Cycle track deserves support

Change is hard, and in cases when it seeks to upend longstanding patterns of traffic, it can be hazardous.

However, the change being sought with the new King Street cycle track ultimately is a good one because it starts Honolulu’s shift toward becoming a city that accommodates all modes of transportation.

Based on the city’s appalling statistics on traffic fatalities, especially where elderly pedestrians are concerned, it’s safe to say that anyone in transit who is not encased in the steel of an automotive body is not currently very safe in Honolulu. Reversing that trend should be a paramount concern.

Ironically, it’s at the beginning of this transition to greater safety that the danger is greatest. And that’s why the city must monitor the cycle track and make adjustments continuously. Planners must improve visibility, signage and traffic movements at critical points along the two-mile route of the track, also known as a "protected bike lane."

Michael Formby, director of transportation services for the city, has acknowledged that the hardest part of all of this is the most important component: public education. In advance of the Dec. 6 opening date, the city sponsored a series of community meetings where education was an important goal.

Not surprisingly, those sessions drew input primarily from cyclists and the business community rather than the motorists, who started weighing in only after the track opened.

Additionally, Formby said, there’s more change to come: The city hopes to pick a route for a mauka-makai protected lane within the next year, the beginnings of a cycle transit "grid" for the urban core. That provision is needed if the two-year pilot project is to be evaluated accurately and produce the right decision about its future.

So the education must continue, in coordination with advocacy groups such as the Hawaii Bicycling League.

The message for motorists should be: You’re sharing the road with people who are moving more slowly and are more vulnerable to injury, so slow down. Lowering the speed limit officially might be necessary along the way, in the interest of safety.

For the pedestrians: More than ever, it’s essential to look all around before entering a crosswalk now shared with cars and bikes.

And for the cyclists: Even if the signs instruct drivers to yield to cyclists in the track, relying on that could lead to an accident because drivers may not see bikers coming. The track is protected but not exclusive territory, and definitely not a speedway.

That protection comes from a parking lane occupied by cars during off-peak hours. It’s a common design used successfully in other cities, but it could be tweaked as well. Formby said it was chosen as the means of insulating cyclists from traffic because at those community meetings, King Street businesses had urged strongly that as many spaces be preserved as possible for use by their customers.

That is probably the element that needs the strictest scrutiny in the coming months. Formby said parking is already curtailed at the approaches to intersections, but there may be spots where parking is still excessively obstructive to the line of sight between motorists and cyclists.

The new cyclist traffic signals aimed at cyclists to enable a two-way cycle track should help, but the city should consider staggering signals to separate the traffic streams.

Such separations proved useful in other cities, according to a study released in June by Portland State University. In particular, according to the study, 78 percent of Chicago residents surveyed gave positive feedback about separate signal cycles for bikes and motorists that were deployed in that city’s two-way track.

That study, conducted for Portland’s National Institute for Transportation and Communities, was titled "Lessons from the Green Lanes: Evaluating Protected Bike Lanes in the U.S." The principal takeaway from the study is that the protected lanes do encourage cyclists, increasing bike ridership in all bike lanes a year after the protected track is opened. That increase ranged from 21 percent in Milwaukee to 171 percent on the two-way Chicago track.

That bodes well for cycling potential in this city, where a commitment to a "complete streets" transportation policy has been made.

The new track represents an important element of that commitment and deserves Honolulu’s best effort.