Florida Pilots Bike Lanes on Highway Bridges

As covered by Tanya Snyder on Streetsblog USA, after years of being ranked the most dangerous state in the United States for walking and bicycling, "state Transportation Secretary Ananth Prasad launched the Bicycle/Pedestrian Focused Initiative and the state is beginning to build more bike lanes and other infrastructure for safe biking and walking. And the experiment in accommodating active transportation on these limited-access bridges is a bold attempt to correct the errors of the past."

Aiming to make cheap retrofits to the existing shoulders on these six-lane, 55 mile-per-hour highways, the "pilot project cost under a million dollars for the two Miami-Dade County bridges together. The most expensive part was adding a hand railing to the wall at the edge of the bridge — there’s no wall between the bikes and the cars. In some cases FDOT and its team painted sharrows and crossings for cyclists to navigate tricky areas like on-ramps, sometimes they added green paint to point out conflict zones. They added rumble strips and striping that would vibrate and make noise if drivers veered out of their lane. They replaced some drainage grates with ones that wouldn’t be dangerous to bike tires."

Many cyclists illegally rode these causeways before the improvements. With the retrofits, cyclist ridership has increased along these highways, with a 40 percent increase in bicycle trips on the William Lehman Causeway, and a 167 percent uptick on weekdays and a 68 percent increase on weekends along the Julia Tuttle Causeway.