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I think it's a mistake to conflate bike and bus lanes in urban transportation analysis. It should not be possible for any vehicle to enter let alone park in a bike lane. As for bus lanes, the bus authority police should be empowered to address this.

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Many of the bike lanes in NYC are nothing but a stripe of paint along the side of a single-lane road, whose curbs are lined with parked cars. Cars double-parking for loading, etc will inevitably either block the bike lane or block the auto lane, causing cars to swerve into the bike lane.

eg, https://www.google.com/maps/@40.7784195,-73.9470116,3a,75y,2...

Yes I know. But as we see in many European cities, it doesn't have to be that way.

The obvious solution is to remove the on-street car parking on at least one side of any street that hosts a bike lane, and use the space for a separated bike route with a protective barrier. Unfortunately I doubt it's politically feasible at this time. There's plenty of resistance to bike lanes already; reducing the street parking would be seen as an undue hardship on the middle class.

I do feel things will change over time though -- I know several New Yorkers who used to have cars but now, in the age of car/bike sharing and app-enabled car services, no longer own one.

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