In Barcelona bike lanes are customized to the streets’ characteristics.

Customized bike lanes in Barcelona.

Each city has its own strategy to design innovative streets that include bike lanes; in Barcelona, the people in charge of the mobility have decided to adapt each bike lane to each street. Moreover, there are streets where the bike lane is customized depending on the necessities of each section. For doing so, there is the need to take into account the following aspects:

• If the bus circulates over the street.
• The width of the sidewalks.
• If there is existing parking.
• If there are trash containers.
• The coexistence of the bike lane with an exiting bus stop.
• Etc.

The latest bike lanes in Barcelona.

As you may have read in other publications of the blog, the amount and the extent of the bike lanes in Barcelona are continuously increasing. This new bike network usually has the following characteristics:

• 1,40 meters wide for the lanes with a unique direction and 1,90 meters wide for the bidirectional ones.
• Bike lanes are segregated by using plastic separators.
• Installation of a system that numbers all the bikes that move along that cycle lane.
• New surfacing for the street.
• Parking for bicycles close to the bike lane.
• Improvement of the signaling and new solutions for the crossroads, with the objective of choosing the one that works best.
• Replacement of the metallic grid for the water drainage in order to avoid the wheels of the bikes to get stuck there.

Nevertheless, there are streets in Barcelona that have five or six different sections, such as Sardenya Streets. Here we would find sections with two segregated lanes, one for bikes and the other for cars; sections with 4 travel lanes, two for cars, one for parking or trash containers and another for bikes; sections with a bus lane, two lanes for private vehicles and another for bikes. In front of la Sagrada Familia, we could find the most innovative road that is composed by wide sidewalks and a travel lane where cyclists and cars live together, and where the maximum speed allowed is 20kph.

Zicla and the bike lanes in Barcelona.

Since 2008, the Zebra and Zipper bike lane separators, made by 100% recycled and recyclable plastic, protect many of the cycle lanes that we could find in Barcelona, and they encourage a sustainable mobility model. But in Zicla, we are not just working to commercialize these products, we also advice our clients and make a follow-up of the project in order to design the bike lane that suits best with the road.