Reminder: These are the opinions of the author, jammed out the door under deadline pressure, and not the opinions of CART as a whole.

Teen Bicyclist, out for a walk with his friends, on West Broadway.

A Broadway Bike Man, here seen riding on the left hand side of the road. Would he benefit from some clearer direction for cyclists? I think so.

Dramatis Personae

On Sunday December 20th I undertook a bikeability tour of West Louisville. The purpose of the trip is to look at the area through the eyes of a bicyclist. Or more properly, through the eyes of many bicyclists, since different bicyclists have different needs and desires. I've built up all this mental hardware for analyzing bicyclist behaviors, and the cyclist I encountered today fit into three categories that should be desinged for:

• Teen Bicyclist: Not quite an adult, not ready for rush hour on a major arterial, but capable of making sound judgements on forgiving streets.
• Broadway Bike Man: on this low-30s, gray, depressing Sunday, there were purposeful cyclists out there. African American men in their 30s and 40s, dressed in dark, puffy winter jackets, with gloves and ski hats. They were moving with businesslike pedal strokes along Broadway, without any cargo, but certainly going somewhere for a good reason.
• The Confident Cyclist: Graduate of Traffic Skills 101, this rider acts as the driver of a vehicle.

These categories were chosen because they neatly categorized everyone I saw on two wheels west of 9th. In building facilities to attract new cyclists, we should be sure that they serve the needs of the existing cyclists in the area too.

Bikes parked outside the Blood Bank in summer, 15th street

Garland's underpass under I-264 is typical of West Louisville - the expressway is ugly, but it is wide open for motorists, bicyclists, and people on foot. I don't understand the history of how West Louisville failed to get a stake through its heart, like every other expressway in an urban core in America, including the rest of Louisville!

Where To Go

Cycling for leiusure is great, but to get real mode share, we have to do transportation. Commercial centers, high schools, middle schools, and churches were mapped in Google Earth. Concentrations were identified on:

• Broadway
• Market Street, particularly 26th-22nd St
• Portland and Bank St, particuarly at 22nd St

Normally I would also list barriers here, but happily there are few barries to list. The only possible destination cut off by I-64 in Portland is block-by-block access to the Riverwalk (more on this later). I-264 runs through the heart of West Louisville, but uncannily, it has failed to destroy the neighborhoods - the interstate is perforated with ~20 bikeable crossings! The lack of any unreasonable barriers leads to a huge search area bounded only by the Ohio River, 10th Street, and Algonquin Parkway. This is ten square miles and far too huge to cover in 2.5 hour bike tour! To partially compensate I supplemented today's photos with file photos from August.

Today I set out from the Kroger at 25th and Broadway, and rode the following route:

• Broadway
• Garland Ave, a quieter street parallel to (but south of) Broadway
• Broadway again!
• 15th Street
• Market to 26th
• 26th
• Broadway yet again!!
• Central High School / City View
• 9th and 8th

Overview of Bikeability

If I had to pick one word to describe the streets here, it would be "good". In general you're looking at streets with very low traffic. However, the #1 favorite street design in West Louisville looks like this:

15th Street looking north from Broadway:
40+' wide, two-lane one-way with on street parking.

Westbound Oak Street:
perhaps 40' wide, two-lane one-way with on street parking.

This is not my favorite way to divide up the streetscape. It gives these roads peak capacity that they rarely actually need. But the higher speeds baited by this configuration endanger people all the time.

I'm not sure what's the right way to deal with this. Some ideas I've thought about and am not happy with:

• Road Diet those suckers down to 1 vehicular lane, with 5' bike lanes on both sides, one direction contraflow. Fatal flaw: halving motorized capacity for bicyclists seems unfair. If we were 50% modeshare, that would be one thing, but we're probably around 5% here, and that's being wildly optimistic. For this reason it would never survive public participation.
• Revert these streets to two-way. This makes life easier for residents. It slightly slows down traffic. But its a big change, needing public participation. Furthermore, it actually annoys the Confident Cyclist, since she is now blocking overtaking traffic and providing them with a stressful dashed yellow line to pass over - at best. I could go for it if someone else really wanted it, but mainly: meh.
• Lane Diet these suckers - 15th street at least looks like it could support two-count 10' traffic lanes, and two-count 7' parking lanes, and one 7' bike lane. Fly in the ointment: Some well-meaning biyclists will ride contraflow in a bike lane, on the wrong side of the road no matter how obvious the markings are. Thus riding correctly becomes a process of scowling and negotiating with every oncoming bone head. If you doubt this, try riding 3rd Street! If you're going to have bike lanes, better have them be 2-way, or suffer them being hijacked by boneheads.
• Add more car parking: replace the parallel parking with reverse angle parking. Reduce moving lanes to one generous vehicular lane and one bike lane. Remove angle parking near intersections to provide space for left turn pockets, bulb outs, and bus stops. Fatal flaw: uh...gosh, I think this might actually work. According to these cats in Davis, a 40' street could have (from left to right) 8' parallell parking, 11' vehicular lane, 6' bike lane, and 15' reverse angle parking, for a total of 40'. This might just work on West Oak, where parking is clearly contentious enough for many residents to require handicapped on-street parking signs. At intersections, some of the on-street parking goes away to provide roadway for efficient turning movements - either turn pockets, or roundabouts. The traffic calming possibilities here are almost endless - angled parking could alternate sides of the street, breaking up the sight lines and slowing down the motor vehicles further.

Broadway near Kroger

Lyle's Plaza, 2700 block W. Broadway

Lyle's Mall, 2700 block, W. Broadway, contains Kroger, probably more busy than all the other retail we saw today, combined.

On Broadway...

They say the neon lights are bright on Broadway
they say there's always magic in the air
but when you're walkin' down the street
and you ain't had enough to eat
the glitter rubs right off and you're nowhere

The tour reinforced my hunch that Broadway is the main axis of West Louisville. With its center at Lyles Plaza and Lyles Mall, this is the commercial destination this side of downtown. No wonder TARC put its transit hub there.

Accomodating cyclists on back roads here will only work for Teen Bicyclist. It does no good a'tall for Broadway Bike Man or Confident Cyclist, because they're coming here whether the city planners accomodate them or not. Bicyclists that are breadwinners must. come. here.

Unfortunately, this is also currently the most dangerous stretch for cycling west of 10th street. Left turning traffic entering Kroger / Lyle's Mall has to dash across several lanes of oncoming. It is classic left cross bait. Furthermore, the too-wide right lane encourages right hooks. Yours truly, a Confident Cyclist, has gotten down in the weeds and made unscheduled right turns into Kroger to avoid these motorist mistakes, more often than I'd like to admit.

Not only cyclists are endangered. A quick survey of the KSP public crash database showed hundreds of motor vehicle collisions and hundreds of injurys on this strip.

Something should be done, and that thing should accomodate cycling.

Gratuitious Photos of Neat Stuff

Left: Road Diet outside Chicasaw Park. The markings are getting faded...
Right: cute house on Doerhoffer. West Louisville has more of these than you can shake a stick at.

Market Street - not nearly the hustle or bustle of Broadway

Other Proposals

On my desk sits a draft map with some proposals on it. I'll quickly weigh in on them:

• Extend W. Market Bike Facility from 22nd to Ohio River - I vote Yea.
• Complete spotty facilities on 15th street from Algonquin to Riverwalk - I vote Yea, but bidirectional would be a big improvement. I've been on this street a few times, and there never seems to be any traffic. I need to come back during a Central HS football game, obviously.
• Bike Lanes on Northwestern Pkwy and Bank St - but only WEST of I-264. I vote Meh. I would say that Northwestern's #1 priority is a frickin' sidewalk. Bike lanes would be fine too, of course, but the current sharrows seem acceptable - just move 'em about 4 feet left so they're not in the door zone! But wait: east of I-264, Portland Ave and (especially) Bank St are getting a little hairy for my taste, they fall victim to the 2-lane 1-way thing that was discussed earlier. Recall that the Riverwalk is worthless for Portland residents going about their business. They have to be able to access the commercial blocks in their city center. The riverwalk doesn't do that. They have to access their housing. The riverwalk doesn't do that either. You can't jink onto it for a block or two either - its limited access is like getting on I-64 every time you want to go a block north on Bardstown Road. Portland and Bank should have local accomodation.

And my own Proposals...

• Bike facility on Broadway from 8th street (or farther east) to the existing route at I-264: this is the #1 most needed bike facility in West Louisville. Period.
• Figure out a way to deal with these 2-lane roads with on-street parking on both sides, that isn't quite as hostile to Broadway Bike Man or Teen Bicyclist. Do a pilot on one or two streets. When we have a working solution, roll it out to all 90,000 miles of 2-lane one-way streets in West Louisville.
• Something for westbound traffic on Jefferson crossing 9th street. There is only one 10' lane serving that destination, its a big intersection, and a short light. Motorists harass us. This becomes all the more important if there's a cycletrack on Jefferson.

This is the only bike parking I could find for both high rises below. Its all-night parking and its not even covered. Pathetic!

Post Script: on the way home...

Going by Central High School to check the bikeability there, I was distracted by high rise pubic housing between 8th and 9th street. I never noticed those towers before. Of the three towers, there is very little parking, maybe 200 car parking spots and only one bike rack. They could really, really use some covered bike parking, bike corrall style!

Maybe this is something for the Active Living Committee to look into with Metro Housing.

Low hanging fruit: 9th Street looks out on giant buildings full of public housing, with incredibly low car ownership rates.

Furthermore, we should look at this strip for bike facilities. They've got the density and low automobile ownership to really justify them based on need. 8th Street is proposed for a bike lane. That's good. 9th Street would also be ideal - the few turning conflicts make bike lanes a safe choice here.

Bicyclist on 8th street - a public housing resident.