How (Not to) Design a Bike Lane
Cycling is good for your health and for the environment, everybody knows it. It is also a safe means of transport during a pandemic. In many cities around the world governments are building pop-up or permanent bike lanes and are changing the road infrastructure to make space for bikes. This is a great improvement for everybody’s quality of life and hopefully these changes are here to stay.
From a design and user’s perspective, cycling may become a popular means of transport everywhere provided that good infrastructure is built. I repeat, good infrastructure. A few kilometers of bike lanes in the middle of the city without clever connections within a network of lanes are not really useful to promote the use of the bike.
In this article I want to show some good, bad and awful examples of how to, and how not to, build a bike lane in a city. All of them come from the city of Matosinhos (a town that is part of the Porto metropolitan area) in Portugal, where I live: I think that it is possible to take some useful general lessons from just a couple of hundred meters of cycling lanes.
Let’s start with two good examples of how all bike lanes should be built. In the picture above…
