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NYTimes: A Busy City Street Makes Room for Bikes

The New York Times ran an article over the weekend on New York DOT’s plan to road diet Ninth Avenue. A road diet is when transportation officials redesign an existing street by shrinking the number of auto lanes, making room for bicycle and other alt-transit lanes. The idea is that officials can insert new bike lanes without needing to widen a road — a practice useful in areas where roads cannot be widened.

Locally, Durham used the road diet technique on Duke University Dr. to create its new bike lane. (seen at right)

What’s unusual about in this New York example is that it’s what you might call an extreme road diet. From a 70ft-wide street, 18ft are being repurposed. 10ft adjacent to the sidewalk will become a new, broad bike lane. Then, an 8ft buffer zone with planters and bollards will separate the bike lane from a 10ft parking lane. The result is that cyclists will enjoy complete separation from the swift current of automobile traffic flowing down Ninth Ave.

How bikes will negotiate intersections is my only question, but I am assuming that the bike lane will be signaled just as the auto-traffic lanes. It’s an interesting idea and one that works in Europe. We’ll see how well it works in NYC. While we don’t really have streets in Durham wide enough to justify this kind of intervention, I am eager to see how New Yorkers (particularly the folks from Transportation Alternatives) respond to the new lane design.

A Busy City Street Makes Room for Bikes
By WILLIAM NEUMAN
Published: September 23, 2007
Cyclists and pedestrians never quite imagined it this way, but maybe there is a use for all those cars after all. The city is planning to remake seven blocks of Ninth Avenue in Chelsea into what officials are billing enthusiastically, perhaps a bit hyperbolically, as the street of the future.

Read more.

Construction is not yet complete (neither planters nor structurally significant bollards are in place), but you can get a sense of the design here.

Analysis and diagrams at Streetsblog and Gothamist.

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