I was surprised last weekend to find the place where we were staying was on a bicycle boulevard. A bicycle boulevard is "a street with low motorized traffic volumes and speeds, designated and designed to give bicycle travel priority" (NACTO 2012). Cycling magnets like Berkeley and Portland aspire to city-wide systems of bicycle-priority streets either as separate from or alterations to auto thoroughfares. I haven't been to either city, so I don't know how well these systems are working, but they seem to have measurable goals and to be using the term in a meaningful way.
My complaint, and I do have one. is that in other places the term bicycle boulevard is being slung around like "cool" or "love" to mean whatever the city wants it to mean, which sometimes isn't very much. Merely stenciling a sharrow sign on a street and adding the letters "BLVD" does not a bicycle boulevard make.
On Charles Street in St. Paul, there are also special street signs...
signs indicating distances...
and this roundabout...
The interface of Charles Street with Snelling Avenue (average daily traffic count=33,500) takes bicycle boulevarding to the next level.
The intersection is blocked for cars, but bicycles and pedestrians can cross.
Some effort has obviously gone into making Charles Street a bicycle boulevard. My question is: Why? It is a residential street that runs parallel to the University Avenue (ADTC=13,800) with its monster shopping plazas, so would certainly make for a quieter ride with less competition for the street. But so would any residential street, with or without special designation or decoration. Given the volume of traffic on Snelling, a car on Charles trying to cross or turn left would be in for a very long wait anyhow.Whatever money was spent on Charles would probably have been better spent making Thomas (ADTC=3100) a complete street, or even taming University.
If I were biking in St. Paul, the only reason for me to be on the bicycle boulevard that is Charles Street would be to visit someone on Charles Street. If my destination were the transit stop at Snelling and University, or one of the stores on University, I'd sooner or later be biking on University. If I needed to cross Snelling, I'd go by Thomas Avenue (ADTC=3100) for the traffic light, or else (gulp!) University again, instead of waiting and waiting for a break in traffic at Charles.
Not every city, to be Mr. Obvious here, is Berkeley or Portland. Or Amsterdam, or Copenhagen. Each city has its own culture, population density, and existing built infrastructure to deal with. Bicycle boulevards that fit the definition and contribute to a crosstown network of cycle-friendly streets may (or may not) be important contributors to overcoming the auto-centric design we all went in for back in the day. But calling something a bicycle boulevard for the sake of calling it a bicycle boulevard, or to be able to claim that you have them, seems silly.
SEE ALSO: Bill Lindeke, "Jefferson Crashes Rekindle Bicycle Boulevard Debate," Streets.mn, 24 November 2015. This blog post provides extended discussion of the Charles Street bicycle boulevard, providing quite a bit of local expertise and policy history my post lacks. He observes that in my experience the Charles medians are very safe to use for pedestrians and bicyclists. Car traffic slows down and, even on extremely busy Snelling Avenue, tends to stop for people crossing the street. On top of that, they provide a "refuge" halfway through the street that allows the vulnerable non-drivers to focus on one direction at a time. On the other hand, see the first several comments. "Scott" says I'm as likely to skip Charles and go over to Marshall if I'm eventually heading south because Charles just isn't worth the hassle.
Lindeke's lengthier discussion of Jefferson Avenue in the same post argues that empty designation can be not merely pointless but dangerous. A federal grant was apparently the motivation in both places.
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