Advisory Bike Lanes in Ottawa, Ontario by Justin Swan.

DC will pilot new “advisory bike lanes” on E Street SE in Capitol Hill. At first it sounds like this might be an April Fool’s joke — I could envision writing a joke headline like “DC will make all bike lanes optional, let drivers park in them anytime they want to.” But these aren’t a joke, but a real kind of bike infrastructure that’s new to DC and will be tried here as an experiment.

E Street SE between 12th and 17th streets SE is a low-traffic, two-way neighborhood street. The local Advisory Neighborhood Commission (“advisory” again!), 6B, asked the District Department of Transportation to look at east-west bicycle connections in this area, which includes Watkins Elementary School and an upcoming 325 apartments above a redeveloped Safeway.

E Street SE by Google Maps.

The street is not wide enough to add bike lanes without taking out parking or making the street one-way. The conventional approach would be to put in “sharrows,” the bicycle markings that remind everyone that people on bikes are welcome to ride in the lane as well (which is legally true with or without the markings).

Instead, with the support of ANC 6B, DDOT requested permission from the Federal Highway Administration to try a less common marking, the “advisory bike lane.” Corey Holman, the ANC commissioner whose district includes most of this lane, said, “We volunteered to be an experiment here, in lieu of just slapping some sharrows down.”

Former commissioner Nick Burger wrote, “As a resident of this street, I’m glad we’re giving this a shot. This is one of a set of coordinated measures that came out of discussions between ANC6B and DDOT, which could really transform the transportation landscape on these blocks if we lean in.”

Diagram via City of Alexandria

Basically, the road becomes a bike lane on each side and then a too-narrow two-way street in the middle for cars — a little like one of those super-narrow Georgetown streets which don’t meet modern standards. Drivers are supposed to use the center section, but if they need to pass another car or truck, they can move over into the bike lane.

The line between the bike lane and the general lane for motor vehicles is dashed instead of solid, just as other types of bike lanes are at corners to tell drivers they can merge in there.

In a sense, it’s the opposite of a sharrow: instead of designing the street for cars and accommodating bicycles in the car space, it’s allocating space for bikes first but accommodating cars in the bike space.

According to a detailed white paper by Alta Planning & Design, there are advisory bike lanes in the United States in Minneapolis and Edina, Minnesota; Burlington, Vermont; Sandpoint, Idaho; and the college towns of Boulder, Colorado; Cambridge, Massachusetts; Bloomington, Indiana; and Hanover, New Hampshire. Lanes in DC will bring it to the second North American capital city after Ottawa.

The closest example, however, is right nearby in Alexandria, in the Potomac Greens neighborhood.

Will it work?

Officials emphasized that this is an experiment, and trying it (at very low cost, given that it’s just paint) will let DC transportation planners figure out if it will work or not.

Jacob Mason wrote on Twitter, “Getting these right is super tricky. Good rule of thumb: if it looks like you can drive 40mph without hitting anything, people will.” Nathan Paxton also tweeted a concern that people double park at the Watkins field regularly; this will require enforcement.

Besides double parking, the potential risk is that, not really understanding what’s going on, people will just drive on the right side of the road partly in the bike lane anyway, and given the width of the street, drive too fast.

Mason noted that European cities which use these do a couple of things North American cities haven’t: they paint the lanes red (here, we use red for bus lanes and green for bike lanes, so the equivalent here would be green) and install little islands to “push” the cars back from the sides of the street into the center by creating a small distance where two cars can’t pass side by side.

Image by Alta Planning & Design.

Drivers are, however, fairly used to not driving in bike lanes, so it’s possible just the dashed lines will nudge them over. Or, if not, perhaps DDOT can try paint and some flexposts to simulate the islands shown above.

Here’s a video Ottawa created to explain the lanes:

The District’s application to the Federal Highway Administration suggested trying the lanes also on 12th Street and Kentucky Avenue in the same area, as well as short nearby segments of North Carolina and Tennessee avenues. DDOT will have to submit reports twice a year for the two-year trial period, and evaluate the lanes’ success. The application also points out this will be a great opportunity for FHWA officials, who work close by, to see this kind of infrastructure in action.

Continue the conversation about urbanism in the Washington region and support GGWash’s news and advocacy when you join the GGWash Neighborhood!

Tagged: advisory bike lanes, bicycling, bike lanes, canada, capitol hill, dc, ddot, ottawa

David Alpert created Greater Greater Washington in 2008 and was its executive director until 2020. He formerly worked in tech and has lived in the Boston, San Francisco Bay, and New York metro areas in addition to Washington, DC. He lives with his wife and two children in Dupont Circle.