Our city has dedicated bike lanes, off-street paths, and "bike-friendly" streets. Our project has fairly good connectivity to many amenities using just one street with a dedicated bike lane. However, the bike-friendly streets speed limit is 50km/hr. The bike lanes/paths/friendly streets are shown on Google Maps as well as our City's Bike Maps and plans. Our city's minimum speed limit is 50 unless otherwise posted (usually only lower around school zones during the school year and school hours). Does any other city have lower minimum's or are others finding this too low? The bike-friendly streets are labelled as such due to generally slower traffic and usually in areas that have one way streets, historic districts, et. but 50km/hr is still the minimum. Are there any addenda's in the works that might address the fact that many cities (or towns) might not have a minimum speed limit as low as 40km/hr? I think we can still make the case for the credit for a few other paths/lanes...but we're limiting a lot of bikeable areas...or crossings or through ways that interrupt some of the dedicated bikes. Thoughts?
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Calie Gihl
Design EngineerLEEDuser Expert
19 thumbs up
December 17, 2017 - 4:37 pm
Hi Alara,
Let's take a look at the credit language again: A “bicycle network” is defined to include, in any combination, demarcated bike lanes, bike trails, and streets with a maximum speed limit of 25 mph (40 km/h).
It looks like, to my interpretation, only bike friendly streets need to have that max speed limit. Are your bike lanes specially demarcated, or separated from the street by a curb in some way? I think if you are separated, and the speed limit is that close to the requirement, you would be okay with sufficient narrative describing the situation. If they're not, perhaps this is something you can advocate for to your city planning group! San Francisco, CA has had a huge push in recent years to make bike lanes more noticeable and protected from car traffic.
I don't see any LEED interpretations regarding your issue right now, but in the future you can check out interpretations here: https://www.usgbc.org/leed-interpretations
Thanks and good luck!