﻿When talking about bike infrastructure it’s easy to focus on bike lanes or cycle tracks that keep
cyclists safe from cars on straight stretches of road, but how you deal with intersections is
just as important, if not more, because of all the opportunities for conflict between different modes
and directions of travel. One approach to safe intersections is to make them really inconvenient
for cyclists, like signs telling cyclists to walk their bikes at each intersection. You can find
these along the Albert/Scott multi-use pathway in Ottawa. Making cyclists spend half their time
walking is not what anyone means when they say cities should support more multi-modal trips.
It’s unrealistic and completely at odds with accessibility; having to constantly dismount,
walk, and get back on your bike makes cycling more challenging for people with reduced mobility.
A better approach to intersection safety is to actually design the intersection with different
road users, including cyclists, in mind. As it turns out, over the past few years Ottawa has
actually become a leader among North American cities in designing and building protected
bike intersections. The before-and-after shots are pretty impressive. The basic
concept is inspired by Dutch design, but Ottawa recently released its own design guide covering
different intersection configurations. In this video we’re going to dive deeper into
Ottawa’s intersection plans and successes with our friend and special guest Matt Pinder, who works as
a transportation engineer focused on designing streets for people. In his job as an engineering
consultant, Matt supports municipalities across Canada with the implementation of “complete
streets” and active transportation infrastructure. He’s worked with cities like Toronto, Ottawa,
and Halifax. You can find more of his work at his blog beyondtheautomobile.ca
or on Twitter @MattPinder1. Why do intersections matter for cyclists? Matt:
So, from a safety perspective, intersections are one of the,
are basically over represented in terms of cycling collisions, more people get hit and more people
get killed riding bikes at intersections than anywhere else. So, when we design intersections
we really need to think about them from a cycling perspective and what kind of conflicts occur.
One of the most common ones is the right-hook collision, this is when a right-turning motorist
hits a through-moving cyclist and quite often that’s because the motorist didn’t even see the
cyclist, they might have been in the passenger’s side mirror but the motorist didn't look, or the
cyclist might even be in the blind spot, that happens a lot with trucks.
Another common one is the left hook, when a left-turning car doesn’t see a
through-bound cyclist, and then when you have something like a two-way bike path,
these conflicts get way, way more complicated and really need to be taken into account.
What have you seen in terms of Ottawa’s big plans for protected bike intersections? Matt:
So, Ottawa is one of the first big cities to have started experimenting with these kinds of
intersections, which makes it a really great place to live to see this kind of stuff happening. So
as far as I’m aware, the city started building these like 4 years ago, and since then they’ve
built almost 20 at different points across the city. So, from a North American perspective,
Ottawa’s actually the leader, they’ve got a pretty strong lead over, I think, Fremont, California,
is the second one. And you can see that, uh, if you look at some of the examples the city’s built,
they’re constantly kind of improving, trying new things, they have experimented with different, uh,
techniques for winter maintenance, for accessibility, how to place bike signals. So, just
from a ride around Ottawa, you can see a lot of really cool examples of this kind of stuff.
What makes a protected bike intersection functional,
safe, and comfortable? Matt: So there’s a few really neat elements about protected
intersections that work, um, the first one is that when you stop on a red, you can see the
stop bar for cyclists is way up ahead of the stop bar for vehicles. That makes them super visible,
so when the light goes green the cyclist gets to go in the intersection first,
and that benefit extends to pedestrians as well. The other next one is the set back, so the
crossride is actually set back a little bit from the motor vehicle lanes, and that means when a
driver’s turning, they have a bit more time to react and see a cyclist, and they get closer to
90 degrees to the cyclist, which makes them more visible through the windshield and the
passenger mirror. And then the third great thing about protected intersections, is,
when you want to turn left, you actually never have to cross any lanes of traffic,
you get to go straight through and make what’s called a two-stage crossing, you wait at the
stop bar, you wait for the light to turn green in the next direction, and you go straight through.
Right turns are even easier, you approach, and you can go straight through the corner without
even having to wait for the signal at all, as long as you yield to pedestrians of course.
How did Ottawa start getting serious about intersections? Matt: So City staff deserve
a ton of credit on this one. It's been really interesting, I work as a consultant, so I work
with the City staff a lot, and there’s been a lot of really passionate people behind that here,
pushing for change, pushing for experimentation. And because Ottawa started building these so
early, a few years ago now, they’ve had a chance to already kind of learn what works, and learn
what doesn’t work, and they have now uh about 17 built but they have dozens in the design process.
So in the next decade, Ottawa is really gonna go on the map in terms of cycling infrastructure.
Entire corridors are going to be re-built with these protected intersections and the city’s
just released a protected intersection design guide that leverages a lot of that knowledge.
They’re still learning how to do things like designing for winter maintenance—Ottawa
gets 3 metres of snow every year—but if Ottawa can do it, surely anywhere can do
it with that much snow. So, a big kudos to the City for doing everything that they’re
doing here, and continuously improving. A big thanks to Matt for showing us around and
helping us appreciate Ottawa’s progress here. He also explained some other features the city
is implementing in these new intersections, like more advanced signal phasing for cars.
One thing to mention is that people in Ottawa are still getting used to these new intersections,
both drivers and cyclists. Drivers sometimes mistake the protected bike intersection for a
slip lane for cars, and you also see cyclists who haven’t figured out that there is dedicated space
for cyclists separate from the pedestrian space. The confusion is understandable; this design is
new, the city is still working on improving the signage, and some streets got a protected bike
intersection before they even got a regular bike lane, which is completely the reverse of what you
see in other cities. This new intersection design is a big deal though and from our perspective
it’s worth the learning curve. Thanks for watching, and as always,
don’t forget to bike and subscribe. Big thanks to our supporters on Patreon.