Work is already underway on an update to Montgomery County’s bicycle master plan, but the county isn’t waiting that long to start working on building bike infrastructure in a quickly-urbanizing neighborhood.

A protected bikeway in Bethesda. Photo by Dan Reed on Flickr.

At a meeting at Walter Johnson High School Tuesday night, planners discussed a proposed network of protected bikeways in the White Flint area. The county’s Department of Transportation has agreed to recommend adding this network to the Capital Improvement Plan. That means that it’ll recommend the County Executive put money to design the bikeways into his budget.

Protected bikeways are a better way to create low-stress bicycle facilities than conventional bike lanes, which rely just on paint. They keep cyclists separate from drivers with things like flexposts, parked cars, curbs, or medians. In some cases, the protected bikeway may be raised to a higher elevation than the street.

The Montgomery Planning Board’s proposed protected bikeway network in White Flint. The dotted lines in the northwest section are not part of the current proposal for the CIP.

These proposed lanes won’t be the entire bike network in White Flint, but they will be a starting point for creating a low-stress network in the area, Montgomery’s newest urban neighborhood. Other streets will have different types of bike infrastructure, and the protected bikeway network may well grow larger over time.

The redesign of White Flint’s suburban streets is a positive step in the county’s quest to transform the auto-oriented suburban district into a walkable and bikeable district.

Two-way protected bikeway in Seattle. Photo by Matt Johnson on Flickr.

While the Montgomery County Planning Board recommended more separated bike lanes on the west side of Rockville Pike, those streets are already well into the design phase and changing them now would be expensive and time-consuming. Those planned streets aren’t without bike infrastructure. In most cases, they will have conventional bike lanes or shared-use paths.

This proposed network is a great start, and will likely be just the tip of the iceberg. Planners intend to recommend more separated bike facilities around the county as part of its bicycle master plan.

Canaan Merchant was born and raised in Powhatan, Virginia and attended George Mason University where he studied English. He became interested in urban design and transportation issues when listening to a presentation by Jeff Speck while attending GMU. He lives in Reston.