This is a fantastic animation and video. Nice job Catherine and company! Will see this broadcast over the airwaves on television soon?

This rocks! I'm with intersection 911, the animated interaction is great...

The bike track is great, until the passenger of a freshly-parked car flings open the door and dashes for the sidewalk, being completely unaccustomed to having a bicyclist approach from behind at 25mph/40kph.

The bike track is great, until the cyclist reaches the next intersection or driveway cut and gets right-hooked.

The bike track is great, until an oncoming vehicle turns left across one's path, because the cyclist in the bike track is marginalized and not noticed.

Bike-car collisions are more prevalent at intersections than anywhere else, and bike tracks exacerbate the danger.

A much better concept is to reduce traffic speeds and to integrate bicyclists into the main traffic flow, where they are seen and expected to behave in a vehicular fashion.

Riders on the "bike track" will be out of sight of motorists turning right across the "bike track". Those motorists will have to look over their right shoulder for oncoming bikes, a view blocked by sheetmetal on many vehicles, to see if the way is clear. This won't be done reliably by drivers, and too often they will fail to see cyclists if they do look.

View of cyclists in the "bike track" will often be obscured for oncoming drivers planning to turn left across the "bike track." Collisions between cyclists and oncoming left turn traffic are too common as it is, this feature will make the situation worse.

This does not even address the people who cross sidewalks, bike lanes, even streets, by ear only. Collisions between bikes and these people are likely to be distressingly common.

Well, at least bike lanes in the door zone will be provided in some areas as an alternative. The people who mindlessly fling their doors open will apologize, and the riders who successfully evade those doors will not be upset. This will make everything OK.

Competently and professionally developed guidance in the design of bicycle facilities is available and well documented. For example, you should review the California Bikeway Design Guidelines, specifically California Highway Design Manual 1000, pg. 100-16, para 1003.2(1). It specifically forbids facilities such as you describe, and gives the reasons why. Of course, it comes from California, so it can't possibly be right.

Nice video, but I share John's concerns about the safety of this idea at intersections. As a pedestrian I already find there to be a substantial danger from turning cars and that's when I'm only going 3 mph and can almost instantly jump back and out of the way. Having cyclists moving at 15 - 20+ mph suddenly appear from behind parked SUVs and trucks seems like a recipe for serious collisions.
In addition, the video doesn't show any driveways crossing the cycle track, such as would frequently be found for parking garages, shopping center lots, etc. Is the plan that cycle tracks will only be located in areas without any driveways? Otherwise these add the same dangers as regular intersections but typically with even worse visibility.

While I understand and appreciate everyone's concerns about integrating bikes with cars, I think it is important to realize that this is a process that will take time. There is no ideal quick fix to the problem about educating drivers about bikes. However, as someone who lives in Holland, where bikes, cars, trams and pedestrians all share the same spaces, I can promise you that it is possible! If any of you Portlanders want to see how it can be and is, I invite you to take a bike trip to Holland. You can assemble your bike at the airport, and bike anywhere in the country - most of the time on dedicated bike paths. For those that live in the City (in my case The Hague) it is all about understanding your responsibility vis-a-vis the others with whom you share the road. I can hardly express the pleasure I get from my morning bike-rushhour commute where I'm in a pack of 60 or 70 bicyclists of all ages heading to work or school. Here in Holland, gas costs about $8.00 per gallon, so you can imagine how practical and necessary bikes are. Stick with it, and support every effort to get bikes on the road! Maybe someday Portland will be a bike-lovers vacation destination too.

this is why i plan on moving very soon to your city. thanks for supporting cycling.

amazing!

who put this on stumble?!?!?! this is the least interesting thing ever! wow seriously i am so proud of the geniuses who developed this astoundingly revolutionary solution. LAME

Ian, I also agree with John and almost everyone else in this thread.

I've been in Holland, I've used a bike there and I'm still thinking the same: bikes are traffic and we should fight for our right to use the road like every other vehicle.

You mention gas costs as if Holland cycle tracks are effectively reducing car use. But they aren't (well, most of them). Here you can see a comparisson of modal share between a spanish city and Eindoven (Netherlands):

modalkombat.demimismo.com/oviedo-versus-eindhoven

As you can see, Holland bike lanes are reducing pedestrian share, not car share.

Data is from Eurostat website, you can confirm it.

Like most cities, ours struggles with budget issues constantly. So past efforts at designing or implementing some bicycle specific accommodation have not been very successful. They're few and far between, they're not maintained, and they don't help to educate drivers of either bicycles or cars.
I've been to Portland. I saw a lot of folks on bicycles. Interestingly, bicycle specific lanes and other facilities are not located throughout the city, even in the downtown area, yet cyclists are able to negotiate the roadways without any special provisions. They follow the wellknown rules that all users of the roads do seemingly without confusion or problem.
Why is no one considering using more of the scarce funding avaiable on education and encouragement rather than paint, curbs, and other infrastructure that has to be maintained separately from the roads and streets we're already challenged to maintain for roadway users? When funds are short do we neglect potholes or bikelane paint?
Spend the money on working with the folks who you indicate are reluctant to ride in traffic through educational programs and by slowing and reducing the automotive traffic.
Them's my thoughts ... not radical, low-cost, less affected by interuptions in financial support for maintaining bicycle specific facilities ...

We all want safer streets for cyclists. The infrastructure in this video will not accomplish that. In fact it will make the streets less safe for cyclists.

The bike lane shown from 0:43 to 1:15 is in the door zone of parked cars. Door zone bike lanes kill cyclists between intersections. Also, they increase intersection conflicts by moving cyclists out of the traffic lanes to a place where they are less visible to other road users. The filmmakers admit that there's a problem here, but their solutions will prove deadlier.

The segregated cycle track shown from 1:25 to 1:49 increases intersection conflicts greatly, placing the cyclist behind a row of parked cars, thus making him invisible to other road users. Look at 01:35 to 01:37 and notice that the car has a maximum of two seconds to see the cyclist before the cyclist enters the intersection - and this is in an artificial scenario where cars are prevented from parking closer to the intersection (something that is not the case in the real world). Also, the cyclist is traveling quite slowly - 6 to 8mph: at normal cycling speeds of 10mph or more, a driver turning right through the bike track might have a second to see and avoid the cyclist.

The left turn box (the unfortunately named 'launch pad') shown at 1:50 is literally a death trap. A cyclist moving to the 'launch pad' has to cross lanes of traffic to his right while slowing to walking speed to perform a 90 degree turn within a space of about 6 feet in order to get into the 'launch pad'. If the light changes during this maneuver, getting caught between the bike track and the 'launch pad' while traffic to the right (which is conveniently omitted from this video) starts to move could prove deadly. Let's hope that the 'launch pad' is not so named because of its capacity to get cyclists airborne.

The narrator says that cycle tracks are a calm pleasant way to get where you're going. In my view, cycle tracks are a calm pleasant way to get cyclists killed. And a 'launch pad' to the afterlife sounds just as awesome!

Buffered bike lanes (2:30 to 2:50) have the same problems as bike lanes - they remove the cyclist from the traffic lane, making him less visible. They are less open to dooring, but not by much.

I'm all for making cycling more pleasant and desirable as a way to commute, but I'm not willing to do that by killing more cyclists. If bicycle advocates want to kill more cyclists, they couldn't choose better ways to do it. Please stop this madness!

Beware of bike paths and lanes. They give cyclists a false sense of security.

1987 Grüne Radler review: Police Bicycle Crash Study (Berlin, Germany)
"...with increasing experience, it became ever clearer that the sidepaths are dangerous - more dangerous than riding in the roadway. There is a simple reason for this: the design and location of the sidepaths conflict with the most important principle of traffic safety, the slogan 'Visibility is safety'."

1997 Moritz: A Survey of North American Bicycle Commuters (USA and Canada)
Study claims increased safety on bicycle specific infrastructure, but the accident site data is flawed - many of the accidents taking place while on bicycle paths or lanes were considered to be on the roadway because only the final crash site was considered.

1998 Aultman-Hall: Commuter Cyclist On- and Off-Road Incident Rates (Ottawa-Carlton, Canada)
"The relative rates for falls and injuries suggest it is safest to cycle on-road followed by off-road paths and trails, and finally least safe on sidewalks... Results suggest a need to discourage sidewalk cycling, and to further investigate the safety of off-road paths/trails."

1999 Aultman-Hall: Bicycle Commuter Safety Rates (Toronto, Canada)
"The relative rates for falls and injuries suggest these events are least common on-road followed by off-road paths, and finally most common on sidewalks... These rates suggest a need for detailed analysis of sidewalk and off-road path bicycle safety."

1999 Franklin: Two Decades of the Redway Cycle Paths (Milton Keynes, UK)
"...the most alarming experience of the Redways is their accident record. Far from realising gains in safety, they have proved over many years to be consistently less safe than even the 'worst case' grid roads for adult cyclists of average competence. This is not an accolade for the grid roads, for their safety performance is not good in relation to lower speed roads of more traditional design. But the segregated Redways have proved to be worse. "

2001 Wachtel: Risk Factors for Bicycle-Motor Vehicle Collisions at Intersections (Palo Alto, California, USA)
"Bicyclists on a sidewalk or bicycle path incur greater risk than those on the roadway (on average 1.8 times as great), most likely because of blind conflicts at intersections... intersections, construed broadly, are the major point of conflict between bicycles and motor vehicles. Separation of bicycles and motor vehicles leads to blind conflicts at these intersections."

2001 Jensen: Bicycle Tracks and Lanes, a Before - After Study (Copenhagen, Denmark)
"The safety effects of bicycle tracks in urban areas are an increase of about 10 percent in both crashes and injuries. The safety effects of bicycle lanes in urban areas are an increase of 5 percent in crashes and 15 percent in injuries. Bicyclists’ safety has worsened on roads where bicycle facilities have been implemented."

2008 Agerholm: Traffic Safety on Bicycle Paths (Western Denmark)
"the main results are that bicycle paths impair traffic safety and this is mainly due to more accidents at intersections."

2009 Daniels: Injury crashes with bicyclists at roundabouts
"Regarding all injury crashes with bicyclists, roundabouts with cycle lanes appear to perform significantly worse compared to... other design types"

2009 Reynolds: The Impact of Transportation Infrastructure on Bicycling Injuries and Crashes: A Review of the Literature
Review claims increased safety on bicycle specific infrastructure, but the review cherry picks and misrepresents data - only the 2009 Daniels study (out of 26 studies reviewed) concerned bicycle specific infrastructure safety, and the review misrepresented its findings.

2011 Lusk: Risk of Injury for Bicycling on Cycle Tracks Versus in the Street
Study claims increased safety on bicycle specific infrastructure, but its street comparisons are flawed - the streets compared were in no way similar other than their general geographic location. Busy downtown streets with multiple distractions per block were twinned with limited access bypasses with few distractions.

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Visibility is safety. Bike lanes and bike paths make cyclists less visible to other road users and result in more collisions with motor vehicles. Ask transportation engineers and government officials why they dismiss the findings of the safety studies.