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Bicycle Boulevard / Neighborhood Greenway

LOC-BBG-12
Recommended Local

Bicycle Boulevard / Neighborhood Greenway

A Local street where traffic calming and diversion discourage through car traffic while prioritizing bicycle through-movement in the shared roadway.

Typical at: Compact Urban Core

Suburban is an edge case, thinning for the same reason as Continuous Sidewalk / Raised Junction: a disconnected, cul-de-sac-heavy grid gives it fewer parallel, low-traffic routes to use. Undeveloped and Rural are unlikely pairings.

Illustration

Type: Paired. Format: Segment / cross-section (~2.8:1).

Typical condition
An ordinary Local street cross-section: unrestricted through car traffic, a cyclist taking the lane alongside car volumes, no diverters, no wayfinding.
Commonway recommendation
A modal diverter or traffic circle blocks car through-movement while a bicycle-width gap passes through; wayfinding signage marks the route; a calmed, low-volume, low-speed shared roadway.

Callouts

  1. (Physical) Modal diverter / traffic circle blocking through car movement; a bicycle-width gap allows continuous bicycle passage.
  2. (Physical) Wayfinding signage marking the route as a through bicycle connection.
  3. (Control-timing) At crossings of higher-volume streets, a signalized or protected crossing reduces bicyclist delay.1

No supplemental illustration needed.

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

The Dutch Solution for Safer Sidewalks - Continuous Sidewalks

Not Just Bikes

Shows the same sidewalk-continuity concept behind Continuous Sidewalk / Raised Junction in practice: the roadway rises to meet the sidewalk at a crossing, rather than the sidewalk dropping to meet the road, so geometry itself signals the priority shift.

Aligned

More Lanes Are (Still) A Bad Thing

Not Just Bikes

Lays out induced demand, Braess's Paradox, and traffic evaporation with real case studies (LA 405, Houston Katy Freeway, Cheonggyecheon), then shows the Dutch one-lane-plus-transit cross-section as the actual fix.

Speed and modal hierarchy

Design speed & speed limit

[SPEED LIMIT 20]
Follows the Local default: 20 mph hard maximum, no exceptions. A separate 85th/95th-percentile operating-speed threshold of 25 mph is used as a trigger for additional traffic calming, not as a substitute design speed.

See Design Speed & Speed Limits.

Modal hierarchy

Bicycle> Pedestrian> Transit> Vehicle> Freight
An override justified because shared-street bicycle priority is this Typology's entire reason for existing.

Design notes

Traffic calming and diverters discourage through car traffic while retaining local access, the reverse of a Collector-scale Bike Highway / Greenway's full physical separation. NACTO's guidance sets the design threshold where the treatment works: daily motor vehicle volume at or below 3,000 and a 95th-percentile speed at or below 25 mph, with heavier calming needed above those figures.1

A comparison of Berkeley's bicycle boulevards to their parallel arterials found bicyclist collision rates two to eight times lower on the boulevards.2

Bike Highway / Greenway (COL-BHG-04) — the Collector-scale pattern this one is explicitly distinguished from on that page: physical separation there, a shared, calmed roadway here.

Continuous Sidewalk / Raised Junction (INT-CSJ-06) — the Local-to-Collector intersection default, explicitly named alongside this pattern on that page as thinning in Suburban for the same grid-connectivity reason.

Modal Filter / Point Closure (ELM-MFP-44) — the Element pattern most frequently paired with this one to build the diversion shown above.

Getting there: Retrofit path options

Parking-lane reallocation (RFT-CDR-05), Modal filtering / Low Traffic Neighborhood retrofit (RFT-NET-01, applies within this pattern rather than transforming it into something else)

References

  1. Precedent-based National Association of City Transportation Officials, Urban Bikeway Design Guide, 3rd ed. (2025), "Bike Boulevards," in Designing Bikeways for All Ages and Abilities.
  2. Evidence-based Minikel, E., "Cyclist Safety on Bicycle Boulevards and Parallel Arterial Routes in Berkeley, California," Accident Analysis & Prevention 45 (2012): 241–247.