You've heard of sneckdowns, those time-traveling bits of infrastructure from the cities of the future that appear on our street corners in the form of piles of unplowed snow?

With Washington DC clearing up its latest blizzard, we were pleased to discover a similarly paranormal phenomenon in the bollard-protected bike lane on L Street. (And to discover that, yes, it did actually make the lane more pleasant to ride a Capital Bikeshare bicycle in.)

The rise of curbs: happening in most U.S. cities, at least occasionally, whether they intend it or not.

The Green Lane Project is a PeopleForBikes program that helps U.S. cities build better bike lanes to create low-stress streets. You can follow us on Twitter or Facebook or sign up for...

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Last week, the San Francisco Bicycle Coalition published a brief exploration of what it called the "myth" that "there's no way we can keep spending so much on bike lanes with so many other pressing needs in San Francisco."

To make their point that dramatically improving biking and walking in a city costs almost nothing compared to many other transportation projects — in San Francisco, one of the bike-friendliest cities in the country, bike projects take up less than 1 percent of the municipal transportation budget — they listed some typical cost figures.

We decided to further explore this question by creating a simple bar chart, based on the same data. We'll let you draw whatever conclusions you see fit.

The Green Lane Project ...

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Photo by waltarrrrr.

Every person biking on a sidewalk is really just casting a vote for a protected bike lane.

That's the core of another great idea from Minneapolis's remarkable advocacy coalition Bikeways for Everyone, the group that has made constructing 30 miles of protected bike lanes in the Twin Cities by 2020 its top priority.

Here's their map of the six locations in Minneapolis where more than 25 percent of people on bikes tend to ride on the sidewalk:

And to get a sense for why, here's the Google Street View for one such location, at NE Lowry Avenue and Central Avenue NE:

Image: Google Street View.

This concept isn't quite the same as a "desire line," the long-established principle of urban planning that...

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