Coming soon to Detroit: Protected bike lanes

Call this a change we can live with.

Detroit is about to create its first protected bicycle lanes, which offer a major boost to the safety of bikers, and might in the long run promote more economic development in a city that badly needs it.

The first protected bike lanes — lanes separated by barriers from the nearby traffic — will be built in coming weeks on East Jefferson Avenue near the city's Alter Road border with Grosse Pointe Park. That stretch eventually will extend along Jefferson to East Grand Boulevard and eventually to downtown, with similar protected lanes installed around the city over time.

The idea has been around for awhile but took on new urgency last year after Ron Brundidge, director of the Detroit Department of Public Works, and other civic leaders visited Copenhagen, Denmark.

Copenhagen is world renown for its biking infrastructure, and Brundidge found himself converted to the idea of separating bikers from motor vehicle traffic as essential to Detroit's future.

Mind you, this came after several years of Detroit painting bicycle lanes on city streets — 170 miles of them since 2006. But existing bicycle lanes are not separated from vehicle traffic, and the dangers of biking on a busy street are obvious.

"That was my eye-opening moment," Brundidge said last week of his Copenhagen visit. "As great as I think a job we had done prior to that, as proud as we are with all the bike lanes we've installed, I came back from Copenhagen thinking that in all of our future projects that we want to incorporate a network of protected bikes lanes."

This initial project, about half a mile running on Jefferson between Alter Road and Lakewood, is just a small first step, Brundidge said, but more will follow soon.

Biking advocates have been urging the creation of protected lanes for some time.

"All of the city's current bike lanes have gotten many more Detroiters riding. However many people still feel vulnerable using them," said Todd Scott, director of the nonprofit Detroit Greenways Coalition. "Building protected bike lanes feel safer and will help us get even more people bicycling in Detroit."

He added, "These protected bike lanes are a milestone for Detroit and Southeast Michigan. We need to make sure they're done well so they'll become a model for other local communities to emulate in the future."

Protected bike lanes are an excellent example of what's called a "complete street," the notion that our streets must accommodate a range of activities, from mothers pushing baby carriages to retailers operating sidewalk cafes, and of course vehicle traffic.

By putting streets on a "road diet," removing some of the excess capacity in our roads for other uses, we not only make jogging and bicycling safer but also we create a new form of transit infrastructure that may aid in Detroit's economic development.

In Detroit, where our main streets are 90 feet wide, installing protected bike lanes will remove 14 feet. Moving from the curb into the street, there will first be a five-foot-wide bike lane, then a two-foot buffer zone with vertical separators, then a parking lane, then four lanes of traffic with two in each direction.

On East Jefferson, that means motorists will have two lanes in each direction instead of three, but Jose Abraham, Brundidge's deputy at public works, said studies show that's sufficient to deal with traffic volumes. "Our roadways were constructed to accommodate two million people," he notes.

In the future, whenever the streets are wide enough to accommodate protected bike lanes, the city will install them, Abraham said.

Contact John Gallagher: 313-222-5173 or gallagher@freepress.com. Follow him on Twitter @jgallagherfreep.



