Hacker News new | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit
mitthrowaway2 | on: Guerrilla bike lanes: San Francisco makes illicit infrastructure permanent (2016)
It's not necessarily at the expense of cars; the people riding bicycles on the bike lane are no longer driving cars blocking the way ahead of you, and parking their car in your favourite spot. Since bicycles use space more efficiently than cars, this can actually be a win for both the cyclists and the remaining drivers (who now have one less lane, but even less traffic). However this only happens if cycling adoption is high enough, which is why the bike routes have to be well connected.

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.

selectodude | parent | next
In Chicago, more people ride the Ashland bus than drive down Ashland every day. We still couldn’t take a lane for bus rapid transit.

People are already stupid, put them in a car and their brains start leaking out of their ears.

dijit | parent
The bike lane space has to come from somewhere, parking space for bikes has to come from somewhere, intersections have to be set up to disadvantage one for the other.

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.

jandrese | root | parent | next
The bit you are missing is the space efficiency. Cars take up the most space by a large margin and getting people into more dense forms of transit (anything else) frees up space to be more efficiently used. Space is the most precious commodity in a city as many people are competing for every square meter.

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.

mitthrowaway2 | root | parent
> The bike lane space has to come from somewhere

> 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...