By Kyle Eltherington and Barbara Spyropoulos – CPTED Canada Board Members
While CPTED – Crime Prevention Through Environmental Design – gives the sometimes-unfortunate impression that it is concerned only with Crime Prevention, its principles can be applied to many areas of physical spaces. CPTED Space Assessments can help a plethora of disciplines do a better job of achieving the primary objective of maximizing safety and efficient movement of all parties because a CPTED approach considers not just a 360o approach but an assessment of all relevant adjacent spaces.
When embarking on a CPTED analysis, one of the first questions asked is ‘who are the legitimate users of the space under consideration’. In the case of a public roadway, those users are pedestrians, cyclists, private, commercial and public transit vehicles all of whom have an equal right to be there. Rather than focusing strictly on the roadway, CPTED evaluates the entire public throughfare to seek plausible solutions.
The following examples illustrate how CPTED can contribute to a more practical resolution to highly sensitive topics such as bike lanes and dedicated transit lanes. First, the bike lanes. Part 2 in this series of blogs will discuss other aspects of road design, including dedicated transit lanes.
Recently, many cities have installed dedicated bike lanes at the expense of vehicle lanes. This has not always been a popular move to the point of the Ontario government’s moving to control where and when bike lanes can be placed.
There has been a proliferation of these lanes in Toronto on major thoroughfares as well as secondary roadways. While the safety of cyclists is important, restricting traffic by reducing lanes may be counterproductive leading to frustration, anger and poor judgement, not to mention increased pollution and reduced productivity. Add to that, poor design that has lanes suddenly end contributes to the frustration of all road users. Three examples follow.
Example 1 is a sideroad in the west end of Toronto which serves industrial buildings on the west side and residential buildings on the east (Figure 1). This road is also a turnaround point for two public transit routes and is part of the training route for new public transit drivers. There is significant pedestrian traffic as this street connects residential areas to three local schools as well as shopping destinations. Bike traffic is limited.
Recently, the lanes on this street were narrowed to allow a bike lane to be installed on the west side, adjacent to the industrial buildings and low curbs and flag bollards were mounted on the roadway. Painted road markings designated the bike lane on the east side. In addition, speed limit bollards were placed on the roadway between the north and southbound lanes.
The construction of the residential units has presented issues for the tractor trailers that routinely access the industrial buildings to the point where large concrete blocks were placed on the boulevard to discourage trucks from mounting the east side. Now, with the narrowed lanes, the curbs on the bike lane, and the bollards scattered on the roadway, the tractor trailer drivers have a great deal of difficulty maneuvering in and out.
The buses often idle in the northbound lane if the driver is off schedule. This completely blocks the lane for other traffic. Not only is the view obscured for any vehicle attempting to pass the stopped bus, but the driver must enter the oncoming lane AND avoid the bollards and the bus knuckles in the roadway.
While the accepted speed limit in front of schools is 40 km/hr, the city has apparently realized the dangers posed by these many obstructions and has reduced the speed limit to 30 km/hr.
Not only are all these measures dangerous, the end result is more time on the road that will mean greater pollution and reduced productivity and quality of life. In addition, in the event of a serious emergency, the evacuation of people in the area would be restricted, possibly creating life-threatening conditions.
So how does CPTED come into this equation? A CPTED analysis would have noted that there are wide boulevards on both sides of the street. On the industrial side, the boulevard is paved. That boulevard could accommodate a bike lane in both directions and it could be done for just the cost of a can of paint. Problem solved. All users accommodated. And no one upset.
The second example is a major thoroughfare in Kitchener, Ontario (Homer Watson Blvd). Since prior to 2011, there was a paved trail/sidewalk that was composed of a mixture of pavement and dirt trail. Around 2021, the Region shut down one lane of the thoroughfare to install a community use trail on the left side requiring hydro poles to be pushed back, and negatively impacting users of the roadway. The average user would question why not simply widen the existing pathway and convert it into a paved bike lane/trail pathway.
Mixed use trails are also impacted by poor design. In this last example, also from Kitchener, the path in Figure 2A was clearly built for mixed use and labelled as such (although the symbol for pedestrians has an unfortunate resemblance to the chalk outline at a crime scene). The pathway terminates at the Region’s busiest and most accident-prone round-about (more accidents in a year than days) where it transitions to a sidewalk, or to a road skirt marked for bikes, (Figure 2B) before merging into a sidewalk for 200’ and then eliminated all together for the recently installed LRT system (Figure 2C).
Generally speaking, major thoroughfares in areas outside of many city’s city cores have wide boulevards. These areas can be used to create the sought-after bike lanes without much disruption of the roadway. Since these boulevards house traffic signs, hydro poles and trees, the bike lanes might not always run in a straight line, but this should be easily handled by cyclists.
CPTED asks “How can we make this better?” This approach should be the aim of all design.