Project Bike Lanez
Proposal
Aldin Mujevic
Summary
The purpose of our project, Project Bike Lanez, is to add more bike lanes for its many benefits that it gives. For one, it helps get more cars off the streets, safety for pedestrians increase, and safety overall for all commuters increase. Another benefit to this is the fact that commuters will become even more active than they were before. There are countless benefits to working on this project, which is why, as a group of civil engineers, we wanted to take on this problem. The problem which is the lack of safe and encouraged use of bike lanes. The cost for the project would reach to be about $39,000 per mile of new bike lanes. We plan to begin our project on Guy Brewer Blvd. in Jamaica, Queens. From there, we plan to expand our project onto the borough of Queens and eventually New York City.
Introduction
In New York City, there’s been lots of problems that you experience daily. Consistent traffic, unsafe lanes for bike riders, and overall too many accidents. As a group of civil engineers, we saw an opportunity to a solution to all those problems, simply by doing one thing. The creation of more bike lanes. The idea of Project Lanez is to create more bike lanes for the people in New York City, but not only for transportation purposes. Yes, it helps, however, there are so many other things that these bike lanes affect. Things like traffic conditions, safety, less consumption, and overall just benefits to many things. When looking at the cost of this, the average cost of a mile long bike lane is about $130,000, which, when considering the amount of change it will have, isn’t a lot. The plan is to try and build bike lanes in a small area in Queens on Guy Brewer Blvd. stretching about 3 miles. From there we will see the effects and continue from there. We don’t plan to do the whole city at once as that isn’t reasonable. Simply starting small and growing big is the idea.
Proposed Program
The way the bike lanes will be made are quite simple. We plan to have them protected meaning there will be bollards. As you can see from the Figure (1), there are bollards on the right side protecting the riders from going over the line as well as drivers going into their lane as well. Bike lanes are typically 4 to 5 feet wide so we will stay consistent with that. Lastly, when it comes to what the bike lanes consist of is the thermoplastic that will be used for symbols on the road for the bikes.
Figure (1): A closeup picture of what our potential bike lanes would look like. (Twelve ways of looking at bike lanes, 2018)
We just discussed how the bike lane could be, but we didn’t talk about the places we would put them. In Figure (2), you can see that it is a really wide street, with two designated bike lanes. We plan to follow this system, with the bike lanes being on either side, and having those bollards protect from the traffic on the street, to further protect the bike riders.
Figure (2): A section view of what a sample street with bike lanes and bollards would look like. (Bike Lanes, 2019)
Innovation Process
When looking at the conditions of Guy Brewer Blvd., they are pretty good, so the cost to resurface the pavement won’t cost much, if at all. However, other things like pavement markings and such are needed, so the cost of that is calculated in Figure (3). In this particular case, the length of the bike lane will be about 2.91 miles long, so the average cost of about $39,000 will end up totaling about $113,000. This is without the steel bollards, as we decided not to go with them in this particular case.
Obviously, materials that would be needed would include equipment to lay down the pavement markings and symbols. The good thing is that expensive equipment isn’t needed to do that, which is always a positive.
Laying down the bike lanes and adding all the symbols and pavements markings wouldn’t be that bad of a job, as you could do that during already scheduled maintenance work. The time to do this shouldn’t take long, but because of inspections that would have to be made by the city, the time frame could range from about half a year to a year and a half.
Figure (3): Estimate for the cost of materials.
Overall, bike lanes was a solution we saw, that could solve a lot of problems for us. Instead of trying to tackle one, we tried to help out in a lot of places. Making bike lanes prove to be extremely impactful in many ways which is why we chose to begin Project Bike Lanez.
References:
Bike Lane [Digital image]. (n.d.). Retrieved May 06, 2019, from http://bike.lacity.org/what-we-do/infrastructure
“Twelve Ways of Looking at a Bike Lane.” Blogging Belmont, 14 Dec. 2018, www.bloggingbelmont.com/2018/12/twelve-ways-of-looking-at-a-bike-lane/.
(n.d.).Road Design. FHWA. Retrieved from https://safety.fhwa.dot.gov/saferjourney1/library/countermeasures/10.htm
Walljasper, J. (n.d.). How Bicycling Infrastructure Benefits Non-Bicyclists. Retrieved from
Berman, J., Finfer, R., Haney, T., Orgren, T., & Sauer, C. (2017). Chestnut Street Bike Lane Evaluation(pp. 1-26). Philadelphia, PA: Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia. Retrieved from:https://injury.research.chop.edu/sites/default/files/documents/chestnut_street_bike_lane_eval.pdf.
