Michael Williams Edge Lane Road Episode - Note: Time Stamps are off a little due to music intro.

[00:00:00] John: Hi, everyone. Welcome to the Active Towns Podcast Conversations About Creating a Culture of Activity. My name is John Simmerman. I'm the founder of the Active Towns Initiative. And I'm honored to serve as your host each week on this podcast journey. Thank you so much for tuning in. It's always wonderful to have you along for the ride.

Today is Friday, October 8th, 2021, and I'm delighted to welcome Michael Williams into the Active Towns, virtual studios for a conversation about edge lane roads. Now, if you're not yet familiar with this type of roadway treatment well you are in for a treat, trust me, they are pretty darn cool when done well.
But before we roll into that conversation and cover those details, please allow me a brief moment to say that this episode is once again being brought to you by the generous contributions of our donors, sponsors and monthly patrons on our Patrion page. If you'd also like to help support my efforts by making a contribution, just head over to my website at activetowns.org and navigate to the donation page.
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Okay, let's get this discussion about edge lane roads with Michael Williams rolling.
Michael, it's so wonderful to connect with you here today. Welcome to the active towns podcast.

[00:02:38] Michael: Thank you, John. Happy to be here.

[00:02:42] John: So our topic today is to introduce and demystify the Edge Lane Road, or as some members of the audience may know it the Advisory Bike Lane treatment.

And we're going to dive into a lot of those details and define it and all that good stuff in our discussion. But to kick this off why don't you just share a little bit about yourself and how you come to be interested in this particular field of study?

[00:03:09] Michael: I spent most of my life in the rural environment, small towns in the mountains, et cetera.

So that's the perspective I come from. Also I've been a cyclist all my life. And so much of my cycling experience has been in the rural environment. And so I'm most attuned to the problems, potential solutions the way solutions don't work when they're moved from the urban to the rural environment, et cetera.
So when I visited the Netherlands and discovered this treatment I thought it was great. In rural areas you have these roads that just have very few cars on them, but they've got a center line down the middle and you are either in the travel lane or you're in the drainage ditch next to the road. So when I saw this treatment, I knew this was something that fit our rural environment well, and come to learn that it also fits quite a few urban settings also.

So it was that rural perspective combined with the discovery of this treatment in the Netherlands. That led me to believe that this is something we really need to have in our toolbox in the US.

[00:04:21] John: So Michael, I was digging into your CV a little bit, and your background now, you don't have necessarily formal training in this area until much later in your life. So what were you doing in the first part of your career?

[00:04:36] Michael: You're right. Civil engineering, active transportation is the third career in my life.
My first career was as a oh, computer software, hardware, biomedical engineer. I went down to the Silicon valley and the primary job I had there was as a developer, did a little bit of research. On the first implantable defibrillator ever with a small company by the name of Ventritex that no longer exists, it's been swallowed up by one of the large companies that like to do that.

So I did that for, I think about 15 years medical applications of computer software and hardware. And then I moved back to the rural area, back to the mountains, beautiful, little town of Mount Shasta, where I became a general contractor. And I primarily worked in public works, roads, bridges, schools different things like that.

I'd always had a hobby of construction and I said, Hey, I can do this for my job as well. So I did that for about the same number of years, right around 15 years and all during this time, I had pursued self-education around active transportation in general. And then once I felt my enthusiasm for the construction world ebbing, I told myself I'm going to go up, get a degree in civil engineering and and start working in an area that I've been passionate about since I was in my twenties.
That's what I did and went to Portland State University, one of the best campuses in the country for this type of area and went from there.

[00:06:14] John: Now let's go back to what you were talking about before, because you wove into, and you've just alluded to it that you did a trip in your twenties and you had an opportunity to visit the Netherlands.

So when was that about?

[00:06:29] Michael: Oh, I've been to The Netherlands three times, maybe four times, I believe where most of those trips, I was just traveling, having a good time and rode bikes, but I didn't have my active transportation goggles on. I just enjoyed the freedoms and luxury of being safe and comfortable on my bike. In that country. The last time I went was actually on a guided tour with Dr. Peter Furth where we got great access to some of the engineers, the local engineers there in the Netherlands. We went and saw particular installations. So that was when I discovered the edge lane road treatment.

[00:07:13] John: Fantastic. That's great. I get the sense then that when you were there the first time that wasn't necessarily the time where you had that thinking cap on and we're like going, oh, this is a neat treatment.

You, you were just like really enjoying the fact that you were traveling and had an opportunity to experience a different lifestyle. Is that about right?

[00:07:33] Michael: Yeah. The Netherlands is a great place to go. Whether you like bikes or not. And if you like bikes, it's a fantastic place to go.

[00:07:40] John: Yeah. Yeah, exactly. So what I thought I do to tee this up is, and I shared with you before we hit the record button that we're on a new video platform here being able to share some content and I thought it would be fun for us to actually show you a little video that was sitting on my iPad.
I had no idea that this was out there. It was from a trip that I did in the Netherlands in 2018. And as I was loading the iPad up with some of your photos, I'm like, oh, you're going to get a kick out of this. So let me queue this up. And hopefully the technology wizards will allow us to jump right into this and have some fun with it.
And let's head on over, and hopefully you can see that.

[00:08:25] Michael: Yes. Yes, it looks beautiful.

[00:08:27] John: Okay. So I'll set this up a little bit for you and for the audience. This was in 2018 and I just happened to be riding out to the airport. So literally this is just along the way getting out to the main airport there in Amsterdam I was shooting some video. It's a little, it's a little off of, I was experimenting with a 360 degree camera. So anyways let me show you this. And and we can
kind of talk about that.

I got a good chuckle out of this, because a lot of it just really demonstrates some of the things that that you talked about.

[00:09:02] Michael: Is this an Amsterdam?

[00:09:05] John: This is, yeah, this is in some of the neighborhoods between Amsterdam proper and heading out to the airport. So this would definitely be a urban slash suburban context. So anyways, I just thought it would be fun to share that to, to set the scene if you will for the audience to be able to look at this for those of you who are listening to this as a podcast, audio only, you just miss some amazing video.
You're going to have to head over to the video version of this particular podcast, because we've got some really good stuff out there, but I thought it would be neat to show you that just because a, it tickled me that I went out there and found it out on my iPad as I was loading some of your photos in there.
And two, I just thought it was a wonderful example to what you were just saying is that it's that that combination of. We've seen it out there applied in rural environments, but here's a context that's very much more of a suburban type of urban application of it. So I thought it would be nice to talk a little bit about that as a visual for you to then take this over and help us out with some definitions and what these beasts are in terms of facilities.
So take it away, professor.

[00:10:26] Michael: So uh, okay I don't have my PhD, but I do know something about these things. That video, if you folks that have seen the video that you showed you'll note that there was no center line painted or marked on the road by that's an important. Part of an edge lane road facility and what you did have were broken lines or dash lines on either side splitting the road up into essentially three different lanes if you will. The center lane is shared by cars going both directions. The center lane is not normally wide enough for two cars to pass one another. Staying within that center lane. If you have two cars that approach one another, they need to merge into one of those two edge lanes to complete the pass.
Then once they've completed the pass they moved back into the center lane and continue on their way. The edge lanes that are created by the dashed or broken lines there are intended for vulnerable road users. In the video you just showed. It's intended specifically for cyclists, but I've seen equestrians and in those lanes, and really could use some for any type of vulnerable road, user wheelchair users, pedestrians.
There are a number of edge lane road installations in the U S that were installed explicitly to sport pedestrians. So it really doesn't matter whether it's bicycles or people walking or people riding a horse or on mobility devices. What it is it's just a slightly different way to share that roadway with, rather than the normal look that we've come to expect, which is a center line down the middle of the road, maybe no other markings as well.

Which guarantees that you're in the travel lane, no matter where you're at on that road if you have a sidewalk, then you're lucky you're a pedestrian, you get to be on the sidewalk. But if you're on the roadway normally those narrow roads you're in the travel lane and you've got cars coming up from behind you, et cetera.

So it's a much, much more friendly and a much more reasonable way to share the roadway with, but that's my bias showing.

[00:12:34] John: And as you mentioned more vulnerable users of the road space you had mentioned that if there were sidewalks present, then maybe pedestrians wouldn't need to be sharing this space. It looks like there's not much in the way of sidewalks in this particular context.

So this is truly a shared space, whether it's the bipedal types of folks or whether we have the four leggeds also sharing the space. So good stuff I wanted to queue up a couple of other photos that that we had here. And talk a little bit more about them.

So here's another one that you passed along that really, I think, exemplifies what you were just describing in terms of having the space and on, on the one side, it looks like there is a sidewalk space, but on the other side not so much. And in fact, there's a pedestrian occupying that space.

Talk a little bit about why it is. We see this type of treatment over in the Netherlands and it looks like Denmark has also embraced them and several other countries, what's a little bit of the history behind why they're there and not necessarily everywhere else.

[00:13:46] Michael: That's a good question. I don't have all the answers for that question. My understanding is that at least in the Netherlands, this was a treatment that arose out of the government department, that's responsible for all of the dykes, all of the levies and dikes that hold back the water in the Netherlands. And they have quite a few roads that run along the top of the dikes.

And of course these roads are fairly narrow. And so when they wanted to accommodate vulnerable road users on those roads, this is the solution they came up with. With respect to other countries. I think the idea really spread from the Netherlands to, to other countries, as people became aware of it.
This picture here in particular is from Denmark. It's a Danish Edge Lane Road. You can tell by the width of the broken lines there. But they have modified some of the engineering guidance to make this treatment own based on the research and the safety data But yeah, it's been used in the Netherlands, Germany, Japan, Denmark, Great Britain, and some other Scandinavian countries, but those are the primary users that I'm aware of outside of the U S and Canada.

[00:14:59] John: Fantastic. here's another one Why the unhappy face on this one?

[00:15:03] Michael: So this again is a Danish installation. And this, I had loved this picture because it's such a great way to do road user education. You've got a little bit of peer pressure there where they're literally frowning on their behavior.

And what they're trying to communicate is, Hey, this is a road where motor vehicles belong in the center lane. You don't want to be edging over into those Edge Lanes. So it's, I just found this amusing it's road, user education, pure and simple. And of course in the classic European way, they don't write it out in some language that a visitor may be unable to understand.

They use a very graphic, very direct way to get their message across.

[00:15:45] John: Yeah, fantastic. And I think that in Denmark is a great place for this they tend to be rule followers anyways. So this is a nice reminder a nice stern unhappy face that, yeah don't be straddling that line there.

A couple of other fun ones. This one I thought was interesting in that it looks like the space that is reserved off to the side then gets blocked. What can you tell us about what's happening with this treatment? And it does look like it's also another Danish installation.

[00:16:17] Michael: I'm not sure I know this facility, so what you're coming up to is a choke point treatment intended to slow drivers. But if you look on either side of the choke point islands, there is a space for cyclists are vulnerable road users to go around those islands. So as a vulnerable road user comes up to that, they would go around the outside of the islands and the drivers would be forced to go through the metal.

It looks like in this case, as you blow it up, there appears to be a trail crossing the street. And so this is a way to slow drivers at a crossing crosswalk probably a fairly well-used trail and I'm guessing. But yeah, it's just a traffic calming device used on an Edge Lane Road.

[00:17:03] John: Yeah, I would even echo to the fact that it's probably a traffic calming device for cyclists too, because it there's literally an impediment in the middle of the quote unquote lane there that they have.

So Let's take a look at another one this is an example from, I believe from Japan. Is that correct?

[00:17:23] Michael: Correct, I think this is the, Kanazawa prefecture or it's a suburb of Tokyo, I believe somewhere around Tokyo, but the real interesting about this one is that it has split the edge lanes up into pedestrian and bicycle.

And I don't know, Japanese road marking intent but I'm guessing that the pedestrian area, which is next to the edge of the road, it's marked with a solid line and the bicycle area is marked with the dash line. So my assumption is that the dashed areas available for cars to pass one another, but that pedestrian area is off limits.

But again I don't claim to know the exact meaning of road markings in Japan. But this is an interesting concept to me.

[00:18:15] John: Yeah. Yeah, no, it sure is. We'll pull up one of your slides in just a moment, but one of the things that comes to mind when I first saw this installation, Really being readily used in the Netherlands.
Gosh, it must've been way back in 2015 on my first trip there that I was just like, wow this is fascinating because it's not the protected infrastructure and it's not the same. Flavor of shared infrastructure that the Fietsstraats are, or the bicycle priority streets. It's a different Stripe altogether.

And it just worked really well. But, one of the things that I really reflected on was the fact that what made it work so well were the motor vehicle speeds are definitely, you use the word traffic calmed. They're definitely much more forgiving to having this type of design or perhaps said in another way.

The design really encourages slower speeds. Talk a little bit about that, and then I'm wondering if it might make sense for us to queue up either of the two videos that you sent over, either the Ottawa one or the one from New Hampshire. So address the speed and then if it makes sense we'll cue up the video.

[00:19:27] Michael: We're talking about two different cultures when we compare the Netherlands and the U S in The Netherlands, most drivers are also bicycle riders in the U S not so much. So that leads to a bit of a uncertainty in my mind about how to apply this treatment, where to apply this treatment where this treatment will be successful.

But what I've seen with the research I've done on the installations we have already in the U S is that drivers respond to this treatment very appropriately. And of course, right now the federal guidance that's out there specifies a maximum speed of 35 miles an hour, and a maximum volume of cars per day.
To my mind, there's a lot that needs to be improved about that guidance. That is the subject of some of the articles I've published. For example, I don't think a 6,000 cars per day road at 35 miles an hour is going to be a comfortable place to ride for most people especially at peak volumes, but if you get down in the lower volumes and the lower speeds you're looking at a treatment that could easily be as an all ages and abilities.

For example, one of the first mentions of this treatment in any guidance in the U S was the still very good handbook on bicycle boulevards that was created by Mia Birk and a couple of other authors who I, forget at the moment where they said, Hey, this advisory bike lane, what's the term they used.
This advisory bike link treatment is an excellent way to mark Bicycle Boulevard, neighborhood Greenway, whatever you choose to call it because what it does that gets the vulnerable road users out of the lane, where the cars are, right. You got them horizontally separated, and it's only when two cars need to pass that you need to do some extra negotiation and merge into that Edge Lane, which, if you're on a street that's suitable for a bicycle Boulevard, those types of passing operations shouldn't be happening very frequently. In terms of speed and volume. The real enemy of this treatment is volume. If you have too many cars that makes a mess. If you have too many cyclists, even the cars don't have a place to pull over to accomplish the pass.

Unfortunately we don't have the too many bicycles problem in the us very often in the Netherlands. They do. And so that is one of the reasons they will choose not to use an edge lane road treatment in the Netherlands is if they have too many cyclists. Speed is a little bit of a different issue.

Speed obviously is a risk factor. It makes any crash worse. Severity goes up. The speed goes up as everyone well knows. But there are examples of Xplain roads. One in particular that I'm aware of in Scotland, where it's 60 miles an hour, about 1400 cars a day, and it's marked as an edge lane road.
The engineer that put her in loves it, it's been in place for, I think, 15 years now. He says safety is much better than it was before. And he would love to do it on more streets, but people are too freaked out about it. They won't let them do it. So speed is a bit of a different issue. There is comfort.
There is a severity issue, but it's not nearly as big an impact as the volume.

[00:22:48] John: This particular treatment has several different names. As I learned when I was out on your website. So you used the term Advisory Bike Lanes, and many people may know them as that.
Why is that not necessarily a good term to use? Why is Edge Line Road better?

[00:23:04] Michael: So they're known by the names I'm aware of that are most commonly used than the U S are Dash Bike Lanes, which almost nobody, but the FHWA uses. And then there's Advisory, Shoulders and Advisory Bike Lanes. And then Edge Lane Roads.

The problem with Advisory Shoulder and Advisory Bike Lanes is that these edge lanes are neither shoulders, nor are they bike lanes. Both of the terms, shoulder and bike lane come with very specific legal and regulatory baggage. Shoulders are not part of the travel way. They are not intended to have motor vehicles in them.

Bike lanes are intended to be exclusively used for by bicyclists with the rare exception when cars need to cross them to get to access, parking, et cetera. So with the legal context of those concepts shoulder and bike lanes are both a poor choice. And that's why ed lane roads is the name.

I prefer it's a name used in Denmark and it appears to be being adopted more and more in the US.

[00:24:03] John: Okay. You think you're getting some traction on that here in north America?

[00:24:07] Michael: Yeah. I was just looking at my website details and the Edge Lane Road search term has really not been showing up anywhere.

And the most recent month, I think it was maybe 10 or 20% of the search terms. It's normally Advisory Bike Lane. People are using, but Edge Lane Roads are certain to, to gain their own following.

[00:24:28] John: All right. let's queue up that video from Ottawa, because I think it's really snappy and gets right to it.

Of course, they end up calling it Advisory Bike Lane, but we'll do that. And a, and chat a little bit about it.
It's very short. It's not too long.

[00:24:42] Michael: Can I introduce a little bit?

[00:24:44] John: Yeah.

[00:24:45] Michael: This is a video that the city of Ottawa put out to introduce people to the concept, to the treatment and how to operate on it.

And if anybody out there is looking for a video do this, to introduce the concept that behavior's expected. This is a really good one to use it's available on my website. If you need to go look at it.

[00:25:04] John: Fantastic. Let's cue it up. Like I said, nice and snappy and gets right to it. When you show people that video what's their response.

[00:25:49] Michael: I don't show people that video very often. Cause normally I'm doing presentations and it's all, it's sometimes it's a bit dicey to do video inside your presentation, but I show them still, I show them pictures from the small town guide FHWA, small town and rural, multi-modal network guide.
But if I'm dealing with an audience to which this concept is brand new, there's always somebody that says, this is crazy. Your putting us into a game of chicken. And I always come back with you know what happens on narrow alleys? What happens on residential streets, where you've got cars parked on both sides and you don't have enough room for two cars to get past what happens on one lane bridge is what happens in narrow shopping mall, parking lots streets that are not yet fully plowed after a snow storm on and on this type of behavior.

That's negotiating for space to pass an oncoming vehicle. It's a behavior that drivers all across the world do hundreds of millions of times a day or a week. I don't know the actual number, but it's a behavior that is common for us as drivers in the US.

[00:27:04] John: Yeah. I have reflected many times here on the podcast that's exactly the situation here in our neighborhood in Austin, Texas.

It's an older neighborhood planted probably in the 1930s. Many of the streets are narrow enough so that if there's cars parked on either side of the street the remaining real estate that's left over in the middle is so narrow that it becomes a yield street. So you're absolutely right that behavior of traveling with care, slowing down yielding and negotiating who gets to go, who doesn't et cetera is much more common than I think a lot of us realize or give it credit for.

[00:27:44] Michael: Yeah. one thing that, that video. Stated was that it's a good treatment for roads that are too narrow with standard bike lanes. And that's a characterization that I don't agree with. It can be used for that, but there are also other use cases that this treatment really does well at. For example referring back to the Netherlands again the city of Utrecht long known as one of the most, if not the most progressive city in terms of accommodating bicyclists within the Netherlands they recently removed a standard two lane street with bike lanes and transformed it into an Edge Lane Road.

And that was it because they weren't getting the low speeds they wanted the bike lanes were hard up against a parking lane, which is not something they like to do. And they wanted a calmer, quieter, more comfortable road. And when they did that, they'd got fewer autos on that road. They got lower speeds.
They lowered the speed limit. At the same time, we had two lane road and they got more cyclists. So in Utrecht the most progressive city in the Netherlands, they took out standard bike lanes, put an edge lane road and got great results. So there are situations where an edge thing road can be better than the standard bike lane.

[00:29:03] John: So this is the before treatment that you were just talking about where motor vehicles were present and clearly parking on the edge there. And then the after treatment ends up looking more like this, and you can see the data that's also presented there.

[00:29:21] Michael: Yeah. And this is courtesy. I think I got this from Mark Wagenbuur . As I said, number of bikes went up significantly. Number of cars dropped and of course the speeds drop they dropped the speed limit from 50 to 30 kilometers an hour. This is a situation where the road was just wide enough for bike lanes and two travel lanes.

And what that ends up doing is it really sandwiches the cyclist between the moving cars and the parking. And you've got very little horizontal clearance, very little space to feel comfortable. And if you move to a Edge Lane Road, you can actually increase that horizontal clearance between the moving cars and the cyclist quite significantly.

[00:30:01] John: Let me ask you this. So the other video that we have, it's a little bit longer but it's actually a US example. We're talking about New Hampshire here.

It's extraordinary to see the amount of bikes and pedestrians out there. Clearly they feel quite comfortable occupying the space. And for the most part, the motor vehicle drivers are proceeding with due caution.
it's probably an indication that it has been in place for so long. and people have become really accommodated to this treatment. what are your thoughts along those lines is that a big part of it is getting the facility down and then giving it time to season and mature and become something that people are become used to.

[00:30:47] Michael: There is that process as part of the research that I've done on installations in the U S one of the things I've asked about is. How much prior public outreach, how much education was done before the installation was installed? What kind of response did you get? Did the agency receive once it was installed, et cetera.

And what I found was there are two installations that were removed after they were installed, both of them suffered from a lack of public education beforehand. And the agencies that did a lot of public education beforehand got almost zero negative comments about the installation after it was installed.

There are examples of installations where almost no education was done but in a lot of those, and most of those actually drivers reacted appropriately. They slowed down, they drove in the middle, they negotiated for space. So really what happens is there is an advantage to telling people, educating them about the concept, telling them it's coming, because it's going to lessen your negative feedback once it's installed, but it's not truly necessary for it to work correctly.

The two that were removed after installation one was in a fairly wealthy affluent area suburb of Minneapolis, and it was their main street to the golf country club. It also had marked parking on either side. That was very unused. And so the markings were a bit confusing. So you had an older population you've had that pattern that tends to happen where people don't like change. And when it's introduced to them suddenly and they have political connection, they can get that change reversed. So there is that issue, but yeah, public education is good just to ensure a bit more acceptance, but people use it appropriately, whether they know what's expected or not.

From the stories I've heard from agency representatives.

[00:32:48] John: Yeah, it seems if you get the design right. And in other words, it's designed well you're able to keep those speeds down and then it becomes intuitive again, one of the main rules of any kind of shared space is creating that balance between organized chaos.

There you go of does it make the drivers feel just a little bit uncomfortable? And if so, they'll slow down but at the same token, you, you've got a situation where the constraints are there. In other words, that center lane isn't too wide to the point where it encourages truly fast motor vehicles speeding.
And so I think that's a big part of it. One of the things that I wanted to talk with you about is that design. And so I'm going to pull up the Better Than Bike Lanes, a Slide that you have. and the caveat to this is in the setup to this, that I'll give, this is my commentary is that this is better than bike lanes, the way we used to build bike lanes.

[00:33:47] Michael: All right. So this is a comparison between what is probably the most common type of bike infrastructure provided in the country nowadays and the edge lane road. And this comparison is only valid for roads that are lower volume, lower speed. We're an Edge Lane Road will work. And what you have on the top of the slide is an example of the traditional bike lane.

I think I even made it yet six feet wide in this case. So wider than a lot of bike lanes are out there now, but you've got a bike lane that's sandwiched in between the parking lane and a travel lane. So if you are appropriately cautious as a rider, and you're trying to avoid that door zone you really have very little space, very, a very narrow envelope.

I think five feet. If I see they're correctly, a five foot envelope and in which you can ride and that envelope this hard up against a traveling car, and you got a little fudge into the doors area. So your horizontal clearance is not great in this type of facility and that's what the six foot lane. But if you compare that to an edge lane road installation, you can create buffers between the parking lane and edge lane.

And that not only allows a place for drivers and passengers to swing their doors open and access their cars, but that gives you a place for garbage cans or the pile of leaf clippings on the days they go to pick up leaves and branches. All of the junk that ends up on the street in normal bike lanes you also can have a much wider edge.

I think in this example, I made it eight foot wide and a drive lane of 10 foot, which is more than wide enough for a center lane on its lake road installation. And so what you have is a large increase in that horizontal clearance between both the moving vehicles and the parked vehicles.
And that just that improves safety and improves comfort. And so on the right street Edge Lane road is going to give you a much better experience as a cyclist than your standard bike lanes.

[00:35:56] John: Yeah. And what I like about this photo too, is it does add an element that was absent in many of the photos that we looked at and that is the on-street parking.

And so I like the way that have that diagrammed out with that door zone, buffer giving that nice space there for the bike lane and really Constraining that traveling that tout traveling of just 10 feet is there. But as we saw from the videos, as we saw from the diagrams, it works and motor vehicle drivers will slow down and proceed with caution.

And I think what I'd like to do now is have you comment a little bit about some of the photographs that we have that you sent over because we have proof you sent me proof that these exist in the United States. And and so we do have a few photos that that we can share with folks and walk through them.
Let's pull this one up here and you can walk us through it. What are we looking at here?

[00:36:57] Michael: So this is a really interesting application of Edge Lane Roads. This is a small town in the state of Washington.

It's called Port Townsend. It's got a a central business district that was built oh, around the turn of the century. I believe it was it was supposed to be the Seattle of Washington until the railroad ended up more closer to Seattle rather than in port Townsend. But this was a busy port destination in the old days.
But this is the main street in downtown Port Townsend and they established an edge lane road. because they have a tradition of allowing. Delivery trucks to park in the middle of the road. If you see that it's barely visible, there's a transverse white line in the middle of the road there that indicates, Hey, you should park here to make your deliveries.

There are no alleys behind these buildings, so there's no way to take your deliveries into the buildings. So they said, we want to accommodate bicyclists, but we had this problem with big trucks, parking in the middle of the road. How do we do this? So what they came up with was the edge lane road treatment.
They have a speed limit of 20 miles an hour. And the interesting thing about this installation is that basically volumes up around 7,000 cars a day, which is higher than the mandatory 6,000 cars per day threshold, where the MUTCD requires the use of the center line. So here's an example where, hey, it doesn't have to be per the book and it can still work and work safely.

You've got high volumes, but you've got low speeds. People are careful they're negotiating. And it works very well for them. They're happy with the treatment. And in fact they are extending it to other roads within the town very soon.

[00:38:46] John: And I believe these additional photos are also from Port Townsend correct?

[00:38:50] Michael: This is port Townsend as well. It looks like there's a center line mark there, but that's from construction. That's not a.

[00:38:56] John: That is not a center line folks. That is part of the travel lane. Now I will say that travel lane that center lane is quite generous. That's much more than the 10 feet that you had on your diagram.

[00:39:08] Michael: They made their center lane wider because of this issue with the trucks parking in the metal. So they had a bit different set of circumstances.

[00:39:16] John: Absolutely beautiful and how long has this installation been in place?

[00:39:20] Michael: This has been in place for a little over a year, I believe.

[00:39:23] John: Okay. Fantastic. Proof that it can be done.

[00:39:28] Michael: It can't be main street USA

[00:39:30] John: street USA. Yes, absolutely

[00:39:33] Michael: Delivery trucks parking in the middle of the road. So it's a very much a negotiating way of handling getting down the road.

[00:39:42] John: Yeah. Exactly. You had mentioned an installation that was taken away because it was in an affluent area and I'm going to pull up the photos that you sent over from Vail.
And these are actually roads that I know quite well. Cause I spend a lot of time in the Vail and it can be done pretty much anywhere. It's just a matter of again, getting the design. Right. And and I can't recall in, in Vail, whether they did much outreach and education for these facilities I just helicopter in every once in a while.

I don't spend a lot of time there, nowhere near as much time as when I lived in Boulder, I'd be up there almost every other weekend. I can tell you I've written on these roads. I filmed a lot on these roads and there, they also have other types of treatments too, as well as shared space areas in the village and other types of shared space concepts that help reinforce what we're talking about here is encouraging the drivers to slow down and be cognizant and careful with the more vulnerable road users that are out there.

[00:40:52] Michael: Yeah. Talking to the town engineer from city of Vail, I had them join me to present on this installation at a couple of different, I think it's the ITE international meeting and one other conference. I can't remember the, at the moment, but this is a very successful, very well used installation. This is where they have a popular trail called the Gore Valley Trail that runs through the valley that Vail sits within and they needed to connect the trail across this street.

And they were looking for ways to make that happen and make it safe, make it comfortable. And they decided upon this treatment. And as you can see from the pictures they get quite a few peds and bikes. I don't remember. I think they, boy, they're up around a thousand bikes a day and peak periods I believe, and maybe 250 peds a day.

And cars are only about four or 500 a day. I believe I'm remembering that correctly, but it's a very successful installation and it shows that number one, you can have both peds and bicyclists using this treatment. And that it can work as a connector for a trail system on street connector for trail system.

[00:42:10] John: Yeah. Do you know when they actually installed this particular installation and dimensions and all that?

[00:42:16] Michael: This one was installed as a pilot in the summer of 2020, and after they had such good experience, they decided to make a permanent.

[00:42:25] John: Okay. Yeah that explains a little bit to me.
I haven't been back up there since 2020. And so I'm like, this look
s very familiar, but just enough different that I'm like. And the reason why I say that is because I have a video that I produced on that trail. And many of the on-street versions of the images that we're seeing here were part of that video.

So now you've got me curious. I need to cue up that video and make that be part of the show notes and the description for this podcast episode, so that you can see what some of that treatment looked like before, as well as some of the cool aspects of the trail that you were referencing.
So Michael, is there anything that we haven't yet covered that you think is incredibly important?

[00:43:14] Michael: I would like to touch on the results of the safety research that was just completed.
So obviously the first reaction people have when introduced to this concept is what the heck are you talking about? I'm supposed to be driving straight at this guy coming at me it's just going to be carnage right?
So what is the safety performance of this treatment? And so I found some research done in other countries. And I was part of a team that just finished some research here in the U S on the, north American installations and all three studies have shown crash rate reductions for edge lane roads over the standard two length treatment.

And It's pretty remarkable in the U S where this concept is brand new, that people on all of these facilities, you're going to get some number of drivers who are visitors to the area haven't been there before, and don't know what the heck's going on. we found 11 installations that had been installed for at least five years, and that we had good crash data was available for.

And when we looked at these installations, we found a 44% reduction in crash rate. And of course these aren't the high speed, severe crash outcomes. Usually local roads, lower volume forward speeds, but we are having a very good safety outcomes with the installations in the US so far. And of course, Same experience in the Netherlands. Their study was confounded a little bit in that they reduce the speed limits on many of their edge lane roads that were studied Denmark also had some extra treatments they were doing with their edge lane roads. They would introduce traffic calming measures or reduce the speed limit.
And that's what they were seeing. Very significant crash rate as well. So this treatment not only is safe, but it's a safety improvement compared to standard two lane roads.

[00:45:16] John: Fantastic. So how do we get more of these?

[00:45:19] Michael: That's a great question. I'm glad you asked that. So the exciting thing is that the ASHTO Bike Guide is due out.

I was supposed to be out this year, but it looks like it may be pushed into the next year. I don't know when it's going to come out, but everybody's looking forward to it. And the great thing is that this treatment is included in the ASHTO Bike Guide. And I suspect that we'll see a huge increase in uptake once that hits the shelves that will just give it more credibility, more awareness, et cetera.

And really the big problem right now is awareness. I consider this treatment to be in the same spot that modern roundabouts were in the 1990s. They're clearly a great tool to have in the toolbox, but very few people know about. Very few people recognize the advantages they confer. And so it's really, at this point, there's a lot of education needs to be done, a lot of awareness raising, and I appreciate you having the on to do part of that.

So I think once this becomes a better known treatment that it will be used heavily all across the country because there are just so many road miles of local and collector type roads that can use this treatment easily and successfully.

[00:46:36] John: Yeah. And a frequent listeners of the podcast and viewers as well.
We'll know that I frequently say that part of the beauty of the Dutch system and the Danish systems is that they do have these other creative types of installations. The protected bike ways and protected infrastructure, separated infrastructure usually gets the most attention.
However 70% of the Dutch network is actually some form of shared space. and these are frequently used in those residential areas. And as we saw in some of the suburban context, too as I was making my way out to the airport fantastic. Michael, how best for folks to follow along with your work and the work of these Edge Lane Roads?

[00:47:22] Michael: I would say the premier spot to go, if you're interested in this treatment is my website advisorybikelanes.com. Yes, it is the term I don't prefer to use, but that's what it ended up being back when I started, so have stuck with it. So advisorybikelanes.com is a great place where I store technical information, examples that I've found across the us and just a lot of resource links.

We also have an email listserv that people can join for free. There isn't a whole lot of traffic on it, so you're not going to be overwhelmed in your inbox. But if your interested in the treatment and the nitty gritty and what's new, what's happening that's a great place to go, but those are the two main resources at the moment.

We are at the national committee for uniform traffic control devices level. It's a volunteer group that helps create content for the MUTCD manual on traffic control devices. We are creating content to support Edge Lane Roads that hopefully will be in the next version of MUTCD, not the one upcoming, but the one after that, of course the ASHTO bike guide should be included in there when it's published.

But yeah, there's a lot happening and I see that snowball is rolling down the hill. It's getting bigger and bigger, the uptake and starting to occur. I think we have almost 60 installations in the U S right now, and that's since 2011. So it's happening. It's going to happen.

[00:49:00] John: Fantastic. Michael Williams. It has been such a great pleasure to chat with you here today. And hey thank you so much for joining me on the Active Towns Podcast.

[00:49:11] Michael: Thank you, John.

[00:49:13] John: Thank you all so much for tuning in to episode number 95 of the Active Towns Podcast. I really hope you enjoy this conversation about Edge Lane Roads and are curious to learn more about their possible applications within your neighborhoods. The fact is that many of our streets and communities would benefit from this type of treatment.

Be sure to check out all the photos and links in the show notes and on the landing page for this episode at activetowns.org.

That's all for this week's episode, but first a final reminder, please help me to grow the culture of activity movement by making a donation to Active Towns, spreading the word and subscribing.
Thank you also very much for your support and for tuning in until next time.

This is John signing off by wishing you much activity, health and happiness. Cheers.