I don’t think bike lanes are a great idea…mostly. Don’t get me wrong: a smart, separate, and affordable way to share an interstate bridge in a town with commuting problems is one thing, but messing up the whole town with crazy little specialty lanes is a bad idea. Cruising around Memphis recently, I spent about ten miles on bike lanes and so many things came to mind:

1) The biggest problem is that when there are bike lanes around town, folks decide that’s where bikes belong. You’re not a reasonable vehicle any more the second you peddle outside the lines: you’re off the reservation. Most car drivers have this idea that they own the road, so this is already a problem if you are a pedaler or pedestrian or any of the other annoying variants getting in the way of the great automobile. I’m not looking to be, but I now am a problem if I need to leave the bike lane.

2) Bike lanes themselves make enemies: every guy who before was parking on the curb is mad, the commuter who has been funneled down to four lanes from six to make room for the bikes resents deeply, the shopkeeper whose clients must now mind a gap while parking and then dodge cyclists before they can even gain the sidewalk is incensed. Drivers generally hated bikes already; now they hate the lanes per se…and, by extension, they hate cyclists even more; that won’t help out in traffic land.

3) Bike lanes subvert basic traffic law and dumb down everyone. They’re mindless, like an interstate: we pedal onto one and turn off the brain; bike lanes appear around town, and drivers don’t need to worry about cyclists anymore so they get to think less because (see 1 above and repeat after me) that’s where bikes belong. I already compete as a cyclist for the attention of those with whom I share the road, with their texting, their spilling their coffee in their laps, their screaming spawn in the back seat, their hood ornament, and all the other things they focus on instead of looking down the road a furlong or so and figuring out what they might need to prepare to do in the next five or ten seconds with the two tons of steel they’re slinging around town. Right-of-way…what is this thing you speak of, mad man? My buddy reports this typical move today: car overtakes him and then suddenly turns right off the road immediately in front of him…while he’s pedaling over 20mph…because he’s a cyclist and is just in the way…because that driver has lost touch with all the simple right and wrongs he learned when he was 15 from the nice pamphlet that the governor printed for us all, which we all had to memorize before we could get the pretty wallet cards with our pictures on them. I guess if he drives over an old lady in a cross-walk, she had it coming for being so hopelessly out of date; get with the times, grandma; walking is lame!

4) Ye gods these damned bike lanes are dangerous…and ugly! They need not necessarily be, but they generally are. There’s all this extra paint that’s super slick in the rain. Bike lanes often come with tons of extra furniture: little stanchions that corral us off at intersections and such. But the biggest problem is maintenance: if there’s a bike lane, I belong in it, supposedly, and I shouldn’t opt out of the leaf piles, fallen limbs, broken glass, sand, gravel, wreckage (literally: headlamp lenses, grill shards, random sharp bits of injection-molded carnage), and any other flotsam that heavier traffic knocks out of the “real” lanes and into the little lane where the guys with the thin tires roll. For a few miles on one street in town, both east- and west-bound bike lanes are contiguous, both on the north side of the street: west-bound I’m pedaling against traffic; who’s going to look for me over there on the wrong side of the street when they cross my lane at an intersection…how is this stupidity improving cycling in particular or traffic in general?

5) No one knows what the lanes mean; the signage is random, inconsistent, and at least somewhat ambiguous. How do we merge so you can turn right and I can carry on straight? Does the bike lane trump other rules? Is that cyclist a criminal or a mere jerk for wheeling out of his bike lane to avoid a stretch of missing, broken, lumpy…whatever type of failed pavement?

We’re teaching ourselves not to think, exacerbating the tension between cars and bikes, and pitting ourselves against our neighbors with these lanes. There’s got to be a better way to design traffic to be bike-smart than what I’ve seen around Memphis.