Mass. Ave. Bridge to get protected bike lanes

Somehow snowy winter cities in the EU seem to manage. How do you plow narrow lanes? You buy trucks made to fit said lanes.

The average Boston winter doesn't exactly involve all that much snow and a day after then storm has ended the roads are down to pavement 99.9% of the time.

The snowpocalypse of 2013(?) was an outlier.

If you're suggesting they shouldn't reduce lanes or do anything to help cyclists & pedestrians, I strongly disagree.

But I do agree that these protected lanes become worse for everyone in the few months when there's snow and ice. These lanes aren't always plowed. When they are plowed, it's not until a day or two later then the snow has turned to ice and has become compacted. And it's pretty common to be trapped in one of these lanes when it's plowed right up to the point of a giant snow pile which will stick around for months.

Last year I went down hard on a protected lane outside of Harvard Sq. It was plowed but there was a strip of snow in the section with the bollards. When the sun shines, that snow melts and drains toward the curb. This then turns to horrible black ice which isn't treated and is far more dangerous than riding in the road.

I also went down hard in Somerville in a similar scenario -- a bike lane which wasn't treated for ice even if was plowed.

Like many cyclists I'll ride in the road when the "protected" lanes are blocked. But when the road is narrow, drivers do not take kindly to cyclists who aren't using the protected lanes. (Most drivers have no idea the lanes are impassable.) It's also not always clear the protected lane will be blocked when choosing between it and main road.

So yeah, they need to not just think of the summertime riders when planning these lanes. Boston winters are getting shorter but they still last for months.

https://twitter.com/BostonPWD/status/1201849568394170373

Is it perfect and cleared right away? No, but its far superior to years past when the non-protected lanes basically became parking spots.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Also note: cyclists pay taxes, too. Drivers are not top priority or special.

Plowing snow into bike lanes is a logical use of resources. Most bicycles don't get used in the winter anyway.

Responding to this, and a couple of comments downthread …

This was a lot of the initial discussion about this: how do we do this, and how do we not eff up transit in the short term, and improve it in the long term.

Short term: we need to make sure there's enough queue space at each end of the bridge so that the lights can process enough vehicles so that buses don't get stuck in long lines of traffic. Now there are times when there's a traffic-pocalypse (especially around Fenway events, which are over for a while) and traffic backs up across the bridge, no matter how many lanes there are, because of downstream blockages. But this is being done at breakneck speed (BCU's petition was sent to the State less than three weeks ago) and the only thing they can conceivably do is road diet/traffic calming. Traffic lights and even lane markings (this time of year) take a good deal longer to procure.

So this is a temporary condition for this winter which will hopefully make things better for bikes and at least not-worse for buses. It helps that traffic is down 10% from the last count many years ago, and probably 20% from pre-covid.

There are three big next steps which we hope will be planned this winter and implemented next spring:

1) Retiming the traffic lights. Right now, the traffic light timing is atrocious, especially at the Cambridge end. There are three lights within about 400 feet. Two of them are run by Cambridge, one by DCR (and the bridge is MassDOT, and the Beacon Street light Boston BTD, so four agencies in half a mile; welcome to Boston). Those three lights have different cycles (110s at Mem Drive, 75s at Amherst St, 80s at the Big Crosswalk) and are the cause of most of the backups that occur off the bridge: a car might hit a red light at each light, causing the queue from Amherst and the crosswalk to back up onto the bridge.

Anyway, there are solutions. The light at Mem Drive is very inefficient. If you go and watch it, you'll see about 20 seconds when basically nothing happens. No one turns right, no one goes straight, just wasted time. It could probably be shortened to 85 or 90 seconds, which would come close to matching the nearby lights (or at least, close enough to set them all to the same cycle and sync them, and optimize them for traffic flow). It also means that today, someone biking or walking along the river waits up to 85 seconds to cross Mass Ave.

2) Along with the traffic light timing, the big safety issue that needs to be addressed are right hook traffic movements by cars across the bike lane. Given the volume of bikes and right turning traffic, off the bridge at both ends, this leads to thousands of conflicts and potential crashes each day (not accidents, it's engineered to have crashes). With the signal retiming, exclusive phases can be added for turning movements and straight through movements, so cars can drive more confidently worrying less about bikes cutting in front of them*, and turning traffic will flow faster.

3) And … buses. Once you've retimed the traffic lights, you can add a bus queue jump using the right turn cycle. So, if general purpose traffic is stacked up in the left lane, buses can join the right turns, but then go straight through to a queue jump box (on the Cambridge end, there's plenty of extra space above Memorial Drive) and get ahead of cars. There's not room for a bus lane on the bridge and safe bicycling infrastructure. The only way to even come close would be to convert one of the existing lanes to a bus lane, but that would either mean buses—and there are about 30 each hour on the bridge—passing close to cyclists, or, if the lanes were in the center, all general purpose traffic in the lane next to cyclists, and that lane would be unprotected. The only way to get protection is to reduce traffic by a lane. But that's okay, the volume allows for it.

So, tl;dr: yes, buses, hopefully next spring.

* Before you yell at me, yes, bikes break the law and run lights, and yes so do cars. Yes, they do. Probably a dozen of them along the Southwest Corridor this evening, unless I am seeing things. Making bicycle infrastructure safer likely makes bikes behave better, so you'll probably see fewer people running the red. Especially if turning traffic has a green light across the lane.

Make the entire lane bus only. Add more busses too.

https://twitter.com/realBurhanAzeem/status/1462781104461594633