Bike lanes: demand before concrete.

Section 1Start with how many people actually bike

According to the U.S. Census Bureau's American Community Survey, about half of one percent of American workers commute by bicycle. Even in the nation's most bike-friendly cities, the share reaches only the low single digits. In a spread-out suburban county like Montgomery — with long trip distances, hills, summer heat, and winter weather — the realistic ceiling is lower still.

Meanwhile, roughly seven in ten commuters nationwide drive. The arithmetic matters: a conversion that meaningfully delays thousands of drivers to serve dozens of cyclists is not a balanced trade. It is a transfer of road capacity from the overwhelming majority to a small minority, made permanent in concrete and paint.

Section 2Lane conversions have real, documented costs

Removing a general-purpose lane is not free. Depending on the corridor, conversions can lengthen queues at intersections, push cut-through traffic onto neighborhood streets, complicate curbside deliveries, and narrow the working space available to fire apparatus and ambulances.

Federal guidance says as much. The FHWA's own road-diet research identifies lane reductions as best suited to lower-volume roads — generally those carrying up to about 20,000 vehicles per day — and calls for corridor-specific feasibility analysis above that range. Too many local conversions skip that analysis, or perform it and never publish it.

• Capacity: a travel lane can carry on the order of a thousand or more vehicles per hour; its removal concentrates that flow into fewer lanes.
• Spillover: diverted traffic doesn't vanish — it reroutes through residential streets never designed for it.
• Cost: protected bikeway projects on constrained urban corridors routinely run into the hundreds of thousands of dollars per mile and beyond, plus ongoing maintenance, sweeping, and snow clearance.
• Permanence: once curbs and bollards go in, reversing a mistake is expensive and politically fraught.

Section 3What we are not saying

We are not against bicycles. Off-street trails, shared-use paths, and parallel low-traffic routes serve recreational and commuter cyclists well without taking capacity from arterials that carry the county's daily load. Where genuine, demonstrated cycling demand exists, build for it — in the right place.

Section 4The standard we propose

1. Count first. Publish existing vehicle, pedestrian, and bicycle volumes for the corridor.
2. Model honestly. Publish projected intersection delay, queue lengths, and diversion onto parallel streets.
3. Pilot reversibly. Use temporary materials and a fixed evaluation window before any permanent reconstruction.
4. Set a threshold. Define in advance the bicycle volumes that justify making the conversion permanent.
5. Report after. Publish before-and-after data — usage, travel times, safety, spillover — and act on it, in either direction.

If a conversion clears that bar, it has earned its place on the road. If it can't, drivers deserve their lane back.