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Daily Planet Staff 

Bicycle boulevards moved one step closer to reality Tuesday night. A unanimous City Council – with Vice Mayor Maudelle Shirek out of the room – agreed with a crowd of bicycle-helmeted folks, many who sported “one-less-car” T-shirts, and approved, in concept, the boulevards and a dozen or so “tools” to make them work. 

The council nod means that city staff can now move forward to write grants for the project and work with neighborhoods to devise the traffic-calming methods best suited to each street. An amendment to the council’s motion underscored the requirement for staff to work with residents along the bike boulevards. The council will make the final approval for each boulevard. 

The bicycle boulevards are safe streets, with a low volume of traffic, where cyclists can ride a distance with few stops. The tools to slow traffic and discourage cars include “bulb-outs,” where plazas reach out into the street, narrowing it and making crosswalks shorter; “one-lane slow points,” which force traffic into one lane only; and round-abouts. 

Cyclist Michael Katz and 10 others, calling themselves the Coalition for Safe Streets, wrote the council, asking for the removal of these three devices from the bike boulevard “toolbox” of traffic-calming devices. 

These three devices would “force bikes and cars to compete for artificially narrowed road space. This could create new bicycle/vehicle conflicts,” they wrote. 

The council, however, voted to allow the bike boulevard consultants and the neighborhoods to consider these and other traffic-calming devices. The Bicycle Boulevard Task Force had already thrown out “vertical deflection devices,” which are speed bumps and other raised traffic-calming tools imbedded in the roadway. They deferred to members of the Commission on Disability who argued that these devices cause pain in some disabled and elderly people when they ride over them in cars or vans. 

In a separate vote, the council extended its moratorium on speed bumps to a moratorium on all vertical deflection devices. The Commission on Disability had asked the council to vote not to use these devices in future traffic-calming efforts, but instead, councilmembers sent the question back to a “traffic-calming” subcommittee for further debate.