The Triangle has never had bike lanes like the ones being built in downtown Raleigh this weekend
Cyclists will be able to ride a two-way street-within-a-street for bikes in downtown Raleigh this weekend and help the city decide whether and how to make it permanent.
The city’s first “cycle track” will be short and short-lived; it will be created along three blocks of Harrington Street with temporary paint and traffic cones on Friday and then disappear by the end of the weekend.
It’s meant to introduce the cycle track concept to Raleigh and its residents and see how one might work in the future, said Paul Black, the city’s bicycle and pedestrian program manager.
“We don’t have any of these in this region,” Black said. “We just want to get people familiar with it; having people on bikes going in the wrong direction is not something you see here.”
Durham recently opened protected bike lanes along a stretch of East Main Street that are set off from traffic by white lines and posts, but they’re designed for bikes to go in one direction at a time.
The cycle track will run up and down the east side of Harrington Street, between Davie and Morgan streets in the Warehouse District, in space that is normally used for parked cars. The loss of on-street parking and delivery zones is one issue the city must grapple with in deciding where to build cycle tracks in the future, Black said.
The project is a joint effort with Oaks & Spokes, a cycle advocacy group that is providing 60 volunteers for this weekend’s test track and has raised $18,600 for materials. Various studies and surveys find that a majority of Americans want to ride on city streets but don’t feel comfortable navigating traffic, said Cody Stokes, the group’s president.
“The whole point of this is to make riders feel safer when they’re riding around downtown on their bicycles,” Stokes said.
Oaks & Spokes approached the city about building a cycle track a few years ago as a demonstration. The plan was to build it on West Street, a block west of Harrington, but West was later ruled out in part because of design challenges. West is also a likely candidate for a leg of the city’s planned bus rapid transit line, in which a lane would be dedicated to buses, and there’s not room for both, Black said.
If this weekend’s demo on Harrington Street goes well, those three blocks may become the first section of a longer cycle track that eventually connects Dorothea Dix Park south of downtown with the planned Devereux Meadows greenway trail north of Peace Street, Black said. Among the challenges of building the longer track would be the need for special bicycle traffic lights at Morgan, Hillsborough and perhaps Edenton streets, he said.
Oaks & Spokes volunteers will collect feedback from people who use the cycle track this weekend and share the results with the city. The group’s members see the test project as a step in creating a city that’s friendlier to cyclists, Stokes said.
“We want to see, in the city of Raleigh, people able to use bikes as a reliable form of transportation, not just as a means of exercise,” he said. “We want to see people using it as a way to commute, as a way of life, so they can leave their cars at home.”
For more information about the cycle track, including a schedule of events surrounding this weekend’s demonstration, go to oaksandspokes.com/ or oaksandspokes.com/cycletrack/.
This story was originally published April 4, 2019 at 3:03 PM with the headline "The Triangle has never had bike lanes like the ones being built in downtown Raleigh this weekend."
