Where bicycles are prohibited in Massachusetts

The main issue you will confront if you get into a dispute with police over bicycle prohibitions is whether the prohibition is supported by law. Often it is not. Example: the ramp from Commonwealth Avenue to Route 128 northbound and Norumbega Road in Weston. The No Bicycles etc. sign is placed at its entrance (well, actually slightly past the entrance so you don’t see it till too late) but also too early because it applies only to the entrance to Route 128. Note the limitations expressed in CMR 9.08 and MGL 85 11B — limited-access or express state highway where signs have been posted. If there is no sign where you entered, you shouldn’t be cited. I recall years ago having an official document listing what actually are state highways — they are all numbered highways, but actually only a few of them. If you went to the State House Library or inquired of MassDOT, you could get that info.

700 CMR 7.02 and 7.06 establish that bicycles are not permitted on specific Ways that are part of state highways:

Way is defined as the Turnpike, the Metropolitan Highway System, tunnels, a service or rest area, that is located on property owned or controlled and under the jurisdiction of the Department, and includes the areas appurtenant to said way that are necessary for the operation, construction and maintenance of the way

(4) Prohibited Entry to or Use of a Way. The Department prohibits the following vehicles from entering or using a way:

(d) Propelled by Muscle Power. A vehicle propelled by muscle power, including without limitation a bicycle or a vehicle drawn by a horse or other animal, or a motorized bicycle or moped

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Seen in Lexington

I have not yet ridden on the stretch of Massachusetts Avenue where bike lanes have been placed to the right of parked cars. I missed that opportunity when my bicycle had a flat tire and I couldn’t fix the inner tube — so I Ubered up to Ride Studio Café to buy and install a new tube. On the way home, I did catch some photos, below with captions.

Center driveway A bicyclist died here in the spring of 2019. Another bicyclist had pulled out to pass and the two collided head-on.

Ghost bike on the Minuteman Path south of Seasons Four Garden Center driveway. A bicyclist died here in the spring of 2019. Another bicyclist had pulled out to pass and the two collided head-on. The path has been repaved, nice work there although it would be better if the grass shoulders were level with the asphalt. The step at the edge can throw a bicyclist down.

Pile of hardened concrete in the bike lane on Massachusetts Avenue south of Season's Four driveway

Pile of hardened concrete in the bike lane on Massachusetts Avenue south of Seasons Four driveway, very sloppy work by a contractor.

Door-zone bike lane, 859 Massachusetts Avenue

Door-zone bike lane, 859 Massachusetts Avenue. This carries the implication that the door zone is the safest place to ride. It is not.

859 Massachusetts Avenue in 2017. There was no bike lane stripe.

859 Massachusetts Avenue in 2017. There was no bike lane stripe.

driver's position in the right-turn lane to Wilson Road.

Signs as seen from a driver’s position in the right-turn lane from Massachusetts Avenue to Pleasant Street.

sidewalk. Placing one sign to hide another is contrary to standards.

Ths same signs as seen from the sidewalk. Placing one sign to hide another is contrary to standards.

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What is the authority for this sign?

Sign on the Shining Sea Path

Sign on the Shining Sea Path

The sign in this photo, which I have copied from a Facebook post, is well-intentioned, but it arouses very mixed feelings in me.

I have no sympathy for people who ride at unsafe speeds around other path users, see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SD9u01lVxe8. There was a death on the Minuteman path in Lexington, Massachusetts this year resulting from reckless speed and unsafe passing. But when the path is totally empty as shown in the photo, are people to be prevented from riding at a speed which allows them to get any significant fitness benefit, or getting where they want to go when they want to? This is the Shining Sea Path — line of text at the bottom of the sign says “FriendsofFalmouthbBkeways.org“. The alternative is Woods Hole Road, which is not an attractive ride — hilly, not very wide, lots of motor traffic.

Is the 15 mph speed limit supported by law and so enforceable? The southern section of the Shining Sea path, which this appears to be, is controlled by the Town of Falmouth and I found no ordinance establishing a speed limit on it. The speed limit rule in Mass. General Laws applies only to motor vehicles — https://malegislature.gov/Laws/GeneralLaws/PartI/TitleXIV/Chapter90/Section17.

One other thing in the photo is troubling and senselessly restrictive: the solid yellow line in the middle of the path, indicating no passing (and contradicting the “keep right/pass left” sign). Pedestrians use this path, also bicyclists traveling at various speeds. Passing is unavoidable. A long, straight stretch like the one shown should be a passing zone with a dashed yellow line, or none. See https://mutcd.fhwa.dot.gov/htm/2009/part9/part9c.htm

Audible signal before passing is in the law. Moving off the path when stopped is required for courtesy and also covered, see https://malegislature.gov/Laws/GeneralLaws/PartI/TitleXIV/Chapter85/Section11B . But all of the signs except the speed limit sign are nonstandard, that is, they are regulatory signs not tested for effectiveness or approved for use. Pretending that things are law when they aren’t is not right — warning signs (yellow, diamond-shaped) can convey the same message without raising that issue. Senseless and unenforceable restrictions also are not right. These issues could come up in the event of a crash on the path, and could hold a bicyclist at fault, for example, passing safely when someone darts out into the path and there is a collision. But on the other hand, the Friends of Falmouth Bikeways, a private organization, has no authority to post regulatory signs on a public way. So, is there any?

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Dummer yet

Let’s take a look at the intersection of Essex Street with Dummer Street in Brookline over the years, with the aid of Google Street Views. Essex Street leads south from Commonwealth Avenue opposite the Boston University Bridge — see Google map.

In 2007, Essex Street had parking on the west side, which resulted in wrong-way dooring conflicts with (then illegal) contraflow bicycle traffic. In order to prevent motor traffic from using Essex Street as a cut-through, it was one-way for one block south of Dummer Street, with no exception for bicyclists. That was unfortunate, as Essex Street was plenty wide for a contraflow bike lane for the one block where it was now one-way. We are looking south along Essex Street in the Google Street View below. Dummer Street goes off to the right.

Essex at Dummer, September, 2007

By August 2009, the parking had been switched to the east side of Essex street (view from the opposite direction, to show parking signs). Contraflow bicycle travel was still illegal.

Essex Street looking northward approaching Dummer, August, 2009

The situation remained unchanged in July, 2011. This is a view from the north. I described conditions then in an earlier post.

By August 2013, as shown in the next two Street Views, a contraflow bike lane had been delineated, as shown in the next two Street Views. At last!

Essex at Dummer, August, 2013

Shortly thereafter, a bike lane was striped up to the corner, encouraging bicyclists to keep to the right of right-turning motor traffic. Dashed stripes in the intersection instructed motorists like the one in the next Street View below to turn right from the left lane, a manufactured conflict. Bicyclists could still ignore the stripe and merge into the line of motor traffic anyway, and that made passage really easy. Many bicyclists though, not having been taught any better, made things much harder and more dangerous for themselves by following the paint. Comment by Sam Archer in a comment on a Facebook post:

I actually always turn right down Dummer because I hate going through that intersection.

Bike lane striped to corner, August ,2013

By September, 2018, the contraflow bicycle lane remained clearly delineated, but the bike lane stripes north of Dummer Street had largely worn away, and a sign instructing motorists to yield to bicycles on the corner had disappeared , as shown in the next two Street Views.

Essex at Dummer, September, 2018How did this situation get remedied? By making it decidedly worse. In May 2019, a cycle track is being installed on the west side of Essex Street, further hardening and complicating the manufactured conflict. (Photo by Sam Archer, from the Facebook post).

Essex at Dummer, May 2019

This installation makes it difficult for bicyclists traveling the street and for motorists interacting with them, by narrowing the travel lane (note moved curb line). Bicyclists can no longer merge on Essex Street, as they could earlier, with or without the bike lane. Instead, bicyclists must carefully time their entry into Essex Street when no motor vehicles are entering, or else be forced into a right hook threat on the cycle track, or perhaps hop down the curb into the street. It does look as though it will be a low curb for the last 100 feet before Dummer Street, after the driveway conflict. Count your blessings, but will a motorist expect you to hop a curb to enter the street?

This is a stunning example of a manufactured conflict that increases delay and danger. ALL the motor traffic headed southbound on Essex Street will haveto turn right across the new cycle track onto Dummer Street. The bike lane on the bridge in the background, the cycle track in the middleground and the contraflow bike lane in the foreground don’t line up, so bicyclists are supposed to zig and zag. Bicyclists entering the Cycle track also will be in conflict with the heavy pedestrian traffic on the corner of Commonwealth Avenue. The appropriate location for a bicyclist continuing straight into the contraflow bicycle lane is in line with the motor traffic, and so an appropriate treatment would slow the motor traffic even more than would be necessary to turn right, so bicyclists could more easily make their way into the contraflow lane — say, a speed hump.

The installation being built terrible design based on false premises.What are these false premises? That bicyclists fare best in sidewalk space, and that motorists can always be relied to yield to bicyclists in their right rear blindspot.

When the largest single cause of fatal bicycle crashes in the Boston area is the right hook, why is the city leading bicyclists and motorists blindly into right-hook conflicts? Is merging into a line of slow motor traffic so horribly intimidating that we must replace it with a right hook wherever possible — especially, considering that this can’t possibly happen at more than a small percentage of intersections, because there is no funding to pay for “improvements” like this at every one of them? Please.

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What’s with Winter Street, Waltham?

Today I rode on Winter Street in Waltham, which runs around the south and west sides of the Cambridge Reservoir. A few years ago, bike lanes were installed on much of Winter Street, starting a quarter mile west of West Street in Waltham and extending (with a couple of interruptions) to the Lincoln town line. The bike lanes were functional — no problem with parked vehicles — but today I found that considerable parts of the eastbound bike lane have been removed, to extend a left-turn lane into the Gatehouse Drive office park, and other parts have been poorly repaved as part of a project which, based on observation, installed storm drains so that runoff from Winter Street would drain into Hobbs Brook below the reservoir, rather than into the reservoir itself. It used to be necessary to control the right-hand travel lane of four-lane Winter Street for a quarter mile west of West Street and at a couple of other places west of the reservoir. Now it is necessary to control the lane over a greater distance. Also, some stretches are bumpy due to a seriously third-rate repaving job following the installation of new storm-sewers.

I am curious as to who funded the recent project, and who had to approve it. The Reservoir belongs to the City of Cambridge, but the street is in Waltham.

The location, in Google Maps (this server won’t embed Google maps, so you’ll have to open the map separately).

As a Google Street View from September, 2017 makes clear, the work occurred in 2018.

Photos follow.

Bike lane westbound past reservoir gatehouse

Westbound bike lane past reservoir gatehouse

Farther along westbound -- rough paving following installation of storm drains

Farther along westbound — rough paving following installation of storm drains

No bike lane, rough paving southbound approaching Gatehouse Lane

No bike lane, rough paving southbound approaching Gatehouse Lane

Bike lane removed eastbound at dam

Bike lane removed eastbound at dam

 

Bike lane removed eastbound opposite gatehouse

Bike lane removed eastbound opposite gatehouse

Bike lane rmoved eastbound opposite gatehouse

Bike lane removed eastbound opposite gatehouse

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Micromobility bills before the Massachusetts Legislature, 2019

I have prepared extensive comments on transportation bills currently in the Massachusetts legislature. Most bills are about micromobility devices, electric bicycles and various safety measures. My comments also include a slightly different version of the observations about Massachusetts traffic law in general which I have posted elsewhere.

 

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Massachusetts traffic law, the nation’s most disorganized and confusing

As my comments on Massachusetts traffic law may be of interest to people outside Massachusetts, I have posted the comment in a different blog.

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Centre Street, Jamaica Plain, Boston petition on Change.org

One Joshua Grolman has published a petition on Change. org asking for “protected bike lanes” on Centre Street, the main street through the Jamaica Plain neighborhood in Boston.

Centre Street is two-way, narrowed by parallel parking on both sides everywhere except at special locations — bus stops, turn lanes, approaches to intersections etc. While the petition calls for “protected bike lanes” (plural) and so, for two-way bicycle travel, the drawing with the petition shows a one-way bikeway on a one-way street (dashed white center line), with parking on one side — half the parking eliminated. That gets past the narrowness issue, but how is it supposed to relate to any feasible reallocation of space? Merchants and many residents won’t accept the removal of parking. Nobody is going to find it convenient for Centre Street to be one-way. Maybe in 20 years autonomous vehicles will reduce the need for parking, but people are still going to want to use the street for two-way travel. For now, bicyclists on Centre Street will have to to ignore the existing door-zone bike lanes and control the travel lane in order to be safe.

The drawing also doesn’t show intersections, where most car-bike crashes occur. Barrier-separated bikeways d not solve that problem and often worsen it.

Here’s the drawing, copied from a NACTO publication.

Joshua Grolman illustration

Joshua Grolman illustration

Mr. Grolman’s proposal will get only positive responses. Change.org allows negative responses only in response to inappropriate online behavior. That is usual for the petition process (as opposed, say, to a polling process). Also, only people who have signed the petition are allowed to post online comments. I find  Mr. Grolman’s proposal impractical and so I won’t sign the petition. As I can’t comment on the petition there, I am commenting here.

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Non-responsive signal actuators in Waltham

Why are we still seeing traffic-signal actuators which won’t trigger the signal for bicycles or motorcycles?

I have made a short video of a Waltham intersection, Bedford and South Streets. This illustrates the problem which a bicyclist or motorcyclist faces with many traffic-signal actuators.

Another issue at this same intersection is that many westbound motorists pull forward past the stop line, but there is then no loop under their vehicle and the light does not change. Drivers do this so they can look left to check whether it is safe to turn right on red, but some also do it when they intend to travel straight across the intersection or turn left.

Due to policy issues and different entities specifying and installing actuator loops, their installation is inconsistent. Some are better. Here is a photo of bicycle-sensitive quadrapole loops (if correctly adjusted) on Tavern Road at Weston Street. I think that these were installed by the Massachusetts Department ofTransportation.

Quadrapole loops at Tavern Road

Quadrapole loops on Tavern Road

There is a bicycle-sensitive California D-type loop on South Street, though it is after the stop line. Drivers are unlikely to pull past the stop line here, as there is no sight-line issue, and they would be blocking traffic entering the driveway on the right.

D-type loop at South Street

D-type loop at South Street

The devices nearest the top in the picture below, at the intersection of Main Street and Linden Street, are vehicle-sensing video cameras. These work even at night for a bicyclist who has a rather weak headlight, if the bicyclist leans the bicycle to aim the headlight at the camera which points in the bicyclist’s direction.

Main and Linden Street intersection in Waltham, MAssachusetts

Main and Linden Street intersection in Waltham, Massachusetts

The installations shown in the photos and video above have all been in place for a year or more. However, a stretch of Main street (Route 20 and Route 117) in Waltham was repaved in the fall of 2018. Then following the repaving, traffic-signal actuator loops were installed — the obsolete kind, plain rectangular loops of wire.

Installing the good kind involves only laying the wires in a different pattern and adjusting the sensitivity in the control box. No new equipment or supplies are needed.

Examples, east to west on Main Street:

Westbound lanes at Exchange Street in front of the Public Library

Westbound lanes at Exchange Street in front of the Public Library

Eastbound lanes at Exchange Street

Eastbound lanes at Exchange Street

Westbound lanes at Hammond Street

Westbound lanes at Hammond and Prospect Streets

Eastbound lanes at Hammond and Prospect Streets

Eastbound lanes at Hammond and Prospect Streets

Westbound lanes at Banks Square

Eastbound lanes at Banks Square

I have discussed the actuator issue with Tim Kelly of the Signals and Wires Department, City of Waltham, and he told me that he is entirely in favor of having responsive signals, but that installations are changed only when a street is reconstructed: not when it is only repaved, as was the case with Main Street. The problem, then, is bureaucratic: it requires a change in policy, and minor changes in specifications and procedures.

More than one government entity may need to be addressed: some streets and street projects are under the jurisdiction of the Massachusetts Highway Department, and others, the Department of Conservation and Recreation. The Massachusetts Highway Department has generally been good about installing bicycle-sensitive actuators, and so it is perplexing that the new actuators on Main Street, part of Massachusetts Route 20, are not bicycle sensitive. Others on Main Street are bicycle-sensitive, as shown in other photos in this article. I would like to know who was in charge of these. Most of all, I want the City of Waltham consistently to require sensors which respond to bicycles and motorcycles. The city has a place at the table in discussion of all projects.

A technical description of how actuator loops work is here.

Massachusetts design standards for signal actuation are discussed and described here.

Additional documentation is here.

The definitive report on actuator loop design and installation, published 1986, is here.

Comments on some previous loop installations in Massachusetts are here.

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Massachusetts Highway Department advice on bicycle detection

The Massachusetts Department of Transportation Project Development and Design Guide, published in 2006, is recognized as pioneering in its call for street design “from the outside in,” recognizing the need to provide for pedestrians and bicyclists. The Guide is explicit in its requirement that traffic signals work for bicyclists, but does not give detailed actuator specifications. This is in Section 6.3.2:

Traffic Control – Bicyclists are required by law to obey control devices at intersections. Therefore, traffic control devices need to account for bicycle activity. Traffic signals which operate using detection systems (such as loop detection, video camera, and microwave) must be designed and field tested to be sensitive to bicycles. Many of the aspects of traffic control described for motor vehicles (below) also apply to bicyclists.

The Massachusetts Highway Department document Bicycle Detection at Signalized Intersections, published in 1998 does get into specifics, including recommendations for quadrapole loops. The 1986 San Diego report, the definitive report on electromagnetic loop detectors, is cited as a reference. The Massachusetts document does include some recommendations which reflect an inadequate understanding of bicycle characteristics and operation, notably:

Bicycle markings should be placed to the right side of general purpose through lanes to conform to recommended bike-riding practice (allowing the faster accelerating cars to pass within the lane).

A bicyclist needs to actuate the signal when first to arrive at a red light. A bicyclist who waits near the left side of a through lane which also allows right turns can offer the courtesy to a motorist who arrives later to turn right legally on red. The bicyclist also avoids the risk of a “right hook” collision.  The bicyclist can merge back to the right side of the lane (assuming that it is wide enough to share) once the light has changed.

The report later states that a detector should be placed

1. In a dedicated bicycle lane.
2. On the right side of the right travel lane.
3. On the left side of a left turn lane (if the lane is a shared use lane for left and through movements).
4. On the right side of a left turn lane (if lane is an exclusive left turn lane).
5. Just to the right of the centerline when turning left on an ordinary, two-lane street.

Therefore, bicycle detection should be placed at locations described above. It is not practical to force bicyclists to ride in traffic situations where they are not comfortable or are in conflict with recommended bicycle safety practices. We suggest that each intersection be evaluated individually for bicycle detection.

Aside from the issue already described, this advice reflects concepts of lane use which have to some degree been superseded.  A bicyclist who waits near the left side of a left turn lane risks having motorists pass on the right to turn left, forcing the bicyclist into oncoming traffic in the cross street. A bicyclist who waits near the right side of a left-turn lane risks having motorists overtake unsafely on the left. It is generally better for the bicyclist who arrives when the light is red to ride closer to the center of the lane, but the best position depends on conditions at a particular time and place. The best design practice is to install a detector which senses a bicyclist anywhere in the lane, for example the California D-type loop described in the San Diego report.

The document lists several types of detectors besides loop detectors: video, microwave/radar, sonic, magnetic — and magnetometers, the only one besides loop detectors  to which it gives a strong recommendation; but in mentioning magnetic detection and magnetometers at all, it is mistaken, because aluminum bicycle and motorcycle rims are nonmagnetic and will not be detected.

I have another post describing national history of traffic signal actuators, here.

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