#Damien Talks Episode 13 – The Davis Planning Department on the Bike Protected Intersection
Today, #DamienTalks with Jennifer D’Onofrio and Bryan Michaelson of the City of Davis about the new protected bike intersection in Davis, California. The newly redesigned intersection is the first of its kind in America, and receiving warm reviews from both cars and bicyclists in Davis and advocates around the country.
As you’ll see in the middle of the episode, it gets a little complicated trying to explain how the intersection works. D’Onofrio and Michaelson assure me that it’s pretty simple when you’re actually riding in the street…an opinion shared by my colleague Michael Anderson who wrote of the intersection, “hard to explain, simple to use.”
If you have trouble following it, check out Anderson’s post, and pictures, at Streetsblog USA.
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Thanks for listening. You can download the episode at the Damien Talks homepage on Libsyn.
I’ve added in some notes on top of Davis’s more technical rendering of the intersection as I understand it to work:
https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/2f16c05655fc755c9529d3bdf4ddcfa50a4dee3e8fa4cff902e8695f2b5c4aaf.jpg
Legend:
Class I = shared two-way multiuse path (bikes, peds, etc.)
Class II = conventional one-way on-road bike lane
Optional Diverter Channel = optional connection between Class I and II
Again, this is how I currently understand the intersection to work. Will confirm once I check it out this weekend 🙂
Thanks for posting the interview! Great to hear about the positive response it’s been getting in the community. That comment about even kids instinctively getting it and using it unsupervised is directly analogous to how good 8-to-80 infrastructure like this works in the Netherlands:
https://youtu.be/xSGx3HSjKDo?t=6s
Damien, maybe part of the totally understandable armchair confusion over this intersection in Davis is that it has both:
1) buffered on-street bike lanes
and
2) separated multiuse pathways (what Caltrans calls Class I multiuse paths for people on foot, bike, rollerblades, wheelchair, etc.–and as with all such paths these are wide and bidirectional, by the way)
It is the latter that receives the protected intersection, not the former. This is a distinguishing characteristic from Dutch intersections which would not have both a separated and on-road lane for people biking to choose from in the same corridor. However, this is a fairly common thing in Davis so locals should be pretty used to the option.
Interestingly Davis has *also* built an optional “onramp” channel into the protected intersection from the on-street bike lanes if people wish to bike on-road mid-block but then join the protected path at the intersection.
Or, they can just stay on the Class I the whole time.
Or they can bike on the road the whole time and do vehicular turns.
I’ll try and take some pics of it this weekend when I go.