Urban Bikeway Design Guide

Last week at the National Bike Summit in Washington DC, the National Association of City Transportation Officials (NACTO) released its new online Urban Bikeway Design Guide. The bikeway design guide is an online resource providing cities with solutions to create complete streets that provide enhanced safety for bicyclists.

The design guide was unveiled by NYC DOT Commissioner Janette Sadik-Khan – who also serves as President of the NACTO.
From the design guide website:

The NACTO Urban Bikeway Design Guide is based on the experience of the best cycling cities in the world. The designs in this document were developed by cities for cities, since unique urban streets require innovative solutions.

To create the Guide, the authors have conducted an extensive worldwide literature search from design guidelines and real-life experience. They have worked closely with a panel of urban bikeway planning professionals from NACTO member cities, as well as traffic engineers, planners, and academics with deep experience in urban bikeway applications.

The website provides a clean, easy-to-read interface with the following high level bikeway design categories:

• Bike Lanes

• Cycle Tracks

• Intersections

• Signals

• Signing & Marking

The top-level categories are broken down into different features:

Each feature provides a list of benefits, typical applications, design guidance (best practices), maintenance, and a list of U.S. cities that have adopted the particular feature.

There are plenty of great ideas in this design guide that are applicable to cities in North America. NACTO has committed to update the content of the website as new best practices and features emerge.

Now if only we could get those ideas off the website, and built in our cities tomorrow.