Move Redmond: Add protection to buffered bike lanes in the city budget + A note on evolving bike lane terminology

Move Redmond put out an action alert asking people contact the Redmond City Council and/or attend one of the upcoming public hearings on October 15 urging them to add enough funding to upgrade the city's planned buffered bike lanes to protected bike lanes.

Now, I may be biased because Move Redmond's Executive Director Kelli Refer is also my spouse and the love of my life (that's her cheering as our cargo bike hits 10,000 miles). But it's also a reasonable and worthwhile ask. Buffered bike lanes increase the space between the bike lane and the general purpose lane in order to better enforce a safer passing distance and make the bike experience more comfortable. But if you're creating a buffer space anyway, why not add a barrier there and get more benefit out of the same road space? Sure, the barriers do cost more money, but the level of safety and comfort they provide are well worth it. You don't want a Redmond community member to give biking a chance only to have to make a scary merge into traffic because someone parked in the city's brand new bike lane.

Redmond already has a beloved and widely-used bike trail network," the organization wrote in their sample action alert text. By adding physical protection to bike lanes, we can create a trail-like experience on our streets."

The streets in question include Bel-Red Road, Avondale Road, Old Redmond Road and Red-Wood Road.

A note on evolving bike lane terminology

The terminology around bike lane types is getting a bit mixed these days. It used to be that buffered bike lanes" only referred to painted buffers without anything in the buffer space, like much of Dexter Avenue along Queen Anne. This is how Seattle Bike Blog uses the term. But I've lately seen people start to refer to bike lanes with plastic flex posts as buffered," reserving the term protected" for bike lanes with physical barriers that might actually impede a vehicle from entering the bike lane. I get the reasoning behind this shift in language, but it also introduces new complications. For example, there are many bike lane barrier materials that fall into the middle ground, such as those plastic posts mounted on a larger plastic curb or those zebra-striped armadillo" things or even concrete curbs that people can drive over without too much issue.

My preference is to refer to any bike lane with something physically located in the buffer space as a protected" lane, but then describe the level of protection and differentiate between using temporary materials and permanent materials. As SDOT's Even Better Bike Lane project has demonstrated, there are great temporary options that offer various levels of protection. Using plastic posts or other temporary materials when building a bike lane that is not part of a larger road reconstruction project allows the city to move more quickly and more cost effectively, which should in theory allow them to build out more miles. When a road is reconstructed, however, the city should build permanent barriers.

It's worth having a wide range of tools available at different price points, especially since the context of each bike lane will vary. We don't need or want a big freeway-style barrier on a slower neighborhood street because it would make the street look and feel like a freeway, but we likely do need them on state highways, streets near freeway ramps and industrial streets with heavy freight traffic. Some streets might have long stretches where minimal protection is perfectly fine and key problem spots where more significant barriers are needed.

In general, I think the job of advocates should be to push for the desired result: A bike lane network that is safe and comfortable for people of all ages and abilities. Determining what kind of barrier meets this criteria for a particular project is a traffic engineer's job. Ideally, advocates should not even need to go into technical decisions about bike lane barrier materials, but SDOT has not always gotten it right in the past. The good news is that thanks in large part to advocates, SDOT in recent years has been making good barrier decisions reliably. There are plenty of older bike lanes with inadequate protection, but bike lanes from the past couple years have been much better.

So at least for now Seattle Bike Blog will keep using the term protected" to include essentially anything physically located in the buffer area, which aligns with how SDOT categorizes them for official purposes. We can debate about the level of protection, but even those flimsy plastic posts do provide a significant upgrade from no posts at all. Unless they are destroyed.