Recent news coverage highlighted several crashes involving the protected bike lane barriers on Cherokee Avenue. It's an understandable story. Photos of vehicles perched on top of concrete barriers naturally raise questions about whether the design is working.

But those images also present an opportunity to ask a more important question.

How should we evaluate street design?

Too often, we judge transportation infrastructure by how quickly it moves cars or whether every driver navigates it perfectly. Modern transportation safety takes a different approach. It asks whether the transportation system protects people when inevitable mistakes occur.

That distinction is at the heart of why protected bike lanes exist.

People Make Mistakes. Street Design Should Account for That.

Before going any further, it's worth explaining one small piece of terminology.

At Propel ATL, we use the word "crash" instead of "accident." 

The word accident can imply that a collision was random or unavoidable. In reality, transportation professionals increasingly use crash because these events usually have identifiable causes and are often preventable through safer street design, responsible driving, and effective enforcement.

We also talk about drivers, not cars, because people—not vehicles—make decisions that lead to crashes.

This reflects the principles behind Vision Zero and the Safe System approach, which recognize that people will inevitably make mistakes. The goal of our transportation system is not to eliminate every mistake. The goal is to ensure those mistakes do not result in death or serious injury.

That philosophy represents a fundamental shift in how we think about streets. Instead of asking drivers to be perfect, it asks engineers to design streets that are more forgiving when people aren't.

Why Protected Bike Lanes Use Physical Barriers

Many people think of a bike lane as a painted stripe on the pavement.

But paint has an obvious limitation: it cannot stop a vehicle from entering the space reserved for people riding bicycles or other micromobility devices. 

That's why national design guidance increasingly recommends protected facilities on streets with higher traffic volumes, higher speeds, or frequent conflicts between people driving and people biking. Physical separation creates more predictable interactions between road users while providing meaningful protection that paint alone cannot.

The National Association of City Transportation Officials (NACTO), whose design guidance has been adopted by transportation agencies across North America—including the Georgia Department of Transportation (GDOT)—describes protected bike lanes as facilities separated from moving traffic by both a buffer and a vertical element, such as flexible delineators, curbs, medians, or barriers. The purpose is straightforward: create a street that better protects vulnerable road users while making everyone's movements more predictable.

The goal is to create safer streets for everyone.

Does a Driver Hitting a Barrier Mean the Design Failed?

This is where the conversation often goes off track. When a vehicle strikes a highway guardrail, we don't conclude that guardrails are a bad idea. When someone crashes into a bridge rail or a concrete median, we don't suggest removing those protections.

Instead, engineers ask two questions:

Was the infrastructure visible?

Did it prevent something worse?

Protected bike lane barriers deserve the same evaluation.

If crashes reveal opportunities to improve visibility, reflectivity, pavement markings, placement, or signage, those improvements should absolutely be made. Transportation infrastructure should always be evaluated and refined as cities learn from real-world conditions.

In fact, that's exactly what many cities have done. Portland, Oregon initially protected bike lanes with flexible delineator posts that were frequently struck by drivers. Rather than abandoning the protected lane, the city upgraded to more durable lane separators with built-in reflectors that improved visibility while maintaining physical protection.

The lesson wasn't that protection had failed. The lesson was that protection could be improved.

The Question We Should Also Be Asking

News stories naturally focus on visible crashes. What they cannot show are the crashes that never happened. If a driver leaves the travel lane and strikes a barrier instead of continuing into a protected bike lane, it is entirely possible that the barrier prevented a collision with someone riding a bicycle or scooter.

That outcome rarely becomes a headline because nothing happened. Yet preventing those tragedies is precisely why protected infrastructure exists.

The purpose of a barrier is not to remain untouched forever. Its purpose is to reduce conflicts between drivers and vulnerable road users and to reduce the likelihood that a driver's mistake becomes someone else's life-changing injury.

Safe Streets Are About People

Through Atlanta Families for Safe Streets (AFSS), an initiative of Propel ATL, we've worked alongside families whose lives have been permanently changed by traffic violence.

Those conversations change how you think about transportation. You stop seeing a bike lane as paint on pavement. You stop seeing a barrier as concrete. Instead, you begin seeing transportation decisions for what they really are: choices about whose safety we prioritize and whose mistakes our streets are designed to forgive.

Transportation infrastructure is never just about moving vehicles. It is about helping people get to work, school, the grocery store, the bus stop, or home to their families safely no matter what mode of transportation they use—driving, biking, walking, rolling, riding transit, or using another type of micromobility device.

The Measure of Success

The Cherokee Avenue barriers should absolutely be evaluated. If design improvements can make them safer or more visible, the City of Atlanta should make those improvements.

But removing protection simply because drivers have struck it asks the wrong question. City streets should not be judged solely by how easily they allow drivers to maintain speed. They should be judged by how well they protect human life when inevitable mistakes happen.

That's the principle behind Vision Zero.

It's the reason protected bike lanes are becoming the national standard. And it's why the conversation about Cherokee Avenue shouldn't end with a photo of a damaged barrier.

It should begin with a broader conversation about the kind of transportation system Atlanta wants to build. Because ultimately, the question isn't whether a barrier was hit. It's whether our streets are designed so that when mistakes happen—as they inevitably will—everyone still gets home safely.