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It's required only during maintenance made as part of a pre-existing 5-year reconstruction plan on roads that were included in the 2015 Bicycle Plan (or any subsequent plan the Council approves). That's still a dramatic expansion from Cambridge's current separated bike lanes, but it's not "any roadway" as the article claims.

That makes more sense.

So I'm guessing their bike plan drew out routes and arteries and such for bike paths and the requirement just applies to those?

Better bike infrastructure will encourage groups of people who don't currently bike to start. More protected lanes means more kids, more old folks, more women of all ages, will start cycling. And more cycling is a good thing!

There's many things that are good things. However, you need to balance them against the cost (money, space, time, whatever) required to achieve them. For some smaller roads, the cost might not be worth the benefit.

Encouraging people to exercise and not drive gas-powered vehicles is a net win for not only their long term health but also the environment. It's worth it.

Even if they use an electric bike and don't exercise, it's still good for pollution and congestion.

Agreed, lets skip the automobile lanes and just put bike lanes on those streets :]

For smaller streets, just make them pedestrian & bike first.

The cost of things should indeed be considered. Depending on region, tax money subsidizes every mile driven (one well done source here https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2015/10/driving... but there are many, many others). A switch to cycling amounts to a much lower subsidy per mile, so if we want to talk costs then the argument for cycling infrastructure becomes even stronger.

You’re not in the group of people who do not bike due to the lack of barriers.

It’s possible that this group is extremely tiny, in which case it may not make sense, but whether existing bikers feel they needed it is not really the relevant question.

But that’s only considering the “get more people biking” aspect. The truth is that protected bike lanes are statistically safer than ones that are not, so there is good reason to require it just to reduce injury or death even if it does not lead to an uptick in biking.

If it reduces cyclist deaths, then in absence of other factors it will by definition result in a relative uptick.

Here's a map from the Globe of bike accidents reported to Cambridge police from 2010-2014 [0]. Unfortunately the map no longer loads for me, but the accidents are mostly along major roads and the area is still discernible, especially when compared side by side with a map of the area [1]. As the article says, Cambridge Street, Broadway, Beacon Street, and Mass Ave are all hot spots.

Would love to see data combined with Somerville, since I'm sure the stretch of Beacon between Porter and Inman would be similarly populated. These are also only accidents reported to police, so I would bet they lean towards more serious accidents.

[0]: https://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/2016/10/05/map-bike-crashe... [1]: https://www.google.com/maps/@42.3773046,-71.1224085,14z

I think our cities are learning from what Scandinavia has been doing for ages. This is exciting news. Smart streets keep everyone safer and raise awareness to pedestrians and people with mobility issues, too.

Don't they get snow? With vertical barriers I'm confused how a plow will be able to properly clear the street.

In Ottawa, Canada that appears to be a realistic problem (according to my colleagues that live there; I have limited personal experience). They try to use the sidewalk-cleaning smaller machinery, but it's still a struggle due to shapes and barriers.

Most of the existing separated bike lanes are incorporated into the sidewalk, and therefore protected by the curb. There are a few that are "protected" by rows of parked cars or bolted-down pylons, but this would seem to not be legal under the new law.

I'm actually not sure how they manage to get those bike lanes cleared, seeing as how the sidewalks are always covered in snow, but there seems to be some method.

There are smaller vehicles that are used to plow just the bike lanes in some parts of the world.

It probably doesn't matter so much though because the percentage of people who continue biking even in cold winter and with adverse snow conditions is quite low.

It's true. It's actually very disconcerting how much less snow there usually is on the bike lane, than on the sidewalk it's built into. There are stretches where folks just walk in the bike lane, because the sidewalk is so unsafe.

Maybe. I stopped biking in the winters in Cambridge purely because the pathways are impassable because of the snow. Not because of the weather.

> It probably doesn't matter so much though because the percentage of people who continue biking even in cold winter and with adverse snow conditions is quite low.

This is not necessarily true. Here in Copenhagen the amount of people cycling in winter is not significantly less than at other times of the year. That said, we don't have much snow, but the bike lanes are cleared before the road lanes (to incentivize not taking the car into the city).

It's not the snow so much as the temperature. I bike commute year-round here in NYC and most other cyclists aren't willing to brave the cold, even when the streets are completely clear.

The problem is more that twilight is around 4:30PM from December through February, rather than the weather. Though I suppose this might be less of a worry if cycling infrastructure were safer.

The city does clear the snow from bike lanes with little mini bobcat tractors, but there's only so much that can be done. In mid-winter, I think studded snow tires are a must. And even those aren't exactly magic. There were a couple of late season storms this year were the city basically didn't plow much at all because they knew it would melt; and while the slush was navigable easily with a car, trying to carve through that on a bike was pretty freaky. Studs are great on ice and hard pack but with mash potato snow they don't help much.

Even when things are cleared off, melting and refreezing can make the lanes treacherous. That said, I estimate the number of people riding mid-winter is probably less than 10% of what you see in Spring through Fall.

Cambridge has a fleet of sidewalk plows (About 30" wide) that are also used for plowing paths and bike lanes. In the winter they are a godsend.

In a snow emergency (i.e. when cars are forced off one side of the street for plowing), the vertical barriers can be manually removed.

On a lot of streets, won't the only way to do this be to eliminate parking on one side of the street? Should be interesting.

This is what has happened so far. Retail business owners have... not been pleased (to put it mildly).

Overall it's pretty clearly been a net gain, but there's definitely some short term pain there.

I don’t believe there is pain. All the studies in the US have shown that improving biking infrastructure immediately improves retail sales (it’s obvious why...you throw bikes in the mix, and walking is also a lot safer, and everyone who enters a retail store eventually needs to walk, so a nicer walking environment makes it better for all their customers).

The complaints are likely a combination of general aversion to change, the fact that most retailers are likely drivers and identify as such and look at bike improvements as an attack on their group, and media reporting that focuses on those who lie on the extremes.

>I don’t believe there is pain. All the studies in the US have shown that improving biking infrastructure immediately improves retail sales

That generalization is vague to the point of uselessness. It really depends on the nature of the business in question.

One Cambridge business that has been vocally against bike infrastructure is a pharmacy. I understand why they would be against it, because much of their clientele is elderly. There's a new parking protected bike lane in front of their business, and there are fewer parking spots than there used to be (and those that remain are bang against the "car lane" on one side and the bike lane on the other)

I fully support the law, but given that the proprietors treat us very well and know my wife by name, I haven't tried too hard to change their mind.

Specifically to Cambridge many of the people who need to go there are not within bike distance, and to me Cambridge has been friendly to people walking around for a long time so that was never a thing. I can't speak to biking as for me a bike would have not really helped the situation, so putting more squeeze on the limited parking arrangements would affect retail businesses. There's quite a bit of retail that only makes sense to have in Cambridge because of proximity to all of the universities.

I feel like these bike-centric arguments do well in very dense cities like NYC but don't translate as well to places like Boston where there's just as much reason to go into Boston as there is to go out of Boston.

Some of the pressure for parking spots should be reduced by the people who are now biking. It's not clear it will even out, though.

For one-way streets this is avoided by reducing one lane of travel and using it for parking, putting the protected bike lane where cars used to park. Example: https://goo.gl/maps/9FoAZgKirbQ2

This is Cambridge, MA.. it is incredibly hard to go most places in Cambridge and ever find a parking space on the side of the street.

If you are not a resident the majority of non-metered parking is not legal for you to park in.

The metered parking has strict maximum time limits and they enforce parking aggressively. It can be very hard to find a parking space at all.

If you need to travel in for business/pleasure in a car you basically are forced to either go to a subway/train station with a parking lot and then park there and take the subway/train/bus into Cambridge, or you will need to go in and have a parking garage ($$) to park at, and then walk a long way.

It is seriously stressful to use a car in Cambridge and Somerville.

It's already so dense & hard to use cars that the retail businesses don't really have anything they can complain about. By locating their business their they already decided to be hostile to customers who want to use a car.

> It can be very hard to find a parking space at all.

It sounds like they are not charging enough for parking, if that's the case.

>I could be misinterpreting the language, [...] but the default seems to be that a typical side street would have a dedicated bike lane.

I think the key here is that it's for any roadway that is rebuilt, expanded, or reconfigured. This is very rare for residential side streets in my experience - it would only come when roads are widened or curb lines are redone, which is more common on major streets and roads. Repaving is explicitly excluded.

I also think the exceptions are not nearly as limited as you. While 12.22.040.B explicitly calls the exceptions "rare", basically as long as they can prove in a public report that it's impractical (for financial constraint or physical features/usage reasons), they don't have to do a bike lane.

It's the perfect time to do it. Building the protected bike lane in the road design from the get go is the most effective way to make both cyclists and drivers happy and safe.

I totally agree with you. If you are re-doing a road, that's the best time to build a bike lane. But I'm personally not convinced that it's necessary on every new road. I lived on a side street in Cambridge that saw maybe one car every twenty minutes. I was lucky to have a private driveway, but my neighbors would have been pretty angry if you took away their street parking to put in a bike lane on a street with very little traffic. In my opinion, there should be some additional criteria, such as needing a bike lane on any new street with expected traffic of more than one car every minute (or some reasonable time frame). As a biker when I lived in Cambridge, I always felt safe on side streets where I could just bike in the middle of the street and move over for the occasional vehicle, but I was much more afraid on major (or even minor) thoroughfares.

I personally would love to live in a world where fewer people own cars in the first place because public transportation is so good, but that's an ideal that we are no where close to achieving, so a lot of people need to own cars.

This is going to get ugly in Cambridge because a lot of parking is going to be eliminated and people who used to be able to park near their homes will be parking on the side streets. People who live on those side streets are going to suddenly find it more difficult to find parking.

I'm for adding bike lanes, but there are plenty of people who work far outside the city and who need to drive are going to find it intolerable. A lot of people will be forced to move, while the value of off-street parking will go up.

And counter-productively, many of those who will move will now just have to commute further, no matter the infrastructure. Cars are no pancea, but they are far from obsolete outside dense city centers.

But it isn't the perfect reason. I live on a dead end road (road ends at the creek), it doesn't take much intelligence to realize the pavement is nearly worn out and so will be replaced soon. However because the road doesn't go anywhere, there is no need for any bike lane. If anything it needs a basketball hoop in the middle - all that hard surface is wasted on cars: let the kids play when there isn't a car coming.

I've got to wonder how this will actually help at intersections - are stoplights really going to get dedicated phases akin to walk lights? Are there going to be stop signs where cars cross the bike lane?

I once hit a car on Mass ave (just south of Central Sq) that popped out across the bike lane (but stopping to oncoming cars), and I couldn't simply move left due to cars on my left. Luckily it was raining so the reason I couldn't stop was traction rather than having been going wicked fast. If there is simply a cut in a barrier for cars to go across at every existing sidestreet, it seems like more barriers constraining bikes (and visual noise for drivers) will make that even worse!

I'll admit it's been over a decade since I've commuted city streets on a bike, and I've never personally seen benefit from city bike lanes. Worrying about being doored, pedestrians stepping off the sidewalk, cars pulling out, and avoiding road debris all require keeping far enough left, and the bike lanes I've experienced actually hamper that. The only times I've ever worried about cars straight up plowing me from behind (/ wind suck!) have been on suburban/rural roads.

What this means is the rich get new roads, the poor don't. The cost of adding these lanes will be enormous, especially in tight areas where you may need to seize property or realign streets. Nobody will advocate for the poor areas to ever be redeveloped at these cost levels.

The cycle continues.

The rich get new roads anyway.

Massachusetts has a de facto policy of no road expansions, and especially not land appropriations for road expansions, anywhere in the state.