I’d love to bike the three miles to my job. But, it requires using a major 6 lane artery in the heart of my city. The speed limit is 45 mph for most of it. It would be suicidal. I’ve never seen anyone dumb enough to risk that road on a bicycle. We do have a nice bike trail downtown. Arkansas River Trail that runs 16 miles along the river. Great for recreation. Not so great for transportation unless you live and work close to it.
Why can’t we create three foot wide bicycle lanes along roads in major cities? Heck, I’d love to see them in all the suburbs too.
The energy savings and health benefits would be enormous. Perhaps even a billion dollars nationwide just in gas and maintenance for vehicles. There should be some way to funnel some of that savings into construction of bicycle lanes.
I’ve heard Europe is far ahead of us in developing bicycle lanes. Is that true?
There are tons of bike lanes in Portland, including on the many bridges, and the bike crowd is a strong lobbying force. One of the bike/hike trails (not on the streets) is 42 miles long. As with most places that have a lot of bike riders, they tend to be aggressive both with foot traffic and vehicle traffic, and don’t think driving laws apply to them.
Driving in Holland is a nightmare for people who are not familiar with the place. Bicycles have the right of way and there are tens of thousands of them used as the primary mode of transportation.
We have far too many of them in Chicago, alongside the cars on the right edge of the road. Even if the bikers would obey the damn traffic laws (which they generally don’t), I don’t see how they aren’t taking their lives into their hands. Anytime a car wants to turn right, a bike going straight is at risk of getting creamed.
We are starting to get more and more “protected” lanes, with a concrete curb separating the vehicular and bicycle traffic. That avoids some dangers, but the turning issue is still there. And it makes the roads all the narrower.
Nonsense. Gas taxes and car fees pay for less than half the maintenance and building of new roads. The rest comes from general taxes.
No bike registration fee would ever be fair and would likely not pay for itself wth administration costs. Plus it would openly discourage cycling, which we are trying to increase to reduce gas consumption and gridlock.
Multiple studies show that The more bike lanes there are, the safer cyclists are and the more they obey the laws of the road and the safer they are. Not having any bicycle facilities means bikers think they are not wanted on the roads and leads to an outlaw mentality where the cyclist figures since the city doesn’t care about their safety thenthey won’t care as much about the traffic laws.
The “US” doesn’t install bike lanes, as far as I know. It’s a regional issue, and many regions are gradually installing bike lanes. Los Angeles is becoming more and more bicycle-friendly, and has been implementing an ambitious Bicycle Master Plan since 2012.
I would say most major cities do have bike lanes. Enough of them, or what coverage riders wish, maybe not so much so. But some drivers make the same complaint when it comes to getting from one place to another.
All major cities? No, absolutely not. There are barely sidewalks in many major cities. You can’t even cross the road in very large cities like Dallas without getting killed. Most of the U.S. is built for cars. That said, there are long bicycle trails in the Boston area. I like near one but it isn’t for transportation. It is just a reclaimed railroad line that volunteers turned into a bicycle path. It is fun to ride but it isn’t going to get you to work.
The Minuteman? I’ve ridden that a hundred times the last couple years, I wonder if we almost ran into one another. I ride it for recreation, but I’m sure it’s a commute for some people; ride to Alewife, lock your bike in the secure area, and hop on the red line subway. And when I lived in Newton and worked at Kendall Square I used to commute on the path along the Charles River on nice days.
It’s much worse than that. No bike lanes means lots of people live too far from work to bike. Because everyone drives, we need wide roads, and lots of parking around each building. Which causes the buildings to be further apart, thus increasing our commuting distance.
Not really. I bike to work almost every day, in a city that has only a couple of bike lanes (and none on my commute route). Some parts of my commute route are 5-lane (2 each + center lane) roads, which is much better than the 2-lane roads because car drivers can pass cyclists just by changing lanes, without having to wait for a break in oncoming traffic. In 11 years of bicycle commuting I’ve been in a couple of minor accidents, but never had an injury worse than an ugly bruise.
Some European countries are better than others. Holland and Denmark are known for their cycling infrastructure. Italy is no better than the US, at least the parts I’ve seen.
Variable, from country to country. Time was, many more people used, within living memory, to cycle, and cars were a luxury for a relative minority. The Netherlands is taken as the usual leading example. True, they had already had a substantial tradition of everyday all-purpose cycling, but the interesting point is that they were on exactly the same path towards the supremacy of the car, but, as relatively recently as the early 70s, made a conscious decision to turn back towards encouraging cycling by developing dedicated separated infrastructure, under pressure of protests at the increasing rate of child deaths on the roads.
Other countries are trying to follow suit, but it’s a patchy picture, and not always consistent and thorough enough. London has only recently got some properly dedicate cycleways on main routes.
The point is that it has to be a long-term and thought-through plan, not just an ad hoc bolt-on here and there, and that takes a lot of public consultation and cross-party agreement (good luck with that). About 20 years or so ago, Amsterdam had a referendum on which of three traffic management plans to introduce - and voted (narrowly, IIRC) to choose the most radical restrictions on cars.
Sadly, this still sounds like suicide, to me. Coming at your thread from a safety perspective, there’s a lot which needs to happen with motorists, themselves, before I’d consider roads safe enough to have proper sharing.