Atlanta's New Bike Barriers Are Flipping Cars and That's a Good Thing

It's like the people who complained when they ran their car onto the big boulders in parking lots. The rocks aren't in the road... how did you manage to do something so dumb and yet blame the inanimate object that no one else seems to be hitting?

That is, of course, if you have properly trained drivers and enforced rules.

We don't and will not in our life time. So for practical purposes, they do not work.

If you consult the CROW manual for bicycle traffic, which is what the Netherlands uses as a guide for road design (and is where the design you're talking about came from), you will see that there are certain constraints on when various designs should be used:

The street's speed limit and motor vehicle traffic volume have to be low enough, and it matters what category the road has been classified as in both the motor vehicle traffic network and the bicycle traffic network. Since instead of just thinking about roads individually, their place in the larger system is considered:

(This is the bicycle network of Amsterdam)

The width of the throughway and whether there is enough room to fit the infrastructure for a given combination of network links within it is also important. That's another reason why it's best to plan the networks holistically, to make the best use of all available space on multiple adjacent roadways.

Of course if you decrease car traffic volumes and speeds to a low enough level (by making other transit modes more attractive, making more of the urban area mixed use, etc) you can start using the higher categories in the above chart more. But the standards in the Netherlands are not so simple as "just put some paint down anywhere and it'll work so long as the drivers are educated". And that's without even getting into how they design roads to enforce their own limits on speed and traffic volumes, using things like chicanes and modal filters. So, some amount of effort goes into creating the conditions that make such a design safe, rather than the drivers just deciding to do it themselves.

Painted bike lanes have other problems: maintenance and grip when wet.

Germany is one of the few countries where people bother to drive properly, with eyes on the road and respecting rules and weaker traffic (sadly the situation is changing for the worse…). In Italy - where a proper bicycling culture exists and one could expect a lot more acceptance - it’s a disaster, with many young cyclists being murdered by idiots in their cars.

In many countries, there really is a need to properly shield cyclists from irresponsible drivers, particularly in a world where caring for others looks like a long lost virtue.

Ah yes. I cycled from Italy into France last weekend and rode on one of those for a bit. There was not really enough traffic to know how well it works.

Riding on the sidewalk is illegal in most places.

Fuck the law, and fuck any pig who wants to enforce it.

Dont endanger pedestrians.

What pedestrians? I live in the US. Nobody walks anywhere here. It's extremely rare for me to even see a pedestrian.

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I find neither of these to be compelling arguments to put my own life at high risk.

I mean, bikes don't belong in a road where they are unprotected from cars. It's dangerous.

But it is true that riding a bike on a sidewalk is dangerous to pedestrians too, and pedestrians shouldn't need to share the sidewalk with more dangerous vehicles. Bikes can be heavy (especially ebikes), and they can ride quite fast. This is why we need protected bike infrastructure, to both keep cyclists and pedestrians safe.

Exactly what I thought. These things are the height of a kid, you shouldn’t be driving if you can’t see it. Also someone else pointed out that road lines are on the ground and don’t stick up and if you can’t see the barrier then you can’t see road lines and you absolutely shouldn’t be on the road.

You don’t actually need to see the barrier, you need to see the white line marking the right limit of the lane, which you are not allowed to cross while driving a vehicle. That’s lower to the ground and anyone should and can see it.

I think smartphone use is more of a culprit than obese vehicles in this case (but then: “I need a truck so that if I run into a barrier, I just hop on it without even noticing!” That seems to be the raison d’être of most SUVs and crossovers in Europe: climbing up curbs)

What visibility is needed? Stay within your lines.

There will always be a problem with people not paying attention though. You only need to be distracted for a second to kill a pedestrian or a person on a bike.

But the design doesn't need to be this invasive. Copenhagen which is a top-tier bike city does three levels of "roads": cars lowest, bikes 10 cm (3 inches) up, and pedestrians at the top level a further 10 cm up. That's more than enough to catch even the most distracted drivers, and it keeps pedestrians clear of the bikes so they can go full speed too.

I saw someone drive into one of the large red concrete spheres at a Target once. Stopped their car quite effectively.

There was one in Calgary, Alberta in a parking lot that somehow people kept hitting too, global phenomenon apparently

Oh shit, sorry Atlantians. New king in town.

Little delay in reply here, was off travelling and forgot to reply.

We have a lot of protected bike lanes where I am, and they are much shorter than these ones. The car might be doing the action that gets them flipped, but being so high up im sure is part of the cause.

But with ours, you could drive over them with enough speed and have the wheels touch the ground on either side, so I think the ones in the Pic do provide better protection, but even being a little lower would probably make a difference and still be able to get them stuck on top?

I really do like how they can get stuck. Much better protection and makes them have to get help / suffer.

is also a low speed inner city road

I don't have an exact way to measure but the road is almost as large as some highways where I live (France, not USA).

Yes any driver that hits it is at fault, but everybody would be safer if the road was designed thinner so cars would naturally slow down, having the bike lane behind the parked cars not in front to reduce the odds of being doored etc...

If the infrastructure treats people like they're robots that will perfectly respect speed limits because there is a sign, it will not work and just be dangerous. The infrastructure should be designed so that the most natural speed and the intuitive path is the right one.

FYI: I have a driving license, but I don't own a car and bike almost everywhere. I really don't like car, I also don't like infrastructure making cars more dangerous than they need to be.

People expect sidewalks and the center line.

They've added something new and unexpected to the roads and it's causing accidents. That's clearly a fail.

They're both gray.

Maybe new asphalt, but the old stuff is faded to grey.

Even if it weren't faded they still use reflectors on concrete medians on asphalt roads.