Is this a bike lane?

In a word, No. None of these are bike lanes. But someone sure went out of their way to make it look so. They even moved the not-bike lane stripe over to make more room in the not-bike lane (center photo). [See Fig 1, here, for a picture and description of how an actual bike lane is marked]

What is the correct — both legal and safety — position for a cyclist to assume in these not-bike lanes? Just try to get a straight answer out of the-powers-that-be (in this case, the City of Phoenix) on that one.

The law is refreshingly clear: “If the lane…is too narrow for a bicycle and a vehicle to travel safely side by side within the lane” a cyclist may ride anywhere in that lane, §28-815(A)(4).

See other articles on critical width; see AASHTO for dimensional guidelines for (real) bike lanes.

Dimensions

Exactly how wide, or narrow as the case may be, are these ridiculous shoulders? Dimensions of the shot of the white SUV, in the top-left  picture, can be found here.

Dimension of Ray Road, the picture with the big yellow school bus are as below. This section is typical of Ray Road between approx E 3600 and 4400 blocks in Phoenix (but there are even narrower parts, as pictured above top-right):

115 / 38 / 14″ : lane / shoulder / gutter pan

The “bike lane” (were it to be one, it is not) would the be 38+14 = 52″ — 8″ shy of nominal.

But that’s not even the biggest problem. The travel lane, at less than 10′, is unusually small by Phoenix standards. The usable width is 115+38 = 153″ (less than 13′) is unsuitable for any side-by-side sharing, as is graphically obvious from the photo. This is 15″ shy of being sharable with narrow-profile motor vehicles, and a bus or truck or trailer is out of the question.

Good graphic of how 14′ usable space can be shared by a typical cyclist and a typical, narrow, motor vehicle from cyclist and traffic engineer Richard Moeur.

Cyclists riding in the shoulder can and will, I can attest to from first hand experience, get passed with just inches to spare by drivers merrily and illegally skimming by cyclists in the “not-bike lane”.

Large vehicle dimensions are commonly 8′,  or 8.5′ (e.g. see Large School Bus Design Vehicle Dimensions ; the AASHTO defined SU truck or BUS is 8.5′); not including mirrors.

What the MUTCD Says

The Manual of Uniform Traffic Control Devices, MUTCD, is the transportation engineer’s bible, throughout the United States; it is incorporated into Arizona law, see the-mutcd-and-a-r-s.

See sections 3B06 and 7, Edge Line Pavement Markings, and Warrants for use of Edge Line Markings.  What is an edge line? “If used, edge line pavement markings shall delineate the right or left edges of a roadway”.

Types of roads where their use is warranted include “Freeways, Expressways, and RURAL arterials”. (my emphasis). Note that urban arterials are NOT on the list, to put it another way, the use of edge lines on urban arterial is non-standard and unwarranted. The only other possible allowable usage would be “where an engineering study indicates a need for edge line markings” — were there engineering studies done to support their use? I, um, highly doubt it.

The kindest thing i can think to say about edge lines (on urban arterial with closed shoulders) is they are not prohibited, due to the “if used…” language in 3B06.

Recommendations

Since motorists have an expectation that cyclists must use bike lanes; these not-bike lanes cause confusion, since they are widely perceived as actual bike lanes.

The confusion has only deleterious effects on cyclists, one of two problems arise:

1. encourages (mis-informed) cyclists to ride too far to the right, this encourages motorists to buzz cyclists. Or,
2. cyclists riding (legally) in the lane are harassed by motorists.

Planners should not lay out urban arterial roads with a right lane that has a “critical” width. This is a critically important revision needed to the current (1999) edition of AASHTO’s Guide for the Development of Bicycle Facilities: “an outside or curb lane wider than 3.6 m (12 feet) can better accommodate both bicycles and motor vehicles in the same lane and thus is beneficial to both bicyclists and motorists (p.17)”

Improved wording in the DRAFT Guide reads: “Lane widths of 13 feet (4.0 m) or less require most motor vehicles to be driven at least part way into the next lane to pass a bicyclist with an adequate and comfortable clearance (usually 3 ft [0.9 m] or more depending on the speed of the passing vehicle). Lane widths of 14 feet (4.3 m) or greater enable motorists to pass bicycles [sic] without encroaching into the adjacent lane” (p. 57).

…

Where these bad layouts already exist, because of the confusion caused to both cyclists and motorists, the stripe should be removed; i.e. it should have never been placed there in the first place.

A Ray of Hope

Yes, that was a little play on words — When a portion of Ray Road in Phoenix was rebuilt in July 2010, it overlapped with the portion that has the onerous stripe. Happily when the newly rebuilt portion was striped, the edge stripe did not make a reappearance. So the portion between Ranch Circle South and 44th Street used to look like the picture above with the school bus but now looks like this (east and west bound; the west bound has just a few feet of edge stripe in order to mate up with the bad old existing edge stripe):

It’s only maybe a quarter-mile but at least it is a step in the right direction.