Fix Biking 2: Design a City Bike Network Around These 5 Principles

Every bike project should be connected, direct, safe, comfortable and attractive

The Dutch know a thing or two about building a bike network. All that wisdom has been distilled into the CROW Design Manual for Bike Traffic. 

The CROW manual has become the international go-to guide for bike network design. It lays out 5 principles that every bike network – anywhere – should follow. 

Connected. Direct. Safe. Comfortable. Attractive.

In Canada and elsewhere, we need to make sure our bike networks are following these principles. Let’s look at them in a little more detail.

1. Connected to Other Safe Bike Infrastructure

A chain is only as strong as its weakest link. That applies equally to biking. 

A city can have kilometres of protected lanes, but if those protected lanes end suddenly and throw riders back into traffic, a lot of people won’t use the bike network at all.

So individual bike projects need to connect to other safe bike infrastructure. That’s pretty obvious to anyone who has ridden a bike in a city. 

The CROW design actually calls this principle cohesion, from “anywhere to everywhere”, and includes integration with transit. 

For cities that are still installing islands of protected bike infrastructure, we suggest you at least inform the public of future plans to fill the missing links. Also, provide signage to nearby protected lanes.

2. A Direct Route of Travel

Biking takes effort. No one on a bike wants, or deserves, a circuitous route. 

All bike networks should be designed to provide as direct a route as possible. If you make safe infrastructure too inconvenient, people won’t use it. 

Furthermore, we want cycling to be as competitive as possible with cars and transit in terms of how long it takes people to get to their destination. That requires direct routes that give priority to sustainable transportation. Planners in North America don’t always want to hear this, but road networks should be designed so that biking and transit are the fastest and most convenient ways to access congested urban areas.

If we think of a city transportation network as a grid, directness means that parallel sets of bike infrastructure should be no more than 300-500 metres apart.

3. Safety Means Separated and Protected

You’ve heard that “paint is not infrastructure”. Safe cycling means physical separation from cars whenever possible.

It turns out that cycling infrastructure has a calming effect that slows down traffic and makes streets safer for everyone. Cycling infrastructure reduces fatalities for all road users – drivers, pedestrians and cyclists. 

With added bike lanes, researchers found that US road death rates fell by 75% in Portland, 61% in Seattle, 49% in San Francisco, 40% in Denver and 38% in Chicago. 

Sharrows, at best, do nothing. At worst, they increase accident rates by giving cyclists a false sense of security. 

4. Comfort Matters

The more comfortable the ride, the more the bike infrastructure is used.

Making a bike network comfortable starts with minimizing stops and disturbances. That means smooth pavement, continuous pathways, and avoiding unnecessary stops. It means “cyclists dismount” signs are kept to a minimum. It means clear signage so that cyclists are able to move around efficiently without unnecessary detours or getting lost. Comfortable bike infrastructure also provides enough width that we’re not worried about running into others, or that we can bike side-by-side.

5. Make it Attractive and They Will Come

People are more likely to use things that look nice. So to get people to use bike infrastructure, give it some flair. Greenery, open spaces, street art, good lighting. These are all ways to make a space more attractive. 

Some may argue we don’t have the money to spend on making something attractive. That’s nonsense. Attractiveness is simply a way to get more people to use the infrastructure that you’ve spent taxpayer money to build.

Connected. Direct. Safe. Comfortable. Attractive.

These five principles provide a clear framework for looking at individual projects, and evaluating how much they will get used.

How many of the bike projects in your city – existing and planned – follow these principles?