Data Suggests Fears of Bike Lane-Induced Traffic Problems Are Unfounded
This article was originally published in Greater Greater Washington. It is shared here, in slightly different format, with permission.
With our crowded roadways, taking away a lane of traffic would, intuitively, seem to cause enormous delays for drivers. And resistance to change seems baked into the human condition.
So it’s unsurprising that the installation in December 2022 of separated, buffered bike lanes along two miles of Old Georgetown Road in Montgomery County, Maryland, while removing lanes for cars, spurred virulent opposition. Yet statistics from the Maryland State Highway Administration (SHA) show virtually no change in driving time due to the changes, but a plunge in fatalities and a tripling of bicycle traffic.
A memorial for Enzo Alvarenga, one of two teenagers killed in a car crash while biking on Old Georgetown Road. (Source: Richard Hoye.)
The changes came after the deaths of two teenagers, Jacob Cassell and Enzo Alvarenga, who were biking the sidewalks of this stretch of road. Additionally, the road diet and bike lanes were “the result of several safety and multimodal mobility assessments,” noted a spokesperson for Maryland SHA.
Most controversial has been removing a lane of traffic from each direction and adding five-foot bike lanes protected by an additional five-foot buffer, along with plastic bollards, from Nicholson Road in the north to just south of the Capital Beltway. Green pavement markings further enhance safety. The project also installed better crosswalk markings and narrowed 11-foot travel lanes to 10.5 and 10 feet.
A Storm of Criticism
Maryland State Delegate Marc Korman acknowledges problems with the initial installation. “It was a complicated, challenging installation, it was a big change, and I think State Highway and people like me could have done a better job of letting people know what was happening and why.” And the immediate reaction was a storm of protest, including a petition to remove the new bike lanes signed by over 9,000 people (a petition supporting them was signed by over 2,000).
The petition against the bike lanes claims a 39% reduction in driving capacity, and that “the road now is consistently congested, with back-to-back traffic.” On Nextdoor, angry posters abounded. “I saw my first cyclist on old Georgetown road this Sunday,” one announced, “After months of seeing no one on the closed lanes.”
“At 1:15 PM today traffic was backed up from Tuckerman to Executive and up to Rockville Pike,” said another. “It took me 6 Red Light [sic] cycles to go 1/4 mile.” Still another stated that “The most dangerous thing about bike lanes is they stir up the kind of anger seen in this thread. And an angry, or inconvenienced driver is a threat to those around them.” This is just a small sample.
The data so far tell a completely different story. From March 15 to July 26, “the corridor experienced two injury crashes in 2020, two injury crashes in 2021, and four injury crashes and one fatal crash in 2022,” yet “zero multimodal injury or fatal crashes” during the same four months in 2023, according to a Maryland SHA spokesperson.
The corridor itself has a bloody history, with 338 crashes reported from 2014 to 2018 according to a January 2022 MD 187 Needs Analysis. Of these, “65 were severe, disabling, or fatal” while 14 injured or disabled a person walking or biking. The road diet and buffers seem to be making this traffic violence disappear.
Contrary to intuition, meanwhile, overall traffic flow has been unaffected: “In the northbound AM and PM peak directions, travel times along the entire corridor increased by about 60 seconds since implementation of the bike lanes,” said the Maryland SHA spokesperson. Southbound, “travel times initially increased, but have since reduced to the levels before the bike lane project.”
A Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority study of bus lanes, prepared for State Delegate Marc Korman’s office, similarly showed no change in runtime for the J2 bus following the installation of bike lanes and the road diet. The study concludes that travel times for the bus along the area converted to two lanes are identical in the eastbound direction, while they actually decreased in the westbound direction, from 6.8 minutes to 6.4 minutes.
These “surprising” results are actually not so surprising, since road diets have been shown to improve safety and traffic flow simultaneously.
The Federal Highway Administration explains how a reduction from four to three lanes (different from Old Georgetown Road’s reduction from six to four) results in a “crash reduction of 19 to 47 percent” as well as “traffic calming and reduced speed differential.” These changes provide space for new road uses, such as bike lanes or increased pedestrian comfort. Greater Greater Washington contributor Canaan Merchant discusses similar results around the DC region, even as opposition to road diets remains potent.
Helping Walkers and Bicyclists Reach Key Destinations
Another charge by some opponents of the Old Georgetown Road bike lanes is that the existing Bethesda Trolley Trail already parallels the route. However, it can be inconvenient to reach the Trolley Trail, and many bicyclists prefer a real road to a path shared with pedestrians. “The Trolley Trail to me is not a commuting type trail,” said local bicyclist Kristoffer Nessler. “There are runners and joggers and strollers and babies, all sorts of things going on.”
Perhaps more important, Old Georgetown Road needs its own safe bike lanes because it has many important destinations, community safety advocate Ashleigh Nugent told me, including churches, a synagogue, and several private and public schools. Woodward High School, directly along the protected bike lanes, is also expected to reopen in 2025. “That’s going to bring thousands of students to the area. And how are these students going to get there? We need to be encouraging safer alternatives,” said Nugent.
Another area of contention is whether separated bike lanes serve a tiny population while ignoring the needs of the great majority of drivers. Yet the increase in bicyclists due to the new separated bike lanes is appreciable. The SHA Maryland spokesperson noted that September 2022 “averaged approximately 17 bicyclists on a typical weekday in this area” versus 59 in April of 2023, after implementation. Of course, automobile users still dwarf these numbers, but a longer-term impact on bicycle use is expected, especially as these lanes are connected to other parts of the growing bicycle network called for in the Montgomery County Bicycle Master Plan.
Yet separated bike lanes and road diets increase safety and comfort, helping more than bicyclists. Nugent emphasizes the benefits to pedestrians on a corridor that long had dangerously exposed sidewalks alongside high-speed traffic. “Commuting is for everyone. I have two little kids and my sister-in-law has disabilities,” said Nugent. “Think about who this might be helping, it’s not just the driver, it’s about persons with disabilities, it’s about cyclists, it’s about pedestrians.”
Riders Enjoy the New Lanes
One local bicyclist who has switched his daily commute to the new lanes is Kristoffer Nessler. “It’s a more direct route, it’s a flatter route, so it’s just made my life as a daily commuter into the city a lot easier.” He added that now he can drop off a kid at school. Nessler also enjoys the connection to Pike and Rose, a thriving mixed-use development in North Bethesda. Initially, opposition to the new bike lanes meant people yelling and honking at Nessler, but now “people are learning and treating each other with respect.”
Nugent also finds that opposition to the bike lanes has slowly died down as people have gotten used to them. “I really appreciated the responses from county council member [Kate] Stewart and council president [Evan] Glass. They … put out there publicly that they were committed to these bike lanes, and I think that made a world of difference.”
Nugent herself is a casual user of the new bike lanes. “I did not and would not try biking Old Georgetown Road prior to the installation of the bike lanes. Now I use it leisurely.” She pointed to a previously chaotic roadway unsafe for the local neighborhood. “People are using it as a highway, they’re weaving in, they’re weaving out, they’re trying to get to 270, they’re running lights,” said Nugent. “And so after the installation, I really appreciate how much it has slowed drivers down.”
Building a Network
Of course, the Old Georgetown Road project constitutes only a relatively small stretch of road, one part of a whole network of bike lanes projected in the Bicycle Master Plan.
So the next question is, what other connections might build onto the Old Georgetown bike lanes, increasing accessibility to multiple destinations, and likely bicycle ridership?
To fulfill the promise of the Old Georgetown Road bike lanes, access to downtown Bethesda is critical. This would connect Pike and Rose—and its planned bicycle access to Rockville—all the way to Bethesda. But there are difficulties with the right of way as Old Georgetown Road proceeds south. “I just think figuring out how to connect to centers like downtown Bethesda is really important, and I recognize that it’s also really hard. The infrastructure was not built for this,” said Korman. Indeed, the bicycle master plan shows safe bicycle lanes disappearing as the road approaches Bethesda.
Originally, the Bicycle Master Plan called for a side path on Old Georgetown Road, rather than separated bike lanes. Circumstances changed these plans. However, Korman explained, “The shared use pathway was actually supposed to be alongside BRT,” which would require heavier installation, such as concrete channels. If a bus rapid transit (BRT) line is eventually built on Old Georgetown Road, a shared-use path might eventually replace the lanes, Korman explained.
The separated, buffered lanes “was something SHA was able to do fairly quickly,” said Korman, “without a huge design-engineering process,” so that “it can also be undone if the data doesn’t support it.” Korman awaits a full analysis of the project’s impact from Maryland SHA due out in the next month. However, the results released so far show huge benefits for cyclists and pedestrians at minimal inconvenience to drivers.
Ethan Goffman is an environmental and transit writer. A part-time teacher at Montgomery College, Ethan lives in Rockville, Maryland. He is the author of Dreamscapes (UnCollected Press), a collection of flash fiction, and two volumes of poetry, I Garden Weeds (Cyberwit) and Words for Things Left Unsaid (Kelsay Books).
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