Do We Overvalue Bike Lanes? | Hacker News Reader

Do We Overvalue Bike Lanes?

davemabe.com

39 pointsOsiris3061 comments

He makes some good points, but here's my take: I used to ride my bicycle to work every day and for general transportation for quite a while (I live in Israel), but I've basically given that up completely because I have to ride on the road, and I've had too many close encounters that it's just too much for me. I've had cars brush up against me, others ignore me completely when taking a left turn from the opposite direction forcing me to brake suddenly, and more.

The worst was when I was riding on a two lane road, approaching an intersection where the right lane could either continue straight or take a right turn. I was going straight, and was just a few meters from the intersection when a female driver overtook me on the left lane and slowed down. I could see her looking at me in her mirror, and right when I was about to reach the intersection she suddenly turned sharply right. I had to brake hard and veer to the right, almost slamming into her car. She flashed an evil smile, and sped away. That was it for me. If drivers are trying to kill me as if it's a sport, I'm out.

Bike lanes aren't better though. There's basically two types where I live: first are bike lanes right on the sidewalks. These have many people walking on them, oblivious or not caring that they're on the bike lanes. Motorcyclists also like to park on them. The second is even worse, where the bike lane is on the right edge of the road, but with parking to the left of it. People don't know how to park, so cars often block the lane, or back up into you while you're riding, or someone on the passenger side suddenly opens the door on you. Couples also like to walk in those lanes as if it's some romantic activity. Seriously, it happens a lot.

Eh, I'll just walk.

And I thought I have it bad. A large part of the issue with bikes interacting with cars has less to do with infrastructure and more to do with culture. You should shoot for driving culture that forces drivers to be more respectful and responsible. It sounds like I wouldn't want to bike in Israel by what it sounds like.

It goes both ways. The average bicyclist actually rides on the sidewalks, and pedestrians are often injured by bicyclists. This problem has grown considerably as electric bikes became very popular the past few years, and new traffic laws now ban riding on sidewalks completely, so bicyclists must ride on the road, or on the bike lane (if it exists). As I'm writing this it sounds like this should be a given, but it wasn't up until a few months ago, and many bicyclists still don't know or care about this law. I will ride on the sidewalk myself in certain situations if I find it safer than the road.

Many electric bicyclists are very noticeably oblivious of traffic laws and their own mortality in general. They often enter intersections at a red light without even slowing down. They zig zag between the road, the sidewalk and crosswalks all the time. They take right turns at red lights (this is not allowed in Israel). They ride while using or talking on their smartphones. They ride in the middle of the road between two car lanes! I often look at them and think "where did they get the guts to do that?".

>The average bicyclist actually rides on the sidewalks, and pedestrians are often injured by bicyclists.

This happens, but I don't think it is as common here, which probably again points to a better overall transit culture. Most cyclists in my city ride on the road. I personally am not against riding on the sidewalk, but one should slow down/be more careful and not ride when the sidewalk is densely populated. I am not opposed to laws that regulate that.

For electric bikes, I don't think they should be considered in the same category as bikes as they are closer to mopeds.

> The average bicyclist actually rides on the sidewalks, and pedestrians are often injured by bicyclists.

Sure they are. While over a million people are killed by cars, your big concern is pedestrians "often" injured by bikes.

The fact is that car culture is incredibly bad and dangerous for everyone.

In 20 or 50 years, people will look back and think what idiots we were to let it get this far.

They are a death track meters away from your house.

Who said it was my "big concern"? I just gave an example of how this bad culture thing goes both ways and made no comparison about injury/death potential. Have you not noticed these replies started with a comment made by me about car culture?

They have that second type of bike lane here in Oakland; the addition of some barriers at the beginning and end of a block has helped compliance a lot. It took about a year for drivers to get wise, but these days it's just the occasional delivery van standing in the lane.

They have some small rubber bumps or something to mark the boundary, but nobody cares or notices...

All true, the only solution I've seen that would work for me are bike-only trails + bridges over major roads.

"female driver"

I suspect her gender had nothing to do with it.

It's a statement of fact. I suspect you wouldn't have made your comment if he had written 'some guy cut me off'.

But it's superfluous. He (presumably) went out of his way to identify the gender of the driver when it has nothing to do with anything.

You're right - I wouldn't have reacted to "some guy", because you're not calling attention to the person's gender. In fact, given the context, I wouldn't even presume to know the gender of "some guy."

OP's use of "her" throughout the section makes it clear that she was female, and that's fine. But going out of his way to call out that it was a FEMALE driver reinforces stereotypes about women's competency, and that's not OK.

I am not a fan of statements of the format 'There are a lot of studies showing X but they are flawed because of A,B or C, but among those, there is one study, which is not flawed in A which shows !X which is the thesis of post, therefore !X'.

You don't want bike lanes, you want separate routes. http://www.aviewfromthecyclepath.com/2012/07/unravelling-of-...

The article says the opposite, claiming that it dooms cyclists to second hand status.

I agree with this. We have both here in NYC. First of all, cyclists need a way to get to their destination. Nobody is going to ride on the greenway and then walk a few blocks to their destination. Second of all, motorist behavior has really changed since the lanes were installed. The protected lanes are mostly like a separate route, but they still intersect the same road, and force drivers to mix in with cyclists on some turns. It can be hairy, but it's helped define space for everyone and increase safety for pedestrians, cyclists, and drivers alike by reducing turn speeds.

The article makes out that adding lanes to back roads without changing anything else is bad.

Unravelling implies that if you were to use roads like that as part of your cycle network, you stop them from being a useful through route to motorized traffic ("Filtered permeability"). When you do that you don't need the bike lanes.

As the article is implicitly about adapting existing motor-centric infrastructure I would have made a better point posting this brief video instead: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gdWllXfGGrg

I think it says that about separated bike lanes themselves. I can't see any reference to separate bike routes that aren't immediately alongside roads.

Reasons (my personal opinion): in combined route you

1) have a higher probability to get into accident with a motor vehicle,

2) must inhale the air polluted by traffic.

1) crashnotaccident.com

2) Sucks, but unavoidable as a pedestrian too. Hopefully the next few years will see some decent gains in electrification of road vehicles.

The safest answer is separate bike infrastructure. Full Netherlands style.

http://www.aviewfromthecyclepath.com/2011/11/first-cycle-sup...

Have you ever visited Milton Keynes in the UK. You can get across town without touching a road, as they have a completely separate cycling infrastructure. The red routes. Sadly though as they are out of sight, they are used by hoodlums and gangs at night, to the point people don't want to use them. Shucks, people. They are also used by mobility scooters.

A major part of the Dutch system is the bike network has the most direct routes, while cars generally have to go around.

Except around highways where bikes have to make ridiculous detours and the car on-ramps are relatively straight.

Near Zaandam there are a couple of really nice examples of this, bike detours easily 1 km for what would have been 200 m at best without the detour. (Onramp of A8, both sides).

"Separate but equal" never ends up equal. Separate infrastructure due to funding constraints will inevitably be limited, and will limit access to streets/places/routes and most likely will be at the expense of cyclists. This is my experience in my city.

How do cyclists get to their final destination, then? Do we have equal numbers of bike routes and driving, all the way from A to B? If so, that's pretty much just a protected bike lane.

God yes. I live in Boston, Massachusetts. There are bike lanes here and there, and for the most part I stay the hell out of them. Here are common reasons a bike lane is more dangerous than riding in the road:

  - Too narrow
  - Too close to parked cars (being doored is the *most* common collision I hear about)
  - Full of debris that you have to dodge into traffic to avoid, which is super dangerous
  - Full of people picking up passengers (same)
  - They suddenly end at an intersection, or just randomly, so you have to merge with traffic *in* an intersection

If you don't have clear line of sight or it's not a bike lane you're super familiar with? Don't chance it. Take the lane, as is legally permitted. (The law in MA says to ride as far to the right as is safe, and many bike lanes are not.)

As the article stated, they also make drivers think cyclists don't have rights to the full lane, so assholes will try to give me shit about being in the left lane when I'm trying to turn left. I don't need that.

One nice thing I've seen is on Brighton Ave in Allston. The road has one or two lanes of traffic each direction, and there is a "bike lane" going down the center of the rightmost lane. It's marked by dotted lines and has a bike symbol on it: https://www.google.com/maps/@42.3523473,-71.1263011,82m/data...

It's more or less a way of saying "yes dammit bikes can be here". But it works. Drivers are more respectful, and the road doesn't need to be any wider.

It sounds like the problem isn't the existence of a bike lane, but the construction of a really half-assed bike lane. Here in NYC, we have some of those, and I avoid them like the plague. If someone doors me, I'm going flying into traffic. Ridiculous.

But we also have lanes that put parking between the bike lane and the motor lanes, and have a few feet of buffer between to eliminate the door zone. They're pretty fantastic to ride in, except when NYPD parks in them for whatever reason.

Yeah, I'd at least partly agree with this -- half-assed bike lanes are worse than nothing, and well-made ones are great. But there's not always room for well-made ones.

I was thinking about this the other day:

What if we had a dotted bike lane on EVERY road, so cars could straddle it, but when trying to pass a bike would have a clear indicator of how much space they need to leave.

You could still have dedicated solid-line bike lanes where you had high bike traffic, but you might not need so many of them because the dotted lane would get you part of the safety/bicyclist comfort benefits.

Edit: I guess this exists. It's called "Advisory bike lanes" http://www.minneapolismn.gov/bicycles/advisory-bike-lane

Those "lanes" decrease safety. We have plenty of them here because it's just paint so it costs nothing.

Just look at the picture on the linked site. Left of the dotted line is where I would be just to keep enough space to opening car doors. But now there is a dotted line and lots of bicycle symbol paint in it so I get all the nutjobs driving at me to tell me I should ride in that "bicycle lane". And beginner cyclists who do end up riding in that lane get a double whammy, car doors in their face and cars passing way too close because they think the dotted line somehow means you don't need to keep space when overtaking.

Notice that cyclists in those lanes have priority over turning vehicles! You have to be suicidal to get anywhere close in one of them to a vehicle that has "mysteriously slowed" (no signal of course) though. I see bikes in those lanes getting cut off every single commute.

Part of what makes them dangerous is that virtually no one performs a legal turn when a bike lane is present. You are supposed to change lanes into the bike lane and then turn after you are driving in the bike lane. Turning across a lane is super dangerous, but everyone does it when the lane is a bike lane.

In the UK, you should really treat overtaking a bike as you would a car. This just doesn't happen in reality. I pretty much got bulldozed off the road only two days back. I'm not a fan so much of bike lanes, but do prefer wider roads.

As a twin cities human, i'm surprised that the bike lane thing isn't in more places.

That said, knowing many people who bike, advisory might be the operative word. People have told me that most drivers treat it more as a "guideline" at best.

I've grown up cycling in a historically cycling-hostile city, I'm used to it, and several years ago when the city jumped on the bandwagon and got serious about cycling infrastructure, I was all like 'I don't need those', for mostly the reasons cited in the article. But I was just being one of those assholes radiating his toxic masculinity.

The lanes have a strong signalling effect, that's the real reason for them. They grant cyclists legitimacy in their minds, and in the minds of drivers. As in 'fuck you, I've got a lane now, I'm riding here, You can't fuck with me anymore!'.

They're working. Whatever myths and superstitions are running through the minds of tentative new cyclists, the lanes get them out riding and not driving. The number of cyclists commuting in and out of the core has visibly doubled each year for the past 4 years, and there is safety in numbers, one thing the studies all agree with.

Otherwise I agree, except on the last point - that lanes make drivers more hostile to cyclists. Driver tolerance of cyclists goes up when they perceive cyclists to be legitimate, and that's what the lanes do.

The article cites bike lanes in residential neighborhoods being less safe. I've never found bike lanes to be useful in such an environment anyway. Taking into account traffic and stop signs bikes are effectively already as fast as cars and don't need special treatment. On multi-lane roads with speed limits > 35mph is where bike lanes become more useful.

By law bikes in CA are supposed to stop at stop signs [0]. Most cyclists ignore it.

[0] http://www.latimes.com/opinion/opinion-la/la-ol-cycling-coll...

It's less safe for bicyclists to stop because they have to dismount and remount. But even less safe than that is the inconsistency. If the law was that bikes had to slow down within e.g. 50 feet of an intersection to ~8 mph, and then had the right of way like a pedestrian in a cross walk, that would be followed much more consistenty than stop signs applying to bikes.

Some municipalities let bicylists treat stop signs as yield signs, and that's also safer because it's more consistently followed.

For your statement is correct. The article does not back your second statement up.

Please don't draw conclusions of fact where there are none.

OP makes some good points but should go on vacation in the Netherlands. Way ahead in road safety. For example:

https://youtu.be/FlApbxLz6pA

Or more extensively:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l0GA901oGe4

Here in Germany, all these bike lanes exist and function more or less as well as they can. Taxis tend to play chicken with you a lot, but they also respect your space if you claim it.

The main difference between here and where I learned to drive (CA, US) is driver's education. Bicycles are not treated as second-class in the driving curriculum: you are required to check over your right shoulder every time you take a right turn. The presence of marked bike lanes helps reinforce this notion. You will still find those who park in or walk on them, which is annoying, but overall I feel safer here riding my bike than in the US.

What frustrates me most where I live is poorly marked bike lanes/paths. My neighborhood is surround by 'multi-use paths' that consist of a wide finely crushed gravel path next to a double wide sidewalk-like path. These are supposed to be used by cyclists as well as horses and pedestrians, and when used as such are glorious and completely safe.

Problem is, many cyclists don't realize they are for their use, and wind up riding on the narrow, winding, traffic-calmed streets where it's most definitely not safe or convenient for cyclists or motorists.

I'm not sure I get what these multi-use paths roads look like. If by "finely crushed gravel" you mean loose gravel, I would understand why cyclists don't use it.

Maybe it'd be fine for Mountain bikes (but then definitely not fine for the pedestrians receiving pieces of gravel on them), but for regular city bikes with a small tire, this would not be a suitable road.

Multi-use paths typically don't go anywhere, are circuitous and have to yield all the time. Of course nobody uses them because well people on bikes are just trying to get to work, too.

Yeah, the stupidest thing I hear shouted out of car windows is "you belong on the bike path!" (meaning the scenic multi-use path).

(Well you belong on the highway, dipshit, but I'm guessing that doesn't take you to the grocery store either.)

"Finely crushed gravel" is not for a road bike.

I'm a big fan of protected bike lanes - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-6LZ0iRO-TM.

I live just off a road that has long been popular with cyclists. I used to bike on it myself. But the towns it connects have grown a lot in the past 10 years and the car traffic on it has grown as well. Last year a woman on a bike was killed on the road. I don't bike on it myself any more. It just isn't safe.

It would be a lot safer with bike lanes, and safer still if there was separate pavement for bikes.

No, not at all. The case for protected bike lanes is rock solid, but it's been tread so many times that it's only worth addressing the article itself:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge's_law_of_headline...

Remember, in this age conflict, not content, drives journalist profit.

Didn't read the article. But the answer is yes.

We all know that the law of car-driving-assholes means that any bike lane that a car is capable of entering, will be entered by a car = risk of death/injury. The only way for bike lanes to be a safe method is to introduce barriers so cars CAN NOT ENTER AT ALL. Sadly there are so many roads that are too narrow for these bike lanes to exist as well as allow two way traffic as well as parking that I think the only way is to create one way roads from the old 2 way roads and have a segregated bike lane use up one car space, with barriers to cars, and parking one one side only. They have created trial bike lane on bloor street in Toronto, with only one parking lane (which alternates from side to side.) Bloor still has 2 way car traffic.

I think one way is the way. Then with self driving cars(cab like, but lots cheaper) reducing the numbers of cars will help. http://www1.toronto.ca/wps/portal/contentonly?vgnextoid=18cc...

> car-driving-assholes

Please let's avoid the "car-driving assholes" vs. "bike-riding assholes" back-and-forth that usually plagues these threads. This is covered by the site guideline on classic flamewar topics.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

How often do you bike in these protected bike lanes?

My city has them and I intentionally avoid roads with them. It's more dangerous because every intersection the protection is broken for the turning lane and let me tell you, cars do not check for you before jumping in to that turning lane. It's terrifying.

I think D.C. has some mixing zones that are gold standard: https://i0.wp.com/www.streetsblog.org/wp-content/uploads/201...

Would love to see this in more places, because seriously, no other method is safe. For me, mixing zones usually mean merging over to the turn lane and riding to the right side of cars turning left (NYC puts bike lanes on the left side of the road).

Funny, as a pedestrian, I daily observe that any sidewalk a bicyclist is capable of riding on will be entered by a bike, with resulting risk of injury or death to pedestrians. I have indeed daydreamed about ways to introduce barriers to prevent bicyclists from riding on sidewalks, but without success. Any ideas?

As always, the answer to all articles titled with a question is "No".

Betteridge's law of headlines

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headline...

Bike lanes have always been controversial. MIT professor John Forrester has long argued that it is better for people to think that "a bicycle is a vehicle".

Bicyclists often have a fear that somebody is going to hit them from behind, but earlier studies show that the majority of accidents happen around intersections: if bikes are segregated from traffic, often cyclists are invisible at intersections and get hit.

More recent studies in the U.S. south, however, show that bicyclists are more likely to be hit from behind than previous studies -- but that might just be southern culture...

America has done the vehicular cycling approach for decades and what we have to show for it is 1% cycling mode share. Vehicular cycling is the transportation policy for the 1% of cyclists (it made sense to me when I was 22 years old and fearless). By contrast Dutch infrastructure is designed for a 60 year old woman with two bags of groceries.

The Southern culture of hitting people with your car? I don't really get the logic that you're implying accidents will go up if there are bike lanes. Bike lanes should increase visibility of bikes overall, especially if they are more common around the city.

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