John Gallagher

Detroit Free Press

Hamburg%2C Germany%2C does bike lanes differently

Detroit is rapidly adding new bikes lanes of its own

Biking is big in Detroit, and it's growing more popular all the time. And to accommodate that trend, the City of Detroit has been painting new bike lanes on city streets at a brisk pace.

Just five years ago, there were few if any bike lanes in Detroit, other than on Belle Isle. Today, more than 150 miles of bicycle lanes have been painted on city streets, and more are planned all the time.

The vast majority of these new bike lanes are not "protected" lanes, separated from nearby vehicle lanes by actual barriers. Sharing the road with motor vehicles with no separation can create some hairy moments for bikers. There's talk in town of creating more protected lanes, but so far it's mostly an idea.

So to spark some thinking about new designs, today I would like to present images of bike lanes I saw last month during a visit to Hamburg, Germany, during a research tour conducted by the German Marshall Fund of the United States.

Hamburg doesn't put its bike lanes on the street, but rather on the sidewalks. And Hamburg sidewalks tend to be much wider than Detroit sidewalks, allowing plenty of room for both bicyclists and pedestrians.

Hamburg reserves a lane on the sidewalk nearest the street for bicycles, and paves that lane with a different colored brick than found the adjacent pedestrian sidewalk.

It's a simple and effective idea, although visitors need to get used to it. I had some bikers ring their bell at me when I trespassed in bike lanes during my visit, but I got the sense of it pretty quick.

Most of Detroit's sidewalks aren't wide enough for this particular solution to work here. But it's still worth seeing how Hamburg does it, even if it just sparks some new thinking. The more ideas we get into the hopper, the better to create new transit modes in Detroit.

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