Rutgers researchers have found that the installation of a bike lane at a high-traffic intersection in a Jersey Shore town reduced driving speeds. The study, conducted by Rutgers University–New Brunswick, was aimed at finding ways to lower vehicle crash incidence and was published in The Journal of Urban Mobility.
"We are giving you more evidence that bike lanes save lives," said Hannah Younes, lead author of the study and postdoctoral research associate at the Alan M. Voorhees Transportation Center in the Rutgers Bloustein School of Planning and Public Policy. "And it’s not only cyclists’ lives that could be saved. It’s more than that – drivers and pedestrians as well."
The research team included experts from the Bloustein School, the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering in the Rutgers School of Engineering, and the Department of Computer Science in the Rutgers School of Arts and Sciences. They focused their efforts on Cookman and Asbury Avenues in Asbury Park, N.J., where Cookman intersects with Asbury Avenue leading to Atlantic Ocean beaches.
Drivers heading to the beach often take a legal right-turn-on-red at this intersection without stopping first, creating hazardous conditions for pedestrians and cyclists crossing at the corner.
To address this issue, researchers created a temporary bike lane on Cookman and Asbury Avenues using orange road cones. Bloustein students then surveyed random bike and electric scooter riders about their use of bikes and electric scooters, as well as their attitude toward bike lanes. Most people surveyed expressed a positive view towards bike lanes.
Using computer vision techniques to classify speed and trajectory data from over 9,000 motor vehicles before and after creating the bike lane, researchers found significant reductions in traffic speeds: a 28 percent reduction in average maximum speeds and a 21 percent decrease for vehicles turning right. For those heading straight, an 8 percent reduction was observed. Drivers moving perpendicular to the bike lane did not slow down.
Marking bike lanes with cones proved more effective than painted-only lanes; cones led to greater speed reductions compared to painted lines alone.
Younes hypothesized that drivers slow down when they see delineated spaces like cones because these markers make driving lanes narrower requiring more concentration.
With pedestrian deaths rising nationally—7,388 pedestrian deaths occurred in 2021 according to the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety—a study such as this could contribute to new traffic policies or revisions of existing ones. Cities nationwide are adopting policies aimed at eliminating all fatalities and serious injuries on public roads under initiatives like Vision Zero.
