Over and Over, Studies Show Bike Lanes Don’t Cause Congestion

In an arti­cle for CBC, Nicole Mor­tillaro high­lights research from cities around the world that shows that, despite pop­u­lar mis­con­cep­tions, bike lanes do not increase traf­fic con­ges­tion.

The arti­cle is in part a response to a con­tentious pro­posed Ontario, Cana­da law that would “would require munic­i­pal­i­ties to get provin­cial approval to install any bike lanes that would remove a lane of vehi­cle traf­fic.”

Accord­ing to stud­ies, ded­i­cat­ed bike lanes increase the num­ber of peo­ple bik­ing and reduce the num­ber of cars on the street. “Bike Share Toron­to sta­tis­tics show that rid­er­ship on its net­work of shared bikes has increased dra­mat­i­cal­ly since 2015, when 665,000 bike trips were made annu­al­ly. In 2023, that shot up to 5.7 mil­lion trips.”

In New York City, the aver­age time it takes cars to trav­el on a major thor­ough­fare decreased from 4.5 min­utes to 3 min­utes after bike lanes were installed. “Oth­er case stud­ies found either no impacts on traf­fic, or min­i­mal delays — any­where from a few sec­onds to just over a minute.”

The arti­cle high­lights oth­er stud­ies from Cana­da and beyond, not­ing that bike lanes are also shown to increase safe­ty for pedes­tri­ans by decreas­ing traf­fic speeds. And in many cas­es, they also bring addi­tion­al rev­enue to local busi­ness­es.