The Problem
Today's streets are designed to put buses and bikes in direct and dangerous conflict with each other.
This guy's about to get squeezed.
The Backstory
The bike lane is typically on the side of the road, between the main car lanes and the parking spaces or sidewalks (already a pretty dangerous location.) But this is also the area that buses use when they pull over to pick up or drop off passengers. That means that bikers are often confronted with a bus swerving in front of them and stopping quickly. The biker usually then has no escape route. He cannot go into the fast-moving car lanes on one side or into the parked cars/sidewalk on the other. The all-too-common result is a biker with a flatter face.
The Solution
Bus-only lanes in the center of the street, with crosswalks leading from the sidewalks to the new bus stops in the middle. This will have a number of advantages. Taking buses out of the main flow of traffic will make them much faster so they will be more attractive as a means of transportation for the public, especially during rush hour. That will also decrease the number of cars on the road, helping ease the traffic those riders were running away from.
By making biking safer and riding the bus faster, you will make the two most popular alternatives to cars even more popular -- an always helpful boon to the o-zone layer, and gas prices.
Take notes from Israeli city planning.
Notes
The safest solution for bikers would obviously be one that separated them from cars entirely. However, convincing a city to build a whole second grid of bike lanes is unlikely to happen and in some cases, there just isn't the space for it. Central bus lanes only require the addition, or alteration, of one or two lanes in an existing road. In most cases you would only need one lane as bus routes don't typically go up and down the same road anyway. A few cities have started implementing this but it needs to become the norm, not the exception.
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