Memphis pedestrian and bicycle coordinator Kyle Wagenschutz at a bike lane project.

Boston Magazine is warning darkly that bicyles are the newest wedge in the culture wars between urban and rural sensibilities. And in most state transportation departments, the attitude toward allowing protected bike lanes on state roads that run through urban areas — let alone helping fund them — ranges from hesitance to outright resistance.

Maybe someone forgot to tell the Tennessee Department of Transportation.

"Most people are not going to feel comfortable riding in a bike lane with just a stripe protecting them," TDOT bicycle and pedestrian coordinator Jessica Wilson said in an interview Wednesday. "That extra protection is really going to encourage people to change. … That's when you really start seeing reduction in traffic, because people feel comfortable enough to shift modes."

Next spring, TDOT will fund its first protected bike lane project, a 3.5-mile stretch of State Route 1 in Memphis, along Danny Thomas Boulevard and Crump Avenue, that was already due for repaving.

Wilson said she'd approached a colleague to ask if the protected lane construction would be eligible for reimbursal from the federal Highway Safety Improvement Program.

"He was like, 'Sure,'" Wilson said. "'Let's go out and make pictures and use this as an example for stuff across the state!'"

That sort of attitude might boggle the minds of officials in other states. But Wilson said Tennessee isn't motivated by any deep pro-bike progressivism — mostly just by fiscal conservatism and a small-government deference to the wishes of city in question.

"If the city is all for something, we'll pretty much go along with it. as long as it's a reasonable request," she said.

TDOT pedestrian and bike coordinator Jessica Wilson.

Wilson added that as the mother of a young son, physical separation from auto traffic will make the difference between whether she'll let him ride on a street in her home city of Nashville.

"When he's five or six when we're out there riding, I'd feel a lot better putting him on a protected bike lane than just on a highway with a stripe," Wilson said. "In that case, I wouldn't let him ride."

For thousands of Tennessee families, building physical activity into daily life is a matter of health as well as convenience and economics. A 2007 study found that the state has the nation's fifth-highest rate of overweight and obese children, a statistic that has been rising rapidly in every U.S. state. Nationally, the number of people who ride a bicycle daily has been rising fast in every age group but one: children aged 5 to 15.

In the case of the L-curving State Route 1, Wilson said, the state was "lucky" to be working with a street that, like many in Memphis, could sacrifice street space without worrying about congestion.

"We had wide shoulders on the northern part, and on the southern part we had seven lanes of traffic," she said. "We just did not need that, so we were able to take away two lanes of traffic."

From the state's perspective, since pavement markings and flexible delineators are both on an official list of infrastructure that's eligible for 100 percent reimbursement from the federal HSIP, it was a way to get a street project done at no state cost.

"We see funding decreasing with state DOTs and we see more and more just having to do routine maintenance," Wilson said. "This is a way we can get bike facilities in without having to do new and reconstruction projects, which frankly we're seeing less and less of every year. … This is not some hard difficult thing. it's been a pretty easy process. I think a lot of people think it's so hard, but it's really not that hard."

The Green Lane Project is a PeopleForBikes program that helps U.S. cities build better bike lanes to create low-stress streets. You can follow us on Twitter or Facebook or sign up for our weekly news digest about protected bike lanes. Story tip? Write michael@peopleforbikes.org. Top photo courtesy Wagunschutz. Bottom photo courtesy Wilson.

Calgary's two-way protected bike lane last week. Photos: Tom Thivener, unless noted.

For dozens of newly built protected bike lanes across North America, it's the season for one of their hardest tests: How are cities supposed to keep the damn things plowed?

Though most people who never use them will never know it, many protected bike lanes are designed to a particular width not just for safe riding, but because they need to fit a maintenance vehicle.

"We've put in a few projects that were narrower than a pickup truck, and those are the locations that just take forever to get plowed," Chicago transportation planner Mike Amsden said in an interview.

Obviously that's not ideal, Amsden said, but it's the situation.

The need to fit maintenance vehicles in protected bike lanes is one of many factors that's driven a recent boom in two-way protected bike lane designs.

The design of these double lanes may be more complicated, but the maintenance is a snap.

"Back when we were weighing a two-way cycle track on one road or two one-way cycle tracks on two parallel roads, our maintenance guys expressed a clear preference for the two-way cycle track because of the ability to get in with standard equipment and to have one facility to maintain instead of two," said Tom Thivener, bicycle coordinator for the City of Calgary.

It's a difficult tradeoff for cities that see many days of snow in the winter: do you set an eight-foot minimum width for all protected lanes, to ensure that they can be plowed and swept promptly — but that protected lanes become much harder to build?

"If we increase our minimum widths, it decreases the number of locations where we can do cycle tracks," Amsden said. "Honestly, every inch counts. We're always looking for an extra six inches here, an extra foot there."

In a recent white paper on the subject of winter bikeway maintenance, Alta Planning and Design recommends setting aside six feet of roadway for snow storage if possible, in addition to the bike lane.

In Calgary, which has a long history of winter biking activism, the city has committed (despite some criticism from both sides) to clearing the snow from its 7th Street bike lanes "within 24 hours after the snow has stopped falling," Thivener said. That's the same standard it applies to off-street paths.

Here's how it works: a Bobcat with a 6-foot-wide bucket picks up snow from the city's nine-foot-wide protected bike lane on 7th Street and moves it into a dump truck. A worker with a shovel comes behind to lift snow from the protection barrier and from driveways and intersections. It's labor-intensive, but effective:

Amsden said Chicago, meanwhile, uses a five-foot-wide Kubota tractor for its narrowest lanes:

Photo: Mike Amsden, CDOT.

The problem with that, he said, is that in Chicago, the law requires such a vehicle to be hauled to its destinations on a flatbed and then unloaded.

"It is not cost efficient for multiple people to drive around the city carrying a piece of equipment," he said.

Where it's possible, specialized equipment may be the best option. Chicago, Portland and Seattle have all rented or purchased 7.5-foot street sweepers that can be used on most protected bike lanes.

Amsden said Chicago is looking for better ways to keep the streets clear while minimizing costs through measures such as coordinating its street-cleaning efforts, which are currently divided between multiple departments.

"Every time it snows, we learn something that we didn't know last time," he said.

Why do some city governments stand out as leaders in the development of better bike lanes, while others languish?

Political dynamics, staff culture, and appetite for change all ebb and flow. But here at Green Lane Project HQ, we've watched these cycles and we've observed which cities overcome them. Here's how they do it.

1. Visit other places

A Green Lane Project study tour in Rotterdam. Photo: Jonathan Maus.

Travel can seem like a luxury in times of municipal budget shortfalls, but it’s never been more important. Comparing notes with peer cities not only helps good ideas spread more efficiently, it gives city officials the confidence, vision and experience necessary to make bold decisions. That’s why the best cities encourage staff and leaders to get out and see how things are done in other places, whether it’s the next town over or across an ocean. Chances are, they have a lot in common. “Pushing an innovation forward can be like dribbling a soccer ball down a field with your head down,” said Rob Burchfield, city traffic engineer of Portland, Oregon. “Until suddenly you look up and realize you have teammates all around you.”

2. Don’t talk about bikes

Ask a marketing professional or anyone who’s been to a community meeting on a contentious project: messaging has the power to make or break a street makeover. Word choice matters. The smartest cities don’t talk about building better bike lanes to make life better for the people already riding bikes (though the lanes certainly do that). They describe how the street will work better for everyone, make the community safer and more pleasant, and create conditions where businesses can succeed and residents can get around easier. Lots of good things happen when cities build protected bike lanes. Having better places to ride bikes is just one of them.

3. Make ‘yes’ the default answer

“The biggest problem in the public sector has been career-level bureaucrats saying 'no,' said Gabe Klein, the entrepreneur and former transportation commissioner of Chicago and Washington DC. "It’s easier to say no. It’s safer to say no.” Most of us have faced professional or personal decisions where fear of failure stifled the desire to improve. The most innovative cities have leaders who foster an agency culture where trying new things is encouraged and learning from mistakes is valued. They don’t tolerate recklessness as far as safety is concerned, but they start with the assumption that it's possible to do any project safely. “When you come in with a more positive attitude, saying 'yes,' it opens up a whole new spectrum of opportunities,” Klein told Chicago Magazine. When that works, it's thrilling.

4. Endorse the NACTO Urban Bikeway Design Guide

The National Association of City Transportation Officials (NACTO) publishes the Urban Bikeway Design Guide, the most complete compendium of American know-how on the nuts and bolts design of protected bike lanes and related street improvements. Putting an official stamp of approval on the Guide is like a permission slip that opens the door for your city's engineers and planners to supplement Federal and State guidance with NACTO's state-of-the-art, peer-approved techniques.

5. Treat streets as public spaces

Traditional transportation thinking uses two primary metrics to decide how well a street works: mobility (read: moving as many cars through as quickly as possible) and safety (causing as few people as possible to be injured or killed in the process). Those are both important goals, but there’s a lot more to it. Forward-thinking agencies are taking a multi-disciplinary approach to street design that treats them as a valuable and limited public resource and a way to generate social, cultural and economic value. The best transportation and public works departments understand their mission as not just to pave streets and connect pipes, but to create the places that help their cities thrive.

6. Share the burden (and the glory)

Cutting the ribbon on Los Angeles' first bike corral. Photo: ubrayj02.

Changing the way streets work is never easy. But it’s worth it. The most successful cities have cultivated balanced, trusting partnerships between elected officials, professional staff, business interests and community groups to get projects done. Not all projects are popular initially – some require political horse trades and some require design compromises. Other times, projects are so wildly successful that a queue forms to claim credit. The best agencies know how to spread the costs and the glory around so that everyone shares in the victory.

7. Apply for Green Lane Project 2

How could we leave this out? Early in 2014, we’ll be choosing the next round of cities to lead the way in building better American bike lanes. We’re expecting more than 100 cities to apply. Even though only six will be chosen as focus cities, the act of gathering the consensus and commitment necessary to complete the application will be catalytic spark that builds support for protected bike lanes in cities across the country.

The Green Lane Project helps cities build better bike lanes to create low-stress streets. You can follow us on Twitter or Facebook or sign up here to get a weekly news digest about trends and best practices in bike-friendly street design.

Photo courtesy CDOT via Streetsblog Chicago.

You can cite studies showing that for every quarter-mile a home is closer to a low-stress bikeway, its value goes up $510. But that's not the same as catching it in action.

I didn't immediately know why this unassuming profile on a Chicago real estate blog, of a new 36-story luxury apartment building just outside the Loop, would have popped up in my scan of recent news about protected bike lanes. Then I got to the "transportation" section of the description and saw that the profile writer had devoted three photos in the profile to the building's access to "a protected bike lane path that provides quick access to River North, the Loop, Wicker Park and Bucktown."

The author of this piece, Joe Zekas, may not have his terminology quite solid yet, but he's referring to Chicago's new mini-network of better bike lanes: Kinzie Street, Milwaukee Avenue and Dearborn Street.

Zekas didn't mention the nearby conventional, painted bike lane on Halstead that provides quick access to Lincoln Park, or the conventional lane on Clinton that connects to Union Station. Rightly or wrongly, paint-only lanes are afterthoughts here — just like the unspecified "number of CTA bus routes" at which Zekas waves vaguely after describing the local rail connections in detail.

Real estate writers aren't ideologues, and Zekas isn't going out of his way to cheerlead for physical protection of bikes. What he's doing is using his experience and his gut to describe the relevant amenities of a luxury apartment. He's using emotional intelligence, not cold logic. That's what informed his decision to mention the protected bike lanes nearby.

And the truth is that people tend to see protected and buffered bike lanes as important and useful in a way that painted lanes aren't. That's not something science can fully explain, at least not yet. But it's what's happening.