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Bike Highway / Greenway

COL-BHG-04
Recommended Collector

Bike Highway / Greenway

A dedicated, physically separated bicycle path operating at Collector scale, prioritizing continuous, higher-speed bicycle through-movement over other modes.

Related Media

The items below come from outside the Commonway System, external videos, podcasts, and articles related to this page's topic, not part of the guidebook itself.

Aligned

South Carolina's Freeway for Bikes

Road Guy Rob

The Swamp Rabbit Trail's rail-to-trail history and its treatment as genuine transportation infrastructure, plus the Travelers Rest Main Street road diet that reallocated car lanes to parking and bike parking.

Typical at: Undeveloped Rural Suburban Compact Urban

Core is an edge case, since a dedicated separated path competes for limited right-of-way with other demands at the highest density tier.

Modal hierarchy

Bicycle> Pedestrian> Transit> Vehicle> Freight
An override justified because the Typology's stated purpose is dedicated bicycle through-movement. Design Speed & Speed Limits doesn't apply here, since this pattern excludes automobiles entirely.

Design notes

Distinct from Local's Bicycle Boulevard, which shares the roadway with calmed vehicle traffic, this Typology is physically separated infrastructure, closer in function to a linear park path or a rail-trail than to a shared street. It is realistic across nearly the full density range, since a separated path is not dependent on the surrounding street grid the way a shared-roadway Typology is.1

Bicycle Boulevard / Neighborhood Greenway (LOC-BBG-12) (explicitly distinguished on this page: shared calmed roadway vs. this pattern's physical separation), Multi-Use Trail / Greenway (COL-MUT-06) (a similarly-named Collector-scale pattern this one is specifically distinct from)

Getting there: Retrofit path options

Protected bike lane retrofit via lane-width reallocation (RFT-CDR-07), via lane removal (RFT-CDR-08), via parking reduction (RFT-CDR-09)

References

  1. Precedent-based CROW, Design Manual for Bicycle Traffic, English ed. (2016), Ch. 4.5 "Bicycle highways."