Hacker News new | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit
msteffen | on: Guerrilla bike lanes: San Francisco makes illicit infrastructure permanent (2016)
In Seattle, local residential streets are often designated as "stay healthy" streets, where bikes and pedestrians have right-of-way. You can drive a car there, but it will be slow (intersections are narrowed to discourage fast driving). Cars take parallel streets if they're going more than a block or two.

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.

pnw | parent | next
I wouldn't paint Seattle as a picture of success when it comes to bikes. We've spent untold millions on bike lanes, reduced vehicle capacity with road diets, reduced parking and access to small businesses and made life more difficult for delivery drivers and ADA access.

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-...

Manuel_D | root | parent | next
Your stats are nearly a decade old. Cycling popularity has increased, not decreased, even surpassing the pre-pandemoc levels: https://www.seattlebikeblog.com/2026/08/17/july-bike-counts-...
pnw | root | parent
That's one bridge downtown, and as noted in the article, the summer peak coincides with the nearby I5 closure and the World Cup in Seattle.

The 2024 Community Survey shows bike usage has barely budged compared to the amount invested.

https://www.communitiescount.org/commuting-to-work

fwip | root | parent
The Fremont bridge isn't downtown.
kristjank | root | parent | next
> We've effectively subsidized a recreational interest for a very small population

Many such cases

thelaxiankey | root | parent | next
Stockholm is colder, further north, (though admittedly less hilly).

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.

cruffle_duffle | root | parent
"After all that, the mode share of biking has actually gone down in Seattle over the last decade, to under 3%" <-- your article is from 2018 and that is like 8 years old, an eternity ago.

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!

pnw | root | parent
You might imagine that there are 10x the amount of people riding bikes, but the numbers just don't support it.
asdff | parent | next
Bikes already have right of way. You are allowed to take the lane and bike in the road and pretend you are a car.
nonethewiser | parent
This is more in the direction of what I'm talking about. I think it's a pretty good model and affirms not contradticts what I'm saying because you do have to sacrifice drivability (unless you can just add streets like this - but I assume not).