Posted on 12/17/2017 2:23:19 PM PST by Lonely Bull
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Today the bicycle is a mixed bag, usually with more negatives than positives. In many cities, bike lanes now consume more road space than they free up, they add to pollution as well as reducing it, they hurt neighbourhoods and business districts alike, and they have become a drain on the public purse. The bicycle today — or rather the infrastructure that now supports it — exemplifies “inappropriate technology,” a good idea gone wrong through unsustainable, willy-nilly top-down planning.
London, where former mayor Boris Johnston began a “cycling revolution,” shows where the road to ruin can lead. Although criticism of biking remains largely taboo among the city’s elite, a bike backlash is underway, with many blaming the city’s worsening congestion on the proliferation of bike lanes. While bikes have the luxury of zipping through traffic using dedicated lanes that are vastly underused most of the day — these include what Transport for London (TfL) calls “cycle superhighways” — cars have been squeezed into narrowed spaces that slow traffic to a crawl.
(Excerpt) Read more at business.financialpost.com ...
My son who is a construction trucker in a very wealthy community has a skit and riff that he does about the John Kerry lookalikes that hold up his fully loaded truck or equipment carrier.:
“Yes sir, he says, that old man in yellow neon lycra is going to ride down the middle of the big hill to show me, the stupid, diesel-spewing peon, who’s the boss. This is a man who really doesn’t understand the limitations of air brakes and 45,000 pounds of shifting sand....and physics...”
I am an avid cyclist but urban biking would scare me silly.
I prefer the rails to trails variety of biking.
I agree with majority sentiment, urban bike lanes are a disaster. Even big libs in Pittsburgh make fun of their communist mayors failed obsession with bike lanes.
Here in Austin, they still revere Lance Armstrong like a god even though he turned out to be a fraud. Democrats like frauds even more; that’s why they elect them.
I agree. I cannot stand most leftist initiatives but encouraging cycling is a great thing if done right. That being said, in congested downtown cores dedicated bike lanes are a thing of evil and traffic is usually so slow that there is no reason for a dedicated bike lane. Also, if you are too out of shape to keep up with the flow of traffic downtown the get a damned scooter.
Oh don’t get me going.
Our county is gung-ho to be tops in “bike lanes”. Which hilariously include little stubs wherever there is a right turn lane! LOL
When they brag of 10s of thousand of miles of “bike lanes”, it’s mostly these stubs and otherwise in nice quiet neighborhoods, which already have a bike lane called a sidewalk.
You never know what those little bags on the bar contain:)
all these planning people in power were aware of the rat studies of confined spaces, what rack and stack cubicle prison living does to animals. way increases stress and anger and conflicts. they want people to be under this to control them more.
Nobody would even think of doing that!! Half the riders either work in law firms or are principals.
Last year I went down to our first cathedral in Baltimore for a kids’ field trip. Hadn’t been in that zone for a good while.
I was flummoxed to see what happened to the 4-lane thoroughfare between the cathedral and library. I’m still perplexed.
Get this: 4 lanes 1 way has been turned into 2 lanes for cars, 1 DEDICATED but strangely constrained and located lane for parking, and the “fast” lane turned into the bike lane.
My God, what mayhem! And how are cars supposed to park in this weird lane with white picket posts and so on, between moving cars and a temptingly empty bike lane?
Indeed poor planning. One just cannot change an old city like that overnight; never mind the mess Baltimore can be anyway! Who really wants to “bike” down here?
Bikes rule loser
Stick it where the sun don’t shine
The mountain bike is the worlds greatest invention
Wide sidewalks with marked bike and pedestrian lanes are good. Bollards to separate the two are also good. The curb keeps the cars at bay. This is an excellent solution but it is hard to retrofit unless an area is being rather comprehensively redeveloped. Here in DC, the Southwest waterfront (which is being branded the "Wharf District") is being built this way. When serious rebuilds occur, as they always will from time to time, the design standard needs to change to accommodate non-motorized traffic -- and by and large, if you accommodate pedestrians you can easily take care of the cyclists as well.
Dedicated bike lanes sharing the street with cars are fine on quiet residential streets. They don't work well in high traffic areas, such as downtown. This is not a problem for recreational riders, who will simply avoid downtown. But it is a problem for bike commuters.
The gold standard, of course, is an off-road trail. This is an area where every city will have to study its options. DC has some real assets in the inside-the-beltway portions of the Mount Vernon Trail, the C&O Canal towpath, the Capitol Crescent, the Rock Creek Trail, the Metropolitan Branch trail, the Washington & Old Dominion and Custis trails, and the various branches of the Anacostia trail system. These are a mix of trails along streams, therefore running mostly in areas that are prone to flooding and therefore are parkland, and rail to trail conversions.
From a planning standpoint, the neat thing about these trails is that they all tend to converge in a spokes and hub pattern (since DC was initially built at the confluence of the various streams). This means that these trails, while great for recreational riders, also have substantial utility for commuters. IOW, we have some pretty good off-road arteries for bringing bike commuters into the downtown area, broadly defined. (Plus some gaps to be filled, of course ... but several missing links are on the drawing boards now. The city is finally thinking of pedestrian and bike infrastructure as serious pieces of the transportation system, not just for-fun amenities.) The remaining challenge is neighborhood bike lanes to connect people safely to the trails, and of course, the problem of what to do once the commuters actually get downtown and need to get to various office buildings on heavily travelled city streets. This is where wide sidewalks would be perfect.
Other cities may not have this option. There's no cookie cutter solution.
If it were up to me, here in DC I'd eliminate on-street parking along one side of chosen streets to create a grid of dedicated bike lanes. (Start with the streets that are "no parking" during rush hour. There are always people parked illegally anyhow, so they don't work well for rush hour commuters. If we made them bike lanes, motorists would scarcely notice; the illegal parkers would be the only ones inconvenienced.) This wouldn't need to be done on every street by any means. Have safe bike corridors spaced four or six blocks apart so people have a reasonable grid to get around quickly. If the grid is every four blocks, theoretically you could get to within two blocks of your building before having to hazard shared space. That would be a huge improvement.
A lot of young people are now doing without cars entirely. The hot emerging neighborhoods are building out with condos; parking is expensive if it exists at all. The young people are walking, using Metro, taking Uber, and biking. We now have (I think) four different bikeshare companies operating in the city; only one has fixed stations and the other three are all GPS managed. Users check an app to see where there is a bike nearby, and they can drop the bike anywhere that they can park it safely. The companies have teams that circulate from time to time repositioning bikes as needed. But the point is, there is very high demand. Traffic is impossible, parking is expensive, suburbanites are spending four to six hours a day in their cars, and people are rebelling. Ain't nothin' sacred about the automobile commute.
Many newer cities don't have compact downtowns. But a lot of older cities with traditional downtowns are coming back to life. This is great if you're lucky enough to live within, say, five miles of your job. Use a zipcar for errands, rent a car on a weekend if you want to get away, and live somewhere that is walkable and bikeable. It's a nice way to live.
How should one think about all this? Begin by walking a mile in the other man's shoes. I understand that people who live in Urbana or Haymarket or southern Maryland and have to drive are often oblivious -- and are sometimes downright hostile -- to accommodations for bike and pedestrian traffic. But these folks need to look at the other side of the coin. The people living in Adams Morgan, the U Street corridor, Columbia Heights, Capitol Hill, the H Street corridor, the M Street corridor, or the Wharf District ought to be able to move easily around their own neighborhoods without having to climb into a car. Wonderful urban neighborhoods shouldn't be ruined by expressways built for people who live 30 miles away and want a racetrack to their offices. The automobile commute works fine in smaller cities and small towns, but places like DC are so far past the point of diminishing returns on cars that it's not funny. We have a lot of cultural assumptions that need to change, and a lot of old infrastructure to rebuild over time.
Optimizing neighborhoods for the people who actually live there ... what an amazing idea.
This is already happening ... but if we went to full school choice with vouchers so that families with children can more easily remain in the city, there would be a stampede.
Exactly, an intelligent analogy from you also, thanks.
I love cycling but that was their plan.
Also like the fake need to reduce carbon in the air formerly called “global warming” is really a plan to re-distribute wealth.
Next they will want self-driving-car-only lanes.
“Right of way” has always been and remains subordinate to The Tonnage Rule...
That is...Tonnage Rules...Will not matter much to the bicyclist who had the right of way once he’s splattered all over the grill of a Peterbilt...
I don't know Pittsburgh, but here the problem is chokepoints and gaps. Bikes work well in quiet residential neighborhoods. We have a lot of these. But to actually go anywhere -- to take a reasonably long recreational ride, or to commute -- you probably have to transit several neighborhoods. Most of your route will probably be bicycle friendly. But sooner or later, you have to cross the arterial roads, or a bridge, or a railroad. And there's no bike-friendly way to do it. Or you're minding your own business on the traditional urban bike lane, known as a "sidewalk," and you hit a stretch where the sidewalk was eliminated, probably during the stupidity epidemic of the 1960's, to create another traffic lane. It's these gaps and chokepoints that force cyclists onto heavily trafficked streets. If we just insisted that every urban street had an adequate sidewalk, we'd solve most of the problem. If we take care of pedestrians, it's generally fairly easy to accommodate bikes at the same time.
To reduce it to a simple principle: people should be able to walk safely and conveniently around their own neighborhoods. Cyclists can usually piggyback on that infrastructure.
Accommodating bike commuters in the downtown business district is a different problem. In my previous post I suggested a grid of bike lanes perhaps every four to six blocks apart. Or wide sidewalks if space allows. Every street doesn't need to be bike friendly, but if we think in terms of a workable grid, it's doable.
excellent post, i work in dc but live and hour away in va. i think dc can do with more trails but they are doing great. A lot of people dont realize that a secondary point of protected bike lanes IS to slow traffic down and improve safety. and they have no idea what induced demand is.
“Right of way” has always been and remains subordinate to The Tonnage Rule...
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Unfortunately, it not only ends the bicyclist’s life, but also ruins the career and life of the driver.
Society regresses when bicycles are promoted as a serious form of transportation.
Forward societies evolve AWAY from using horses and bicycles to get to work.
Totalitarian places like China however love bicycles to keep the masses moving cheaply.
We can do much better.
Not intended to suggest “heavies” can ignore traffic laws because they outweigh bicyclists...
Meant as cautionary to smug bicyclists...Right of way or not, be careful, share the road and stay alert...For the reasons you state...
Public transit is for the herd, and it is the herd that is easiest for the pols to control, and make government entitlement dependents of. So, when nothing else is working then keep squeezing the space for cars to force the sheeple into more public transit. Bike lanes help make driving in cities less tolerable, which helps the pols push the herd into more public transit (which is always unsustainable without tax payers subsidies of the daily consumer cost, paid by all taxpayers not just those in need of public transport).
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