Why bike lanes often seem “empty” in LA
One of the most frequent criticisms I hear of (the few) bike lanes in Los Angeles is: “they’re empty most of the time.” Usually, the person making this statement goes on to conclude that, therefore, no one uses them, and investing in biking infrastructure is a waste of time in Los Angeles.
There are a few reasons LA’s bike lanes are often “empty,” or appear to not be heavily used:
1. Cyclists take up less space and make less noise than cars. It’s hard to miss a huge SUV making noise driving in the street. But a cyclist — whose physical footprint when biking is only a few feet larger than the person themself — is easy to miss. Cyclists are quiet. They don’t honk. They don’t blast music out of their windows. They don’t rev their exhaust. Often, the perception that bike lanes are empty is simply applying a windshield mindset to non vehicular infrastructure; if we don’t see big, moving objects, then there’s nothing there. They’re not as empty as you perceive.
2. We don’t have many protected bike lanes. For those that don’t bike, bike lanes all look the same. However, if you bike, you’re acutely aware of how different it feels to be biking in a bike lane physically protected from cars versus a “door zone” bike lane that is between parked cars and moving traffic. Los Angeles doesn’t have many protected bike lanes (protected from moving traffic by parked cars, curbs, or bollards), and the ones we do have are often blocked by drivers illegally parking in them or unloading passengers or cargo. With the majority of bike lanes in Los Angeles being “unprotected” (where cyclists bike between parked cars and moving traffic), many don’t feel safe biking in them. Therefore, you see fewer people using the bike lanes than you would if we built truly safe, protected infrastructure.
3. We don’t have a bike lane network. Imagine if the 405 didn’t connect to the 10, and the 10 didn’t connect to the 101, and the 101 didn’t connect to the 110, and instead you had to drive on dirt roads with potholes to connect between the freeways — how many people would drive on them? Yet that’s exactly what we expect cyclists to do. Because most of Los Angeles lacks a connected bike lane network, we have a lot of “bike lanes to nowhere” that don’t connect to each other. If you choose to ride a bike, you choose to deal with subpar infrastructure that puts your life at risk and usually doesn’t get you to where you need to go without having to “share” the lane with cars or go far out of your way. If we built a protected bike lane *network* that took people to the places they needed to go, a lot more people would bike in LA.
Los Angeles has the best weather of any major city in the world. We live in a fairly flat city where the average trip is three miles or less (we aren’t “too big” to make cycling work for many trips). This is a chicken and egg problem: the masses aren’t going to start cycling until there is a comprehensive, safe bike network city-wide. We can’t just build some and expect many to use less than safe infrastructure that doesn’t get them to where they need to go. If we do build a safe, protected bike lane network city wide, with our weather and topography, they would come, and we would become the best cycling city in the world.