apparently my city literally literally banned public rail funding, and people online love jerking off about how good biking is, so i figured might as well try. I have come up with:
pros:
- good for mental health / exercise / endorphins
- arguably quaint
- feel like an old timey guy taking his wares to market
- feel european
- can annoy others
- less of a police state around them vs cars
- more flexible parking, routes
- capacity to be peaceful
- nice in summer
cons:
- look like an annoying dork (esp w neon - which also hurts the quaint factor)
- have to wear a helmet (^)
- getting sweaty, potentially “unpresentable” for work
- still have to find safe parking
- still takes a while
- have to find new routes to places
- can’t listen to music or might die
- little meaningful protection against severe injury
- can only carry so many groceries/etc
- sucks in winter
I tried biking in a city awhile back, and someone actually tried to hit me with their door.
Any city that thinks its a great idea to share the road on a bike has never personally tried it.
I’ve done it for almost 2 decades and confirm people are assholes.
Thats why cities should build seperated lanes so cars and bikes mingle as little as possible
Yeah, in an ideal bubble, I would like to see trams replace cars for dense sectors that see a lot of traffic.
If we’re talking infrastructure buildouts I’d rather just go the extra step and build a few tram/train lines vs adding a bike lane to every road
I sorta agree and sorta don’t, all streets should be 30km/h or less and shared traffic, everything else should be with bike lanes. Streets meaning a piece of infrastructure that provides access to places lining it, not a piece of infrastructure for longer distance travel.
The Netherlands is good not because there is a bike lane on every street but because all the streets with destinations (private homes, business, schools)are connected by bike lanes as well as roads, often more and more direct bike lanes.
There are a lot of areas where cars bikes and sometimes pedestrians share the same space both in inner cities and in residential neighborhoods, it’s just that they aren’t through roads for cars or at least very very slow ones, while they are often through roads for bikes and peds.
I see where you are coming from there. My comment is mostly concerned with north america and our street/road design and layout is awful. There are many school zones where cars could easily exceed 100km/h if the driver wanted to. Because of these deisgns I think it is best we keep cyclists and pedestrains as seperated from cars until better street design and traffic calming can be massively implemented. The scale of the street redesign is massive and would have to be city wide to be truly effective.
An easier and cheaper start to pitch politically would be proper bike lanes along major corridors. A few years down the line streets along those lanes would improve and the city could slowly redevelop.
I wish I could just snap my fingers and have safe streets but stroads and the attitude of driving is so bad in much of north america we are going to have to fix it in stages. We can’t just convert our stroads overnight unfortunately.
Yeah I’m in Germany so my context is somewhere in between and here the projects that improve my life the most is when cars don’t get to/need to travel on the streets as much, this can either be through modal filters, removing car lanes or just banning cars (with the usual delivery window in the morning and such). And they are starting to get to the kind of streets where you could go 100km/h (in terms of size) that are in practice 50km/h, and are now getting them down to 30 (taking 1 of 2 car lanes and giving it to bikes as well as adding obstacles to indicate slower speeds). So it’s doable and of course it takes time, but with a bit of luck it might be faster than some Americans imagine it could be.
So of course bike lanes along mayor roads (corridors) make sense, and it can be a good starting point to get a skeleton network in place, which then can Kickstart intersection redesigns and traffic calming, wherever it’s reasonable around it. To me the best bike paths don’t go along roads though, they are the “recreational” paths that still connect things. Cutting through a patch of Forrest or a park, going along the waterfront, parallel to a tramway or rail corridor or just along/through the fields. These are probably also politically cheaper than some other measures, but you run the risk of building a thing that just connects nothing because there is no real infrastructure on either end.
I feel like Americans think they are 60+ years behind when they are probably only 30-40, if the attitude turns somewhat sharply, either just in your local area or more generally, maybe just 15-25.
A lot of this stuff is monetarily very cheap, depending on how desperately you wanted change the actual infrastructure you’d need, would boil down to planters, bollards, cones, maybe hay bails or large stones/concrete pieces. The problem with that stuff is that it’s only possible with the right opportunity politically, otherwise your traffic calming might get bulldozed by police or something.
I agree, everyone thinks cars, bikes, buses, and people all should follow the same line along the same corridor. Having bike lanes seperated more can be very benefecial and helps seperation without need for physical barriers. For example a road could run down the center of a commercial area, with a dedicated BRT lane, and bike/ped pnaes closer to the businesses or even a seperate enterance/laneway behind the businesses dedicated to people.
But most of North America thinks a painted bicycle gutter along a busy road, crossing many car intersections and entrances is the best we can build.
There are plenty of protected lanes in my city, but they just hide bicycles behind parked cars, making it less safe at every intersection.
The only way I can think that might work better would be to convert a 3-lane road (with suicide/turn lane in center), into a 2-lane road. The center lane gets converted into a two-way bicycle road - raised up like a sidewalk with curved curb. No left turns allowed for cars, only right turns. This way bicycles are visible and protected.
A better option is to make seperate intersections for cars and bikes. Bike lanes do not exclussively have to run right next to the car lanes.