Highway interchanges are perhaps the most dangerous place to ride a bike. You have high-speed merges going on where drivers are not expecting to find cyclists or pedestrians. Traffic engineers often make the problem worse with idiotic striping. For example, this bike lane in Orinda running between a double right-hand freeway on-ramp (Streetsblog called it the Worst Bike Lane in World):
And then there is this death trap in Colorado Springs:
There are a couple problems here. The first is that traffic engineers keep “upgrading” major arterial roads into freeways, converting ordinary intersections into interchanges. The second problem is that Federal design standards are completely outdated for bike accommodation at highway interchanges.
This shouldn’t be a hard problem, because Dutch cycle planners figured out the solution a long time ago:
That is a pretty standard interchange configuration in Holland. The signalization allows for cyclists to cross the offramp, without having to worry about high-speed car traffic.
[…] Biking at highway interchanges: dangerous by design (Systemic Failure) […]
First, I am surprised cyclists are allowed on Highways. If this road is not categorized as a Highway, but as a high traffic road, the design is not just idiotic, but downright criminal, because there will be fatalities from numerous collisions. Why, can’t North American engineers learn from Amsterdam and Copenhagen road design? Is it arrogance or folly
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Bikes are allowed on highways whenever there isn’t a suitable nearby alternative route. For example, between San Luis Obispo and Santa Margarita, bicycles are allowed on the Cuesta Grade portion of Highway 101.
The bikes in these examples aren’t on highways…they’re on other roads that *cross* highways, and it’s these crossing points that are dangerous.
Wow, I can’t see any bicyclist actually using (or wanting to use) that jug-handle whoop-dee-doo just to enter the threaded-between-lanes bike lane. Road designers are clearly out of touch with bicyclists. I can just imagine how they proudly figured out how to paint a safe-looking-to-them path onto the road and thought “there, I fixed it!”
What we are actually looking at here are unobstructed right-hand turns. The dutch model works for the bikes, but does not solve the traffic issue at hand — the need to improve flow by allowing right turning traffic to proceed without stopping. By placing a light in the right hand turn lane we have defeated the purpose of the unobstructed lane, keeping traffic moving.
There are a number of interesting, and workable, solutions the the problem given money and space. One is to take right shoulder traffic under the conflicting lane which works well in a clover leaf because there is already an elevation differential. Placing the bake lanes and sidewalks in the middle of a diverging diamond is also a very nice solution. Even without a DD a protected crossing to a central bike path in the median is not a bad solution if you have controlled intersections on both sides.
Having the right turning traffic stop doesn’t work. If it did then the intersection could simply revert back to a normal all way stop intersection.
For the right-hand turn lane, cars almost always have the green signal, except when a bicycle is approaching. Video detection or loop detectors can trigger the bike phase — and even be timed to trigger the signal without requiring the cyclist to stop.
Also note that for the on-ramp situation, highway engineers often install ramp metering, to limit the number of cars entering the freeway. Caltrans has been spending a lot of money to install ramp metering lights, but putting the in the wrong location.
Place bicycle through traffic to the left of right turning traffic. Problem solved.
With that design, the issue is that at some point cars have to cross the bike lane to enter the right-turn lane. There’s no conflict-free way to make that transition; it’s an inherently vulnerable position for cyclists.
There’s a similar “interesting” situation on the bike lane heading west along Riverside Drive at Buena Vista in Burbank, where it accesses the Ventura Freeway (geo:34.154250,-118.326117). While it involves a signalized intersection, there is no separate signal to allow bikes to clear before cars begin crossing their path as they attempt to accelerate to highway speeds. I can attest that the situation when the light turns green is as awkward in it’s own way as the situation when traffic is already flowing as you approach the intersection. If there was a separate portion of the signal cycle for bikes, I would be happy to wait for it rather than deal with the insanity.
Jughandles for cyclists (the Colorado Springs picture) are an improvement over no jughandle…
They allow cyclists for a safe place to stop and make sure they can cross safely.