Now that we have scooters sharing bike lanes, I wonder if we’ll need to think more clearly about the different kinds of lane on a street and what their real defining features are. This could lead to different words.
We separate traffic types for two reasons:
- Speed, so that faster vehicles aren’t often stuck behind slower ones,
- Width, so that we use less space to serve the needs of narrower vehicles, thus using scarce space more efficiently overall.
Where speed and width come apart, however, speed has to be the defining feature. You can’t ride a motorbike at 30 km/hr down a “bike” lane, even though it may be narrow enough. You have to ride it in the traffic lane, even though that’s a waste of space.
All this came up because I was trying to think of the correct new term for “bike lane” as we proliferate more vehicle types that run more or less at the speed and width of bicycles but are clearly not bicycles, such as electric scooters. The two logical terms seem to be narrow lane or midspeed lane. One way or another the two concepts will need to track with each other.
I wonder if this kind of language can make our sense of the role of these lanes more flexible, and thus less divisive.
I don’t know whether he is writing just for North America, but in this country we don’t separate traffic types for either speed or width reasons – at least not in cities. In cities we provide separate lanes for two different reasons:
– safety, particularly pedestrian safety but also cycle safety
– priority, to give priority to specific types of vehicle, such as buses or cycles
Once you change the reasons for operation, the rest of his article become irrelevant