Graph of L.A. City bike lane mileage implementation over time. New bike lane mileage has increased dramatically in 2011 and 2012
It’s July 2012, which means that the city of Los Angeles has just completed Fiscal Year 2011-2012. The city’s fiscal year runs July 1st to June 31st. Mayor Villaraigosa’s directive to “build 40 miles of bikeway a year” went into effect July 1st 2011, one full year ago. The great news is that L.A. City greatly exceeded the 40 new miles pledged! Bikas doesn’t have an exact total, but L.A. has installed ~62.5 miles of new bikeways over the past fiscal year – including over 50 miles of new bike lanes.
Bikas thanks Mayor Villaragosa, the City Council, and the Los Angeles Department of Transportation (LADOT) for making hugely important strides to make bicycling safer, easier and more legitimate.
(Bikas is doing an overall report card, with some additional analysis… which we hope to post within a week… but today, we’ll share some early commentary.)
Earlier today, the LADOT website posted this article where LADOT General Manager Jaime de la Vega is claiming “76 miles of new bikeways”:
For FY 2012, LADOT successfully delivered 76 miles of new bikeways. This consisted of 51 miles of on-street bike lanes, 21 miles of sharrow-ed routes (bike routes with shared lane markings), and a 4-mile bike path as part of the Metro Orange Line extension.
LADOT has really stepped up their game this year – with an order of magnitude more bikeways than ever before. I will very briefly critique the inaccurate “76 miles” but mostly will praise LADOT for an unprecedented 50.26 miles (!) of new bike lanes. Historically that’s about ten years’ output – all in one year this time! About one-fourth of all of the city’s bike lanes were installed in the past 12 months! It’s awesome – and it’s making a difference on the ground.
So… “76 miles of new bikeways.” Briefly, there are three discrepancies that affect this total:
- Only ~8 miles of the ~20 miles of sharrows were actually “new” bikeways. (Re-doing old stuff is arguably important, worthwhile, good – but it doesn’t add mileage to the network – so it shouldn’t be counted as “new” miles. In a few cases, existing routes received lanes, this doesn’t add to the overall total, but it’s a very significant upgrade, so it does count.)
- There are also three bike lane projects that the city claimed in FY2010-11 that they’re also claiming this year. (Sheldon Street and two Riverside Drive projects – totalling 1.05 miles.)
- The city is slightly undercounting bike path mileage, by not counting a 0.2-mile L.A. stretch of Metro’s new Expo bike path.
All in all, I think that the new bikeways total is more like ~62.5 miles (50.26 miles of bike lane + 8 miles of new sharrowed bike routes + 4.2 miles new bike path.) This is HUUUUUUGE! Unprecedented! Typically the city has done fewer than 10 miles each year.
So far in Los Angeles, there are three kinds of bikeways: paths, lanes, and routes. Bike path implementation is expensive, and varies based on the city’s success in obtaining outside grants. Bike routes are wimpy, nearly meaningless. Bike lanes are cheap fiscally, but require an allocation of space… so I see them as more-or-less a measure of the city’s political will to accommodate and legitimize bicycling.
From the approval of L.A.’s 1996 Bicycle Master Plan though 2009, the city implemented ~67 new miles of bike lane in 13 years – averaging 5 new miles per year. For the past three fiscal years, there’s a dramatic uptick in new bike lane mileage: (my work-in-progress spreadsheet tracking this stuff posted here.)
- 1996-2009 avg: 5.1 miles
- FY 2009-10: 10.29 miles
- FY 2010-11: 15.29 miles
- FY 2011-12: 50.26 miles
The graph at the top of the post tells the story visually. I will repeat it here:
Graph of L.A. City bike lane mileage implementation over time. New bike lane mileage has increased dramatically in 2011 and 2012
I’ve broked it out into 6-month intervals. Check out the steep rise in the latest two 6-month bars!
More overally FY 2011-2o12 to come in the next few days… but for now – kudos to all the folks who made L.A. streets better and safer this year!
Dennis Hindman
07/03/2012
Comparing the 70 largest U.S. cities in terms of the rate of commuting by bicycle, the Census Bureau’s American Community Survey for 2010 ranked Los Angeles 23rd, or within the top one third of these cities.. There was a 50% jump in the commuting bicycling rate in LA from 2007 to 2008, after a one third rise in the price of gasoline and this noticeable bicycling increase no doubt had a positive influence politically. But this high ranking was also achieved without having any bike lanes leading into or in the downtown area of Los Angeles and downtown areas are typically where the highest rate of cycling is in a large city. The new bike lanes and the CicLAvia events in the downtown area should move L.A. up the list for the next two ACS surveys.
I love the graphs. They help to put the achievements into perspective.
It’s my understanding that any new major Metro transitway for LA has to include provisions for a bikeway. So expect to see at least bike lanes funded by Metro and paralleling the upcoming Crenshaw Line, the Purple Line Subway Extension along Wilshire Blvd, the Van Nuys Blvd or Sepulveda Rapidways projects, the Sepulveda Pass project and of course the Expo Line phase II to Santa Monica is scheduled to include some bike paths.
Christopher Kidd (@BikeBlogChris)
07/03/2012
Dennis,
Last I heard on Crenshaw, Metro was only committed to bike lanes where the LRT was at-grade.
It may have changed since then, but it’s worth following up on to make sure bike infrastructure complements underground, as well as above-ground, sections of new transit projects.
Mark Elliot
07/03/2012
Hard to argue with increase at an increasing rate! I’d like to see this trend in the context of mileage increase across other cities. And it will be interesting to look at implemented mileage over time when plotted against the bike plan forecasts. Ideally we’d outpace the schedule year-over-year, with an accelerating rate of increase there too. That’d be practically exponential!
Joe Linton
07/03/2012
The increase is indeed great – something I’d hoped for, but even as late as the end of last year, I wasn’t expecting. Regarding ever-increasing rates: I don’t expect quantity to continue to increase. The city really hustled nearly every weekend for the past ~6 months to get these 50 miles in. I think that it’s possible for the city to another ~4-6 years of ~40 annual new miles of relatively low-hanging fruit… but over time, (ie: once a network gets going) quantity probably decreases, and quality should increase – completing difficult gap-closures, adding strategic traffic-calming, protected bike lanes, etc. We’ll see!
Dennis Hindman
07/03/2012
There is a fixed amount of money that Los Angeles has available from the 5% of local Measure R funds to implement on-street bikeways. We are currently in year one of the first five years of the bicycle plan with 56.9 miles of bike lanes and only 5.6 miles of bicycle friendly streets on the priority one list.
The priority two list has 77.7 miles of bike lanes listed and 54.6 miles of bicycle friendly streets. Bike lanes were listed on the bike plan as costing anywhere from $28,000-50,000 a mile (averaging about $52,000 a mile last time I calculated). The bicycle friendly streets are expected to be much more expensive at $30,000-300,000 a mile. So, as we move more into doing bicycle friendly streets, expect the amount of miles of on-street bikeways to be done per year to diminish due to DOT working from a budget that is almost entirely coming from Measure R funds. This would likely mean that 2012 could very well have the highest amount of bikeway miles installed of the first five years of implementing the bike plan.
Dennis Hindman
07/04/2012
For comparisons sake, Chicago’s new mayor Rahm Emmanuel has promised to implement 25 miles per year of protected bike lanes. He just may be able to pull that off since he received $40 million from the federal government to do bikeway installations.
The number of bike lanes per year that New York City has installed:
2011–15.4 miles
2010–58.0 miles
2009–44.5 miles
2008–81.6 miles
2007–61.1 miles
2006–28.6 miles
Dennis Hindman
07/04/2012
I should also mention that New York City has installed 19.9 miles of bike lanes so far in 2012.
Dennis Hindman
07/04/2012
Chicago is constructing a protected bike lane on 55th St. What’s interesting about this design is that instead of moving the bike lane over to the left of a right turn only lane as the MUTCD states, the city put the bikes going straight in with the right turn only vehicles:
http://gridchicago.com/2012/55th-street-protected-bike-lane-and-road-diet-began-wednesday/#more-6304
This is a much better design than having the bike lane in-between two moving vehicle lanes as you approach a intersection or freeway on-ramp. The limitation is that there should only be one right turn only lane in order for this to work.
Another Grid Chicago article mentions that Chicago intends to put in 110 miles of cycle tracks and 40 miles of buffered bike lanes.
http://gridchicago.com/2012/bike-of-the-yards-a-quick-interview-with-12th-ward-alderman-george-cardenas/