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Comment by bb88 | Hacker News Reader

Bike infrastructure can in fact increase congestion.

Fivethirtyeight did a study in Minneapolis on bike lanes constructed earlier this decade and showed that bike lanes did increase congestion for 10 roads they looked at.

https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/bike-lanes-dont-cause-t...

Anecdotally, the mid sized city I lived in added a bike lane experimentally on my commute to work. The lanes going into the city decreased from 4 to 3 and immediately increased the amount of congestion. It also slowed my commute anywhere from 5 to 10 minutes based upon what time I left.

And the sad thing was, nobody used the new bike lane. I never saw a single rider use those lanes during my morning commute.

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Adding a single bike line is like adding a single road in middle of nowhere. Dutch have bike infrastructure. Here you can go on a bike everywhere and leave bike everywhere. They have very clever solutions to avoid conflicts between cars and bikes, so it feels very safe and you can simply relax. Actually, some cities in Netherlands start to have issues with bike lines congestion :) .

https://bicycledutch.files.wordpress.com/2016/03/groningen07...

I was studying in Groningen and I can tell you this is a daily occurrence there, sometimes it's even worse since the photo is from a rainy day in winter :P .

From: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cycling_in_the_Netherlands

By 2012 cycling had grown tremendously in popularity. In Amsterdam alone, 490,000 cyclists took to the road to cycle 2 million kilometres every day, according to its city council statistics. This has caused some problems as, despite 35,000 kilometers of bicycle paths, the country's 18 million bicycles (1.3 per citizen old enough to ride) sometimes clog Dutch cities' busiest streets. This is being addressed by building even more bike lanes to tackle a problem many other cities in the world would envy — that of bicycle traffic congestion.

Also, it takes time to build biking culture. And as a side note, biking infrastructure in Groningen was build on anti-car sentiments. They wanted to get rid of cars from the city, not to relive car congestion. They did get rid of them especially from the center and the city is now lovely for pedestrians and cyclists. https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2015/jul/29/how-groningen...

Your windshield perspective is showing. The reason people in cars don't notice bike traffic is because a bike is small and unobtrusive and silent. Fifty cars in the same place is an epic disaster but fifty bikes in the same place is not a problem.

Take for example this data in London, which was produced in response to a question from a member of the public having essentially the same bias as your statement "nobody uses this bike lane." In London some bike lanes have slightly increased travel times by car but cycling has increased more than 50%. The bike lane is five times more efficient at moving people than is the carriageway.

http://foi.tfl.gov.uk/FOI-1235-1718/20170317%20STB%20CSEW%20...

> In London some bike lanes have slightly increased travel times by car but cycling has increased more than 50%.

50% of anything near zero is still darn close to zero. But at the same token, a 5 minute increase for 1000 people is a loss of 5000 minutes.

> The reason people in cars don't notice bike traffic is because a bike is small and unobtrusive and silent.

False. A single bike sticks out like a sore thumb in traffic -- even if there's a bike lane. In this case, I was so pissed off at the increase of my commute I started to count bikes in the bike lane, and I saw exactly zero.

The paper has the number of bikers. But I’m sure your statistically representative research of ‘watching for bikers while driving once’ is much more worthwhile.

My apologies. It was 0 over the course of 30 days of commuting. Exactly 0.

Have you considered using the bike lane yourself?

To start off that’s ableist. And reeks of privilege (can he afford to live a biking distance to work?)

But that doesn’t matter - someone unilaterally changes something and everyone else is supposed to get with the program or find a hole to die in.

I don't think its ableist, I wasn't suggesting that there shouldn't be a road for cars, or that they should even bike themselves. I was just wondering if they had considered why they didn't want to use it as that might shed light on why it wasn't a successful bike lane.

Like the motorists changed laws concerning pedestrian traffic and road laws?

Yes, but I have a life long history of listening to horror stories of people on bikes getting hit by cars.

These days, I fly back and forth to work, so it makes little sense to use a bike.

> so pissed off

> single bike sticks out like a sore thumb

Now it totally makes sense.

Well when you have to dodge an unfit person going up a hill you notice.

I’m all for bike lanes. And bicycle licenses. Can’t go up the 80 percentile hill in your town at 20 mph? You fail.

There are plenty of places in US that are exactly as OP has described. This is not because bike lanes aren't inefficient per se, but because they're often built in the wrong places, or lack other infrastructure.

Lack of related infrastructure is a real problem.

Bike lanes built one at a time, and not connected. So, if you happen to live and work along a single bike lane, great. If not, you're back in the car.

Lack of bicycle facilities at destinations. My office has a tiny, poorly constructed rack outdoors. I wouldn't trust it to hold my bicycle, even with a good lock. Much of the USA is warm or hot in summer, so anything more than a few miles on the bike results in lots of sweating, so showers at offices would be helpful.

In places where bicycle infrastructure is provided, it is well used. The first Reston Metro stop (Weihle Station) has a large, locked bike room with nice racks and a small workbench area. The station is located right off one of the regions main multi-use paths. That bike room is heavily utilized.

Sadly, the second Reston Metro station, Reston Town Center, doesn't provide any infrastructure at all. No bike storage, no parking, nothing. Not sure what the heck the county was thinking when planning this station.

> Bike lanes built one at a time, and not connected.

That's probably the number one problem of bike lanes.

The second problem is that if you add a bike lane, you have to take something away. Usually it's parking or traffic lanes. And neither of those are super popular.

> Much of the USA is warm or hot in summer, so anything more than a few miles on the bike results in lots of sweating

Or there's snow on the ground 4 months out of the year, and makes it a real pain to commute on a bike. Or in several places, you have both. Chicago comes to mind.

On street parking is a horrible thing to have in any urban area. That MUST be banned.

Bike lanes are beneficial in urban areas, and that's pretty much it.

But when it comes to US, the bike lanes is the last thing when it comes to the kindergarten level of infrastructure planning. In my experience infrastructure in US was planned exclusively by NIMBYs...

Increase congestion...for the people still using the car instead of the shiny new bike lane. Use the bike and problem solved, for those that don't, well suit yourself.

And as others noted. A single bike line without connecting lanes will not change people's commute. Changing habit is also something that doesn't happen over a day or even a year. It might take 5 years for the effect to show.

Sounds like Austin, where the prevailing wisdom is to covert car lanes to bike lanes. Which causes nothing but problems because the couple people a day who use the lanes in no way compensates for the cascading problems as fewer cars can drive through an intersection during a light cycle, which means the cross streets start to pile up/etc.

This is happening in New York right now. Massive investment in bike infrastructure. But congestion hasn’t improved at all. Combined with increased ride sharing, NYC roads are now 15% slower. We need solutions for average people, not high brow idealism for people who have fancy bikes and showers at work.

https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2017/12/ride-ha...

Average newyorker isn't a driver, dear. Congestion isn't going to go away in NYC. Mostly because New York wasn't built for this much traffic in the first place... And new bike lanes is a welcome sight in NYC. Based on how much CitiBikes move around the city, you can easily determine that those bike lanes are a welcome change.

But then... I haven't been to a city with a good motor vehicle infrastructure in a long time. Certainly none of the major US cities are designed well to handle even remotely appropriate levels of private motor vehicle use.

PS: I have a car in NYC. Use it for some cases, but would never drive daily in NYC.

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