Riders on the East Liberty Blvd bike lane.  Photo by Brad Quartuccio randomprecisionphoto.com

Where do they come from?  How do they happen?

In the coming weeks, we’re expecting to see several miles of bike lanes and sharrows (shared lane markings) installed on Pittsburgh’s streets.  There are about five miles that are ready to go, with another seven miles that are in design and are expected to be installed by the end of the painting season, according to Stephen Patchan, the City’s Bike/Ped Coordinator.

In the past few years, several streets received bike-friendly treatments where they previously didn’t exist.  But bike lanes aren’t as simple as putting a line on the street, and sometimes take months to develop.  Between getting community feedback, the iterative engineering process, and cost of installation, any type of “change” to our streets can often take much longer than we would like.  The purpose of this blog post is to simply answer the question, where do these bike lanes and sharrows come from?  With the exception of some streets that will only be receiving sharrows, most of the bike lanes that you will be seeing come to fruition in the following manner.  Read on!

1. CHOOSING STREETS ON THE BICYCLE ROUTE NETWORK: BikePGH and the City of Pittsburgh sit down at our monthly Bicycle Technical Advisory Committee meetings.  At these meetings, a strategy is set to retrofit streets with bicycle lanes and sharrows.  The committee prioritizes streets on our Pittsburgh Bike Map which the City has adopted as their official network.  Of these streets, we then weigh which ones are the “low hanging fruit,” i.e. streets that can more easily be retrofitted using just paint without any major engineering and construction dollars needing to be invested.  Sometimes outfitting a street with sharrows is the least-costly and easiest way to establish a street in the bike network, often with the hope of creating a better facility later on when money becomes available.

When a street requires something other than paint, for instance the removal of a lane, existing street markings, or parking spaces, the cost, both monetarily and politically, goes up.  The East Liberty Blvd bike-lane road diet is an example of a more complex installation where we had to work closely with East Liberty Development Corporation to be sure the proper studies, traffic counts, and community support were in place.  The eventual goal is to have the entire bicycle network marked and signed, a process we aim to have expedited once the Bicycle Route and Signage Plan and an updated Bicycle Master Plan are in effect.  The former is under development.  The latter has not yet gotten underway, but is part of the Mayor’s PLANPGH comprehensive plan.

2. ENGINEERING: The initial ideas for the streets are a collaborative effort amongst BikePGH staff, the traffic engineer that BikePGH has under contract, the City’s traffic engineer, the Bicycle and Pedestrian coordinator, and other stakeholders.  Yes, you read that correctly — With funding support from the foundation community, BikePGH hires a traffic engineering firm to help design bike lanes. This arrangement was dreamt up at a time when the City lacked a staff traffic engineer and Bike/Ped Coordinator, but it also serves to temporarily address the City’s current lack of resources and capacity to take on this resource-intensive work.  This arrangement is a unique situation in the United States.  There are no other bicycle advocacy organizations that we know of (and we know a lot), who help pay for the engineering of their city’s on-street bicycle infrastructure.  We are happy to do it, because the alternative would be to wait until the City was in a position where it could hire more traffic engineers.  We decided that the bicycling community, which has exploded over the past ten years, could not wait for these important safety improvements.

A majority of the lanes and sharrows are engineered as explained above, however there are some that the City’s traffic engineer and/or bike/ped coordinator have designed, and have plans to design themselves when the resources become available.  The Forbes Ave bike lanes and sharrows are an example of bike infrastructure that was initiated and engineered by the City of Pittsburgh in-house.

3. APPROVAL: The City must approve all engineering documents that our engineer creates.  Once the work orders have been completed, we submit the design to the City of Pittsburgh for DPW’s traffic engineer to analyze.  At this point if there are any questions, concerns or any changes that need to be made, they are kicked back to our engineer, edited and resubmitted for approval.

4. INSTALLATION: After the work orders have been approved, it is then time for the City of Pittsburgh to install the markings.  There are two ways that they go about this, in-house by DPW or by using a private contractor.  The City of Pittsburgh only owns the type of equipment that uses paint to install lines and markings.  Any other type of marking, like a longer lasting thermoplastic, must be done using a private contractor.  Most of the lanes that will be installed this year will be using paint for the lines and thermoplastic for the bike symbols.  There are, however, times that the City may decide to use paint for both lines and symbols, for instance if a road seems like it is to be repaved in the near future.  Given that thermoplastic is much more expensive up front (but may last between five to seven years), it makes more economic sense to save the cost of thermo for streets that will not be repaved for two or more years.

It’s important to keep in mind that a Platinum Bike Friendly Community like Portland wasn’t built in a year.  It took years of committed advocates, citizens, city staff, transportation agencies, and elected leaders to create the political will to transform that city.  The cycling utopia that we all envision won’t happen overnight, but as we work hard to establish this on-street network, we look forward to the day when streets full of sharrows transform into something even better.

In the current recession, money is tight for both people and cities.  Making it easy and safe for people to transport themselves using the least amount of taxpayer support should be prioritized.  The amount of money it takes to provide infrastructure for bicycles is dirt-cheap compared to providing infrastructure for cars.  In fact, Portland was able to transform itself into a Platinum Bike Friendly Community by allocating less than one percent of its transportation budget to bicycles every year. According to sources cited in a recent article in Grist Magazine, it is estimated that it costs city taxpayers 33.6 cents per mile per automobile per year, when you include maintenance and externalities such as parking, crashes and congestion.  Meanwhile, for bicycles, the costs to city tax payers including those same externalities add up to only one cent per mile per bicycle per year.

That means that, according to the article, the average driver travels 10,000 miles in town each year and contributes $324 in taxes and direct fees. The cost to the public, including direct costs and externalities, is a whopping $3,360.

On the opposite pole, someone who exclusively bikes may go 3,000 miles in a year, contribute $300 annually in taxes, and costs the public only $36, making for a profit of $264. To balance the road budget, we need 12 people commuting by bicycle for each person who commutes by car.

To quote Elly Blue, the author of this article, “cities — and taxpayers — can’t afford not to invest in bicycling.”

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Want more bike lanes in Pittsburgh? Join BikePGH today! We need you to add your voice! Bike Pittsburgh works to protect cyclist’s rights and promote the vision of making Pittsburgh a safer and more enjoyable place to live and to ride. For more info, check out: www.bike-pgh.org/membership