OKLAHOMA CITY — Transportation planners in Oklahoma City say they are committed to creating the safe, convenient, and interconnected biking route infrastructure that cyclists want to see throughout the city.
But to get there, it’s going to take some experimenting and more than a little trial and error.
Since opening the city’s very first parking-protected bike lane on Lottie Avenue late last year, city planners have been studying resident responses, design oversights, and even the efficacy of a new state-funded lane that’s showing what a higher budget and greater attention can produce.
“We’re figuring out what works,” said Justin Henry, the Transportation Program Manager in OKC’s Planning Department. “And it’s not just us. It’s a national thing. Bike lane standards have just been evolving so rapidly in recent years.”
Kelley Avenue – state-funded, curb-protected
One of the most striking recent additions to the city’s bike lane network is the newly curb-protected cycling lane on Kelley Avenue following a stretch of the historic Route 66.
While a curb-protected lane is regarded as one of the safest and most clearly delineated forms of biking lanes, the space, the labor, and above all, the funding required place them outside the reach of most city projects.
In the case of the new lane on Kelley, the resources needed came from a state-level project.
“That one is interesting,” Henry explained. “Years ago, ODOT (The Oklahoma Department of Transportation) partnered with other states to do Bicycle Route 66 across the country. So we got involved and helped ODOT map out a biking route that closely followed Route 66 through OKC, and it became apparent that on some of the spots we needed to cross, we couldn’t just do sharrows through neighborhoods. We needed a higher touch for crossing on Kelley.”
That higher touch came in the form of concrete curb protection fully preventing cars from entering the bike lane, with funding combined from ODOT and the city’s Better Streets, Safer City sales tax.
According to Henry, that degree of bike security is more or less ideal, but the city typically cannot execute it at that level due to financial constraints.
“It always ends up being about money,” Henry said. “If we weren’t limited by funds, I think we would always have every bike lane either curb-separated or elevated to be the same level as the sidewalk.”
Lottie Avenue – slight re-design
One of the more forward-thinking recent additions to the city’s bike lane network came late last year in the form of OKC’s first-ever parking-protected bike lane on Lottie Ave.
Utilizing the groundbreaking design of placing the bike lane between on-street car parking and the curb – inverting the more traditional layout – city planners hoped to see a marked embrace of the design and a clear improvement in safety.
Just under a year on, however, some retooling of the design has already been required.
“We’re always learning from the last project, and Lottie is a good example,” Henry explained. “We put a lot of focus on the commercial parking spaces on that stretch of Lottie, but we had a bit of a blind spot for the residences. On those last couple blocks, by moving the parking over, people couldn’t park as close to their houses as they wanted.”
That feedback from residents is spurring changes in the design.
“So we’re going to change Lottie now,” Henry said. “Just for those last three blocks, we’re going to move it to the more traditional kind of parking against the curb.”
Cycling advocate Shawn Wright is especially happy to hear that only that small stretch of Lottie will be changed.
“For a minute there, we thought [the bike lanes] were getting ripped out entirely,” he told Free Press via email. “I’ve personally ridden Lottie before and after the lanes and it is much better now than before.”
Trial and Error
According to Henry, city planners are focusing on creating safe, navigable, and potentially permanent solutions for bicycle lanes and bike routes around the city, but there will undoubtedly be some temporary experiments and periods of trial and error as they determine what works best.
“We actually only got bike lane standards in OKC for the first time in 2018, so it’s still a pretty new thing that we’re learning how to implement,” he said. “Something that I think we want to do next year is to update all of our bike lane standards, because now we’ve piloted a lot of stuff and figured out what works.”
For cycling advocates like Bike Oklahoma president Tony Carfang, that’s encouraging news, even as he believes that more overtly car-oriented development has hampered more effective designs and solutions.
“I think ‘half measure’ is a good phrase for it,” Carfang told Free Press. “There is a lot of desire and a lot of understanding of what the best practices are, but it feels like there are a lot of artificial constraints on what can be done.”
As explained by Henry, those constraints can range from concerns over parking availability, lane width, congestion, and more, but are most often simply matters of funding and resources.
To find solutions that provide safety and separation at an acceptable cost to the city will require a continuing transitional period of trying different designs and approaches while building a better-connected network of bike lanes.
“We’ve kind of focused on building out enough of a network that we can get people cycling first,” Henry said, “and sometimes that means building these kinds of interim designs like protected lanes or delineators or using ‘armadillos,’ which are these little striped humps on the ground. They’re not curbs, but they provide some separation.”
‘Level of service’
Whichever designs and approaches eventually present themselves as the best and most feasible, Henry is confident that OKC’s biking infrastructure will only grow and solidify as the increasing population density makes traffic and transportation more difficult.
“Right now, it’s just so easy to drive in Oklahoma City, but you need to densify,” he said. “We can’t continue to accommodate that level of service on our roads. It just becomes financially impossible.”
Brett Fieldcamp has been covering arts, entertainment, news, housing, and culture in Oklahoma for nearly 15 years, writing for several local and state publications. He’s also a musician and songwriter and holds a certification as Specialist of Spirits from The Society of Wine Educators.
