The Bike Blog is excited to announce that LADOT will soon be implementing a green bike lane pilot project, right here in the City of Los Angeles. Jurisdictions around the country and around the world have been experimenting with colored pavement as a treatment that visually enhances the separation of bike lanes from vehicle travel lanes. Join us below the fold to find out what’s good about green bike lanes, the process behind getting them, and where you will soon be able to ride L.A.’s first example.
Updated: An example of green bike lanes from Boston, MA
What’s good about green bike lanes?
Federal Highway Administration (FHWA) studies have shown that green bike lanes improve bicyclist positioning as they travel across intersections (and other conflict areas). FHWA has also found that both motorists and bicyclists have a favorable impression of green colored bike lanes. Bicyclists felt safer while riding green bike lanes, while motorists felt that green bike lanes helped increase their awareness of bicycles in the area.
How do we get Green Colored Bike Lanes?
According to FHWA, any treatment intended to regulate, warn, or guide traffic (motorists and bicyclists) that serves more than just an aesthetic purpose is considered a traffic control device. Traffic control devices are regulated at the federal level by FHWA and are codified in the Manual on Uniform Traffic Control Devices (MUTCD). The State of California also has its own CA MUTCD, which is overseen by Caltrans and the California Traffic Control Devices Committee (CTCDC). Both MUTCD’s are responsible for defining the standards used to install and maintain traffic control devices on all public and private roads (open to public traffic). Basically, anything not in the CA MUTCD is considered not approved for use on our roadways. New treatments – like green bike lanes – can be tested by local jurisdictions only after they receive FHWA and CTCDC approval.
As recently reported by the LACBC, FHWA has recently granted Interim Approval to states for the optional use of green bike lanes as a traffic control device. The California Department of Transportation (Caltrans) has requested to participate in this Interim Approval. As a condition, jurisdictions – including us here at LADOT – within the state will have to notify Caltrans before proceeding with green bike lane projects. Caltrans has to maintain an inventory of green bike lanes per federal regulations.
1st Street (1.6 miles between Boyle Ave and Lorena St.)
L.A.’s first green bike lanes will be installed on the newly minted 1st Street bike lanes between Boyle Ave. and Lorena St.. The department is committed to installing green coloring that is not only visibly green, but durable and (perhaps most importantly) skid/slip resistant. On a recent site visit to 1st, we noticed that a few bicyclists were reluctant to use the new lanes, choosing instead to ride on the sidewalk. We hope that with the new green bike lanes, those bicyclists will feel more comfortable and confident riding on the street.
Green lanes can make bicyclists feel more comfortable riding on the street
So where would you guys like to see green bike lanes in the future? How do you think we should prioritize the “greening” of bike lanes? Should they be along transit lines, commercial districts, wide boulevards, or only in conflict areas? Be sure to leave a comment and share your thoughts below.
LADOT BIKE BLOG 
Unless someone moved the Prudential Center to New York City and also built some surface Light Rail there. that top photo was taken in Boston, MA.
Thanks for catching that. Cant always trust google images.
Are you sure your example photo is from New York? Because it looks an awful lot like Boston to me…
Nonetheless, it’s great to hear this news, and I look forward to riding the new green lanes on 1st and many other streets throughout LA in the (hopefully) not-too-distant future.
One other thing: I’m fairly agnostic about the use of green lanes in general, but my intuition tells me they’d work best in busy commercial areas with high parking turnover where the flurry of activity might cause some drivers to fail to notice conventional bike lanes and the riders in them.
Broadway Ave in Santa Monica would be perfect for Green Lanes!
Well…it may not happen all that soon, but green bike lanes on Broadway are part of the 5-year implementation plan of the draft bike action plan in Santa Monica (http://www01.smgov.net/planning/whats-new/bike%20action%20plan/bap%20chapter%203.pdf – ” Broadway from 6th Street to Centinela Avenue: Restripe existing bike lanes to green buffered bike lanes by narrowing travel lanes and parking lane.”)
Love it! I’ve been a big fan of Long Beach’s green lanes.
I think green lanes would be perfect for all of the lanes planned in the congested downtown area (when I rode the new 7th Street bike lanes recently, there were a few clueless cars trying to use the new bike lane to bypass traffic, and green lanes may help discourage that too)
This is awesome! I would love to see green bike lanes on boulevards that have commercial districts. Ventura Blvd would be a great choice since it can be a major east-west bikeway for the San Fernando Valley.
Yay for green bike lanes! I would like to see them all the way down Venice Blvd., one of the longest and well-used bike lanes that I know of. Too many drivers treat the existing bike lane as a “bonus” traffic lane.
P.S. Venice Blvd. – the green lane might help discourage the habitual placement of trash bins in the bike lane. I see this happen every week on trash day.
I did a bicycle/pedestrian count this Tuesday for LACBC at the intersection of Lankershim Blvd and Chandler Blvd. The crossing guard who has been working that corner for a year and a half for LADOT told me that he had never seen a pedestrian hit there in that time, but that there was one motorcycle and eight bicyclists hit by right turning cars entering the intersection from the west side on Chandler Blvd heading south on Lankershim Blvd. None of the bicyclists were hit crossing the street by way of crosswalk/sidewalk.
Los Angeles is going to have to try harder in order to get people cycling off of the sidewalk and onto a street. Simply painting or using thermoplastic is not going to work very well. Sidewalk riders are the canary in the coal mine for whether people feel comfortable riding along a corridor. If they are still riding on the sidewalk, then what has been done is not good enough. We need at least protected lanes with buffer zones on busy streets in order to get a wide range of demographics for a given area.
I would proceed causiously with painting green lanes at intersections. A study from Denmark noted that having all four crossings for bikes painted blue at an intersection increased the accident rate.
Click to access 070503_Cycle_Tracks_Copenhagen.pdf
Thanks for your feedback Dennis. We will be proceeding cautiously and appreciate the input.
Any bike lane upgrades, which I am in favor of, need to be accompanied by massive culture change campaigns addressed both to drivers and to bike riders.
On the one hand I think drivers need to be more accommodating, but as a driver I have nearly hit bicyclers who were heeding neither the actual law nor laws of respect towards fellow human beings.
I LOVE the green bike lane in Long Beach on 2nd st. I wish I had more info about the high traffic areas that this would most benefit. I am a Hollywood rider, so am not around the areas that may need it most. Personally, Id like to see some green on the side streets, such as Willoughby (from La Cienega to Gower) I see lots of bikes out there and agitated drivers in the morning. Green lanes would be great! Maybe up and over the Cahuenga pass? That is one of the only ways to get into the valley on bike other than canyon roads or the metro or Griffith.
I would like to suggest that the irresistability of cycling should be measured before and after the green paint is installed. Using non-holiday weeks of Monday-Thursday, check to see if the ratio of men to women and street riders versus sidewalk riders has changed significantly. If it hasn’t, then this probably didn’t make bicycling along this corridor much more irresistable than before.
We need to measure the subjective, along with the objective, to see if treatments are having the desired effect of increasing bicycling. In other words, you have to pay attention to whether the treatment has made a wider range of potential cyclists feel more comfortable with cycling, not just measuring whether more young adult males started bicycling there.
The potential amount of people who would drive a car is limited by a minimum required age of 16 years old, having a license to drive, access to a car.
Compare that to the much wider range of potential cyclists. People from about nine years old and up are the ages that can bicycle independently and access to a bicycle is much easier than a car. Therefore, the pool of potential bicyclists is a much larger group than potential motorists. Targeting just the young adult male for cycling on the street is a much smaller group than the amount of potential drivers. This will always severely limit the ability to achieve anywhere close to a ten percent modal share for bicycling.
As you noted, Boston uses green bike lanes to highlight confusing intersections. The same should be done in LA, only use green to help get cyclists across an intersection. Elsewhere, it’s sort of wasted money.
Here are the Boston examples. An overhead view of the picture in the article (note green in both east and west directions)
http://g.co/maps/x46mg
At a triangle
http://g.co/maps/zyncr
Where the bike lane switches from right side of street to left, with help from a bike box.
http://g.co/maps/yargs
And not green, but a proper use of bike lanes and sharrows
http://g.co/maps/zja5w
Bike lane for straight, sharrow for soft left, bike lane for hard left.
[…] de la Vega says L.A. is committed to becoming a more bike-friendly city. L.A. will soon get its first green bike lanes on 21st Street, and the Reseda Blvd bike lanes are now complete from Roscoe to Parthenia. Joe […]
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Any chance we’ll see any of these “green lanes” in the SF Valley any time soon? Maybe Reseda Blvd?
Hey Andres. Thanks for commenting. I couldn’t agree more about Reseda considering that lanes exist, yet there are still many people who bike on the sidewalk. As funding becomes available we will have a discussion on what bike lanes will be “greened.”
I am very excited to see the green coloring to be added to the bike lane in Boyle Heights. As someone who lives and bikes in Boyle Heights, the addition of color will be important. I also drive in Boyle Heights and I didnt even notice the bike lane. It wasnt until I read an email 2 weeks after it was installed that I knew about it. The added color will really make it stand out for drivers and protect pedestrians.
Gosh, from the Boston pics one can only dream of what it must be like to bike around a city that actually cares for your road safety. Green lanes, bike boxes, well-marked intersections. Los Angeles (the region, not the city) really is the ‘capital of the third world’ as David Reiff memorably said.
I agree with Dennis: sidewalk riders are the canaries. Last week I counted bikes at Wilshire & Santa Monica. Without getting ahead of the official data, I found that anecdotally white middle-aged guys like me took the boulevards in a helmet; most others chose the sidewalk sans helmet. The proportion of female cyclists varied between 1/4 to 1/3 (weekday) with under-age or older cyclists negligible in the count.
See my post on Metro usage here:
http://betterbike.org/2011/09/lacbc-bike-count-metro-bike-carrier-data/
Forgot to add that the green lanes are all about signaling: to bikes that there’s a conspicuous, protected lane; and to motorists that there is a lane that must be respected. As one poster said, that’s critical with regards to intersections & a greater potential of mode conflict.
For other lanes, I believe that we can mark them appropriately (which means a marker more frequently than every 1000 feet) without going all-green.
There are at least a couple spots on the new 7th Street bike lanes. At 7th & Bixel the E/B bike lane has many cars crossing over it (and usually partially blocking it) to make right turns off 7th onto S/B Bixel. Often the cars block most of the bike lane when queuing to turn right. Going W/B, the bike lane has to shift over one full car lane to fall between the thru lane and the right-turn lane. This lane shift could really use green shading to help guide cyclists correctly.
I’m sure situations like this occur at many busy intersections. I think they are strong candidates for green painting priority. :-)
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[…] to be in place by December of this year. The lane will have a six foot painted lane (in the now famous green color approved by the state earlier this summer) and a four foot painted buffer. The lane will allow for full time parking […]
[…] lane will have a six foot painted lane (in the now famous green color approved by the state earlier this summer) and a four foot painted buffer. The lane will allow for full time parking […]
Can you please finish the bike lane on Silver Lake Blvd and connect it into the VT/Beverly subway stop? That seems like such a no-brainer and would go a long way towards bike mobility in the area.
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[…] sidewalks where possible to encourage walking and provide space for outdoor dining, placing green bike lanes along the length of the route, painting high-visibility crosswalks on all major intersections, […]
Great blog of L.A. to get its first green bike lanes.thanks to share about green bike lances.