White Means Surrender
Making US cities safe for people on bikes will take a lot more than paint on asphalt.
At the corner of SW 3rd and Madison in downtown Portland, on the western approach to the Hawthorne Bridge, there are two white bicycles. One is a Ghost Bike, spray-painted white, disabled to discourage theft, and chained to a post. Ghost Bikes are installed as memorials to people who died while cycling; in this case, a 28-year-old woman named Kathryn Rickson, who had a fatal collision with an 18-wheeler in May of 2012.
The other is more abstract: a white bicycle shape stenciled on the pavement and surrounded by a field of bold, optimistic green, to form a traffic marking that engineers call an “advanced stop line,” though it’s more commonly known in American cities as a “bike box.” This particular bike box is preceded for half a block by a green-painted fragment of bike lane; together they form a sort of flag shape when viewed from above.
One evening in 2013, a few days after the anniversary of Rickson’s death, I passed through this intersection while riding home, and was struck by the similarities between the bike painted on the pavement and the one chained up nearby. Besides their shape and color, they also shared some common purpose, as quiet warnings and, to some degree, as apologies.
The only real drawback to bike boxes is that they don’t work.
Bike boxes are cheery looking, compared to the bureaucratic black-and-white signage that cities usually use to direct drivers. They’ve shown up in countless blog posts and articles over the past few years, serving as a kind of visual shorthand for bike-friendliness. Highly visible and relatively cheap to install, they’re popular among traffic engineers and bike advocacy groups. Their only real drawback, as they’re currently used in US cities, is that they don’t really work.
People who cycle regularly in city traffic — messengers and commuters, myself included — have a complex relationship with bike-specific infrastructure. Often we’re grateful for it, since in many cases it truly makes urban riding safer. One intersection near a heavily trafficked freeway on-ramp in Portland’s Rose Quarter, for example, was closed to right turns in August of 2012 after years of outcry and dozens of collisions, and injuries have plummeted since. Other well-considered and targeted projects, like traffic signals that give bikes a few seconds head start at busy intersections, or physically separated lanes in high-traffic corridors, have shown measurable safety improvements. The Portland Bureau of Transportation has been a national leader in designing and installing these kinds of facilities, and the city’s relatively high bicycling mode share (about 6% of Portland’s residents commute by bike) is largely due to those efforts.
Bike boxes fall into a different category though. Ostensibly, they exist to prevent a particular type of collision called a Right Hook, in which a right-turning car or truck hits a bicycle that’s traveling straight. Although Right Hooks constitute less than 10% of all bike-car collisions, they are notoriously deadly, due to the vulnerable position of the rider after initial impact—often directly under the tires of the turning vehicle. In Portland, they’ve taken numerous lives, including Kathryn Rickson’s last year, and two people in 2007 whose deaths drew widespread attention to the problem.
On October 11 of that year, a 19-year-old college student named Tracey Sparling was killed while riding through downtown Portland, at a corner in front of the Crystal Ballroom, a popular live music venue. Eleven days later, a bike mechanic named Brett Jarolimek died at an intersection about two miles from there, across the river on the city’s east side. Both were traveling in marked bike lanes when they were hit, and both were crushed to death by heavy trucks turning right: Tracey by a cement mixer, Brett by a garbage truck.
The cynical conclusion is that safer infrastructure is bought with dead cyclists.
The first bike boxes, modeled on a type already popular in European cities, began showing up six months later. The intersection that killed Tracey was among the first dozen to get the green paint treatment, while Brett’s intersection got a “right turn prohibited” sign. When cynical observers remark that safer infrastructure is often purchased with dead cyclists, they tend to reference these kinds of examples.
A bike box aims to prevent Right Hook collisions by requiring motor vehicles to stop about 10 feet before the regular stop line, and inviting bikes to advance along the “pole” of the bike lane, into the “flag” of the box. In theory this makes the bike and rider more visible, and gives them an opportunity to cross the intersection before the much larger motor vehicles start to turn.
In practice, the boxes haven’t been clearly shown to reduce collisions at all, in Portland or anywhere else. Studies conducted in the US and the UK since 2002 have found that, while they’re well-utilized and tend to make people feel safer, whether riding a bike or driving a car, their effect on injury-producing collisions is inconclusive. The intersection where Kathryn Rickson died, for example, has had a bike box since 2008. A Portland Bureau of Transportation memo in 2012 suggested that they might even be making collisions more frequent.
The studies point out several issues that hamper the boxes’ effectiveness. For one thing, they only impact drivers’ behavior during a red light, and do little to discourage “rolling” Right Hooks, when bikes and cars are both proceeding on a green. More discouraging is the fact that many drivers don’t stop where the law requires, either because they don’t understand how the boxes work, or because they simply don’t care. Police enforcement of bike box violations is essentially non-existent in American cities, and public education efforts mostly take the form of signs or online videos, delivered in a friendly, chatty tone, rather than conveying any legal or safety imperative (“Get behind it. The Bike Box: Portland’s new green space!” announced a local 2008 campaign). Even several years after being installed, the boxes in these studies were ignored by 25 to 40 percent of observed drivers, many of whom then proceeded to make illegal right turns on red.
This lack of effectiveness doesn’t seem to have sapped the bike box’s popularity. The Portland Bureau of Transportation currently lists ten more intersections proposed to get the treatment, and in a city that debates even the slightest bike-related expenditures for months or years before reaching consensus, bike boxes are exceptional in their rapid and near unanimous embrace.
The obvious explanation is that they’re cheap, both in dollars and in political capital. Nothing more than paint and plastic on asphalt, Portland’s first dozen bike boxes cost a combined $240,000—less than the price of signalizing a single intersection—and I personally witnessed one of them get installed in less than a day. They also don’t require anyone to go to the mat, politically. Sparse and innocuous, bike boxes are an easy way for policy-makers to say they’re addressing safety concerns without offending more than a fraction of constituents.
A bike box is there to make a statement, not solve a problem.
The other explanation is either more comforting or more cynical, depending on your point of view: a bike box is there to make a statement, not solve a problem. Genuine solutions to the Right Hook threat are well-established and abundant in cities like Copenhagen, Bogota and Tokyo. They are cycletracks with separate signal timings, well-designed traffic circles, car-free mixed use streets, mandatory side underrun guards for trucks that drive in cities, and limitations on truck sizes in urban centers, among others. These require real resources and political will though, and in some cases the removal of a car lane or a block of on-street parking, which often makes them non-starters in US cities—even relative cycling utopias like Portland.
In comparison to these substantial safety improvements, a bike box is more like a flag: a green one, with a white bicycle symbol on it, plastered to the pavement. Like most flags, it displays the intention and purported values of the people who put it there. But like a flag, it also slips from an indicator of values to a substitute for them if not backed up by action. Action, in this case, would mean infrastructure and enforcement that makes all road users equally safe, regardless of their chosen mode.
A dozen times at least, I’ve stopped in the spots where they died, and realized they were doing exactly what the signs and paint told them to do.
The intersections where Tracey and Brett died each got Ghost Bikes of their own, which I’ve ridden past more times than I can count. More than sorrow or anger, their greatest impact is a sobering realization that it could’ve been me. Both of these people were, by all accounts, experienced and conscientious riders, traveling routes they knew well. Tracey was 19 years old, probably quicker and more alert than I am at 39. Brett was an amateur racer with thousands of miles under his belt. A dozen times at least, I’ve stopped in the spots where they died, and realized they were doing exactly what the signs and paint told them to do. Exactly what I would have done.
While Brett’s Ghost Bike is still in place, Tracey’s and Kathryn’s are gone, removed to more private venues where family and friends can easily visit them. For me, the green bike boxes with their white stencils that remain act as a surrogate — memorials of the memorials. The flags that linger after the funerals are over and the world has moved on.
For the city, they’re an act of civic contrition. We couldn’t save these victims, they announce in two bright tones, and we can’t afford the physical changes or police enforcement that might protect the next one. But at least we’re letting the world know that we’re sorry.
An earlier version of this story was published in 2013 under the title “Green Means Surrender” in Share Document, a limited-run book edited by Clifton Burt and Nicole Lavelle for Design Week Portland.
