By Patrick McMahon
Whether or not you’re a bicyclist, you’ve probably become familiar with the bike lanes and sharrows that the City has been painting on Baltimore streets for the past several years. Bike lanes are usually on higher-volume, higher-speed, and wider streets like St. Paul or University Parkway to carve out a specific area for bicyclists. Sharrows (aka shared lane markings or “Sergeant Bikes”) reemphasize that bicyclists are welcome on our streets and should indicate where the bicyclist should be riding to avoid being hit by car doors (some in Baltimore have been painted in the wrong place and are too close to the door). The neighborhoods along 33rd Street also have the more obscure and less-well known “Floating Bike Lanes” to deal with peak-hour parking restrictions.
Now, Baltimore City is about to introduce “Bike Boulevards”, a new type of bike facility in Baltimore, and Guilford Avenue between University Parkway and Mt. Royal Avenue, is the first place it will be implemented. A bike boulevard is different from the other types in that it focuses on making improvements to lower-volume, lower-speed streets that are provide good linkages between neighborhoods and are already pretty attractive to a wide variety of bicyclists. Making a street into a bike boulevard involves adding additional traffic calming and greening measures that will slow down auto traffic and give some priority to bicyclists, making the streets quieter, prettier, and healthier.
Because they have less auto traffic, bike boulevards are more welcoming to kids, families and novice cyclists, and attractive for all kinds of cyclists who want to ride on a convenient & comfortable route. Where they have been implemented in Portland (OR), Berkeley (CA), and New York (NY), they have often involved installing barriers force cars to turn off of the route, but allowing bicyclists to pass through the diverter.
Baltimore’s gridded street system is ideal for bike boulevards and Guilford Avenue is a great place to start because the City Public School System’s headquarters parking lot already serves to divert auto (but not bike) traffic off the street at North Avenue and it provides a direct connection to downtown from neighborhoods in north central Baltimore and an alternative to the higher-speed, higher-volume arterials of Calvert, St. Paul, Charles, & Maryland. The frequency of four-way stop signs on Guilford Avenue is currently a challenge for bicyclists (coming to a full stop makes a bicyclist lose a lot of momentum and a number of auto drivers also roll through stop signs creating a real safety hazard).
Other bike boulevards have dealt with this by installing mini-traffic circles, which force the traffic to slow down to a reasonable speed without requiring everyone to stop unless there’s a pedestrian to yield to. Seattle has installed over 700 mini-circles and has found they reduced motor vehicle crashes by an average of 90 percent.
After considerable experience with bike boulevards, Portland, Oregon is now shifting to calling them Neighborhood Greenways because they feel that better represents the fact that the benefits of lower speed, lower traffic volumes, and more greenery aren’t just for bicyclists but also for pedestrians, residents, and the environment.
As someone that rides a bicycle, walks, and drives along Guilford Avenue (I live on Abell, the next street over) I’m excited about the potential to make the street even nicer, safer, and more attractive for bicyclists. It’s already a great alternative to riding on Calvert, St. Paul, Charles, or Maryland used by a lot of bike commuters and the new signage and other improvements will make it even better. There are also four elementary schools within two blocks of Guilford Avenue, making it even more important to manage traffic speeds and make it an attractive street for walking & bicycling.
For more information about Baltimore Bike Boulevards, visit Bike Baltimore.
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