A bike lane in Sylvan Heights
“Have the 12th Ave S Bike Lanes Been Designed?” That's the question Nashville’s dedicated micro transit tracker account asks and answers on Twitter almost every day. The answer is always some form of, “The fully funded, life-saving 12th Avenue South protected bike lanes have not been designed.”
This small socratic act draws attention to the bureaucratic labyrinth that is the bike lane. The near daily reminder highlights Metro’s role in the planning, funding and designing certain infrastructure projects — and its role in leaving others to languish on the pages of the Capital Improvement Budget, a yearly menu of possible infrastructure upgrades that may or may not get the green light.
The account, rumored to be run by District 17 Councilmember Colby Sledge, is part of Nashville’s small but militant bike Twittersphere. Users frequently chime in about blocked lanes and dangerous encounters with the other kind (cars). Last week, a cyclist lightly doxxed a delivery truck that was blocking a lane downtown — a frequent occurrence, especially on arteries and in the urban core. Accounts Nashville Bicycle Collective, Safe Streets Campaign and Bike Lane Uprising collect pictures of blocked lanes and name-check the perpetrators
There’s not a single paved path for how a bike lane becomes real. There are also many types of lanes, from painted lines to physical barriers to fully separated tracks, which come with their own paths to creation. Divvying up right-of-way is the purview of Metro, which has released hundreds of pages of plans in recent years that indicate an interest in transit-oriented development. Nonprofit group Walk Bike Nashville has helped drive and coordinate some of these conversations, and released a five-year strategic plan in 2021.
Seeing these plans stall in reality is the force of an account like this one. Plans look great, but even when projects clear all the hurdles, they’re still subject to a discretionary list of Metro priorities. Nashville bike advocates traverse these problems every day, many as commuters.
“You’re not going to get more people riding before you have comfortable infrastructure,” former District 25 Councilmember David Kleinfelter tells the Scene on Earth Day. Kleinfelter commutes downtown from West Nashville and helped found Walk Bike Nashville in the late 1990s. “Paint is not protection. When you look at other cities, they use parking bumpers. We don’t do any of that in Nashville. This mayor ran on the theory that he was going to focus on some of this, but none of it has come to pass.”
Cyclists want a more protected, larger network that allows for safe bike transit across the city. Discouraged by over-promised and stalled upgrades, they experience car-supremacist planning decisions as a direct safety threat. The mayor’s office laid out an ambitious roadmap with last year’s revised WalknBike plan, which recommends additional strategic planning and coordination between departments and lays out a phased chart of Nashville’s few dozen next bikeways. According to the plan, the 12th Avenue South project is still in the design phase.
