This may surprise you… 

In Delray Beach, bike lanes are ubiquitous. The new ones are painted green and have a slightly different surface coating than does the road on which they are painted. They say it’s for safety. And that seems like a good thing. Right?

Well, it would surprise our local regulators to know that bike lanes don’t make bicycling safer. On the contrary, every study that has been done on the subject has concluded that they make it less safe. This was documented ten years ago by industrial engineer John Forester, who published an 800-page book on bike safety titled Effective Cycling.

In fact, most of the things that governments use to make roads safer have the opposite effect than intended.

I remember reading a story about a town in England that didn’t have a budget to install all the stop signs and traffic lights the town elders felt were needed. So, they hired a specialist who convinced them to try something radically different: “shared streets.”

Instead of adding more lights and signs, he suggested they eliminate all of them. The only thing they’d do is alert drivers that they were approaching an intersection by changing the surface of the road.

The result? Traffic accidents went down. Significantly. Including fatalities.

And that is what has been happening in Montgomery, AL, since the city eliminated bike lanes and most traffic lights and signs in the downtown area in favor of European-style cobblestone streets and plazas shared freely by cars, bikes, and pedestrians.

It may seem counterintuitive, but when you understand what happens when you eliminate safety measures, the reduction in accidents makes perfect sense. What happens, says Chris Conway, a city engineer involved in the Montgomery transformation, is that drivers are forced to pay more attention and take more responsibility for their actions. “The more uncomfortable the driver feels,” he says, “the more he is likely to make eye contact on the street with pedestrians, other drivers and to intuitively go slower.”

I’ve seen this play out in my hometown every time the traffic lights black out after a storm. No traffic cops. No signs. Just four- and six-lane roads crisscrossing one another. And guess what? The traffic moves steadily. Drivers look out for pedestrians. Everyone is more alert and courteous.

There’s a lesson here that applies to other things we do to produce desired results. More isn’t always better.

Click here for an article on bike lanes from Forbes.

And click here for a longer article about traffic safety devices and regulations from Scientific American.