A group of national engineers have released a new version of a guide that advises city and urban planners across the country on best practices for bicycle infrastructure.
The Guide for the Development of Bicycle Facilities, published by the American Association of State Highway and Transportation (AASHTO), is the first revision in over a decade. This version contains a total of 16 chapters, including nine new chapters, and seven revised chapters.
The revised chapters include updates on bicyclist operation and safety, bicycle planning, design of shared use paths, design of shared lanes and bike lanes, maintenance and operations, bicycle parking, bike share site location, and end-of-trip facilities.
“AASHTO and its members are focused on delivering safety, mobility, and access for everyone on our nation’s transportation networks and the AASHTO Bike Guide is one tool state departments of transportation and other transportation agencies can use to facilitate that,” AASHTO Executive Director Jim Tymon said in a statement regarding the release of the latest report.
“Communities across the country are all different, but the AASHTO Bike Guide allows each of those communities to learn how to grow, maintain, and operate their bicycle infrastructure – allowing for more transportation options for those who cannot or choose not to drive,” he added.
Protected bike lanes and beyond
As interest in urban cycling grows and cities – including those around the Bay Area – continue tackling how to best service this population of its community, guides like AASHTO’s are critical in enhancing safety and guiding local experts on how to best implement safety measures.
For years, transportation experts have said that because the AASHTO report is a guiding principle among planners, if a specific initiative, such as protected bike lanes, isn’t in the guide, there’s little motivation to adopt it – even if research has backed those measures.
“For all of my career, AASHTO(‘s Design Guide) has been the thing people who don’t want to do stuff for bikes point to — and they will no longer be able to do that,” Conor Semler, a senior planner with Kittelson & Associates, who focuses on bike and pedestrian projects, told Streetsblog USA in 2018 when an early draft of guide updates began circulating. “It’s an organization that engineers have grown up their whole life thinking of as the authority.”
Now, the report gives guidance that roadways should not only accommodate cyclists, but do so in a way that’s accessible for people of all ages and abilities. Authors of the guide say this is among the “game-changing” updates, which also includes:
- Robust guidance on separated bike lanes
- Intersection design that protects vulnerable users
- Expanded guidance on shared use paths and shared streets
- Design ranges that make clear which values provide safety and comfort
- Expansive street crossing guidance to ensure safe crossings for all users, not just bicyclists
- Guidance to increase comfort and accommodate social cycling
Acknowledgement of separated bike lanes has been particularly noteworthy for planners. With new guidelines, it’s possible that many communities that haven’t previously prioritized such projects now will.
San Francisco and its neighboring communities are no stranger to the challenges of getting these important infrastructure upgrades. Demonstrations that originated in the Bay Area in 2017 to call attention to separated bike lanes have even been credited with getting them implemented in cities as far away as Europe.
Still, some communities have gone back-and-forth on cycling infrastructure. Earlier this year, the San Mateo City Council unanimously agreed to rip out a section of bike lanes that were implemented to improve safety and reduce dangerous crashes to restore some parking lost to the changes. Eliminating the bike lanes may cost up to $2 million – more than it cost to install them as part of a federally-funded safety project, according to SFGate.
Setting the standard
Toole Design served as lead author on the updated AASHTO guide, which the group says “sets a new national standard for safe, comfortable, and connected bikeways in the United States.”
“We integrated current state-of-the-practice guidance, revisited decades-old assumptions, and cited relevant research at every turn. After years of labor (a labor of love, of course!), the new guide navigated AASHTO’s rigorous evaluation and balloting process and ultimately won support from agency representatives in every single state and territory,” Toole said in an announcement of the report.
What will the guide do? Hopefully improve safety and access, drafters say.
“We’ve already factored the updated AASHTO guidance into a number of state-level manuals in recent years. Now agencies throughout the nation can bring their own guidance—and, ultimately, their bikeways—into alignment with the new guide,” Toole continued in their December announcement.
Toole also boasts its focus on research in the revision. By linking guidance to research, Toole leaders say, “the new guide takes a fact-based approach to bikeway design standards.”
This means that each change, reference and new chapter in the guide can be traced back to some scientific study and sets the precedent for future updates so that they remain research-driven.
For cyclists, the update will be seen, hopefully, on their commute.
“Better bikeways, and more of them, will result from the new guide,” said Bill Schultheiss, Toole’s director of design and engineering. “And it’s just going to happen naturally through normal project delivery. That’s what creates larger change culturally.”