Minneapolis than deal with the actual problems with an automobile-dominated city. Every news outlet has a file photo of a bicyclist speeding down a street ready to go. Rather than think about more complex problems like speeding, crosswalks or the increasing expense of street infrastructure, it’s easier to make jokes about spandex. Bicycles end up serving as convenient fig leaves for other real problems around making our city streets safer for our kids, elders and neighbors. 

That’s my theory, anyway. At any rate, I should stop commenting on Facebook. 

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