Morning bike flow off the Johnson Street Bridge

As council debates the Pandora and Johnson protected bike lane project (options for which I analyzed already), I figured I would see where people go when they bike off the Johnson Street Bridge into downtown. Yesterday was a cold but clear day, and the numbers showed it:

JSBcount

Caveats

First: This is a one-day, two hour count in the morning. Margin of error with short-term counts is high. Numbers are certainly higher when it is warmer and we have more tourists out.

Second: Patterns of biking shift as infrastructure changes. People don’t usually pick the fastest route to their destination, most trade-off of distance for comfort (how much distance for how much comfort is a subject of a great deal of studies, including this great one [PDF] by Jennifer Dill at PSU). So building the new protected bike lanes on Pandora and possibly Johnson will shift biking patterns considerably, as I pointed out the other day with Dill’s later research on the new protected bike lanes in various US cities. See the large percentage of riders in blue below:

DillComfort-2

Safe, comfortable, convenient: analysis of the Pandora St Protected Bike Lane options

The era of modern, protected bike lanes is finally coming to Victoria, as the City of Victoria looks to close a gap along Pandora St from Cook St to the Johnson St Bridge. Staff have recommending a trio of different options (PDF) but not much else to help guide a decision. Looking at the wealth of modern research on biking out there, what does council need to know before they make a decision? Turns out, nearly everybody who studies this agrees: we need bikeways that are safe, comfortable and convenient. How do the three options for Pandora stack up?

Context

Running right through downtown, the Pandora corridor connects the major north-south streets with the Johnson St Bridge. Crucially for people riding bikes, it is a natural eastward extension of the Galloping Goose Regional Trail.

PandoraPBL-ortho

Modern Research

Thankfully, thanks to the long lag between getting our first protected bike lane in the CRD, we have a wealth of research to draw from, including an excellent report by Jennifer Dill and others at Portland State University. She looked at the all the various protected bike lanes in the US, and did a huge amount of research into ridership, comfort, perceptions and other factors. I strongly recommend you read  the final report: Lessons from the Green Lanes: Evaluating Protected Bike Lanes in the U.S. I will draw from it below as I compare each of the three options.

Safety

Biking is very safe. Even when forced to mix it up with cars, biking is still about as safe as nearly any other way of moving. But that doesn’t mean the current Pandora is as safe as it could be. Multi-lane roads with high speed like Pandora are probably the most dangerous place to ride currently. Bicycles have to mix with cars, heavy trucks and buses, not a recipe for high comfort. Pedestrians are also in conflict with vehicles turning right.

 

mixing-zone-birdseye
Mixing zone from NACTO Bikeway Design Guidelines

Of the three options, Option 3 has so-called mixing-zones as can be seen to the right. Not only does this create a potential rear-end collision zones, people riding bikes simply find them less comfortable and useful.

 

DillComfort-1

Comfort

Comfort and perceived safety are strong determinants for the Interested but Concerned population on whether or not they ride. Unsurprisingly, the two fully signalized  options will likely generate the highest ridership gains, especially with helping car drivers choose biking. Fully signalized options not only attract more riders, they also saw twice as many people change to biking than any other design.

DillComfort-2

Convenience

Biking is often the fastest way to travel through an urban area, especially in a downtown where speed is determined more by intersections than the streets themselves. Here the two-way design offers significant speed advantages over either of one-way designs. Bike riders wishing to travel east along Pandora to the major employers or shops along the street need only cross a single intersection just east of the Johnson St Bridge, while either one-way design forces riders to wait two or three light cycles at Wharf Street.

JSBintersection
Number of lights to be crossed with one-way vs two-way

 

Conclusion

It is pretty clear, once you lay it all out, you get one option: a two-way protected bike lane on Pandora stands out as the best option. Mixing zones in Option 3 are less comfortable and get less riders, while the ease and convenience of a two-way on Pandora with Option 1 can’t be beat.

Putting BikeBC funding in context

Bike infrastructure in the CRD is built in fits and starts, much of it done with grants from other levels of government. Usually these grants are announced with little background information about the projects and where they are in the region, or what has come before. Today’s ICBC announcement of funding around the CRD is case in point, the tweet shows a picture of Bay St at Chamber, with no mention of the additional bike lanes and other work the City of Victoria has done in recent years.

So I thought I would do up a few quick maps of the Ministry of Transportation & Infrastructure’s BikeBC Cycling Infrastructure Partnerships Program (CIPP) funding for 2015 in the CRD, to show how they fit into the larger regional picture.

First, of the 20 projects throughout BC, how much of the funding went to each of the economic regions?

2015BikeBCFundingChartandMapWhen you slice up pie by population, you find that funding doesn’t fully match population, with the large projects in Kelowna skewing their percentage upwards, while Metro Vancouver and the Fraser Valley RD were much lower. The CRD does not badly, getting 10.1% of the funding despite being only 8.2% of the population (2011 numbers, Census Canada).

The Projects:

Three municipalities received funding this round: North Saanich, Oak Bay and Sooke. All three could be described as gap-closing projects, connecting existing bike infrastructure better together, although the density of our bike network means that nearly all projects could be reasonably described as gap-closing.

North Saanich

This bike lane project extends existing work on West Saanich Rd and helps like the Ardmore neighbourhood to the airport Flight Path. North Saanich has been looking for funding for this section for some time, after being turned down for Regional Significant Project Funds in 2014.

2015WestSaanichBikeLanesOak Bay

Helping close the gap between Oak Bay and UVic up the Foul Bay/Henderson corridor, this project is actually a joint Oak Bay/Saanich project, as it ties together the work that Saanich will be doing further west in 2015 on Lansdowne and Camosun College. The reason this was a sole Oak Bay project as although Foul Bay straddles the border, Oak Bay is responsible for the entire roadway for Foul Bay Rd to the Saanich border (although Saanich is responsible for the curb, gutter and sidewalk). This doesn’t fully close the gap up Foul Bay hill, as there is still a short section of bike lane to be finished between Middowne and Lansdowne.

2015FoulBayIntersection

Sooke

The need for a connection from the Galloping Goose Regional Trail to Sooke has been long requred, something Sooke has looked into for years, with a long-term plan to connect via a bridge over the Sooke River (PDF). For the immediate future, this bike lane down Sooke River Road will help connect the Goose better to downtown Sooke, for tourists and visitors alike.

2015SookeGGConnection

(Final note: First post in a long time. My contract with the CRD recently ended, so I have been teaching myself QGIS. All maps in this post made with entirely Open Source software: QGIS, Inkscape and LibreOffice)