Interesting Link: the Boston Bike Stress Map
The Boston Cyclists' Union has created a "stress map" of Boston streets - a map which shows how much stress a cyclist experiences while biking on any given street in the city. Check it out here.
What an interesting way to depict the cycling experience!! I've seen plenty of tools which aim to depict road quality, and Pointz has a "safety slider" which avoids streets that it believes are dangerous, but I've never before seen a map which attempts to illustrate the emotional experience of cycling safety specifically. Choosing to quantify and visualize "stress" is a great way of bundling up all the different lenses through which a person on a bike could rate and plan their routes. It also matches closely to whatever I am actually doing in real life whenever I choose a route through LA.
Anyone that has ridden a bike knows that just having a bike lane on a street does not mean it is comfortable to ride there – there could be cars whizzing by at 50 miles per hour with just a line of paint between you and the cars. On the other hand, riding on a low-traffic residential street can feel comfortable even without a marked bike lane. Unfortunately, if you look at a tool like Google Maps and turn on the biking layer, all it shows you is where there are bike lanes. With this in mind, Northeastern University professor Peter Furth came up with a system called “Level of Traffic Stress,” LTS for short, which he and his colleagues have developed as a way to help both cyclists and transportation planners.
LTS takes into account many attributes of a street that affect how comfortable people find riding a bike actually is. These attributes include: average volume and speed of cars, the level of separation between bikes and cars, whether the road is one-way or two-way, and whether there is street parking. More information on their criteria is available on Peter Furth’s website.
On BCU Labs’ Bike Stress Map, we’ve used the same rating system Furth and colleagues use, to identify roads as LTS 1 through LTS 4, where LTS 1 is “Carefree” for most riders, and LTS 4 is a stressful “White Knuckles” ride.
The map itself shows more streets if you zoom in farther. I've never biked in Boston myself, but I lived there for several months back in 2010, and visited constantly over the years. I know just enough to be able to imagine some of the places I can see on this map and imagine what it must be like to bike there today.
I also recommend checking out the website of Peter Furth, the researcher who established the LTS system, and whose blog is linked on the BCU map site.
In 2012, I developed a new method for classifying streets, publishing it in a report with coauthors Maaza Mekuria and Hilary Nixon. It classifies streets into four levels of traffic stress (LTS) using simple rules that rely on data that’s either readily available or easy to acquire. The four levels of traffic stress are:
LTS 1: Strong separation from all except low speed, low volume traffic. Simple-to-use crossings. LTS 1 indicates a facility suitable for children.
LTS 2: Except in low speed / low volume traffic situations, cyclists have their own place to ride that keeps them from having to interact with traffic except at formal crossings. Physical separation from higher speed and multilane traffic. Crossings that are easy for an adult to negotiate. Limits traffic stress to what the mainstream adult population can tolerate, those who are “interested but concerned” in the classification popularized by Portland, Oregon’s bike program. The criteria for LTS 2 correspond to design criteria for Dutch bicycle route facilities.
You can see his information about levels 3 and 4 on the page linked above. After reading them, I'm definitely often riding at level 3 myself, occasionally dipping my toe into level 4 when I absolutely have to. I am more likely to ride in a Level 4 environment if the lanes are extremely excessively wide, which is often the case on some of the higher-speed quasi-highways in the LA area. Last year I rode Del Mar/San Gabriel Blvd end-to-end - I still need to release that on my YouTube channel - and that was certainly a Level 4 ride for the last mile or so. I did not like it!!