Advisory Legal Bike Lanes

Advisory Legal Bike Lanes

Advisory legal bike lanes are essentially legal bike lanes marked with a bike symbol and broken white lines that function as advisory lanes because the road’s central zone is not wide enough for opposing directions of vehicular traffic to get by without using the bike lane. This form of advisory lane is relatively new and has been common only since about 2014. The Dutch do not call them “advisory bike lanes,” just “bike lanes.”

An advisory legal bike lane’s major distinctions from a suggestion lane are as follows:

• The lane must be at least 1.5 m (5 ft) wide: This was the main difference because suggestion lane widths can be as small as 3 feet wide.
• There is no parking in or next to the lane: This rarely made a difference because with most suggestion lanes, there was no parking allowed or because it was a rural road with no parking demand.
• The lane should have red pavement: This also rarely made a difference because most municipalities had painted suggestion lanes red already.

As shown in the below images, Veenweg in Nootdorp had been transformed from a roadway with striped suggestion lanes to advisory legal bike lanes. Through this reconfiguration, advisory lanes increased in width, the central zone decreased in width, and bike lane symbols were added to the lanes.

Move the below to History page??

• Historical development:
  • Dutch roads have long had bike lanes marked with broken white lines that are not advisory lanes. In Europe, solid line = Don’t Cross. So bike lanes next to a parking lane, or on a road with frequent driveways, have always been marked with broken white lines. Examples:
    • Duinstraat 15 in den Haag
  • In the 1990s and 2000s, municalities gradually enhanced their suggestion lanes, making them more like conventional bike lanes: red color, wider, and finally, added bike symbols.
    • Example: Delflanddreef in Pijnacker – an early example of a suggestion lane subtly upgraded to a legal bike lane by adding a small bike symbol to the pavement.
  • For many years, the prevailing thought among cycling advocates was to oppose such moves, to keep a strong distinction between suggestion lanes and bike lanes so that respect for bike lanes wouldn’t be diluted. Eventually, cycling advocates changed their view. There was nothing in the highway code that prevented vehicular traffic from using a bike lane if it was marked with a broken white lane, and a shift from suggestion lanes to legal bike lanes meant cyclists would get wider lanes with better pavement. By 2016, national guidance promoted such a shift where possible.
    • Because “suggestiestrook” is often translated into English as “advisory bike lane,” when Dutch publications began around 2016 to recommend replacing suggestion lanes with bike lanes, people reading English language translations and reports were sometimes misled to think that the Dutch were moving away from advisory lanes, when all they were doing was recommending an upgraded form for their advisory lanes.