Ideally we have entirely separate paths for bikes. Of course this is infeasible for most established cities. Doesn't mean they are't inherently a problem in these cases though.
>Bikes don't belong on the road with cars and they dont belong on sidewalks with pedestrians and they don't belong in between.
The NYC bike lanes are inherently problematic. These are the "in between" that I'm talking about. They are not entirely separate paths in the way that I mean. They are a new lane within the existing path. What I mean by a separate path is something that is above, below, or in an entirely different location than the road/sidewalk.
Normally, if you’re turning right you’re in the rightmost lane, so nobody to your right is going straight. And likewise for left. A bike lane puts straight-through traffic to the right of turning cars so they come in from your blind spot. A "yield to bikes" rule doesn’t help much when you can’t see who you’re yielding to. And car traffic presents the same problem for bikes. They have to deal with this by merging all the way across traffic or cross and become a pedestrian. The fact that they may have to become a pedestrian is a major flag that they inherently dont fit.
Parking and buses have the same problem. The sidewalk and the road were designed to touch. When you put a bike lane between them, every trip from curb to car, bus, etc. has to cross it.
It’s essentially splitting 1 road into 2 with separate rules. It's inherently problematic. You can't introduce bikes without increasing the rule complexity and worsening the experience for everyone else.
There is plenty of basic intuition here.
- Pairs. Each pair of modes (car,bike,pedestrian) needs its own set of rules. Two modes is one pair. Three modes is three pairs, so adding one mode triples the relationships.
- Introducing a "middle": Every segment of one street crosses every segment of the other. Adding a middle lane on both sides takes an intersection from 9 overlap zones to 25, and from 4 where different modes meet to 16.
- Fixed width: The street doesn’t get wider. Any space dedicated to bikes costs car lanes, parking, or sidewalk.
For busy cycle routes, specific infrastructure to deal with this is installed like separate lights and banned turns to de-conflict the road.
Something similar to this dynamic happens anywhere you would "look both ways" as a driver but don't have far enough visibility to extrapolate a safe window of passage relative to the speed of oncoming traffic. It can happen when parked cars block your view of oncoming traffic, or when parked cars block view of the bike lane, or when parked cars, trees, hedges, fences etc block view of the sidewalk that a non-pedestrian is using.
In europe there's also a great culture of bike /walking dirt only pathways too, but I agree its not very practical solution for cities
Bike lanes making riders less safe has been known for decades. John Forrester’s book “Effective Cycling” [1] catalogues a lot of these dangers and warns cyclists to not assume that bike lanes are safer.
[1] https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262516945/effective-cycling/
Vehicular cycling techniques can help in situations where there is no bicycle infrastructure, but they are not safer than good bicycle infrastructure.
Option A: A separate, safe bike lane through the park, not useful for actual transit but nice for leisure.
Option B: A line of white paint at the side of the travel lane that will guide you into the “door zone”, along the right side of cars turning right (and right into you), and other dangerous situations.
Note that there was hardly ever Option C, actual bike infrastructure that was both safe and useful for transit. So this idea that one single cyclist “killed” good bike infrastructure is ignoring that it was never an option to begin with.
So the options at the time were riding on the sidewalk or in the street, and Effective Cycling became popular because it contained some genuinely good advice for cycling on a street with no infrastructure. Unfortunately Forester felt that this was the best and only way to safely cycle, which is why he immediately became popular with state and local DOTs who did not want to build bike lanes.
It is not an exaggeration, he set national cycling infrastructure policy in the US that stood for decades.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Forester_(cyclist)#1978_C...
What was the result?
A stunning INCREASE in pedestrian deaths and no significant effect on bike deaths: https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/transportation/as-...
Edit: my personal theory is that these "improvements" on average do nothing whatsoever. They "worked" in some places in Europe because they made traffic so shitty that more people were forced to use bikes. In turn, this provided driver education, by showing them how badly average drivers behave.
> And since cycling has increased ~25% over the same time frame
The percentage of bike commutes in Seattle is in the noise, around 2-3% of the non-remote-work commutes. So the data is too noisy for any reasonable statistical significance.
For example, this year was deadly with 4 cyclist deaths (to date). In 2024 there were no cyclist deaths.
Your personal theory is refuted by studies in the US, here's the classic lit review on this subject if you're interested: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC2776010/
No statistically significant correlation.
From my personal observations, sabotage of arterials resulted in a lot of traffic shifting onto the side streets that are much less safe. But our local DoT doesn't have enough traffic data to confirm or disprove this, I tried to FOIA it.
> Your personal theory is refuted by studies in the US, here's the classic lit review on this subject if you're interested: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC2776010/
Look at the dates on these studies. Nearly all of them come from the period of the global crime drop, a result of the leaded gasoline phaseout.
I recently tried to replicate some of the studies of bike lane effects and quite often found the _opposite_ of the original studies. For example, in Seattle the business tax receipts declined more steeply on streets within 1 block of a protected bike lane compared to controls.
Get your attempted study published and reviewed, then I'll take your observations seriously.
Go on, I'll wait.
Still waiting.
Oh, there are almost no publications? Wonder why. And the ones that do appear tend to be relegated to rarely cited journals. E.g.: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/19427867.2022.2...
> We examined changes in counts and per capita rates of all, pedestrian, and bicyclist fatal motor vehicle collisions between 2007 and 2019 for 18 U.S. cities that took early Vision Zero pledges. Only 2 of the 18 cities have experienced statistically significant decreases in total fatalities since taking a Vision Zero pledge and only one city experienced a statistically significant decrease in pedestrian fatalities.
I’ll take a full lane here in Miami. Screw these thin bike lanes next to the curb with F-150s and Cybertrucks. I’ve seen too many bike falls. Pass me safely and that’s that.
Drivers and pedestrians hate each other too. Everyone gripes about any minor impediment to their own travel, particularly other modalities, but also their own. I mean, drivers universally complain about being "stuck in traffic", but they are traffic.
I think there are some scales of magnitude to this issue. I also feel like you're a bit dishonest by omitting them.
I never care a lot about cars when commuting on foot, and I don't have a problem stopping for pedestrians when driving. Pedestrians are very predictable unless they're a small child running after a ball into the street or something similar. Those problems are solved with 30-zones and street planning in most settlements. Most of the time it's just looking left and right before crossing, and in case of busy crossings, waiting for someone to safely stop for you.
Most of the hate towards cyclists stems from them having the right of way while also behaving incredibly unpredictably. In the European city I live in, most cyclists signal less often than BMW drivers, which leads to a lot of ambiguity, which kills. As such, traffic education places immense responsibility onto drivers to basically track and predict every cyclist around their vehicle, such that they avoid potential accidents.
I'm very glad I'm in a city with superb public transportation.
I haven't checked the statistics but it seems to work. There's one near me that's packed with bikes during coomute hours, and I think the cost to the city was negligible.
After all that, the mode share of biking has actually gone down in Seattle over the last decade, to under 3%. It turns out if your city has hills, rain and darkness much of the year, there is no amount of money that will convince people to ride a bike. We've effectively subsidized a recreational interest for a very small population, a group so small that the top profession of the ~12k who do cycle is "college professor". And as a pedestrian who has to share with cyclists almost every day, it's been a net negative. In my own neighborhood they've made sidewalks unusable for pedestrians in the quest to encourage more cyclists.
https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/data/seattle-bike-...
The 2024 Community Survey shows bike usage has barely budged compared to the amount invested.
I can't argue that the bike infra improvements in Seattle haven't made a huge difference, but I'm not at all convinced this is because it is intrinsically unlikeable.
For what it's worth, the environmentally incredibly bikeable SD/LA has such bad infra that they have both fewer bikers and far more deaths.
Many such cases
There is significantly more bike infrastructure now then in 2018. Plus the lime scooters and bikes have radically shifted the balance of bikes vs cars to the point where I'd say that bikes now rule the street in most of the dense parts of Seattle.
I would imagine there are at least 10x more people using those lanes than there was before affordable e-bikes and "bike shares" showed up. You've got people who would never, ever ride in a million years be caught dead on a bike using those bike lanes to run errands, go to visit people, commute to work, etc. Just sit down anywhere in the dense parts of the city and you'l see them go by constantly!
I doubt the people who put those bike lanes in back in 2018 and before ever could have imagined how popular they are now thanks to lime bikes, electric scooters and such. Its honestly pretty remarkable and thank god somebody had the thought to build up that stuff back then!
There is also the question of what you are going to do with your bike once you are at your destination, where are you going to park it?
For those who went to Amsterdam as a pedestrian, I don't know how it felt, but to me, it was not great. Lots of narrow sidewalks littered with stuff, the stuff in question is often bikes, so you have to step onto the adjacent bike lane, where you are usually greeted by an angry cyclist, because for some reason, parking your bike on the sidewalk is fine but stepping on the bike lane is not.
So, as a pedestrian, I wished Amsterdam converted its car lanes into trams and sidewalks rather than bike lanes. And yes, I hated bikes for as long as I stayed in Amsterdam, and so did everyone in my group.
The cars vs bikes debate tend to get a lot of attention, but the bikes vs pedestrians and public transit aspect matters too.
Note that bikes + buses can be a particularly dangerous combination. Buses are long and can block off the path of a careless cyclist as they turn, who may fall right under the wheels of the bus.
There were well-maintained sidewalks everywhere I needed to go. The reduced amount of automobile traffic made it easier to cross smaller roads and intersections without risking my life. At larger intersections, I often received a crossing signal almost immediately upon requesting one, instead of waiting multiple minutes.
Negotiating interactions with cyclists was trivial, because I could always make eye contact with them. Unlike drivers, who barely pay attention to those outside of cars, have their heads buried in their phone, or are obscured behind tinted glass.
It was also the quietest major city I've ever visited, which I largely attribute to the prevalence of bikes instead of automobiles. Some of the semi-tractors / HGVs I saw making deliveries were even electric, which is a great reduction in noise and other forms of pollution.
If I ever have the pleasure of visiting Amsterdam again, I intend to rent a bike. I hope to explore more of the city via the obviously superior mode of transportation, as demonstrated by so many locals.
As someone who regularly walks on what is almost certainly the street with the busiest cycle path in the world[0], and who regularly walks through some incredibly congested mixed-use streets: it just... isn't a problem? Stay in your designated area, yield when you are not, behave predictably, and things will be Just Fine.
Tram lanes are a travesty, but bus lanes make pretty decent bike lanes. I biked through Seattle to work for a year or so in 2018/2019 where bikes are allowed in bus lanes, and it's a good compromise. There's a couple of streets where the bus lanes are always full of busses, but most of the bus lanes are a nice place to ride; unless they've got rails, of course.
Seattle has put in a lot more separated bike lanes since I've been there, but on routes I wouldn't have used anyway, so I dunno. There was one on my route that was terrible, but I don't think they used that pattern very often; they put a separated bike lane between parking and the side walk, and parking ended close to an intersection where many cars wanted to turn right; limited visibility and limited space made it hard to get to the center or left of the lane to avoid conflicts with vehicles turning right.
IMHO, there's a conflict between bike infrastructure appropriate for beginner / slow bicyclists and infrastructure appropriate for experienced / faster bicyclists. Separated lanes can be nice, but they make it harder to mix with motor vehicles when that's appropriate and desirable. If separated bike infrastructure makes me take a longer path or wait for a signal change to turn left, but lack of infrastructure (and the traffic situation) would have let me mix with motor vehicles and take a permissive left without waiting for a signal change, that's a negative for me --- but the extra wait isn't an issue for someone who wouldn't have mixed with traffic for that left turn anyway.
It's out of the question in most places, it slows car traffic down and makes it harder for people to park in places where parking is already scarce. Then residents and customers of local businesses have nowhere to park.
If you actually make a sufficiently high-quality bike network to convince people to bike that would otherwise drive, I would expect this to speed car traffic up by taking a lot of cars off the road.
And then, so what about the lane? Drive all you want it doesn’t affect you, other than lessening the risk you kill a cyclist or someone you know dies riding a bike.
I like the comfort of my car too much to freeze my ass on a bike. Cities were built around the vision of economic prosperity and a car for everyone, and they should stay that way.
you usually don't get cold when cycling. If anything you are warming up.
> Cities were built around the vision of economic prosperity and a car for everyone,
That is a false statement. Most cities predate the existence of cars for a start.
Also economic prosperity is unrelated to cars. If anything cars are a financial burden for most people and people buy them because they feel they are forced to need them, not because they want them. This is the antithesis of prosperity.
the US is huge, and its all car all the time. you have thousands of options of where to live like that - I have like 5. and you think I shouldn't even have that.
I guess heavy snow isn't too common there, maybe if we plowed the bike paths? Ok, now I'm getting distracted imagining a bike-path-plow, it would presumably be mounted on a powered bike of some sort, or maybe on those little parking enforcement trikes.
https://cykelmagasinet.se/facit-finns-nu-sopsaltade-cykelvag...
The opposite is also true: If you take a place where people primarily walk and bike, and take out the sidewalks and bike lanes to widen the road, people will also be pissed.
All you're pointing out is that humans are resistant to change. We already know that is true. The question is not whether people don't like change, the question is: which is better urban planning? What is a better environment to live in?
So stupid all the suburbanites blocking my driveway to come eat at nice restaurants because all they have out there is fast food; such a huge waste of resources
And the whole idea is to encourage biking, ergo less parking is a good thing.
Considering the rise of additional micromobility vehicles, this is such an obvious solution when you see it in practice.
The complaining never stops.
https://time.com/archive/6683576/signal-failure/
https://bikecity.amsterdam.nl/en/experiment-traffic-lights-d...
http://dutchcycling.nl/get-inspired/sarphatistraat-amsterdam...
The roads are always full of cars, the pavements are maybe 0.001% utilised outside of places like central NYC. There is plenty of capacity for bikes.
We have decades of bicyclists clamoring for infrastructure, and they've been starting to get it.
Meanwhile, e-bikes and delivery apps have caused a recent explosion in the number of motorbikes on the road. Cars think they're too slow. Cyclists think they're too fast. They're nimble and vulnerable like bicycles, but can be regulated like cars. Like taxis, they're often piloted by people who come from places with chaotic road cultures, and who have a financial incentive to bend the rules to get there faster.
Ideally, we'd be like the Dutch and have different outlets for different classes of transportation (mass + speed + amount of protection). Instead, everyone just gets pissed at everyone who moves differently than they do, and the road network fails to keep up with anyone's needs.
And also there were dedicated bike lanes which should be a must in any self-respecting place.
It's a method for a cyclist turning left at an intersection. Turning left from the bike lane on the right is of course impossible, because the land is on the right, despite being a basic function of biking somewhere.
So the cyclist wants to turn left. They go through the intersection and move off to the side, near any pedestrians waiting to cross. When the light turns they and the pedestrians can cross.
Otherwise the biker must leave the bike lane and merge across traffic.
In either case the bike lane is inherently problematic.
"Turning left from the bike lane on the right is of course impossible"... if there is a lane of fast-moving automotive traffic directly on the cyclist's left. From the cyclist's perspective, the car lane is the "inherently problematic" one.
I don't think it's fair to say either is inherently problematic, just that there is inherent conflict with different mode types. Then, imho, you ought to look at the overall social cost/benefit of each mode type and prioritize accordingly.
Reading your comment and many others makes me think that the most "intractable" problem with shared transportation infrastructure isn't making it physically safe, it's getting people to treat other road users as human. Even a car-only road still has this problem.
It simply is not. The problem is sacrificing an unreasonable amount of space to drivers. There is a ton of space for human-scale vehicles.
I said it is inherently problematic, not exactly that it's infeasible.
The Netherlands is excellent support for my claim because of what you just said. The cities support less car traffic and slower driving speeds. Something has to give and in that case its drivability. In fact there are a lot more streets where cars can't go at all, or are just mostly bikes correct?
And the 3 modes/lanes in one place is still not even solved while minimizing cars. Cyclist are more than 1/3rd of Dutch road deaths and the Fietsersbond has even argued that the middle lane. https://swov.nl/sites/default/files/bestanden/downloads/FS%2...
Let's say you have space for two lanes. You can either a) install two car lanes, so >95% of people drive, or b) install one car lane and one bike lane, so 75% of people cycle. Which one is more drivable? Hint: it's the one with significantly fewer cars.
Similarly: car infrastructure takes up a lot of space. If your destination is 10% closer because cycling means far less car infrastructure is needed, you'll actually end up driving there faster.
A street's car traffic capacity is far less important than its total traffic capacity, and the last-mile driving speed is a rounding error on the whole trip. If you like driving, you should be in favor of building more bike infrastructure!
And yes but those road deaths are caused by cars. There's just more victims on bikes because there's so many bikes around.
I beg to differ. And I used a bike daily for commute (okay, when it wasn't raining) and a car otherwise.
The roads are for everybody. Bikes, cars, lorries, farmers. We should (and can) learn to live next to each other.
If you aren't a kid or aren't driving a bike for leisure on the weekend, then "separate from the street" bike ways have several drawbacks. Especially if you want to go speedy from A to B.
- often they aren't cleaned like the normal streets. So expect weeds growing into the lane, dog poop, farmers mud remnants, glass shards. Things a car driver sometimes see, but to a much lesser degree.
- kids play there, making the biker need to speed down
- dog owners walk there dogs there. Especially the long telescope lines are bad as bikers aren't usually not that good with rope jumping
- people walk there and if a bike rings the bell, they usually first turn around "What in gods own world could ring on a way dedicated to bikes?" seems to be an important question to be answered. Way more important than just going to the side.
- if a parking lot separates the bike way from the street, then the passengers in the cars just open the doors, not looking if some bike comes
- every street crossing is usually not level with the bike lane. So as a biker you always go 1-3 cm up/down twice for every crossing street. Some bikes have very narrow tires, that's not fun
- at the street crossings the car drivers are used to check for other cars. But they are less likely to check for bikes. This improves currently in Germany, but it's still not at the same level
So if I want to go fast from A to B by bike, I actually prefer to use the normal street. And if I go by car and see a bike then I can understand this. Except if the bike drives intentionally in the middle of the street. Don't do that, drive on the right side (except in UK or so ...)
FWIW I think that is a fine trade-off. I think people don’t truly realise how poorly cars scale until they take a really large step back and take a holistic view on infrastructure- which is inherently difficult for most people as they are so close and bought-in that they can’t even conceive of life being different than what they’re used to.
And they reach for exceptions to prove the requirement, when less cars in cities frees up the roads for those that truly need it (LGV and disabled access, but slow thus disincentivised unless actually required and thus less likely to cause accidents).
Sometimes it doesn't even require sacrificing a lane, because many North American cities have lanes that are wildly larger than necessary or even appropriate given the posted speed limits. The lanes can simply be narrowed, and then this also causes the drivers to naturally drive at safer speeds, reducing traffic accidents, speeding tickets, and the unplanned delays that those both cause.
People are already stupid, put them in a car and their brains start leaking out of their ears.
Street space really is zero-sum, though more people in bikes and out of cars free’s up so much infrastructure that it can make less space work even better for cars- I’m sure urban designers are aware of this.
The major issue I presume that is faced in urban design is how to handle people coming from far away, the regional hub/spoke design (with train stations around a radial that have good parking allowing train access into the city) is not something actively pursued by advanced economies for some (presumably good) reason.
This is also why suburbs and rural areas are a better fit for cars. Space is much more available and you can afford to be wasteful with it.
> though more people in bikes and out of cars free’s up so much infrastructure that it can make less space work even better for cars
Yes, you've reiterated my point...
Not a problem, we just reduce lanes for cars. Bikes use way less space, do not contribute to bad air, keep their riders healthy - well, except when car drivers kill them.
Toxic entitled drivers hate bikers. Some bikers are toxic on sidewalks. Most sane people are actually able to exist with all three.
> Bikes don't belong on the road with cars and they dont belong on sidewalks with pedestrians and they don't belong in between.
Bikes belong both on road and in between. Childrens bikes belong on side walk. Bikes moving in small speed can be on sidewalks too.
Ultimately, motorised traffic tends to disrupt other forms of transport as people get used to travelling longer distances to get to shops, work etc. This then results in out-of-town hypermarkets which pretty much require people to use cars to get to them. The resultant traffic inevitably results in congestion, so more space is assigned to building roads and facilities get built further apart which of course just exacerbates the whole congestion issue.
> Ideally we have entirely separate paths for bikes. Of course this is infeasible for most established cities
Maybe in the US which has gone all in on providing space for cars and their parking, but it's quite feasible in old European cities that are much older. Often it relies on reducing the space available for cars. There's good examples of how some European cities were able to change drastically.
The Netherlands is a great example as during the 1970s, it was heavily biased towards motorised vehicles. The "Stop de Kindermoord" (approximately "Stop the child killing") campaign was key to changing attitudes and nowadays, cities such as Amsterdam are held up as examples of designing for multi-mode transport.
https://www.dutchreach.org/car-child-murder-protests-safer-n...