In March 2011, the National Association of City Transportation Officials (NACTO) released its Urban Bikeway Design Guide, a document that crystallizes the knowledge and experience of some of the best and brightest city transportation engineers in the U.S. This Design Guide incorporates time-tested principles of bicycle facility design, offering a model for safe and comfortable bicycling that is not described in existing national guides. NACTO published the second edition of the Urban Bikeway Design Guide in September 2012.
NACTO invites cities, states and counties to endorse this collection of design treatments for better bike facilities. This unified endorsement will push federal and state governments to recognize these best practices and ultimately make it easier to build safe, active, and livable streets.
Letter of Endorsement for the NACTO Urban Bikeway Design Guide
The National Association of City Transportation Officials (NACTO) Urban Bikeway Design Guide offers communities across America a state-of-the-practice tool for designing safer, more attractive, and sustainable streets that accommodate and encourage bicycling. The guide details the design of traditional bicycle lanes, with and without buffers, and provides extensive guidance for protected on-street bikeways. The designs presented in the guide have demonstrated success in the cities that have been piloting them. They are fostering safer and more comfortable riding conditions which attract unprecedented numbers of bicyclists diverse in age, gender, and skill level. Perhaps most importantly, the designs are proving effective in reducing car-bicycle conflicts and crashes, lowering both crash-related injury and death rates.
The NACTO guide was written by an experienced team of national and international experts and guided by the transportation, streets, and public works departments of fifteen of the largest cities in the United States. The guide drew on a range of U.S. and international bikeway design standards and practices, and assured that all of the designs were tailored to the codes and conditions of the American streetscape. In addition to plan drawings and visualizations, the guide provides U.S. cities with the design specifications and engineering logic to support these design concepts. Based on the most up-to-date data and designs across the country, the NACTO guide is a unique, flexible document that will be frequently updated to reflect the state of the practice.
The NACTO Urban Bikeway Design Guide is a crucial and integral tool for practitioners to improve the safety, viability, and attractiveness of cycling in our communities.