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nonethewiser | on: Guerrilla bike lanes: San Francisco makes illicit infrastructure permanent (2016)
You misread me.

>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.

cameronh90 | parent | next
When you turn off a road, you need to look for pedestrians and motorbikes. Why is a bicycle so different?

For busy cycle routes, specific infrastructure to deal with this is installed like separate lights and banned turns to de-conflict the road.

dgunay | root | parent | next
Since bikes/scooters are much faster than pedestrians, it causes problems like this when they use pedestrian infra. For an example, I was driving up to a yield-to-peds xwalk a while ago, and on the sidewalk there was a scooter going at full clip. I slowed down because I had a hunch he would do this, but he took a hard 90 deg turn at the xwalk and went straight through at speed. If I hadn't done that, I might have run him over. A pedestrian could never have done that.

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.

asdff | root | parent
The issue is the parked cars not the bike lane. Planners are aware of this. There is recent efforts to “daylight” intersections as they call it when they work to increase these sightlines.
clickety_clack | root | parent | next
I think this reasoning is like “you can be right and dead”. If you’re cycling at 20km/hr, some bike lanes are arranged so that it’s very hard for a driver to see you whether you have the right of way or not. You can’t legally mandate someone to see what they physically cannot see.
kristjank | root | parent
Bicyclists are a lot faster than pedestrians while being even more fragile.
sellmesoap | parent | next
Yes I'd rather ride in traffic then be seperate, when I used to commute in Vancouver cars have a convoluted sign saying they are to yeald to bikes on right turn, or no right turn at all and I would get 'right hooked' at least once a week, I always had my eye out and would stop before getting pasted, but yelling at a driver who's in the wrong probably isn't helping them be aware of what they're doing wrong, I'm just 'yet another angry cyclist' since I'm upset they broke the rules and tried to kill me with their 4000lb+ metal brick!
tough | parent | next
the beltline on Atlanta comes to mind
nonethewiser | root | parent
I just looked it up and this is exactly what I mean by a separate location. Minneapolis has a bit of this too. I mean you could also use 3 dimensions space and put bikes up or down to resolve the core tension. All of these are of very limited viability so I understand from a pragmatic perspective why cities arent just doing this.
tough | root | parent
Yeah I think atlanta only got this as a freebie due to it being built on top of their abandoned rail road.

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

jt2190 | parent
> A bike lane puts straight-through traffic to the right of turning cars, coming up from behind in your blind spot.

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/

hamdingers | root | parent | next
John Forester is globally recognized as a clown who's conclusions have never been supported by real world evidence. He was employed by DOTs to tell them what they wanted to hear ("don't build infrastructure for bikes") and in doing so set US infrastructure back decades.

Vehicular cycling techniques can help in situations where there is no bicycle infrastructure, but they are not safer than good bicycle infrastructure.

jt2190 | root | parent | next
As I understand it, in those days cyclists in the U.S. were largely given two bad options:

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.

hamdingers | root | parent
Modern on-street painted bike lanes were less than 10 years old in the US when Effective Cycling was published, only a handful of California cities had a few miles of them. The average US cyclist had never even seen one.

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.

jt2190 | root | parent
I guess I don’t buy the narrative that we’d have some kind of cycling paradise in the U.S. if it weren’t for this one guy.
hamdingers | root | parent
He wrote the CalTrans Bicycle Guide which later became the national AASHTO Bike Guide. These guides prohibited protected bike lanes and discouraged dedicated bike infrastructure until 2012.

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...

sellmesoap | root | parent
I think the real issue is where is the space for the truly seperated bike lanes? I've personally experienced the new segregated lanes as a distinct regular threat to my safety as a cyclist, I was safer before the lanes were put in (at great tax payer cost and local businesses griping about less parking space) I'm in a smaller city now and they're spending a lot of money they don't have making these segregated lanes, creating the same problem all over again and making the driving feel claustrophobic to boot! I understand making a road feel less safe, or too narrow is a strategy to calm traffic down, but the old roads were just short of two lanes wide and felt quite safe in comparison. The worst spots in Vancouver aside from the dunsmiur upgrade I was referring to above are also bike corridors, a round about may slow a car down but for a 2 wheeler it does not, it's still not safe for the bike as cars try to cross or turn onto the bike lane, it truly is an all or nothing, I felt safer biking in raw Broadway or grandville street traffic then the adjacent mixed traffic bike corridors.
cyberax | root | parent
So here's the thing. Seattle drank all the urbanistic Kool-Aid and started doing all the road sabotage with bike lanes, bulbouts, road diets, and so on with the goal to eliminate pedestrian and bike deaths.

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.

Manuel_D | root | parent | next
Why would cycling infrastructure reduce pedestrian incidents? They'd presumably decrease cyclist collisions. And since cycling has increased ~25% over the same time frame, steady rates of traffic incidents involving cyclists amounts to an increase in safety: https://www.kuow.org/health/2026-09-21/seattle-had-record-br...
cyberax | root | parent
The infrastructure sabotage was done as a part of the Zero Vision program, that included both pedestrian and bike safety. It achieved neither.

> 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.

hamdingers | root | parent
Did they observe more crashes on roads that received upgrades? Doesn't sound like it, these are overall numbers. Maybe more people are walking/biking now, maybe just noise (10 and 18 ped deaths is really good for a major city already, in LA it's 160+).

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/

cyberax | root | parent
> Did they observe more crashes on roads that received upgrades?

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.

hamdingers | root | parent
I tried giving you the benefit of the doubt, but your word choices make it clear you're not approaching this topic in good faith. This means your anecdotes are even more worthless than normal.

Get your attempted study published and reviewed, then I'll take your observations seriously.

cyberax | root | parent
Do an experiment: try to find papers in pro-urbanist publications that look past 2016 in the US cities like SF or Seattle. 2016 is a good starting point, as it's the year when a lot of Vision Zero construction kicked off.

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.

occz | root | parent
John Forrester spewed completely disproven garbage and harmed cycling for decades by this influence on policy.