Bike infrastructure in Baltimore has helped make city streets safer in recent years but the Department of Transportation is behind schedule in building a network of lanes, Director Corren Johnson told the City Council on Thursday night.

“In total we have just under 37 miles. We are making progress, but not as great as we had planned,” Johnson said.

At an informational hearing examining Baltimore’s bike infrastructure in the Rules & Legislative Oversight Committee, Johnson presented data about a protected bike lane on Maryland Avenue that has led to fewer car crashes with pedestrians.

The avenue was the site of 107 car crashes in 2015 and 124 in 2016 before the protected bike lane was installed, Johnson said. There were 88 crashes in 2021, then 76 in 2022.

Along the same road, 11 pedestrians were involved in car crashes in 2015 followed by nine in 2016 while between 2019 and 2021, there were 10 total crashes with pedestrians, Johnson said.

“Separated lanes do double duty as traffic calming, which reduces the amount and severity of vehicle crashes. These crashes occur with other vehicles, pedestrians and other cyclists,” Johnson said. “It really is a safety issue, not a bike issue.”

In a bike master plan from 2017, the transportation department set a goal of creating a citywide network of bike infrastructure by adding 77 miles of bike lanes by 2022.

Johnson said the city has fallen short of that goal, adding nearly 37 miles, including 8.5 miles of separated bike lanes, 6 miles of bike lanes, 7 miles of shared bus-bike lanes and 5 miles of bike paths. The city added less than a mile of bike lanes in 2019 before adding 16 miles in 2020, 10 miles in 2021, 6 miles in 20202 and 3.5 miles in 2023. Johnson also said in 2023, the department received 1,862 requests for traffic calming features such as speed bumps, crosswalks or bike lanes.

Matthew Garbark, director of the Mayor’s Office of Infrastructure Development, said during the hearing that around 1% or $7.8 million of the transportation department’s $737 million capital budget over the next six years is currently programmed for bike infrastructure projects.

The increase in bike lanes has coincided with a drop in car crashes, according to data from state police.

In 2023 there were 15,871 car crashes in the city, down from 16,183 in 2022, and 17,927 in 2021, according to the Maryland State Police.

Car crashes involving bicycles and pedestrians have also decreased in the city in recent years. According to state data, there were 199 crashes involving bicycles or other pedacycles in 2018 and 218 in 2019, decreasing 156 in 2020, 163 in 2021 and 180 in 2022.

Crashes involving pedestrians have steadily dropped from 1,019 in 2018 to 917 in 2019, 684 in 2020, 785 in 2021 and 733 in 2022.

Citing census data, Councilman Kristerfer Burnett said nearly 27% of city households do not have a car, compared with a national average around 9%. Burnett added that in the Oldtown/Middle East, Sandtown-Winchester, Harlem Park and Cherry Hill neighborhoods, over half of households do not have a car. Burnett, whose district is in West Baltimore, added in Canton and Roland Park, under 7% of households do not have a car.

“If you look at a map with the economics of those areas, we see where this is going, right? It’s the black butterfly and the white L,” Burnett said, referring to low-income, majority-Black neighborhoods that make up large sections of East Baltimore and West Baltimore compared with wealthy neighborhoods around the Inner Harbor and stretching north. “When we talk about equity, it’s not so much the inconvenience of safety. Sometimes safety is inconvenient.”

Councilwoman Sharon Green Middleton characterized bike lanes as unfair to families with cars.

“You can’t just wake up one day and say we’re going to put bike lanes when there have been families that raise their children to drive a car,” Middleton said. “You have that feeling when you get your driver’s license for a car, you feel like an adult. That has been embedded.”

During a public comment period that lasted over two hours, Shantel Faulkner, who sells jewelry in Lexington Market, said a bike lane outside the market has complicated package and food delivery services as drivers are in a rush to avoid a parking ticket.

“Due to the bike lanes, all of these deliverers are threatened with getting tickets due to double parking,” Faulkner said. “With me being located in the middle of the market and everyone knowing me, postal service are coming to me wanting me to sign off on packages, and after 18 years of friendship with these postal services, there is now a negative energy because I am refusing to sign these packages.”

Redmond Finney, a physician, said during public comment that his homebound patients benefit from bike lanes.

“A number of patients who live in areas that have better sidewalks or bike lanes or any kind of infrastructure that is better than a road that barely has a sidewalk and just high-speed lanes, they get out more,” Finney said. “They are able to actually get around the community much better even though they are homebound otherwise.”

Middleton concluded the meeting by saying another hearing on bike infrastructure would be scheduled in the future.

“We need to be able to have these hard-fought conversations, because someone’s inconvenience may be somebody’s actual lifeline. That is a conversation we need to have in balancing those two swords,” Councilman James Torrence, who represents West Baltimore, said.