Lekdijk (?? from Herbert Tiemens) – Peter to check for photos

Later in the 20th century, most rural roads were repaved with asphalt, eliminating the original need for bands of smooth pavement. Cyclists, however, discovered that while the pavement was smooth, they missed a benefit they had enjoyed with the old style of paving. With the old style, cyclists and motorists alike recognized the smooth outside bands as a bike zone. When riding in that zone, cyclists weren’t stressed by vehicles approaching from behind, and motorists didn’t resent them for “blocking” the road. With the new uniform asphalt paving, there was no longer an indicated bike zone. Cyclists sometimes felt obligated to ride along the extreme edge of the road, as motorists sometimes didn’t respect cyclists who strayed too far from the road edge; cycling became more stressful. And so they asked for striping to be added to indicate a cycling zone, as it had been indicated before.

This desire on the part of cyclists converged with those of road safety experts and road managers concerned with pavement preservation. Road safety experts recognized a value in marking white edge lines, also called fog lines, as a way to keep drivers from running off the road at night and in other poor visibility conditions. (Note that in the Netherlands, unlike the US, fog lines are marked with broken lines.) And road managers wanted to encourage vehicles to stay away from the edge of the pavement, where the pavement is weakest. As a result, many rural roads were marked with broken white lines set far enough from the edge of pavement that they created advisory lanes that mimicked the smooth pavement bands of the earlier era.

Just as the distinctly paved edge bands of the earlier era had no legal meaning, so too these new broken white lines had no legal meaning; that is, drivers and cyclists alike should follow the rules of the road that would apply if those lines weren’t there. Whether lines are marked or not, bikes, which are slower than autos, should keep to the right; however, when a line is marked, the uncertainty inherent in the term “keep to the right” disappears. Without advisory lane lines, motorists sometimes resent cyclists who don’t ride along extreme edge of the road, honking at them or passing with scant clearance. With marked advisory lanes, cyclists can ride comfortably within the suggested zone, which motorists inevitably respect.

Cities Adopt Advisory Lanes, Calling them Suggestion Lanes

Only years later did advisory lanes come to cities. Until the late 1950s, few urban roads in the Netherlands had bike lanes, because bikes so outnumbered cars that bikes needed the full width of the road. But as cars came to dominate streets in the 1960s, cities began to mark bike lanes on their streets. However, there were streets on which cyclists wanted bike lanes, but they were not wide enough for exclusive bike lanes; and so cyclists demanded the kind of broken-line bike lanes that rural roads had, which they called “suggestion lanes” (suggestiestroken) to distinguish them from exclusive bike lanes. They were called suggestion lanes because, as on rural roads, they have no legal meaning; that is, they put no legal obligation on cyclists or motorists. The first known published use of the term is in xxx.

Parking was another issue that led to cities to adopt suggestion lanes. When cities first starting installing bike lanes, prohibitions on parking in bike lanes were enacted at a municipal level, sometimes street by street. On streets with little parking demand, parking was sometimes allowed in the bike lane. When national law in 19xxx banned parking in bike lanes nationwide, municipalities that wanted to continue to allow parking in a bike lane restriped it as a suggestion lane. (It should be pointed out, however, that only a tiny fraction of suggestion lanes allow parking. Parking is never allowed on rural roads, and most urban roads with suggestion lanes have parking bays, which obligate motorists to park in them.)

Suggestion Lanes Become Enhanced with Color and Other Features

The first use of red color for bike lanes was in Enschede in 198xxx, and quickly spread across the country because it engendered greater recognition of and respect for bike lanes. A dilemma then arose regarding suggestion lanes: should they also be colored red? National guidelines advised against it (for example, xxx and xxx), wanting to maintain a distinction between “true” bike lanes and suggestion lanes. However, municipality after municipality, wanting to make cycling safer for their children and other citizens, went ahead and colored their suggestion lanes red. Some went further still, marking bike symbols on the pavement. To the average citizen and most elected officials, a suggestion lane was just a bike lane (the term suggestion lane was used only within the profession), and to them, bike lanes should be red and have bike symbols.

Published national guidance resisted this trend for at least 15 years. To many professionals, marking bike silhouettes in advisory lanes was a clear error, because in national law, it is the presence of a bike symbol — not the color of the pavement, nor whether the line is solid or broken – – that determines whether something is a legal bike lane. Motor vehicles aren’t allowed to drive in legal bike lanes, and it seemed wrong to apply the imprimatur of “bike lane” to a band of the roadway that motor vehicles routinely enter.

Converting Suggestion Lanes to Legal Bike Lanes or Bike Streets (Fietsstraten)

Around 2010, a remarkable reversal of opinion emerged among professionals responsible for drafting national guidance. While most people thought of legal bike lanes as something that excluded autos, there was an exception — if a bike lane is marked with a broken line rather than the usual solid line, motor vehicles may cross the line. Broken lines were commonly used to mark bike lanes next to parking lanes, on approaches to unsignalized junctions (for which motorists are taught to merge into the bike lane to avoid cutting a cyclist off when turning, a so-called “right hook”), and on roads with frequent driveways or intersections. Why not also on roads too narrow for vehicles to get past each other without entering the bike lane?

And so, instead of resisting enhancements that made suggestion lanes more like legal bike lanes, leaders began to promote the idea that urban suggestion lanes should be enhanced and converted to either legal bike lanes or, if bike volume exceeded auto volume, to bike streets (as described here xxx). By “legal bike lane” they did not mean widening the road so that there could be conventional bike lanes that exclude autos. Rather, they tacitly created a new form of advisory lane — an advisory lane that is also a legal bike lane, and would thereby be significantly enhanced from its earlier form as a suggestion lane.

Three enhancements follow from converting a suggestion lane to a legal bike lane. First, parking would be prohibited; however, as mentioned earlier, parking was already prohibited on neary all advisory lanes. Second, they should be colored red; however, by then most were already red. The third and most significant enhancement was that they would have to be widened to meet bike lane width standards. While suggestion lanes could be as narrow as 3 or 4 ft (0.9 or 1.2 m), legal bike lanes have a minimum width of 1.5 m (5 ft), with a strongly recommended desirable width of 6.2 ft (1.85 m xxx). Figure xxx shows a road at a municipal boundary in which one municipality has widened the advisory lane, originally installed as a suggestion lane, to comply with minimum bike lane width standards.

Caption: At a municipal boundary, an advisory lane’s width is increased to comply with standards for legal bike lanes

Figure xxx shown Google StreetView images for a street before and after its width was increased to make its advisory lanes legal bike lanes.

xxx Veenweg images go here

A Reemergence of Pavement-Indicated Advisory Lanes

Dutch regulations classify streets as “local” (erftoegangsweg) or “through” (gebiedsontsluitingsweg). Speed limits are strictly tied to a street’s class: in urban areas, 30 km/h (19 mph) for local streets and 50 km/h (31 mph) for through streets; in rural areas, 60 km/h (37 mph) for local, and 80 km/h for through roads. Advisory lanes, whether as suggestion lanes or legal bike lane advisory lanes, can be found on both 30 km/h and 50 km/h urban streets, and on many local rural roads.

Dutch regulations also specify the “essential characteristics” of each road type (xxx reference). For urban local streets, they include brick pavement, no centerline or other lane lines for autos, and a narrow cross section. It’s worth noting that the narrow cross section requirement precludes conventional (i.e., exclusive) bike lanes, but allows cycle tracks, which are physically separate from the roadway. The prohibition on lane lines is to emphasize the “place” function of a local street, as opposed to the “flow” function of a through street.

Essential characteristics regulations come into play whenever a munipality wishes to change a street’s speed limit, and when a road is reconstructed. For safety and livability, municipalities often desire to lower a street’s speed limit to 30 km/h, but this may be done only by reclassifying the road as local, which in turn is allowed only if it is redesigned to comply with the essential characteristics of a local street. For road maintenance and reconstruction, certain sources of funding requires bringing a road into compliance with essential characteristics.

In xxx, it was elaborated that the prohibition on lane lines for local streets included not only lines for vehicles lanes, but also for bike lanes, including advisory lanes. Because advisory lanes only apply to roads with no centerline, most urban advisory lanes are on 30 km/h streets; yet suddenly, a regulation that was not about bicycling appeared to prohibit advisory lanes on 30 km/h streets. However, Dutch designers devised a workaround: they went back to the original form of advisory lanes, with the bike space indicated by distinct pavement rather than lines. Thus, pavement-indicated advisory lanes have reemerged since about 2013 on both urban streets (Figure xxx) and on local rural roads (Figure xxx). However, using pavement to indicate the bike zone is far more expensive that marking lines, and so this new restriction is still rather onerous.

Reconsidering the Prohibition on Advisory Lane Lines

The prohibition on advisory lane lines on roads classified as local stems from the road safety community, led by SWOV, the national scientific institute for road safety research, who pioneered the highly acclaimed Sustainable Safety program which the nation has followed since 1997. One of Sustainable Safety’s fundamental principles is recognizability — that road users should be able to recognize the kind of street they are on, what is expected of them (e.g., the speed limit), and what they can expect of other road users. The essential characteristics criteria follow from this principle. At the same time, another fundamental principle of Sustainable Safety is that road users should be separated by mass (as well as by speed, and, at high speeds, by direction), which suggests that separating bicycles from motor traffic is important; however, based on historical crash data, it has been determined that at speeds of 30 km/h and lower, mixing cyclists with motor vehicles is objectively safe.

However, cyclists care not only about objective safety, but also subjective safety — a feeling of comfort regarding the traffic situation, elsewhere described as low traffic stress. When sharing a road with motor traffic, cyclists care not only about traffic speed, but also traffic volume. The authors, who as municipal officials often get complaints and other feedback from citizens, have found that even where traffic speed is 30 km/h, sharing a road with more than 2,500 vehicles per day is stressful to many people unless cyclists have a designated lane. Mechanistically, traffic volume affects traffic stress both because drivers behave differently when a solo vehicle passes a cyclist than when a platoon of vehicles passes a cyclist, and because with higher volumes, “passing challenges” — events when a cyclist and two opposite-direction vehicles want to get past the same at the same time — become more frequent.

The prohibition on bike lane lines in the essential characteristics criteria for local streets fails to recognize that bike lanes, including advisory lanes, can be vital for cyclist comfort. We are not aware of any evidence that road safety has improved by removing advisory lane lines from local streets. We also wonder: would not a prohibition on lane lines for motor vehicles be sufficient to make a street recognizable as not a through traffic channel, without a corresponding prohibition on bike lane lines? Indicating advisory lanes with distinct pavement — a workaround not explicitly permitted by design guidance but also not prohibited — is more expensive than doing so with lines, yet the outcome appears to be the same, that is, everybody recognizes that the distinct bands of pavement are advisory bike lanes.

Where designers see the need for designated cyclist space on a 30 km/h street to reduce traffic stress, design guidance already offers two ways; however, neither is widely applicable. One is that if a street has more cyclists than motor vehicles — preferably, twice as many — it can be laid out as a cycling street (fietsstraat); the other is to build separate cycle tracks, but they are not feasible on most streets due to lack of space (and are expensive). This is why the general solution of advisory lanes, which are inexpensive and require no additional space, is so important. One may also note an inconsistency in the current design guidelines in that while they allow completely mixed traffic (autos and bicycles share an undifferentiated space) and also allow complete separation in the form of cycle tracks, they do not recognize a place for an intermediate solution of visual separation by marking advisory bike lanes.

Because the essential characteristics regulations are enforced only when a street changes classification or undergoes substantial renovation, advisory lanes marked with lines, which include suggestion lanes and legal bike lane advisory lines, will continue to exist on Dutch 30 km/h streets for several years. However, over time, those regulations could have the unintended effect of making cycling more stressful by forcing municipalities to give up their advisory lanes if they cannot afford an expensive repaving solution.