Cambridge's Ambitious Protected Bike Lane Law | Hacker News Reader

Cambridge's Ambitious Protected Bike Lane Law

citylab.com

480 pointscienega476 comments

I've lived in Cambridge or neighboring Somerville every year but one since 1989. The cycling infrastructure is much improved and still deadly.

Just yesterday, I approached an arterial Street from a side street at 6pm. Cars on the arterial were moving about 8 MPH. I dismounted my bike, and began walking across the arterial in the crosswalk. As I re-mounted on the other side and resumed riding, a white man in a mid-size SUV leaned out his window and said loudly to me, "I hope you get hit!"

This morning on my way to work, a driver popped out of a side street from my left side directly in front of me. As I was along side of him, he swerved hard to the right and into a parking lot (no signal of course).

I've been a daily bike commuter in Cambridge for 12 years. We desperately need infrastructure that forces drivers to respect cyclists as equal road users. There is hardly a day that I don't almost get hit by car while cycling.

I've experienced this same anecdote in similar situations for the past 20 years as well. There has been a long push by auto manufacturers to make anything other than cars that use the roads seen as both illegitimate and illegal. For example, see the history of Jaywalking laws: https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-26073797. Starting around 1920's the auto-industry encouraged laws around the US to make crossing the street illegal. These laws have the downside of making car drivers feel entitled to the road.

Cyclists and other non-car users of roads have a deep hole to climb out of to change these laws, and to change the perception that streets are only for cars. Infrastructure is probably the only real mechanism we have that can make tangible changes, that don't allow the personal feelings of car drivers to get angry at being inconvenienced by cyclists and other road users.

We need to slow down auto-traffic and encourage more non-vehicular use of the roads, while making those roads safer for pedestrians, cyclists, scooter riders, skate boarders, etc.

> We need to slow down auto-traffic and encourage more non-vehicular use of the roads, while making those roads safer for pedestrians, cyclists, scooter riders, skate boarders, etc.

Is that the most efficient use of the roads? Especially in a place like Boston, where most people in the metro area don’t live in (and can’t afford to live in) the city itself. At a certain point doesn’t creating a preference for pedestrians and cyclists actually end up being a preference for wealthier people who can afford to live downtown, versus those who need to access the city but can’t live within walking or biking distance? (Note that bicyclists and skateboarders also slow down busses, which are what lower income people use to get around.)

It might not be as efficient, but it sure is better for the environment, for traffic, and for health, among others. In most of the US, the wealthier people live in suburbs, though your point still stands.

Many European cities are nicer places to live as a result of better cycling infrastructure and a culture of road-sharing.

You mean the roads downtown should be inaccessible to people living downtown so suburban people can commute in on 2 ton steel boxes that they then store for the day in downtown?

No, that is indeed not the most efficient use of the roads. The most efficient use of the roads would be to rip them out and use the space for vastly more efficient public transport.

(Bus transport is also not slowed down by cyclists, or of all things, skateboarders.)

> The most efficient use of the roads would be to rip them out and use the space for vastly more efficient public transport.

More efficient for who? The software developer who lives in a condo downtown, or the lady who cleans his office that drives in from the suburbs?

For both? This isn't policy, this is what you already mentioned: space is becoming rapidly more expensive downtown, and that doesn't stop with such mundane things as roads or parking spaces. These are not magically guaranteed their place, forever. This article and things like congestion charge in NYC are the natural consequence.

So the choice isn't some faux gentrification debate on optimizing roads for the strawman "cleaning lady from the suburbs" or the "downtown software developer", it's for the cleaning lady to be out of a job in 10 years because the only cars driving downtown will be worth a century of her yearly income - or taking the train...

In Boston? The cleaning lady takes the T. No way she can afford parking downtown.

But how does she get to the T? It doesn't go very far.

It goes to East Somerville. It goes to Chelsea. It goes to Everett. If you want to knwo how the night shift janitors in your office get to work, just hang around the Sullivan Square station at 6PM.

She would benefit most from more bus only lanes going into the city. Or perhaps rip out the parking garages and replace them with affordable housing downtown.

I lived next to a main traffic route in a bigger city for a few years. You rarely see a commuter that is not completely ALONE in their car.

Using a car in a city is not a human right, it is a luxury. That trunk and the four free seats are there "just in case" you might need it. There is no rational reason why it is that way. It is a whole culture that revolves around owning a car and I say that as somebody who was driving for a living once.

Commuting to a city boils down to using the cities advantages (well paying jobs, infrastructure, etc) while avoiding the disadvantages (noise, pollution, higher rents and criminality) at the cost of those living there (you take jobs people living there could take, you are traffic, space and noise). Could they get a space in the city? Sure. Only it would be tiny and substandard and they don't want that.

If you're committed to high quality public transport, it's more efficient for both.

Do you think there's a lot of cleaning ladies driving in and parking downtown in expensive major cities?

In Austin, a significant portion of the cleaning people work evenings/nights, and I believe frequently are given the option of parking in the garage of the office building(s) they're cleaning.

It's not all, but it's a part. Of course, Austin's no NYC. I assume NYC doesn't have as many empty parking garages at night, and it definitely has better public transit.

People who are 'reverse commuting' are unlikely to be hurt by this, since there's not much traffic pressure going that way at that time.

A parking spot uses about as much space as a mid-sized apartment if you build four stories above it. Fewer cars mean more room for affordable housing.

lower income people in nearly all major cities tend not live in the suburbs since that require owning an maintaining a car (or two), usually they live in high density housing in areas adjacent to larger metro areas and accessible by public transportation. These people would benefit tremendously if urban areas where restructure to have better, more efficient public transportation.

It depends on what you mean by efficient, I guess. I like the graphic on this article, https://www.treehugger.com/urban-design/how-much-space-do-pe...

It shows how many more people can efficiently use roads while on bikes than in cars. So, if we define efficiency by that measure (obviously this matters more in cities and congested areas), then yes, it's more efficient.

I see that graphic a lot, but it's not a very useful one, because it ignores residential patterns. Most people can't use a bike. So if you displace one car, you're not going to replace it with one bike, much less than 5 that would otherwise fit in the same space.

The efficiency question is: what minimizes the amount of collective time people spend getting where they need to go. Bike infrastructure might actually make that worse, slowing down the majority for the sake of a tiny minority that can use a bike to get where they're going.

> it ignores residential patterns

I would argue that what we need to discuss more, is how do we make transit more efficient for the different residential patterns. Is driving to a parking lot, and then getting on a bike, scooter, skateboard, a more efficient option? Or transferring to a train/bus? Do we really want people driving into city centers?

> Most people can't use a bike.

I don't think you mean that exactly, I think you're extrapolating from your residential patterns comment. Most people can ride a bike, we just need to make it a better option in different areas.

> what minimizes the amount of collective time people spend getting where they need to go. Bike infrastructure might actually make that worse.

This isn't supported by my personal experience (live in a city), it's faster for me to bike somewhere, than drive and look for parking.

Here's a 538 article specifically on this: https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/bike-lanes-dont-cause-t...

"This is an important point: Bike lanes don’t cause a lot more congestion if you put them on the right streets. If you cut down the size of streets that are already near capacity, you’ll create severe congestion. But if you start with roads that are well under capacity, you’ll only increase the congestion a little bit. And it may not even be noticeable."

Doesn't sound like you know Cambridge at all. There aren't many under capacity roads, especially when winter snow comes down. What this is going to do is make traffic slower, encourage more bikers who will ignore traffic rules and act unpredictably, and generally muck things up. Cambridge is actually probably a really great candidate for bike lanes with multiple colleges nearby, but let's not pretend this isn't going to absolutelymake commuting worse. Biking into work isn't an option for me. When I come into the Cambridge office it's 5 hours in the car round trip. Nevermind the jerk motorcycles who drive down center lanes, cut cars off, pop wheelies in the highway, etc. I can definitely say the animus bicyclists receive is undue. My wife and daughter have been threatened with vehicles, I've been hit in a crosswalk walking by a car, and I can't even get into how bad it is trying to follow the rules in Boston with pedestrians crossing against the signal while you've got a short green.

> bikers who will ignore traffic rules

Bikes ignoring traffic rules is a 1000x better than cars ignoring traffic rules. Since cars actually kill people. 40,000 a year in the US. Every year. But hey, you don't give a shit about that, right?

This is true, but it doesn't excuse bikes ignoring traffic rules. Also, bikes striking pedestrians can kill them just as dead as cars can.

> Most people can't use a bike.

Huh? What kind of people are you referring to? In my simple observation, most people can indeed use a bike. And in some countries, like Denmark, or China, it is my impression that most people do use a bike.

I think he means most people don't live close enough to the city that they could reasonably ride a bike to get where they need to go.

That is why you have park & ride concepts and trains. In many european cities you have places just outside the city where you can park your car or hop of and take your bike and take the last mile by bike or public transport.

Having all your commuters drive their car into the city is not at all a good idea. I lived for years at one heavy intersection in one of Germanys biggest cities and I can tell you, if you watch the traffic for half an hour you will see maybe one or two cars with more than one person in them.

I moved from their because the dust and the noise were having a huge impact on my health.

I don't think it is about banning cars from city centers totally. It is about finding acceptable solutions that work without forcing people. Encourage them. Have a working public transport system. Make it cheap. Make it so cheap that driving a car will cost you. Include all problems cars cause in a urban space in some kind of toll or tax.

Park & ride is a fine idea, but Massachusetts needs to invest in that sort of infrastructure before it will become viable for commuters.

Currently there's the commuter rail, which is hard to get to from many areas, is quite expensive, and doesn't run very frequently. It's not good enough to get people to stop driving.

If the commuter rail is not convenient they could park at the end of the T, e.g. Alewife, BC etc.

But now they need to pay for the car anyway, so you're left balancing the comparatively small cost of parking + extra gas + extra mileage against inconvenience of switching transit methods + cost of transit.

There's many other factors, too, which could influence things in either way: total time spent commuting, whether you hate crowded spaces and prefer to sit alone in your car, whether you can be productive (eg: phone call, working on laptop, doing email on phone etc) or want to be able to read.

But can they bike from a train station in the city? Can they bike around the suburb they live in? Yes, they probably can.

Can they find a parking spot in the train station? No, no they can't.

Many suburbs in Europe are set up with either lots of parking at the station, or such that people even in the suburb are within walking/biking distance of the station. I can show you examples if you're interested.

I don't think it's a problem that can't be solved. But Massachusetts needs to invest in that infrastructure before it will become viable. Just making the city more navigable by bikes doesn't solve the problem.

> Massachusetts needs to invest in that infrastructure

And that is the crux of the problem. Cities across the US don't have enough funding to maintain the infrastructure they currently have, let alone try to build anything new. Their only hope is to get a grant from the state or federal government.

None of this is sustainable.

If you always wait for complementary infrastructure, you'll never do anything. Sometimes a half-assed compromise is just an intermediary step on the way to a full-assed solution.

If your elderly or disabled. Although if you that level of elderly, you might not be able to use a car either, and the disabled often have motorized wheelchairs that could go as fast as bikes.

For people who say 'but the disabled need cars', I want to offer some ancedata: I know a retired couple that bought a house in SF years ago because they wanted a working transit system when they can't drive cars anymore.

But rayiner said “most people”. Most people are not elderly or disabled.

A third of people in the US can't (or can't afford to) drive. Bicycling seems much more democratic.

They said most people, and even many elderly or disabled folk can bike. I see some very old people biking around Munich. Almost never saw that in the US, almost like having better infrastructure has some kind of impact...

Elderly: https://bicycledutch.wordpress.com/tag/elderly/

Disabled: https://bicycledutch.wordpress.com/tag/disabled-people/

Less serious, but still a good demonstration of the inclusiveness of cycling: https://vimeo.com/131968609

Just building protected bikelanes is not enough for cities that were build over decades with a car-centric layout. You need to drastically reduce parking and increase the density. This is a process that will take a long time. Changing cities is hard.

Boston/Cambridge were built for horses not cars. A car centric layout would actually create way more space to accommodate the bicycles.

More space for traffic is generally bad for everybody since it increases the number of miles between the places where you want to be.

Take a bike on public transportation for longer-distance routes. I don't know what sort of barbaric backwater you live in, but in my bike-friendly city, all the buses and light rail have bike racks, and bike commuters regularly use them for the longer legs.

In a super-dense city like Cambridge, it's even more true. Less need for long travel, more need for bikes in the congested center.

The problem is the people who can't afford to live in Cambridge. There isn't much in the way of public transportation to get you to Cambridge.

How many of those people can afford a car?

> Most people can't use a bike.

This is simply false. Most people absolutely can use a bike. Maybe not for every possible trip, but for many of them, yes. Just look at the bike rate in the Netherlands, if you don't believe me.

There are a variety of possible modes available, and they can be mixed and matched as people need and want. Driving to a suburban park and ride transit station, taking the train into the city, and then using bike share to get to your final destination, is a perfectly sensible thing.

> Driving to a suburban park and ride transit station, taking the train into the city, and then using bike share to get to your final destination, is a perfectly sensible thing.

And if Massachusetts had that kind of infrastructure, it would work out fine. But it doesn't, and just making a city more bike-friendly doesn't solve the problem on its own.

I think you could arguably entirely remove non-commercial vehicles form dense cities like Boston and New York. You could build massive parking garages at the limits of the city and suburban commuter could just park and take alternate transit from there.

During peak traffic in both of these cities I've been easily able to walk as fast as traffic, forget how much faster public transit or biking would be.

If you displaced all the cars within a city, then transportation within the city would likely be faster and more efficient for everyone. City buses would be much nicer if there was virtually no traffic in the city. Biking would likewise be a more realistic option if was dramatically safer and had better infrastructure for storage.

of course that's a pipe-dream, but the obsessive car culture in the US is a nightmare so it's nice to have some contrast.

Not all of the mass transit in Boston is weather protected. Snow routinely causes train stoppages. The lines are also really old, being dug by hand when street cars and horse and buggy still existed. There's also the face of massive cost increases forcing people to take transit and park, not to mention the increase in commuting time by not getting directly to your location. I've been on some really great transit systems in places like Bucharest and Tokyo. Boston is an unfortunately poor comparison on some lines.

I don’t disagree with that at all—that’s the ideal. But I don’t know what version of the United States you’re living in, but in mine, most cities don’t have that infrastructure, are too politically incompetent to be able to build that infrastructure cost effectively, and most of the few cities that do have it (like DC and New York) have let it decay to the point where it’s not timely and reliable.

One of the things transit advocates fail to grapple with is that our municipal political systems in the United States are broken. When it costs New York City 5-7 times as much money per mile of subway as it does Paris or London, you can’t build enough subway to meet peoples’ needs. (The debate over transit would be totally different if, for what MTA spends now, it was building five times as much track to meet peoples’ needs.)

Who would run the transit that goes from the edge parking lots to the city in your hypothetical? It would be WMATA. The same organization that, despite ample funding, let DC’s Metro decay to the point that they had to turn off automatic train control—a feature that was designed into the system at inception in the 1970s.

That’s the political reality we have to design our transportation systems against. Looking over the pond at what they do in Amsterdam or Paris is foolish—it’s like designing a plane for earth’s gravity based on what it would take to fly a plane on Mars.

> Most people can't use a bike.

What? How do you figure? My observation is that most people absolutely can (and many would seriously benefit from it).

Maybe not for every situation, but for the rare ones where a bike won't do, a cab will.

Winter (ice, snow, freezing winds) Rain storms People who don't want to show up to work sweaty (my work never had showers and I'm the sort of person who creates a lot of sweat (and smell) even if I'm taking it easy on a bike People who live more than X miles from where they are going People who live up/down major hills etc.....

I lived IN Boston for a while, and actually rode my bike to work during the summer (didn't own a car) and just let everyone suffer through my sweat. But I couldn't do it in the winter (yes I know some people do). Aside from the physical cold/misery, the snow and ice made many roads extremely dangerous. The last few places I've lived were in the suburbs, commuting to other suburbs (luckily I've been avoiding the worst city traffic). The distances were too great to bike (unless you like a 3+ hour commute). shrug. Its great if you live somewhere that biking works for you, but don't expect everyone everywhere can just give up their car, jump on a bike, and carry on with life...

Wow, excuses? Ok. Yes, car driving is easier, it always will be. But how about you drivers start actually paying for what you use, the pollution you create, the roads that are paid for by taxes?

You mean gasoline taxes? lol

No, since that only covers a small amount of what you use. Think about the 40,000 deaths a year. Who pays for that? Not you. The 500,000 seriously injured? Not you. The pollution you cause? Not you. The 3m children with Asthma caused by drivers? Not you. The list goes on...

There's a difference between "can't" and "don't want to". I'm not going to tell anybody what they should or should not do for their transportation. If you prefer driving, for whatever reason, go for it! I'm not going to say you're wrong.

My main point is that a lot of people assume that biking is the worse choice for them without actually knowing.

I have noticed that most people I know who have tried bicycle commuting and gave it up didn't really give it a fair shake. They used substandard or the wrong type of bikes, didn't use the accessories and clothing that make it feasible (rain gear, panniers, trailers, etc), and so forth. They just grabbed their old bike out of their garage and hopped on. That can work, but it's not usually the best experience.

> I see that graphic a lot, but it's not a very useful one, because it ignores residential patterns.

Yes parking needed for cars would be several times bigger than what cars occupy.

> Most people can't use a bike.

This is a lie, most people can use a bike.

> At a certain point doesn’t creating a preference for pedestrians and cyclists actually end up being a preference for wealthier people who can afford to live downtown, versus those who need to access the city but can’t live within walking or biking distance?

Reducing the number of cars (and therefore traffic) on the roads will benefit everybody, especially if cars and bikes don't get in each other's way (such as in the case of dedicated and protected bike lanes).

> Note that bicyclists and skateboarders also slow down busses, which are what lower income people use to get around

I don't think this is true. Busy streets and traffic jams slow down buses.

  Reducing the number of cars (and therefore traffic) on the
  roads will benefit everybody

You seem to have a rose-tinted view of the world we live in.

  Have you ever had to commute in less-than-ideal 
  conditions? 
  Heavy snow? Sleet? Black ice? 
  Have you ever lived in places that are not 
  perfectly flat? or lived in places that 
  are hot that make bicycling unfeasible?
  Did you have sporting gear / work gear that
  you had to lug? Did you know some people have
  to fetch their own gear to work
  Did you have to take calls during transit?
  Did you know its common practice for employees
  to call into meetings during their commute and/or 
  help assist operations via conference calls?
  Have you had to shop for more than a baguette 
  or a bagel at a store? You know how cumbersome
  that gets for even a family of three? 
  Do you have the slightest clue how much casual 
  violence and crime happen on public transit?[1]

Not to belabor the point but there simply are dozens of cases where bicycles or public transit just don't cut it. Not to mention the hygiene, personal safety (from other passengers for example) and personal space aspects involved in someone choosing a mode of transportation other than public transit or bicycling.

Ride-sharing, autonomous vehicles and emission-free vehicles should all alleviate the issues we currently face with traffic, parking and accidents.

However doing away with cars or vehicular traffic is just pollyannaish madness.

[1]

Teen robbed at gunpoint at Fruitvale, BART officer says writing a report is a 'waste of resources'

https://www.sfgate.com/local/article/bart-police-refuse-repo...

> Have you ever had to commute in less-than-ideal conditions? Heavy snow? Sleet? Black ice?

Routinely. The only weather I have encountered that is really problematic is when it's very windy.

I would also note that the conditions you list are also the conditions under which you shouldn't even be driving.

> Have you ever lived in places that are not perfectly flat? or lived in places that are hot that make bicycling unfeasible?

I live in a very hilly area. I don't know how hot you consider "unfeasible", but we top 100 degrees pretty much every summer.

> Did you have sporting gear / work gear that you had to lug? Did you know some people have to fetch their own gear to work

Yes, I do all of that. An urban bike trailer (easily folds up to briefcase size when needed) solves those problems.

> Have you had to shop for more than a baguette or a bagel at a store? You know how cumbersome that gets for even a family of three?

Again, trailer.

> Do you have the slightest clue how much casual violence and crime happen on public transit?[1]

That's extremely dependent on where you live. Where I live, there is nearly no such problem.

Sending distance commuters underground is the best way to minimize big deadly metal boxes on the road, and thus the best way to make pedestrian use of the streets safer, more convenient, and faster. Transportation planning should be based on minimizing door to door times.

"Without tunnels we'll be in traffic hell forever" - Elon Musk

> Note that bicyclists and skateboarders also slow down busses, which are what lower income people use to get around.

Bicyclists are substantially faster than downtown buses (due to stop frequency). It seems unlikely that they are slowing down the buses very much. Push skateboarders use the sidewalk; electric skateboarders move at the same speed as bicyclists.

As somebody who took buses regularily at one point in his live I can assure you that the most slowdown I experienced was due to cars. It rarely ever happens that a cyclist is sustancially slowing down a bus.

Indeed. I am always faster than the bus. And, in the city, bicycling is usually faster than driving.

https://twitter.com/TheRicMan/status/1002373087424274432?ref...

I hate driving in cities. It's stressful because you need to pay attention to so much going in around the streets, and be prepared to slam the brakes at all times. But I also think that's how it should be. Driving in cities should be discouraged IMO.

A city is the perfect place for mass transit. Park the cars away from the centre, provide good public transport and municipal bike rentals, and you reduce congestion and free up space for urban development.

This idea of having multilane roads running through prime real estate so people can spend an hour or so driving a few kilometres in stop-and-go traffic is just nuts to me. There's nothing efficient about it, and I expect as we try to bring co2 emissions down to sustainable levels, we'll have to give up on designing cities around private cars anyway.

> Cyclists and other non-car users of roads have a deep hole to climb out of to change these laws, and to change the perception that streets are only for cars. Infrastructure is probably the only real mechanism we have that can make tangible changes, that don't allow the personal feelings of car drivers to get angry at being inconvenienced by cyclists and other road users.

The problem is that the infrastructure is often inferior compared to the actual road due to bad intersection management, bad surface conditions, significantly longer routes, or routes that don't take you where you need to go. Another approach would be to repeal the keep as far right as practicable laws and allow cyclists the right to use an entire traffic lane when riding and require faster vehicles to change lanes to pass.

The next round of laws that criminalize non-cars at the expense of cars might be impending with the rise of autonomous cars. Cf this recent tweet where zoox called a law abiding pedestrian a "Jaywalker": https://twitter.com/zoox/status/1115622929192980480

I am really amazed they haven't deleted that tweet out of embarrassment for being so utterly wrong.

> There has been a long push by auto manufacturers to make anything other than cars that use the roads seen as both illegitimate and illegal.

And the absolutely disgusting thing about this is we can't get away from roads. Every building has roads in front, and to get anywhere you have to cross a lot of roads.

Examples like this are exactly why bike lanes are not the only change needed to make cycling more accessible. What stops drivers from doing any of these if there were protected bike lanes? Generally "protected" bike lines are not protected at intersections, which is where most problems occur.

I live in Austin right now and I tend to avoid the protected bike lanes because drivers frequently turn across them without yielding to cyclists using them. The city put up signs saying to yield to oncoming cyclists, but in my experience those signs are followed less than 5% of the time. I'd rather ride in the normal traffic lane where I'm visible. Yes, I might be angering some drivers, but angering drivers is better than dying.

There's a certain burden to being vigilant and self-defensive on the road. Even if I'm not protected in intersections, a protected bike lane means that there's a lot less time I need to be worried that a car will hit me.

However, you're bringing up the point that protected bike lanes may make intersections even more dangerous for cyclists. While your reasoning makes sense, do you know if there's anything to corroborate that claim?

They're not. Protected bike lanes are for sure safer than unprotected bike lanes.

If there are problems at intersections, that means that the bike lanes aren't protected enough. Amsterdam for example doesn't have these kinds of issues because their design (and especially light signaling) is better.

> If there are problems at intersections, that means that the bike lanes aren't protected enough. Amsterdam for example doesn't have these kinds of issues because their design (and especially light signaling) is better.

I agree. The problem is that I have never seen those sorts of lanes in the US. The choice is between semi-protected lanes which may be worse or no lanes. I don't know precisely which is better, but I usually choose to not use the protected lanes due to issues at intersections.

We have intersections like this in NYC. Look at 8th and 9th Avenues in Chelsea for one example. There are separate phases for bikes going straight and vehicles turning left across them.

We also have a few of these kinds of lanes in Austin. There are a few downtown and a few in East Austin.

Where specifically? I'm not aware of bike lanes that have a special light for vehicles turning across the bike lane in Austin.

Seattle also has pretty good signage for their (very limited) protected bike lanes - typically a green-painted turning lane, with yield markings and signs. I still see drivers ignoring them from time to time - I think Mad-Eye Moody's mantra is a good one to keep in mind when riding a bike: "Constant Vigilance!".

> If there are problems at intersections, that means that the bike lanes aren't protected enough

Unless you design the intersections properly, then you're never going to achieve that protection. The best way to design them would be to follow how limited access highways/motorways interact with surface streets. In other words, they use interchanges.

I'm not sure there's much clear data on this. I have plenty of anecdotes from myself and other cyclists, however.

Here's what is clear: Many cyclists worry about getting rear-ended, which presumably is a major part of what bike lanes are supposed to eliminate, but those sorts of crashes are rare: http://bicyclesafe.com/#rearend2

I can recall a pro-bike-lane advocacy organization had some different data that said being rear-ended is actually common, but that seems very discordant with the remainder of the data, and they seem hardly unbiased. (The webmaster of the site I linked to seems neutral on bike lanes.)

The main risks come from intersections, and most bike lanes, even protected ones, don't address that.

My concern is that bike lanes may give inexperienced cyclists a false sense of security. These problems are relatively easily avoided if one is aware of them. See this website to learn about how to avoid the most common types of bike crashes: http://bicyclesafe.com/

As a bicyclist, I can tell you what my greatest fear is: parked cars. Statistically speaking, I am far more likely to get hurt because someone opened their driver's side door without looking than from any other cause.

As a result, when I ride by parked cars I make sure that I'm at least a car-door-length away from them when at all possible.

I live in Cambridge and agree with the reasoning as a driver and a cyclist. They put a bike lane inside the car parking area along the main drag (Cambridge street) i live on. It’s hard as a driver to make sure the lane is clear before turning, and when cycling through you still have to be careful and look before crossing the side streets.

It’s still better and it’s been a year since I saw a bicyclist and a driver have words when the car failed to yield.

Ignorance of rules seem to be part of the issue. Using bike lanes (in Cambridge!), I've had turning drivers honk or yell nasty things at intersections as I went straight through, not knowing they are required to yield. Drivers are trained to be forgiving to pedestrians and the crazy jay-walking that happens in Boston, but still treat bikes like aberrations.

I drive as well, and admit it felt very unnatural at first at check behind me for bikes when turning right.

You put up separate lights, where there is a red turn arrow for the cars and a light for the bicycles, just like Europe. It's taken a couple of years for drivers to figure them out, but at this point you almost never see someone turn against them, and when you do, it's usually someone with grey hair and an out of state plate who has no idea what to do.

Another side of this puzzle is that we don't require drivers to update their education or competence on a recurring basis. If we required all drivers to update their education and demonstrate their physical fitness to drive safely every couple of years, this would all go more smoothly.

> You put up separate lights, where there is a red turn arrow for the cars and a light for the bicycles

The problem is that the time to wait for the signal to turn green starts taking longer and longer and people will start to ignore the signals. I see it all the time with pedestrian signals. That is, pedestrians will just start crossing on the don't walk sign rather than waiting for the next 2 minutes before it changes. The same thing will happen when the red phase starts taking more than a minute to change to green or people (whether when in a car or on a bike) will start running the red lights more if they know they're going to get stuck for multiple minutes at the signal otherwise.

I think this a needed change, but as I've said in the other comments, I am yet to encounter one of those sorts of intersections in the US. Though I have been told today on HN that they do exist in the US.

Does this not fit the definition?

https://austintexas.gov/news/new-central-austin-bicycle-sign...

http://fitness.blog.austin360.com/2017/08/04/new-bicycle-tra...

This could be what is needed. Thanks. I didn't see a specific mention of the turning problem, but I guess it's supposed to fix that.

But I should note that those cover only a small fraction of the intersections with this problem in Austin. So few that I've never seen them and I ride a bike on a daily basis. I have been on many of the mentioned streets, but I must not have gone through those intersections as I would remember a special bike light.

(Plus, you can see a few cars parked in the bike lane in one of the photos in the second link. So much for respect for cyclists...)

What are you talking about, "bike lane"? That's the Uber and Lyft drop-off lane.

The separated lane along the Drag sucks (which is the one in the photo) for the reason you mentioned -- cars will turn across it, and people will wander across/along it.

The two-way separated lane on Rio Grande is great. My only complaint is that I occasionally come face-to-face with a car that decided they wanted to use it.

There's one of those bike signals on Rio Grande and 24th does make that light slow, and people ignore it a lot (partly because it's West Campus and that's what kids so.) It's also very short, at least when going north. It's green for long enough to get across the street, and that's about it. Once it turns yellow, cars to the right of the bike lane get the left-turn green. It just miss that light and have to wait a long time roughly every day.

I think better than the signals may be the "I see you" signal on southbound Rio Grande and MLK. There's a blue light that will light up when it detects you, so you know you'll eventually get a green. Going the other way, and at many other intersections, at certain times of night, I know that I have three options:

1. Wait for a car going the same way as me shows up and is detected,

2. Bike up onto the side walk so I can press the pedestrian signal, or

3. Run the light because it doesn't know I'm there and it will let me wait indefinitely until one of the above occurs. (Or morning rolls around in 8-12 hours, I guess?)

I'd trade all these new bike signals for more of those detectors/blue lights. Maybe all the intersections will detect me if I stop in just the right spot, but I don't know what spot is for any given light.

> Maybe all the intersections will detect me if I stop in just the right spot, but I don't know what spot is for any given light.

That's a significant design failure. In my town, they have been adjusting those embedded road car detectors so that they are sensitive enough to detect bikes. You do have to sit on the right spot, but they've added road markings to let you know exactly where you have to be.

THIS * 1000

> Generally "protected" bike lines are not protected at intersections, which is where most problems occur.

Then also build protected intersections? These are common in truly bike-friendly cities. I see them frequently here in Munich (admittedly not as bike-friendly as Dutch cities, but much better than any US city).

Those are either actual interchanges (like how a highway/motorway interacts with a surface street), or a traffic light controlled intersection. Most protected infrastructure out there do not do either.

I'm not sure what you're saying here. Most of what I've seen called "protected intersections" do include traffic lights. Are you using a different definition?

I was referring to separate traffic light phases for different approaches to the intersection. For instance this protected intersection[1] does not have separate traffic light phases for two same direction approaches. While this intersection[2] does. The first one will have turning conflicts since turning traffic and through traffic is allowed to proceed through the intersection at the same time. The second one will not.

[1] https://www.google.com/maps/@40.7631767,-111.8968873,3a,75y,...

[2] https://www.google.com/maps/@37.306157,-79.97767,3a,75y,223....

I've experienced similar hostility, while just walking and minding my own business (and respecting traffic rules). For some reason, drivers get annoyed with anyone on the road that is not inside a car.

I've written about this earlier. People get seriously nasty in their cars. I've seen them honk at my 8 yr old daughter crossing the street from her school to come home.

Most people grew up with cars, in most places in the US (other than big cities like NY, where having a car is a hassle). It is not going to be easy changing their attitude towards pedestrians and cyclists. It is going to be a slow, gradual process.

In a twisted way, many millennials not being able to afford cars (or not wanting to own) might help.

This seems to vary greatly by location.

In the Boston metro area, my anecdotal experience is that cars in Needham will stop to allow pedestrians/bikers to cross a 40mph main road at a non-crosswalk location (though to be fair there are no crosswalks). _Especially_ if there are any kids involved.

If you move just slightly further in, to Brookline, good luck getting people to yield to a pedestrian in a crosswalk, like the signage says they should. I don't know whether it's the slightly higher population density, some difference in the demographics of the drivers or what, but the difference is pretty stark.

The thing about cycling is that it’s basically fast walking. In places where cycling dominates people only ride as fast as a quick jogger (10 mph is a 6 minute mile). The correct model for cycling isn’t space on the road, it’s an extra sidewalk with an accommodating turning radius. This is what you actually see in The Netherlands. People think of public spaces as roads and as roads as places for cars to drive and park, so they get hung up on “sharing the road,” but really the thing to do is shrinking the road and enhancing places for people.

Yes, this makes sense. Nobody is arguing to ride a bike 17 inches from a train (and the train can't swerve into you!), why would you want to do it with cars? Separate places for bikes and people make the most sense.

I was just in Amsterdam this past autumn. It was awesome how most streets have bike lanes that are at-grade with the sidewalk instead of at-grade with the street, and that everyone respects as being for cyclists and does not block.

You're underestimating some of the speeds involved though. People will bike at speeds that feel safe to them. There's bike lanes there that are long, straight, and that have people going much faster on them than anyone can run. Amsterdam is full of life-long cyclists; some of them go pretty fast when it's safe to do so. It was quite impressive seeing some of the people on the city-style bikes hauling ass, especially when they didn't look like you'd expect them to. I do that here in NYC too; no sense in making my commute take any longer than necessary. Although I'm generally on a road bike when doing so, not a city bike!

I cycle somewhere between 20 and 35 km/hour; that's faster than scooters and most electric bikes. It's way faster for me to cycle to the supermarket, the gym and the kids daycare compared to driving.

It beats being lazy in a car and I'm very thankful that the infrastructure here in NL supports it.

> I cycle somewhere between 20 and 35 km/hour; that's faster than scooters and most electric bikes.

This makes no sense. You can pedal an electric bike at least as fast if not faster than a regular bike.

Some e-bikes are speed limited to cut out the assist at a certain speed, but it doesn't mean it also removes your ability to pedal hard and achieve the same speed.

You could, but most e-bikers choose not to go too fast. Additionally, they often have thicker tires and enourage poor aerodynamic body positions which mean that they decelerate faster.

Most are either 60+ or are leisure cyclists. So they just doodle along at their 25km/h.

Proper road racing enthusiasts can average 35km/h including stops (the joys of a flat country).

They generally reduce their assist and completely cut out at 28 to 30km/hour, so to actually cycle 30km/hour takes as much effort as it would on a normal bicycle.

Most Dutch cycle at about 25km/hour (whether or not electric) - those cyclists that easily do 30 on normal city bikes are probably the last generation that will switch to e-bikes.

The electric assist on e-Citibikes here in NYC diminishes with speed and cuts out completely at around 15 mph. Above that speed they're just a heavier normal Citibike. I know because I've enjoyed pushing these things to their limits.

There are many different types of e-bikes, and you're probably thinking of what are effective electric mopeds, with big batteries and engines and a throttle control. Those certainly go very fast. They're also not legal in many places, including here in NYC, and aren't necessarily what people mean when they're talking about e-bikes; that's usually referring to pedal-assist.

I can keep up 28kmh all day comfortably on my road bike and I’m not that fit but that’s 8 kg of carbon fibre running on 21mm tyres at 120psi not your average commuter bike.

I ride much slower on mixed use paths or around pedestrians, me hitting someone at 32km/h is going to hurt both of us potentially badly.

Mixing cyclists and pedestrians causes a whole set of different problems (and injuries).

Some people ride slow, and some ride fast, and it's facetious to conclude that average biking speed is slow.

Also as a jogger, I wouldn't every try running on a busy sidewalk somewhere downtown, but I will need to bike home in rush hour.

Much easier to bike in rush hour as well. Lane splitting lets you beat traffic, and it's of course way easier to dodge a 5mph car in a lane versus a pedestrian wandering all over the sidewalk with zero situational awareness on their phone with headphones.

Nah, I find this to be is suicidal. Not to mention, that even when I get away with this kind of behaviour, the drivers stuck in traffic will be irritated by it and might not be as considerate to the next cyclist passing by.

I'd rather stay on the right, if traffic is too bad I would get off the bicycle and walk the intersection until traffic clears.

Lane splitting at more than a walking speed is quite dangerous and illegal where I live.

Yes, lane splitting is illegal where I live as well. And I think that's appropriate.

> Mixing cyclists and pedestrians causes a whole set of different problems (and injuries).

The other issue is that pedestrians do not typically follow traffic rules while walking. That is, they won't keep to one side of the path, they won't signal their intention to change direction in advance, etc. This makes it much more difficult to ride among them compared to riding in traffic where drivers do generally follow the rules.

>The thing about cycling is that it’s basically fast walking.

What does this mean? Why not slow motorcycles?

Cycling at 10mph at all times would feel pretty slow.

You won't find a cyclist who opposes dedicated, protected lanes that are separate from roads and sidewalks.

It is almost always the car drivers who don't want to sacrifice the single lane required to make a two way, protected bike lane. Case in point, Peachtree St in Atlanta ~3 years ago.

https://www.ajc.com/news/traffic/bike-lane-plan-for-peachtre...

https://www.ajc.com/news/local/bike-lanes-peachtree-road-for...

> You won't find a cyclist who opposes dedicated, protected lanes that are separate from roads and sidewalks.

"Vehicular cyclists" are opposed to bike lanes and are not uncommon. See elsewhere in this thread for discussion of them. I consider myself roughly 1/2 vehicular, 1/2 infrastructural. Both camps have good points.

I've seen vehicular cyclists have good points in theory, but in practice their results seem to be awful. Are there places practicing 'vehicular cycling' that have high rates of cycling and good levels of safety?

Infrastructural cyclists can point to the obvious success in the Netherlands and some other bike-friendly cities/countries, at least.

> but in practice their results seem to be awful

Do you have evidence for this or is it just an assertion?

I don't think there are rigorous scientific studies into vehicular or infrastructural cycling. If the infrastructural approach is more popular it's probably because many people seem to accept the infrastructural arguments uncritically. The vehicular camp makes excellent points that I believe have greatly improved my own safety.

One point that vehicular cyclists make is that many people seem to assume that certain practices are safer, but reality is more complicated. For example, riding on the sidewalk is generally considered to be considerably less safe than riding on the road, even by many infrastructural cyclists. But it seems that most people assume that it's more safe.

As a point in favor of vehicular cycling, it seems to me that vehicular cyclists are indeed safer riders than infrastructural. Some might say this is due to experience, but that seems to be a lot of what vehicular cycling is about so I'm not sure that's an argument against vehicular cycling.

Also, I don't think vehicular cyclists are very interested in increasing the number of cyclists. I think there are major benefits to increasing the number of cyclists, and I think the "safety in numbers" effect is the biggest benefit to an infrastructural approach.

In terms of policy, it's a lot easier to build some infrastructure than it is to train drivers and cyclists. So any apparent success of the infrastructure approach may be due solely to that. Also, as I've pointed out on HN here before, not all infrastructure is the same. Most that I see in the US is awful and I would not be surprised if they made cyclists less safe. It seems that infrastructure in some European cities fixes the problems I have.

Ultimately I think both the infrastructural and vehicular camps have good points, and the best policy is a hybrid of the two.

> Do you have evidence for this or is it just an assertion?

Well, for biking numbers, there are infrastructure-oriented places like the Netherlands with very high rates of biking. I'm not aware of anywhere comparable for vehicular cycling, at least in the developed world.

> Do you have evidence for this or is it just an assertion?

Places where vehicular cycling is more common like the US seem to have worse safety numbers. I think you're right though that there aren't any in-depth studies, or at least I haven't seen them.

Admittedly, to me it seems obvious that cars being separate from bikes will be safer for people on bikes than sharing the space. Just like how everyone would uncritically accept that walking on sidewalks is safer than walking in car lanes, because it just seems really obvious.

Granted, you're looking at it as a personal style, whereas I'm looking at it in terms of public policy: which one is safer for cyclists as a whole, which one encourages more cycling. If you're saying, "well vehicular cycling policy is great except for that part where it only works for a tiny % of the populace" then that by itself means it's kind of useless.

As I said, I can't recall vehicular cyclists claiming that vehicular cycling will increase the number of cyclists. So don't judge them on that. I think increasing the number of cyclists is important, however.

Also, I don't know any place where vehicular cycling is particularly common. It seems to be enthusiastically practiced by a relatively small group of people. As I said, though, those people are the safest cyclists I know. There's no evidence that their practices are detrimental to safety best I can tell. Their practices might seem counterintuitive, but they have good reasons for what they do.

> Admittedly, to me it seems obvious that cars being separate from bikes will be safer for people on bikes than sharing the space. Just like how everyone would uncritically accept that walking on sidewalks is safer than walking in car lanes, because it just seems really obvious.

Again, what seems obvious is not necessarily true. I recommend that you look at websites like this one: http://bicyclesafe.com/

The author of that site seems to be neither in favor of pure vehicular cycling or infrastructure, though I think he's more in favor of infrastructure than I am. You can look through the most common types of crashes and see that most infrastructure does little to nothing to address those problems. And dooring, for example, is unavoidable in some infrastructure.

The infrastructure approach seems to implicitly assume that most crashes (or perhaps the most severe crashes) are due to cars rear-ending cyclists, but that's not true. The vast majority are at intersections. A lot of infrastructure I've seen amplifies the intersection risk by, for example, making cyclists less visible by placing parked cars between the main traffic lane and the bike lane. Those arrangements absolutely increase the number of conflicts at intersections. Yet people keep promoting this sort of infrastructure. (Yes, infrastructure done well can help. See other comments in this thread for more information on that.)

> you're looking at it as a personal style

No, I'm interested in my personal safety and also public policy. I'm not opposed to all bike infrastructure, just bad infrastructure, which is the vast majority of what I've seen. Given the choice between no infrastructure, bad infrastructure, and good infrastructure, my choice is good infrastructure. Most people can't tell the difference between good and bad infrastructure.

Edit: I can see from your other posts that you live in Germany. The infrastructure you see is probably biased towards good. I live in the southern US, and the infrastructure I see (if it exists) is biased towards bad. Keep this in mind.

Getting more bikes on the road makes bicycling safer. Drivers in cars are much more careful when they see bikes everywhere than when they only see them once in a blue moon.

Unfortunately most people are not going to ride when they have to mix with cars. I'm willing to do it on low speed city streets, and in unprotected bike lanes at up to highway (55MPH) speeds when I have to, but the great majority of people won't, and won't allow their kids to do it either. Protected bike lanes are the gold standard, and that's what we should be aiming for.

> Getting more bikes on the road makes bicycling safer.

This is a really interesting point. One of the things about where I live that I think I've taken for granted is that biking is pretty common. Not as common as driving, but at any given time you are very likely to see at least one bike on the road.

And, in general, cars do keep an eye out for bikes -- and they even do things like slow down to make room for bikes when the road gets narrow.

> Getting more bikes on the road makes bicycling safer. Drivers in cars are much more careful when they see bikes everywhere than when they only see them once in a blue moon.

I'm aware of this, but the infrastructural camp tends to assume that it's obvious these effects outweigh the problems with infrastructure. I'm not certain. I think a hybrid between the vehicular and infrastructural approaches is necessary to get the benefits of both with minimal downsides. This means recognizing the problems with infrastructure and avoiding them.

> The infrastructure approach seems to implicitly assume that most crashes (or perhaps the most severe crashes) are due to cars rear-ending cyclists, but that's not true.

It does? I've never assumed that. When I got hit, once was being t-boned, the other was a right hook.

> I'm not opposed to all bike infrastructure, just bad infrastructure, which is the vast majority of what I've seen. Given the choice between no infrastructure, bad infrastructure, and good infrastructure, my choice is good infrastructure. Most people can't tell the difference between good and bad infrastructure.

> Edit: I can see from your other posts that you live in Germany. The infrastructure you see is probably biased towards good. I live in the southern US, and the infrastructure I see (if it exists) is biased towards bad. Keep this in mind.

I live in Germany right now, but I've lived in a handful of different parts of the US, most of which I biked in, including Alabama (not entirely by choice). You're right, biking in the South sucks. It sucks bad.

As you say, a lot of bike infrastructure is bad, but I'm not sure what that has to do with the discussion. If a city really half-asses its bus program so that it's nearly useless, we don't declare that the fault of public transportation generally. You get what you pay for and all.

> As you say, a lot of bike infrastructure is bad, but I'm not sure what that has to do with the discussion. If a city really half-asses its bus program so that it's nearly useless, we don't declare that the fault of public transportation generally. You get what you pay for and all.

I'm not anti-infrastructure. I'd consider myself about 1/2 vehicular, 1/2 infrastructural. (See my other posts in this thread; I've repeated this several times now.) Both sides have good points. The problem is that most infrastructure in the US is bad, often considerably worse than no infrastructure at all.

Atlanta is a great example of where it makes no sense to have bike lines. I lived in Atlanta for eight years. It’s a commuter city. The only people biking are relatively privileged yuppies living in the fancy new apartments and condos that have sprung up recently. Why spend public money, and inconvenience drivers in the process, for their sake?

If we’re going to use up a lane, let’s do it in a socially responsible way and make it a dedicated bus lane, which is what most people in need in Atlanta use to get around.

> Why spend public money, and inconvenience drivers in the process, for their sake?

Because the cyclists, too, are part of the public? It's not like that public money is solely sourced from automobile drivers. Many people I know who live and work and pay taxes in Atlanta cycle and drive, depending on where they're going. Are you really suggesting auto-drivers are more important citizens whose convenience matters more than the safety of others? Should Atlanta also start de-prioritizing safe sidewalks and crosswalks so people who are walking all over Midtown and downtown don't inconvenience the drivers? Suggesting the many people who aren't traveling along on 4 or more wheels should be ignored for the sake of convenience to those who are seems awfully silly.

I'm suggesting that it's not right to inconvenience the majority (drivers), for the sake of a relatively privileged minority (folks who can afford to live within cycling distance of their jobs downtown).

Before going too far down the road with this argument, you also need to figure out how many of those drivers would use something other than a car if it were feasible. The majority is not necessarily the majority by choice in this case.

It also is useful to bear in mind how small a slice of the larger society people who frequent HN represent.

It is easy to get carried away with these hyper arguments in favor of public transit, bicycling everywhere and for everyone, high density living and removing parking wherever possible.

It is helpful to bear in mind that just because a small canal-ridden city of 800,000 people ( Amsterdam has an area of 85 square miles while even NYC is 302 and Chicago is 234 ) has a high density of cyclists doesn't mean we shape policy for much of the Western world based on that small city of homogeneous people with homogeneous values and neighborhoods.

> you also need to figure out how many of those drivers would use something other than a car if it were feasible.

The one thing that debunks that argument is the fact that people aren't replacing their cars with motorcycles.

  Because the cyclists, too, are part of the
  public? It's not like that public money is
  solely sourced from automobile drivers.

Then, would you be not opposed to requiring bicycles to be registered, bicyclists to be licensed & taxed just like cars & vehicular traffic does?

If you want a lane all to yourself isn't only fair that you pay your fair share toward the building, maintenance and repair of the lanes? Why should you get to use them free of cost?

We do pay our fair share, over half of the road funding in Georgia comes from general revenue, i.e. taxes everyone pays regardless of vehicle.

Don't act like my bike puts as much wear and tear on the road as your 3 ton SUV or the 18-wheelers and delivery trucks.

You are delusional, as a car driver you are using trillions of dollars of infrastructure paid for by cyclists. When are you going to start paying for what you use? That is why I love toll roads so much, for once car drivers almost pay their way. You still don't pay for the pollution you cause, or the damage to do killing people.

Assuming people who bike to work are rich is ridiculous, you will see plenty of working class folks using a bike to get to their destination in this city.

Poor people ride bikes at much higher rates than rich people. Keeping a car is expensive, and especially expensive for the poor.

> The only people biking are relatively privileged yuppies living in the fancy new apartments and condos that have sprung up recently.

Not true in Houston, which is pretty much the same. (I couldn't find data for Atlanta, unfortunately.) https://kinder.rice.edu/sites/g/files/bxs1676/f/files/2015/1...

Interesting data point. Doesn't match my experience from Atlanta and D.C., but maybe I'm not looking for cyclists in the right places.

In the city where I live, there are one-way lanes on either side of many largeish streets. Even so, every day you can expect to see people riding the wrong way in them. It's dangerous, and unnecessarily so.

I won't go so far as to say that I'm opposed to them outright, but when there's a choice between a street with a protected lane and a quiet street without one that runs parallel, I'll almost always choose the street without.

Interestingly enough there has been some evidence that driving on the street is safer than using the bicycle lanes in cities that have a flawed integration of these lanes.

It all boils down to the parts where these lanes intersect with car traffic. There is no use in adding a few lanes here and there, you need to have a concept and micromanage every intersection between cars and cyclists to get something that really pays off. Often this is prevented by the unwillingness of motorists to loose space to park or drive on and this results in pseudo-solutions that are more dangerous than having all cyclists using the middle of the road.

My city has been doing half-ass cycling infrastructure implementations going back to the late 70s. Which each different era there were different designs and concepts. The network is patchwork and lanes stop and start arbitrarily. Intersections are more hazardous because drivers don't know what to expect. Road construction when bike lanes seems to get more hazardous. Often it's not clear what rules you should be obeying, like it's not clear if you should be acting like a pedestrian, a bicycle, or if you're vehicular traffic.

Our city implemented a pretty solid network of dedicated lanes downtown a couple years ago, much to the chagrin of angry drivers and the main benefit isn't the real estate that was given to cyclists so much as it is the real estate that was taken from cars. There's just less traffic, drivers are more attentive because they have more hazards to deal with, and they're moving slower. The traffic calming effect is, for me, the main benefit to having dedicated bike lanes.

This is what you actually see in The Netherlands.

Huh? In the city center, speeds are greatly reduced for cars and bikes, but getting between metropolitan areas, both speeds can climb. You do know there's a whole bike highway system in the Netherlands, right?

I think the, "bikes as fast pedestrians" model is a bit outdated. I don't want to be seen as a very fast person on foot, while on my bike. I can hit 30+mph in a sprint, and go many hundreds of miles in a week.

I think the comparison was about personal safety in the event of a collision, not a slight at your cycling ability.

A cyclist, particularly on a heavy bike, going even 10-15 mph is pretty dangerous for an unaware pedestrian. When people collide on foot at walking pace, it's not too bad.

I think average is closer to 12mph, at least according to google maps. I definitely could haul ass and go nearly twice that fast, but when I'm riding to go someplace and not to burn calories, the last thing I want to do is ride at a pace that's going to make me sweaty.

and it's so much less ugly than these protective barriers

> The thing about cycling is that it’s basically fast walking.

My commute while I take the kids to the daycare in a trailer takes me about 20 minutes one way. My ride to work takes me another 6 minutes. If I walked the same route, it would take me over an hour to get to daycare and another 30 minutes to get to work from there.

Bicyclists are not fast pedestrians. They're riding on vehicles that have similar dynamics to any other 2 wheeled vehicle like a moped or motorcycle. The only difference is that they're slower, but when going downhill, they can easily match motorized traffic speeds with little effort (I've managed to get up to 35 mph going down some steep grades).

Infrastructure designed for pedestrian speeds is not really suited for cyclists who ride for transportation.

How about elevating those public spaces up two floors and leaving all of the level beneath to motorized transport (preferably electric only)?

The safest engineering solution is to separate heavy motorized vehicles from human scale things.

Cars crashing into supporting pillars might create a disaster for the people above. And it's also a lot more expensive.

Crashes in to and over 'barriers' can already happen. If you want to provide safety against that you really should have pedestrian only paths.

The way to get THAT inside of major cities involves lots of adapter IO at the edge of the city, and a much more (Azimov's) Cave of Steel like transit infrastructure inside.

It's not though. 10mph is on the slow side for a bike. Also a 6 minute mile is an accomplishment not a quick jog.

Interesting. In my town, it's illegal to ride your bike on the sidewalk. And on a straightaway, most bikes are going substantially faster than people can walk.

I just checked my bike computer, and it tells me that my average speed is around 10 MPH, which means that roughly half the time I'm going faster than that.

Sounds good to me, as long as cyclists follow the same rules drivers do. Just yesterday I had a cyclist blatantly roll a stop sign on a side street, entering the main road I was on. If I was an inattentive driver I would have creamed him! He even looked to the left, saw me, and just kept rolling through!

I see car drivers roll stop signs every day, multiple times a day. Sounds like the cyclists are doing just as good of a job at following the rules.

Rolling a stop sign (regardless of how many wheels you have) can be perfectly safe or stupidly dangerous and requires discretion. I'm not going to fault anyone for doing it in the abstract.

But do you roll a stop sign when a car is literally about to slam in to you if you continue into the intersection? No. Yet that's what the guy did.

The difference is that in the car all you do is press brake & gas, cycling requires some physical work to start up again.

I know it's breaking the law, and I don't usually do it, but when I cycle on a quiet residential street, I'm going to roll a stop sign. I know it's bad, but at that point I'm going home and I feel tired.

Yeah my rule of thumb while cycling is, if it's an empty street i'll slow down so i can scan the other 3 sides and if it's completely empty i'll roll the stop sign. If there is a car/pedestrian, i'll come to a complete stop.

I feel like I would be a lot more frightened of getting hit by cross traffic (with right-of-way) in the rare case where one mis-judges whether cross traffic exists. I've had enough close calls (or times when I mis-judged whether someone was going to blow a red light/stop sign) when driving a car that I feel like doing rolling stops on a bike is nearly suicidal.

Rolling a stop sign (slowly, if there's no one at the intersection) is safer on a bike than stopping. In SF the Board of Supervisors voted to make it legal, but the mayor vetoed it.

They're considering changing the law in my state along these lines -- to allow bikes to treat stop signs as yield signs. I'm ambivalent about it, personally.

However, in the story that abstractbarista tells, that bicyclist didn't even treat the stop sign as a yield.

Sounds like the cyclist properly judged the danger for himself, and his judgement was correct, because he's still alive.

When riding a bicycle, you often choose to endanger your own life and break the law in order to be less of an obstacle to motorists -- motorists, who in turn, almost certainly curse under their breath about how you should just obey the rules. Aggro assholes are gonna be aggro assholes.

Heh it'll work until someone on their phone doesn't even see them. In my case, I had to swerve left of center while blaring the horn. The guy rolled the sign >15mph.

> his judgement was correct, because he's still alive.

That's faulty reasoning. His judgement could have been completely wrong, and he just got lucky this time.

> When riding a bicycle, you often choose to endanger your own life and break the law in order to be less of an obstacle to motorists

I don't. The only time I would choose to endanger my own life on my bike is if the alternative is endangering someone else's life.

Cycling on the street is taking your life into your own hands. I avoid it whenever I can. Sidewalks are usually empty where I live.

Some places have a great network of bike and walk trails. I think this is the only viable option: roads or other paved surfaces where automobiles are not allowed.

What you did was perfectly legal, and I assume that your state, like mine, has a law about stopping for pedestrians in the crosswalk. I feel the need to ask though why the race of the man who yelled at you bears mentioning?

Why do you find it worth asking why I mentioned his race?

There is certainly a strong relationship among perceived entitlement/privilege, apparent race and ethnicity, and apparent gender. I shouldn't need to explain this.

I asked because it changed the timbre of your anecdote from one of cars vs. bikes to one of race vs. race. Was this person yelling at you because you're on a bike, or because of your apparent race?

The simple answer is bikes and cars should never share the same infrastructure. They'll never get along with each other and the bike loses every time. It also doesn't help that bikers don't follow the laws properly. Bikers have to pay attention more than drivers, they should act like it

I don't know the statistics for the US, but here in Germany 75% of the accidents between cyclists are cars are caused by the car.

I drive a car now and then in Cambridge and Boston, and I have to be constantly on a lookout for misbehaving cyclists. It's like most of cyclists are not even familiar with basic traffic regulations. If I was not paying extra attention, and was simply following traffic regulations on my end, I would be involved in more that a few car/bicycle accident.

I'm sure you'd say the same about cars if you were a cyclist. Both bicycles and cars are driven by humans and they generally don't give a damn about the rules unless they benefit personally. The difference is that cyclists usually endanger themselves, while motorists endanger others.

I know that an anecdote is not data, but the only time I've been in an accident with a car, it was because the car ran a stop sign, causing me to slam into the side of it.

And yes, I was seriously hurt.

> "I hope you get hit!"

This is one thing I will never be able to wrap my head around - why would a human being say something like this to a fellow human?

In my experience this comment brings together a few things:

1. Many drivers just have no respect for "Share the Road" and specifically no respect for cyclists

2. This type of "speak your mind" attitude is very New England and specifically Boston (and suburbs).

3. Just speaks to the need to accelerate bike access and harmonize/integrate more with infrastructure.

This news is a good step forward...

why would a human being say something like this to a fellow human?

Cars seem to act as a stress multiplier.

> > "I hope you get hit!"

> This is one thing I will never be able to wrap my head around - why would a human being say something like this to a fellow human?

Because he was frustrated and angry about something else that he has no power to affect (possibly the traffic that he was stuck in) and misdirected his energy at an accessible target to alleviate some psychic pressure.

Fun fact: 49% of non-cyclists think people who ride bikes are less than human: https://usa.streetsblog.org/2019/03/28/study-aggressive-driv...

> why would a human being say something like this to a fellow human?

Because what they see isn't a human, it's an obstacle.

I lived in Boston/Cambridge/Somerville/JP/Brighton etc etc for nearly a decade from mid 90's to early 2000's, half of it as a bike messenger and lived all you describe daily, 365. Hundreds of accounts in that time that do not paint a very warm picture of American "city" living during this era. For every stupid thing someone has done to or near me in a car I have seen an equally shocking occurrence on a bike. Maybe not daily but hooo boy, people are always stupid traveling in any mode of transportation. I don't think anything will change re: bike barriers unless the auto is completely removed from the picture like in various EU cities. EVEN THEN, people will still people on bikes. Count on it...

>I have seen an equally shocking occurrence on a bike.

Yes, as a pedestrian in C in the 60's i was hit by a Cliffe on a bike ... going the wrong way on a one-way street, mind you. We, as a species, need to integrate more with others: We are not our bodies etc, we are the world

Just look at the image used in article; clowntown wearing flip-flops riding in the rain on the Esplanade but with a helmet on no less. Get that man to city streets, he's ready!

Well at least you didn't get "coal rolled": https://www.reddit.com/r/bicycling/comments/9b16vl/a_truck_c...

I don't think I've ever seen anyone 'rolling coal' in Cambridge. I can't imagine the cops around here would let anybody blow out that kind of smog under any circumstances without giving them a ticket.

Under the law, the cops have the authority to impound the truck. I would bet fair money that the first moron to try rolling coal in Boston or Cambridge will also be the last.

And as I know from when the state stopped sending out registration expiration reminders to 'save money,' Cambridge Police do not hesitate to impound everybody they possibly can.

a white man in a mid-size SUV leaned out his window and said loudly to me, "I hope you get hit!"

My usual retort to this, as the cyclist:

"I hope you find true Love!"

One only hurts for a while.

I cycle with a helmet cam, and I typically inform the driver that they are being recorded. While I haven't done a scientific study, I believe this causes some drivers to restrain themselves.

I've only recently installed cams (front and back) on my bike. I hadn't felt the need, but a couple of weeks ago a friend of mine was pelted with eggs while he was riding.

I decided that being able to gather evidence and, if lucky, license plate numbers, is not the worst idea.

How many people commute by bike in Cambridge versus by car? And what’s the cost of inconveniencing all those drivers by having bikes buzzing around?

If almost all commuters are car drivers, then there won't be many bikes buzzing around inconveniencing them. And if there are enough bikes to inconvenience the drivers, then there are enough to justify investing in their own infrastructure.

Actually the City of Cambridge installed a bike counter on one of the main thoroughfares toward one of the bridges over the Charles River into Boston. There are more than 1000 trips in each direction on a weekday.

https://pb.cambridgema.gov/pb4bikecounter

That's kind of cool! At a glance, also kind of expensive at $90,000 for 3! A quick search shows the hardware costing around $5,000 each.

Traffic congestion and inconvenience are caused by cars in vast disproportion to bikes. The sheer volume of car traffic is the primary predictor of congestion.

> "I hope you get hit!"

This, to me, signals the general attitude people have towards bicyclists in the US. The average person either doesn't care or, for some misguided reason or another, actively hates bicyclists. I've been yelled at by drivers for no apparent reason so many times I've lost count. I've had so many friends hit by cars. My partner was struck by a car last fall and broke her leg in two places. She's still recovering and frequently has to lie down for hours because her leg is so sore. Just the other day a friend of mine was struck and had to get stitches in her face.

I think the problem here is a mixture of infrastructure and attitude. The infrastructure side of things is usually what we talk about, which is obviously an important part of the discussion, but I don't think the problem with peoples' overall attitude towards bicycling gets enough attention. There are so many people out there who legitimately wish to harm bicyclists. Don't take my word for it, in 2016 a driver purposely murdered 5 bicyclists (in an area close to where I live, no less) with his vehicle and was sentenced in 2018[1]. Although most are likely accidents, there are other examples of drivers purposefully striking bicyclists with their vehicles if you look.

It's really sad, I think it's a symptom of something a lot more sinister happening to the hearts and minds of people in this country, and it's why I no longer ride my bike in the city anymore.

[1] https://www.mlive.com/news/kalamazoo/2018/05/charles_pickett...

> This, to me, signals the general attitude people have towards bicyclists in the US. The average person either doesn't care or, for some misguided reason or another, actively hates bicyclists. I've been yelled at by drivers for no apparent reason so many times I've lost count.

My experience as a pedestrian (I don't ride a bike on the street so I can't speak to that experience) mirrors this. More than once, I've been honked or yelled at for being in an actual, marked crosswalk, crossing the street. (Never mind all of the driver complaints about my use of legal, unmarked crosswalks.)

On a former commute, I regularly got off the bus at a bus stop immediately adjacent to a signaled crosswalk that several of us used. We regularly got honked at by drivers bringing their cars to a screeching halt as the light changed and, once on a holiday, when it was just me and my kid, a driver yelled "if you weren't so fucking poor you wouldn't have to ride the bus!"

> It's really sad, I think it's a symptom of something a lot more sinister happening to the hearts and minds of people in this country

Agreed, and I live in a city where ways of getting to work and around town that aren't a single-occupant vehicle are now in the cumulative majority yet the pushback has increased even more. People regularly write letters to the local paper about how they "openly" use the bus and bike lanes for their cars because "[screw] those entitled people."

I hold a driving license and, until recently, owned a car that I regularly used. This behavior ought to be unacceptable and more actively enforced against but I can only imagine the uproar if an even light "crackdown" happened.

> "if you weren't so fucking poor you wouldn't have to ride the bus!"

I honestly think this is a huge factor in violence against cyclists & pedestrians. Drivers think you're automatically beneath them in the societal pecking order if you're walking or biking, so they feel justified or entitled to victimize you.

People do similar shit to other people who they perceive to be poor, such as homeless, maids, delivery drivers, etc.

Yes, it's very interesting. I moved to a city (in the US) where driving a car is actually unnecessary, so I sold mine and ride a bike as my primary transportation. I am so happy to not have to deal with car ownership -- it's improved my life tremendously.

Although I haven't been subjected to any abuse about it, more than once I have had people make comments about when I'll be able to buy a car, as if finances are why I don't have one. The funny thing is that my income is in the top 5% of the area, and I have enough liquid cash right now to buy almost any car I want outright. I just don't want one.

People make weird assumptions.

Same boat, I could go buy a car in cash tomorrow but I don’t have a drivers license.

People react with incredulity when I tell them I don’t have a car.

I live a 15 minute walk from the center of town and work and the UK has reasonable bus service in most towns so why would I spend thousands on a car and hundreds a month to park a vehicle I never use outside my house.

I cycle for fitness and pleasure though and most car drivers are lovely but we do have the odd dickhead as well.

Do you have children? I've noticed having a family had impacted my cycling lifestyle tremendously.

Not the OP, but I have 7yo and 3yo kids and don't have a license. For as long as we lived in Europe (UK, Belgium and Czech Republic) I felt little need for it - bikes + child trailer served us well most of the time, and we took trains for longer journeys. Now that we moved to New Zealand I'm working on getting a license because while public transport is passable (but far from great) in Auckland, you really do need a car to get the most out of the rest of this beautiful country.

Fwiw, I bike to work in Cambridge and take my kids to school by bike on the way. It's by far the most consistent way to get to pickup on time. We bike through winter and wet weather.

Negatives? My wife doesn't feel comfortable riding the big bike with kids and there's only one bike with two seats. If the big bike goes into the shop, things get complicated but the same would go for a car-based commute.

This is likely part of it. Particularly for pedestrians. But for cyclists, I don't think that explains it.

It boils down to the fact that cyclists are unusual in most places in the US, and people are impatient and don't like dealing with things that are out of the ordinary.

But there's also just something dehumanizing about driving cars, which causes aggression. Road rage against other drivers is nearly as big of an issue as the issue of hatred towards cyclists.

Of course, even pedestrians get angry at slow walkers, but when they do so they aren't in command of multiple tons of metal that can move at high velocities.

The only place I would cycle regularly is the Netherlands, because of the infrastructure and the attitude of drivers.

In the US, I have heard that the statistics around biking to work every day is that the median lifespan is higher, but the variability is much higher.

I barely feel safe around other drivers when I'm in my own car, a marvel of technology designed to keep me safe.

> The only place I would cycle regularly is the Netherlands, because of the infrastructure and the attitude of drivers.

There are parts of the US where the infrastructure and attitude isn't so bad. Not as good as much of Europe, but good enough to make it OK. This is extremely variable, though. I've seen many parts of the nation where I wouldn't dare to bike.

Where I live, for instance, there is a law that requires a percentage of all road funds to be used for bicycle infrastructure. As a result, there is quite a lot of well maintained bike paths that are completely separate from the streets. About 2/3rd of my daily commute route is physically separated from road traffic -- to the point where the only time I even see a car is when they're going across an overpass of the bike path.

My favorite is when they're freaks about safety and try to be altruistic (ex: "where's your helmet?")...

...by slowing down, driving on your shoulder, and screaming at you.

Had someone do this at an exit to the freeway once. I had to stop and walk across.

I don't think people doing that are trying to be altruistic. They're trying to engage in harassment.

It's easier to change infrastructure to be pro-cycling than it is to change the culture. I'll take mindful drivers over protected bike lanes, any day. The only protected lane in my town (Madison) is one that goes against traffic. Drivers here are generally aware and accommodating when it comes to cyclists. I feel safer biking here (snow and all) than any other city I've lived in.

Man, that lane gave me the willies, first time I rode on it. ;-) But I agree about Madison. One other thing I've noticed is that here's also much less of a car culture. For instance it seems that people are outraged if their work commute is more than 10 minutes. And you don't see as many of the giant cars, SUV's, pickup trucks, etc.

One thing that may help is that a number of large employers are all concentrated near the center of town: Government offices, the university, and the hospitals. This makes it desirable to live within the city limits, but also to look for alternatives to the relatively expensive and inconvenient parking lots.

> One other thing I've noticed is that here's also much less of a car culture.

I think a big factor is the lack of freeways in downtown Madison (not sure if this was intentional or a byproduct of the isthmus + Capitol Square). A lot of people attribute Vancouver's success with alternative transportation to a 1960's decision against urban freeways. Without the option of a freeway, incentives and cultural attitudes are more aligned toward biking, busing, etc.

My guess is that the driver had been yelled at by a biker in the past. I've seen bikers chew out drivers, or yell profanities many times in SF. They sometimes/usually have a good reason to do so, but that kind of behavior just breeds contempt and animosity between the two groups.

I think that's reasonable and sometimes find myself in that group. Instead of yelling what do you think the is the best way to handle a driver intentionally running you off the road?

Take out their valve cores once they park? :)

I wouldn't hesitate to note their license plate # and report them to the police. It may not help, but it might -- particularly if more than one person reports the same car over time.

Yeah, sometimes they have. Once riding around a bike near Powell street in SF in a bike lane with 10 mph limit. A car approached me from behind. Initially it was probably at 40 mph but it slowed down as it came near me. But it was scary as hell as you have inherent assumptions when you are in a bike lane.

Ok, I'll say it - bicyclists tend to annoy me. Obviously, I don't shout at them, or try to hit them, or make them think I'm trying to hit them. That's nuts. That seems like a problem separate for bike/car relations. I doubt someone who behaves that way in a car gets out of it and suddenly becomes a calm and reasonable person.

But here's my assessment of why bikes annoy me. Not argument that they should, just some introspection.

* They make me nervous. Cars are easy to see, have lots of momentum to overcome, and generally exist on a predictable well defined plane. Bikes are different. They can enter the car plane from places I don't expect and didn't even realize existed. They can make 90 degree turns on a dime (relative to my sedan) and can stop in inches. They don't generally obey traffic lights, stop signs, one ways, or any of the other rules that lend predictability to car behavior. They don't have brake lights or signals. And in a complex driving environment, they're tiny and often poorly lit. They also have no protection. Slow moving car crashes aka "fender benders" are expensive and annoying, but rarely dangerous. Similar accidents involving a bike can end lives. Having a bike near me makes me worried I'm going to hit it. I don't want to live with that so I give it huge space and pay it lots of attention. If I could drive on roads that didn't have bikes I'd prefer it.

* Civic disagreement. The arguments in favor of making roads more bike friendly are generally: more healthy, more space efficient, more environmentally friendly. I agree on healthy and environmentally friendly. Though, it does seem odd when someone tells me biking is super healthy and super dangerous in the same sentence, but I cede the point. Space efficient? Yes and no. It is more space efficient for people whose options are bike vs car to ride a bike, but there's tons of people that doesn't apply to - people who live far away, people who need to haul things, people who have health issues, people who are too young etc. Also, lots of people don't want to bike in heat, rain, snow, etc. Also, not everyone has a place to change and shower when they get to work. The shower issue and the distance issue disproportionately impact people who are less well off. I get that biking can be part of the solution, but man does it get over hyped.

* Guilt/jealousy. I really enjoy biking! If I'm in my car and you're on your bike - I'm pretty sure you're having more fun than I am, and that makes me jealous. Then I start asking myself why I'm not biking, and sometimes the answer makes me feel guilty. Neither of those emotions often get followed up with - let's arrange it so I can experience more of this.

> Having a bike near me makes me worried I'm going to hit it. I don't want to live with that so I give it huge space and pay it lots of attention.

As a four season bike commuter (8km each way) and sole wage earner for my single/low-car family, I wish more drivers had this attitude. It sucks that you feel bad and see this as a hardship, but I can assure you that it's far better for the people bicycles with whom you share the road.

> If I could drive on roads that didn't have bikes I'd prefer it.

Thank goodness then for interchange access highways, a car-only environment just for you and other like-minded people. :)

I am a cycle commuter since I am ~10. I grew up on the countryside and because my parents couldn't bring me to school every day and the walking distance to the next bus stop was too far I ended up taking the bike every day and it sort of became a habit. Now I live in a city where I take the bike because on my daily route it is ~10 minutes faster than the metro.

A few points: You mentioned that cyclists make you nervous, which I understand. When I drive the car, I am watching for cyclists too. But because I am cycling I know very well what to watch for – and to be honest, if some suicidal lunatic shows up in the wrong moment, there is nothing you can do except checking carefully anyways. This is a problem of the cities, where many cyclists are people without a drivers license, and they behave as such. Beeing in traffic is about communicating, and it is hard to communicate if you don't even know if there is somebody to communicate with.

So the problem is exactly where cyclists and motorists intersect. Because cyclists often cannot put themselves into a motorists mind and vice versa.

One solutions that doesn't involve educating either side is building infrastructure that makes the intersecting spaces of cyclists and motorists as controlled and perceptually simple as possible. If you ever had the chance to drive a car and a bike in Denmark or the Netherlands, you will notice how less stressful it is to move in public, because they really put thought into lifting that stress from the users of the infrastructure. This means investing into cycling infrastructure is good, as long as you see the whole thing and not just slap some bicycle lane somewhere besides a parking street. If this is done right, everybody can benefit, especially from less cognitive overload.

>Space efficient? Yes and no. It is more space efficient for people whose options are bike vs car to ride a bike

Those people would be in cars or on busses if the infrastructure made the commute only feasible by vehicle. Bikes are denser than cars. Moving commuters to denser forms of travel increases the bandwidth of the pipes they're on. Meaning more space for you, too.

Even though the active risks appear greater, statistically it's still safer to ride a bike than to be in a car (plenty of localized exceptions, of course).

One of the best ways to increase the safety for everyone, and to make drivers less nervous, is just to slow the cars down. Speed is a major factor in crashes, injuries, and fatalities. If the cars and bikes are traveling at similar speeds, they are able to co-operate much more in their use of the road.

Traffic calming works wonders, that's how the Netherlands for example moved from a car-centric road system similar to the USA to the bike-heaven it is today, just a slow, steady stream of infrastructure changes to slow down drivers and improve the safety of people riding bikes.

e-bikes are also changing the game when it comes to cycling longer distances. They are still far, far cheaper than owning a car. I always find it strange when economically disadvantaged people are brought up as a reason to favor cars, they are the people that can least afford them.

> generally exist on a predictable well defined plane

Protected bike lanes/paths mostly solves this problem.

Cyclists aren't unpredictable because they want to be, it's because the system is not set up well for bikes at all. Sometimes it's actively hostile to bikes.

> Space efficient? Yes and no. It is more space efficient for people whose options are bike vs car to ride a bike, but there's tons of people that doesn't apply to - people who live far away, people who need to haul things, people who have health issues, people who are too young etc.

There's multiple problems to unpack here:

* You'd be surprised how accessible biking actually is, with good infrastructure. There's hardly anyone in Munich that falls under the "too young to bike" bracket, I see even three year olds on their balance bikes around, and of course it's common for parents to have toddlers on their bikes. Plenty of elderly people too. And with electric bikes and handicap-friendly bikes around, people who can bike comprise the overwhelming majority.

* There's still some fraction who cannot bike, true, but the same is true of stairs, and yet this doesn't make us stop building stairs. We just also build ramps and elevators. Nobody's suggesting replacing all car lanes with bike lanes.

* If you replace car lanes with bike lanes for those who can bike, the people who cannot can simply...continue driving, because many people who would otherwise be in car lanes taking up space have shifted over to a more space-efficient mode. In theory, this can actually free up space in the remaining car lanes.

Some roads around me are positively lethal on a bike, I sometimes jump off and walk across because it’s not worth the risk to me or anyone else, annoying but worth it.

I consider this one of the big advantages to riding a bike: I can dismount and become a pedestrian almost instantly!

Bit harder for me as I ride with clipless pedals so I waddle like a duck when using cycling shoes.

I think next time I'll look at MTB style where the clip is recessed so you can walk normally off the bike.

Makes sense. I tried using cycling shoes, but I found them really inconvenient and annoying, so I just use regular pedals & shoes. Still clipless, though.

> They can enter the car plane from places I don't expect and didn't even realize existed

That's a problem with cyclists who don't follow the rules of the road for drivers of vehicles. When I cycle, I will check my mirror and signal prior to changing lanes. I'll only make left turns from the left lane and right turns from the right lane. I won't pass right turning cars on the right or left turning cars on the left.

> and can stop in inches

Not really. The contact patch is much smaller and most of the weight shifts to the front under hard braking. Cars, with their suspensions and ABS systems can stop as fast or even faster than a cyclist with excellent bike handling skills. The average cyclist will take longer to come to a stop from the same speed when compared to a motorist.

> They don't generally obey traffic lights, stop signs, one ways, or any of the other rules that lend predictability to car behavior.

That's a problem with the cyclists. There are cyclists who do obey the rules of the road for drivers of vehicles.

> They don't have brake lights or signals

You can get them aftermarket and good ones at that if you're willing to spend the money. It's unfortunate that headlamps and taillamps are not mandated as standard equipment on bicycles. You can thank the Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC) which advocated for an all reflector standard over a combination standard of reflectors and lights.

> They also have no protection.

Car drivers don't have much protection relative to tractor-trailers and buses, yet people drive their cars amongst those much heavier vehicles all the time.

> That's a problem with cyclists who don't follow the rules of the road for drivers of vehicles.

Yes. As someone who bicycles as my primary transportation, I get really angry with other bicyclists who don't follow the rules. A couple of times I've even shouted "you're why drivers hate bikes!"

Here's the thing -- where I live, the police used to enforce traffic laws against bikes to the same degree as against cars. It wasn't unusual to see a bike pulled over and getting a ticket -- but the majority of bicyclists were very well behaved, and there was little animosity from drivers.

At some point, that changed and cops started ignoring bicyclists who broke traffic laws. Now, you see bad bicyclists all the time, and the level of animosity from cars is noticeably increasing.

I wish the cops would go back to the enforcing the laws.

On average I get more annoyed with other cyclists than drivers, no turn signals, running traffic lights, riding without lights at night in dark clothing on a black bike, curb jumping, riding on busy pavements, not signalling turns etc.

I’m fully in favour of the police cracking down on cyclists for not following the rules.

Cars, with their suspensions and ABS systems can stop as fast or even faster than a cyclist with excellent bike handling skills. The average cyclist will take longer to come to a stop from the same speed when compared to a motorist.

I don't have "excellent skills", but I personally have stopped a bike that was moving ~12 MPH quickly enough to not hit a child who jumped out from between parked cars. In a car, I would have killed her. I didn't stay on the bike, and it picked up some scuffs from the pavement, but then again child still alive.

> They make me nervous.

I understand this. I try to make sure I don't make drivers overly nervous in two main ways.

I try to adhere to the first rule of the road (applies equally to cars, bikes, pedestrians, etc.): never do anything unexpected.

The second is that, when I'm biking on the street and have to move toward the center of the road (to go around parked cars, for instance), I'll actually stop and let any cars behind me go ahead. As soon as I put my foot on the ground, cars know they have nothing to fear from me.

> never do anything unexpected

> I'll actually stop and let any cars behind me go ahead. As soon as I put my foot on the ground, cars know they have nothing to fear from me.

Contradiction!

Whatever's wrong with signalling, pausing to see if the driver's going to obey the highway code, or accelerate to overtake, and then moving into the road?

I don't think it's a contradiction, really. I'm engaging in precisely the same behavior as cars do when they're parking behind another car.

What I'm not doing is coming to a stop in front of vehicles that are expecting to keep moving. And I do signal.

All that said, I did state that I try to do nothing unexpected. It's not always possible (and I also don't always know what others on the road are expecting).

> Whatever's wrong with signalling[...]

Nothing, and that's what I do if it's not possible to safely pull over and allow the cars to go by. But I also know from personal experience that drivers really hate it if they have to slow down because a bike is in front of them, so I'm trying to keep them happy.

>Space efficient? Yes and no. It is more space efficient for people whose options are bike vs car to ride a bike, but there's tons of people that doesn't apply to

And those people can continue using roads. Nobody is asking for a nationwide ban of all cars. We just want to make bicycles a safe option. That means less cars on the road, which is better for everybody.

I suspect this is where some of the bike-hatred comes from. People are afraid that somebody is trying to take their car away from them.

Outside of the small percentage of fanatics that you find in any group, I don't know any bicyclists who want to take people's cars away.

I know that I don't. I don't even think less of people who drive. I just want to be able to use the transportation methods that suits me best, just like they do.

I think you've got it backwards, cars aren't easy to see, they're hard to see out of. There is no blindspot for a cyclist or pedestrian.

I’m not sure how broadly this generalizes. Having lived in 7 different regions in the US I would say 4 were cycling-friendly and 3 were cycling-hostile.

I would never yell at a bicyclist, and certainly would never hope one got hit. But I have to say, as an NYC pedestrian, I actively hate bicyclists.

They don't follow the rules of the road--at all. Red lights? Stop signs? Ignored. Pedestrians crossing in a crosswalk? Probably fine to whiz past them with 6 inches to spare.

I almost get hit by fast-moving bikes once or twice a year. A car has never even come close to hitting me in eight years. Not even those crazy taxi drivers.

I have no idea what possesses these people to blast through a red light, into a busy intersection, without slowing down or even looking, but they do it!

It has always seemed to me that bicyclists see something "different" about their mode of transportation that exempts them from most traffic laws. And the crazy thing is that they keep asking for more bike lanes.

(I'm not accusing you of being this way. But I think this may be the reason lots of people have a hatred of bicyclists. I know many people in the city who feel the same way I do.)

Part of the problem certainly is impedence mismatch-different flows in a shared path. The solution to this part is infrastructure.

We also greatly need better awareness and it goes all ways. When learning to ride a motorcycle I learned how bad a pedestrian I was.

Bikes and cars have very different situational awareness, mass, agility, stopping distance, etc. It would be very surprising if the optimal rules for both were exactly the same.

I feel the same way here in DC. Both as a pedestrian and as a driver. (For example, the other day my wife and I were trying to cross a street and nearly got hit by a bicyclist going the wrong way in the lane. Of course, I was looking for cars following the rules and didn’t think to look for a bicycle coming from the other direction.)

As a former NYC cyclist, I can say that your accusations are patently absurd. First, if cyclists blasted through red lights without looking we would all get hit by cars within a few intersections. Second, of course cars have come close to hitting you. It's New York. That's how they drive there. It is always jarring to hear what I anecdotally believe to be a minority of pedestrians who actually believe that cyclists are in any way, shape, or form more of a threat to their safety than motor vehicles. Luckily for us all, NYC is getting more and more friendly to cycling, though it still does have a long way to go.

> if cyclists blasted through red lights without looking we would all get hit by cars within a few intersections

It is left up to the drivers and pedestrians to get out of the bicyclists' way and avoid collisions.

> of course cars have come close to hitting you

Not in my personal experience. One example is what happens when there is a red light and I have the cross signal. If I see only cars I will begin crossing, because the cars typically have already started to slow down well before the light so I know they will stop. If I see a bike I will typically wait for it to pass. And sure enough, most of the time the bike will continue through the red light.

Another example is when the light is green, and there is traffic taking a left turn into a crosswalk which has the cross signal. Cars go so slow to the point that they stop several times before completing the turn. Bikes just make the turn at full or maybe half speed, and sometimes ring their bell. Scenarios like this are what have caused most of my near-collisions. There's no chance of seeing them coming.

> It is always jarring to hear what I anecdotally believe to be a minority of pedestrians who actually believe that cyclists are in any way, shape, or form more of a threat to their safety than motor vehicles.

It does seem that both sides of this issue believe the other side is living in a bubble. All I can say is what I see. Look around any intersection in NYC where there are red lights and stopped cars. If there are any bicyclists around, they will be the fastest moving objects you can see.

From what you wrote it sounds like you've heard this more than once. So have I!

This mirrors my experience over the past few years in Portland. I don't mind bikes, but as a pedestrian having cyclists fly through red lights almost running into me on numerous occasions, I lost a lot of my empathy for them.

One of the other more difficult things to come to terms with (both as a pedestrian and a driver in that city) is that bikes can transition from sidewalk to street basically whenever they want, and however they want. Most cyclists were very careful about this, but there were plenty of occasions where I watched a bike cut across traffic at full speed, hop up onto the sidewalk and expect the pedestrians to just move out of the way for them.

Obviously its still up to drivers to drive safely, and we have a LONG way to go in that category, but cyclists need to do their part as well.

For all your apology, you're still basically arguing that since a few cyclists flout the rules, we should actively make traffic more dangerous for them and encourage them to drive more.

For another perspective, my commute is a routine of watching cars break the law and endanger me with impunity. It's only superficially acknowledged by others and I have yet to see a cop pull over a car for committing an infraction against a bike.

So while I do obey the law as best I can, it should be easy to see why bikers would stop caring. The law is not enforced, even when a cyclist dies. So where's the merit in the law, if you're a cyclist?

"I almost get hit" – so, you don't get hit? Once or twice a year you get... startled?

In NYC in 2017, cars injured 10561 pedestrians and 4397 cyclists, and killed 106 pedestrians and 24 cyclists. Cyclists injured 315 pedestrians and killed one. http://www.nyc.gov/html/dot/downloads/pdf/bicycle-crash-data...

In NYC in 2016, cars injured 10775 pedestrians and 4592 cyclists, and killed 148 pedestrians and 18 cyclists. Cyclists injured 311 pedestrians and killed none at all. http://www.nyc.gov/html/dot/downloads/pdf/bicycle-crash-data...

So the "different" thing that bicyclists see about cycling is that it's much less hazardous to pedestrians.

Interesting that you chose to phrase it "cars injured...cyclists" and never "cyclists struck cars" as if it was never the cyclists fault.

> and it's why I no longer ride my bike in the city anymore

So is your response to just drive a car then? That's a most-poignant tragedy of the commons.

> This, to me, signals the general attitude people have towards bicyclists in the US.

Maybe, but if you have ever tried to get around in Cambridge, MA, you would understand that it is a disaster for everybody.

Pedestrians walk into intersections when they shouldn't and block traffic, sometimes indefinitely. Bicyclists ignore signs, lights, people, etc. and cut off cars randomly. And cars have to shove their way through the mess or they will never get anywhere.

Cambridge traffic is simply dreadful. Go read Neal Stephenson's "Zodiac" for a taste.

Why is anyone driving in Cambridge? This reminds me of a relative who insisted on renting a car in Bali. Just... why?

Note: I have driven in Cambridge, and will do again, when there is a compelling reason to do so. Commuting during rush hour is not a compelling reason.

> Why is anyone driving in Cambridge?

Mostly because they have somewhere to be on a schedule.

I've lived in Cambridge for ~20 years. For about 1/4 of that time, I walked to my office in Kendall about half the time and drove the other half. Bus service was completely impractical and trying to take the subway one stop took vastly longer than walking or driving.

The other 3/4 of the time, I had a job outside Cambridge -> driving to/from work everyday -> driving in/across/around parts of Cambridge everyday.

Now, with kids in elementary school (start time 8:15 sharp, pickup 2:25 sharp), we drive to/from school 8-10x a week. Before they were in school, to/from daycare (can't dropoff before 8:30; must pickup by 5:30 sharp; can't push a stroller on a bike) and work meant plenty of car trips as well. Before kids, to/from work and then to after-work team sports often meant needing to drive as well. Public transport in Cambridge, except directly red line T stop to T stop, is not for those who are on any kind of schedule. The bus service is a disaster, IMO.

I biked to work for several years. I see both sides somewhat. Cyclists are their own worst enemies, as many are a bunch of idiots that flaunt traffic laws, put pedestrians at risk and behave poorly.

Engineering practices don’t account for cyclists well. That’s getting better where i live, but more need to be done there as well as educating folks on what to do in difficult car/bike/pedestrian scenarios.

It should be noted that the perpetrator in the murder case you referenced was on methamphetamine, muscle relaxers, and pain medication at the time of the incident.

There truly is a lot of hostility for cyclists out there, and I think it would be wiser to cite cases that don't have complicating factors like this, such as:

* https://latimesblogs.latimes.com/lanow/2010/01/cyclist-sente...

* https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2018/may/31/why-so-hard-...

* https://nyc.streetsblog.org/2017/08/11/video-cyclist-survive...

* https://www.narcity.com/news/this-ontario-driver-has-been-ch...

* https://www.pressdemocrat.com/news/7502828-181/chp-hit-and-r...

* https://www.thelondoneconomic.com/must-reads/video-motorist-...

* https://metro.co.uk/2019/03/22/smirking-driver-records-braki...

* https://www.dailybulletin.com/2018/11/03/police-bicyclist-ki...

* https://www.ldnews.com/story/news/local/2018/05/16/cyclist-h...

* https://ggwash.org/view/34715/driver-assaults-bicyclist-poli...

* https://cambridge.wickedlocal.com/news/20170505/police-drive...

I live in Kalamazoo and know people both who survived and were killed in that attack. At least our community responded positively with new passing distance laws and broad community support.

ETA: I should mention that I got hit and run on my bicycle by a drunk driver years before the mass murder. My friends tracked down the driver, the police took statements, viewed the damage to the car exactly as I described it, driver matched the description my riding partner and I gave, and the prosecutor still declined to press charges. It wasn't a no-harm-no-foul thing either, I was pretty severely injured. Still pretty sore about that.

This tension is fundamental.

You have two parties who feel entitled to the road, while few parameters exist around how they share the road. Naturally anything a cyclist does that interferes with the driver ends up irritating him/her and vice versa.

Protected bike lanes go a long way to solving this problem. We need rules around how we interoperate.

Is being white a relavent factor here? What if you had said black instead?

Question one: No, Massachusetts is very white. I can’t imagine any reason this information would be relevant or adds to the story in anyway. Someone please advise me how I may be wrong.

Question two: That would anger many people and cause much defensiveness.

It blows my mind that this is the reality I live in and that you are the only person to bring this up in this heavily commented thread.

As someone who grew up in left wing (espoused more than practiced) Boston but chose the search for truth over this hateful leftist religion I’ve spent my whole life trying to understand political and religious motives (really one and the same). One of the things I’ve come to understand is that it is human nature to find an easy enemy to fight even if there is none or you are too cowardly to fight a real enemy. White men have become this easy and compliant enemy for the left. Nevermind reality it’s too uncomfortable.

Anecdotally I cycle into Cambridge almost every day. I cross three cities: Medford, Somerville and Cambridge for an approximate 20 minute commute (vs 40 by car.)

I have never had issue with cars, granted I've only been doing this for the two years (and in college I used to commute from Roxbury to Cambridge for 2 years and only had 1 freak-out with a drunk-driver, but that's another story.)

On the other hand I've seen entitled cyclists lose their shit for no reason at cars.

I feel like there's a subset of cyclists that don't understand that cars may have blind spots and freak out at drivers when there's literally nothing the driver can do about it.

Biking is a very contentious issue in Cambridge. It was one of the most discussed topics during the last council elections and the split, at least how I saw it, was quite generational.

There have been a few deadly incidents as well, adding fuel to the mix.

I found a "simple trick that makes all drivers around me nice".

I put a pigeon on my helmet 8 years ago[1]. Everywhere I go I see smiles. I really makes every ride fun. One of my friends recently started also doing it, so its starting to catch on.

Pigeonriding transforms me from an awkward software engineer into an interesting person who people want to talk to. I have only had a handful of bad experiences[2] with drivers and other bikers in 8+ years that I have been riding (a few of those years I commuted on a bike year-round).

[1]:http://www.pictureboston.com/blog/2011/08/14/a-leica-camera-...

[2]:https://www.youtube.com/watch?reload=1&v=2hJ_hzjlQsw

For those less outgoing, anything that differentiates you, or stands out (from both the environment and other cyclists) seems to help. A sea of loud colors is just a din, and all spandex looks the same to a cager.

For those less outgoing, pigeonriding will probably work even better for you. You can just ignore people who try to talk to you which will make the pigeon seem much more real.

"oh that person really has no idea that bird is on their head".

This is brilliant!! It's such a fun, friendly, subversive way of communicating "I'm a person and not a roadblock/obstacle." I started bike commuting 3-4x per week and I may consider doing this.

OMG DID I JUST SEE YOU IN UNION SQUARE, SOMERVILLE? (Or was it your friend?) I noticed the pigeon.

(File under: it's a small world, I probably shouldn't act so surprised.)

That was my friend. He bikes in cambridge every day while I moved to the burbs and only commute when biking for an hour wont make me cold/wet.

I haven't needed it in the city I'm at now, but I used to wear a USA flag as a cape when riding in less biking friendly areas. It was night and day how drivers treated me.

5 years ago after a princess tea party I ended up with some tall silver tiaras full of sparkly gems, and I started wearing them on my bike helmets. A tiara fits perfectly into the spot for roadies to park their sunglasses.

The constant feeling of "hey my eyes are down here buddy" in public proves that it works!

Every person I know that bikes in Chicago has been hit at least once. Fortunately none of them have been seriously injured, but it is a constant danger.

There are lots of bike lanes downtown but they aren’t protected or respected. We have a long way to go to make biking a safe form of transport like it is in the Netherlands.

I personally know 3 ppl that died in chicago. Two of them were my coworkers, died in the same year. :/

Sorry but if you have kids and family you are fucking stupid to ride bikes on the street in chicago. White bikes on sidewalks are not street art. Go to lakeshore path/606 if you are dying to ride bikes.

I got doored 2 yrs ago escaped only with broken wrist.

Replace Chicago with nearly every city.

It’s a death wish.

Have you been to cities in Netherlands or Danmark?

They were meaning US cities, we can certainly be very US centric in our thinking.

And to keep on that theme let me talk about my city.

If you don't actually need to get anywhere and want to ride for leisure Denver has some nice built up trails that sort of meander through neighborhoods that are completely separated from roads. Very safe and usually very pretty to ride on.

Downtown looks pretty dangerous though.

> They were meaning US cities

Even just considering US cities, that statement is not true. Some cities are very dangerous for bikes, but many are not.

Then I assume you would support a similar law in Chicago as Cambridge passed?

Yes but aren't you back on the street with no protection where there are no bike lanes( most of chicago)?

I don't know Chicago, but I do know what's happened in San Francisco over the last 20 years. It's taken a long time, but the city is finally starting to take protected bike lanes seriously, sadly much of that is in response to lives lost.

When I first got here, it was just a fight for standard bike lanes. For either to happen, more people need to get on their bikes and ride. Contributing to your local bike coalition is also great way to help push these issues forward.

If everyone follows your advice and chooses to not ride because of the danger, then nothing will change, and the lives lost to poor road infrastructure and poor driver education will have been for nothing.

> If everyone follows your advice and chooses to not ride because of the danger, then nothing will change

Are you seriously suggesting some ppl risk their lives for 'change'? Sorry I really don't want to trade my life for bike lanes, there are ppl counting on me to stay alive.

No, I don't want people to risk their lives for anything. I want things to change. 40,000 people die a year in the US while driving or riding in cars, following your logic, that is also extremely risky, and so we shouldn't do it.

I am not sure thats a correct analogy. Driving a car to work is not an optional activity for most ppl. Ppl riding their bikes in the city are doing it for fun/thrill/whatever, its an optional activity for 90% of the ppl doing it.

I have a theory that most of these ppl would stop doing it once the thrill/'cool factor' goes away with protected bike lanes.

That's an interesting theory. I think I've seen some studies that show the opposite:

85% increase in cycling with better infrastructure: https://www.cyclinguk.org/blog/tomguha/85-increase-cycling-a...

This shows a direct correlation between lower risk and increased cycling: https://nacto.org/2016/07/20/high-quality-bike-facilities-in...

I especially like this quote: "A virtuous cycle is clear: With more infrastructure come more riders. Perhaps counterintuitively, with more infrastructure and more riders, safety improves. And the more bicycles there are traversing a city, the more it reaps numerous returns on investment, including the health benefits of cleaner air and greater physical activity." from https://www.drawdown.org/solutions/buildings-and-cities/bike...

I don't think most people who are biking while commuting are doing it purely for the thrill, but that is a plus, no doubt.

It depends on the city, but I see plenty of people biking in Cambridge who, based on apparent age and time-of-day, are almost certainly commuting to or from work. Also a few on kick scooters (not as good for longer trips, but easier to bring on public transit or a sidewalk if necessary). Going to work is not optional for most people, but (depending on where you live and where you work) there can be a variety of choices for how you get there.

Biking (or scooter-ing) is faster than walking, gets you some exercise, is much cheaper than owning and fuelling a car, can be faster than a car in particularly bad rush-hour traffic if bike lanes exist... there's plenty of reasons beyond being a daredevil, if the relevant addresses line up for it.

Riding a bus to work is not an optional activity. People driving their cars in the city are doing it for fun/thrill/whatever.

Please don't make things up. It's detracts from the conversation.

> Ppl riding their bikes in the city are doing it for fun/thrill/whatever, its an optional activity for 90% of the ppl doing it.

Riding a bike for your transportation is exactly as optional as driving is. Most cities have multiple choices for transportation.

> I got doored 2 yrs ago escaped only with broken wrist.

The best way to avoid getting doored is to not ride so close to parked cars. You should maintain a distance of at least 6 feet from parked cars while riding.

This is often impossible when bike lanes are adjacent to parked cars.

Yes, you are stupid and should become part of the problem. Be part of the industry of drivers, that are responsible for 40,000 deaths every year in the US.

I used the lakefront path for years and fortunately never had any serious incidents. Beyond roadways, cities should be thinking more about paths that are not associated with the road network. For example, the 606 in Chicago is an elevated bike path built on an old train line. The riverfront would also serve as an opportunity for good bike infrastructure.

I've never been hit, but I also always have lights on my bike, I've completely covered my bike with retroreflective tape, and I live on the West Side.

I used to ride my bike to my job in East Lakeview every day, which was about about 9 miles each way, and the last mile of my commute was always the worst. Lincoln Park and Lakeview are full of the most entitled drivers on the planet.

I once saved a kid from getting hit by a left turning driver by picking him up just before a driver hit him. The guy was taking a left hand turn while looking at his cell phone. The mom had bent down for half a second to pick up a bottle that her kid in a stroller had dropped.

On another note, rideshare drivers are the worst drivers in the city. They are unpredictable, they have no idea where they are going, they don't have experience driving in the city, and they are always looking at their cell phones.

Chicago needs to crack down on ridesharing. I've almost been hit by rideshare drivers who aren't looking where they are going 3 times in the past month. Each time they were driving in the bike lane looking to drop someone off or pick someone up.

Plus, ride shares absolutely murder traffic. I initially started riding my bike because all the ride shares pulling over made my commute go from 20 minutes each way to 30 minutes in the mornings and 40 in the evening. Any arguments that ride shares somehow are more efficient than actual driving ignore the fact that most drivers don't pull over in the middle of a busy street for 30 seconds to 2 minutes at the beginning and end of their trip.

Edit: I should also mention that I credit disc brakes for part of the reason I've never been hit. I can stop so much faster with then than with rim brakes, partly because I can modulate braking force better, and partly because it always bites right away, rather than needing a revolution to clean road grime or water off that rim brakes sometimes need. I swapped after I almost got right hooked going under the Cortland bridge. There's always water pooled there, and I honestly thought I was going to slide under a car for a few seconds.

> "Local law now requires the city to erect vertical barriers between cyclists and cars on any roadway that’s rebuilt, expanded, or reconfigured"

I'm all for better bike lanes, but it seems kind of extreme to require this for all new roads [0]. I used to live in Cambridge and rode my bike quite a bit. I never felt like I needed a dedicated lane on every side street, just on the main drags (where some of the new protected bike lanes were amazing to have).

[0] Actual ordinance available at http://cambridgema.iqm2.com/Citizens/FileOpen.aspx?Type=4&ID.... I could be misinterpreting the language, and it seems they will allow for some very limited exceptions, but the default seems to be that a typical side street would have a dedicated bike lane.

EDIT: after reading the actual ordinance again (and as a comment below pointed out), it seems that this only applies to streets that are rebuilt or improved and are part of the city's plan for streets that should include bike paths. In other words, most random side streets wouldn't get bike paths.

It's the perfect time to do it. Building the protected bike lane in the road design from the get go is the most effective way to make both cyclists and drivers happy and safe.

I totally agree with you. If you are re-doing a road, that's the best time to build a bike lane. But I'm personally not convinced that it's necessary on every new road. I lived on a side street in Cambridge that saw maybe one car every twenty minutes. I was lucky to have a private driveway, but my neighbors would have been pretty angry if you took away their street parking to put in a bike lane on a street with very little traffic. In my opinion, there should be some additional criteria, such as needing a bike lane on any new street with expected traffic of more than one car every minute (or some reasonable time frame). As a biker when I lived in Cambridge, I always felt safe on side streets where I could just bike in the middle of the street and move over for the occasional vehicle, but I was much more afraid on major (or even minor) thoroughfares.

I personally would love to live in a world where fewer people own cars in the first place because public transportation is so good, but that's an ideal that we are no where close to achieving, so a lot of people need to own cars.

This is going to get ugly in Cambridge because a lot of parking is going to be eliminated and people who used to be able to park near their homes will be parking on the side streets. People who live on those side streets are going to suddenly find it more difficult to find parking.

I'm for adding bike lanes, but there are plenty of people who work far outside the city and who need to drive are going to find it intolerable. A lot of people will be forced to move, while the value of off-street parking will go up.

And counter-productively, many of those who will move will now just have to commute further, no matter the infrastructure. Cars are no pancea, but they are far from obsolete outside dense city centers.

But it isn't the perfect reason. I live on a dead end road (road ends at the creek), it doesn't take much intelligence to realize the pavement is nearly worn out and so will be replaced soon. However because the road doesn't go anywhere, there is no need for any bike lane. If anything it needs a basketball hoop in the middle - all that hard surface is wasted on cars: let the kids play when there isn't a car coming.

On a lot of streets, won't the only way to do this be to eliminate parking on one side of the street? Should be interesting.

This is what has happened so far. Retail business owners have... not been pleased (to put it mildly).

Overall it's pretty clearly been a net gain, but there's definitely some short term pain there.

I don’t believe there is pain. All the studies in the US have shown that improving biking infrastructure immediately improves retail sales (it’s obvious why...you throw bikes in the mix, and walking is also a lot safer, and everyone who enters a retail store eventually needs to walk, so a nicer walking environment makes it better for all their customers).

The complaints are likely a combination of general aversion to change, the fact that most retailers are likely drivers and identify as such and look at bike improvements as an attack on their group, and media reporting that focuses on those who lie on the extremes.

>I don’t believe there is pain. All the studies in the US have shown that improving biking infrastructure immediately improves retail sales

That generalization is vague to the point of uselessness. It really depends on the nature of the business in question.

One Cambridge business that has been vocally against bike infrastructure is a pharmacy. I understand why they would be against it, because much of their clientele is elderly. There's a new parking protected bike lane in front of their business, and there are fewer parking spots than there used to be (and those that remain are bang against the "car lane" on one side and the bike lane on the other)

I fully support the law, but given that the proprietors treat us very well and know my wife by name, I haven't tried too hard to change their mind.

Specifically to Cambridge many of the people who need to go there are not within bike distance, and to me Cambridge has been friendly to people walking around for a long time so that was never a thing. I can't speak to biking as for me a bike would have not really helped the situation, so putting more squeeze on the limited parking arrangements would affect retail businesses. There's quite a bit of retail that only makes sense to have in Cambridge because of proximity to all of the universities.

I feel like these bike-centric arguments do well in very dense cities like NYC but don't translate as well to places like Boston where there's just as much reason to go into Boston as there is to go out of Boston.

Some of the pressure for parking spots should be reduced by the people who are now biking. It's not clear it will even out, though.

For one-way streets this is avoided by reducing one lane of travel and using it for parking, putting the protected bike lane where cars used to park. Example: https://goo.gl/maps/9FoAZgKirbQ2

This is Cambridge, MA.. it is incredibly hard to go most places in Cambridge and ever find a parking space on the side of the street.

If you are not a resident the majority of non-metered parking is not legal for you to park in.

The metered parking has strict maximum time limits and they enforce parking aggressively. It can be very hard to find a parking space at all.

If you need to travel in for business/pleasure in a car you basically are forced to either go to a subway/train station with a parking lot and then park there and take the subway/train/bus into Cambridge, or you will need to go in and have a parking garage ($$) to park at, and then walk a long way.

It is seriously stressful to use a car in Cambridge and Somerville.

It's already so dense & hard to use cars that the retail businesses don't really have anything they can complain about. By locating their business their they already decided to be hostile to customers who want to use a car.

> It can be very hard to find a parking space at all.

It sounds like they are not charging enough for parking, if that's the case.

Don't they get snow? With vertical barriers I'm confused how a plow will be able to properly clear the street.

In Ottawa, Canada that appears to be a realistic problem (according to my colleagues that live there; I have limited personal experience). They try to use the sidewalk-cleaning smaller machinery, but it's still a struggle due to shapes and barriers.

Most of the existing separated bike lanes are incorporated into the sidewalk, and therefore protected by the curb. There are a few that are "protected" by rows of parked cars or bolted-down pylons, but this would seem to not be legal under the new law.

I'm actually not sure how they manage to get those bike lanes cleared, seeing as how the sidewalks are always covered in snow, but there seems to be some method.

There are smaller vehicles that are used to plow just the bike lanes in some parts of the world.

It probably doesn't matter so much though because the percentage of people who continue biking even in cold winter and with adverse snow conditions is quite low.

It's true. It's actually very disconcerting how much less snow there usually is on the bike lane, than on the sidewalk it's built into. There are stretches where folks just walk in the bike lane, because the sidewalk is so unsafe.

Maybe. I stopped biking in the winters in Cambridge purely because the pathways are impassable because of the snow. Not because of the weather.

> It probably doesn't matter so much though because the percentage of people who continue biking even in cold winter and with adverse snow conditions is quite low.

This is not necessarily true. Here in Copenhagen the amount of people cycling in winter is not significantly less than at other times of the year. That said, we don't have much snow, but the bike lanes are cleared before the road lanes (to incentivize not taking the car into the city).

It's not the snow so much as the temperature. I bike commute year-round here in NYC and most other cyclists aren't willing to brave the cold, even when the streets are completely clear.

The problem is more that twilight is around 4:30PM from December through February, rather than the weather. Though I suppose this might be less of a worry if cycling infrastructure were safer.

The city does clear the snow from bike lanes with little mini bobcat tractors, but there's only so much that can be done. In mid-winter, I think studded snow tires are a must. And even those aren't exactly magic. There were a couple of late season storms this year were the city basically didn't plow much at all because they knew it would melt; and while the slush was navigable easily with a car, trying to carve through that on a bike was pretty freaky. Studs are great on ice and hard pack but with mash potato snow they don't help much.

Even when things are cleared off, melting and refreezing can make the lanes treacherous. That said, I estimate the number of people riding mid-winter is probably less than 10% of what you see in Spring through Fall.

Cambridge has a fleet of sidewalk plows (About 30" wide) that are also used for plowing paths and bike lanes. In the winter they are a godsend.

In a snow emergency (i.e. when cars are forced off one side of the street for plowing), the vertical barriers can be manually removed.

I think our cities are learning from what Scandinavia has been doing for ages. This is exciting news. Smart streets keep everyone safer and raise awareness to pedestrians and people with mobility issues, too.

Better bike infrastructure will encourage groups of people who don't currently bike to start. More protected lanes means more kids, more old folks, more women of all ages, will start cycling. And more cycling is a good thing!

There's many things that are good things. However, you need to balance them against the cost (money, space, time, whatever) required to achieve them. For some smaller roads, the cost might not be worth the benefit.

Encouraging people to exercise and not drive gas-powered vehicles is a net win for not only their long term health but also the environment. It's worth it.

Even if they use an electric bike and don't exercise, it's still good for pollution and congestion.

Agreed, lets skip the automobile lanes and just put bike lanes on those streets :]

For smaller streets, just make them pedestrian & bike first.

The cost of things should indeed be considered. Depending on region, tax money subsidizes every mile driven (one well done source here https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2015/10/driving... but there are many, many others). A switch to cycling amounts to a much lower subsidy per mile, so if we want to talk costs then the argument for cycling infrastructure becomes even stronger.

You’re not in the group of people who do not bike due to the lack of barriers.

It’s possible that this group is extremely tiny, in which case it may not make sense, but whether existing bikers feel they needed it is not really the relevant question.

But that’s only considering the “get more people biking” aspect. The truth is that protected bike lanes are statistically safer than ones that are not, so there is good reason to require it just to reduce injury or death even if it does not lead to an uptick in biking.

If it reduces cyclist deaths, then in absence of other factors it will by definition result in a relative uptick.

Here's a map from the Globe of bike accidents reported to Cambridge police from 2010-2014 [0]. Unfortunately the map no longer loads for me, but the accidents are mostly along major roads and the area is still discernible, especially when compared side by side with a map of the area [1]. As the article says, Cambridge Street, Broadway, Beacon Street, and Mass Ave are all hot spots.

Would love to see data combined with Somerville, since I'm sure the stretch of Beacon between Porter and Inman would be similarly populated. These are also only accidents reported to police, so I would bet they lean towards more serious accidents.

[0]: https://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/2016/10/05/map-bike-crashe... [1]: https://www.google.com/maps/@42.3773046,-71.1224085,14z

It's required only during maintenance made as part of a pre-existing 5-year reconstruction plan on roads that were included in the 2015 Bicycle Plan (or any subsequent plan the Council approves). That's still a dramatic expansion from Cambridge's current separated bike lanes, but it's not "any roadway" as the article claims.

That makes more sense.

So I'm guessing their bike plan drew out routes and arteries and such for bike paths and the requirement just applies to those?

>I could be misinterpreting the language, [...] but the default seems to be that a typical side street would have a dedicated bike lane.

I think the key here is that it's for any roadway that is rebuilt, expanded, or reconfigured. This is very rare for residential side streets in my experience - it would only come when roads are widened or curb lines are redone, which is more common on major streets and roads. Repaving is explicitly excluded.

I also think the exceptions are not nearly as limited as you. While 12.22.040.B explicitly calls the exceptions "rare", basically as long as they can prove in a public report that it's impractical (for financial constraint or physical features/usage reasons), they don't have to do a bike lane.

I've got to wonder how this will actually help at intersections - are stoplights really going to get dedicated phases akin to walk lights? Are there going to be stop signs where cars cross the bike lane?

I once hit a car on Mass ave (just south of Central Sq) that popped out across the bike lane (but stopping to oncoming cars), and I couldn't simply move left due to cars on my left. Luckily it was raining so the reason I couldn't stop was traction rather than having been going wicked fast. If there is simply a cut in a barrier for cars to go across at every existing sidestreet, it seems like more barriers constraining bikes (and visual noise for drivers) will make that even worse!

I'll admit it's been over a decade since I've commuted city streets on a bike, and I've never personally seen benefit from city bike lanes. Worrying about being doored, pedestrians stepping off the sidewalk, cars pulling out, and avoiding road debris all require keeping far enough left, and the bike lanes I've experienced actually hamper that. The only times I've ever worried about cars straight up plowing me from behind (/ wind suck!) have been on suburban/rural roads.

What this means is the rich get new roads, the poor don't. The cost of adding these lanes will be enormous, especially in tight areas where you may need to seize property or realign streets. Nobody will advocate for the poor areas to ever be redeveloped at these cost levels.

The cycle continues.

The rich get new roads anyway.

Massachusetts has a de facto policy of no road expansions, and especially not land appropriations for road expansions, anywhere in the state.

This is long term controversial issue. If you think the right answer is obvious you probably haven't dove down to the details, where it's much murkier. See in particular John Forester's _Effective_Cycling_. Forester believes that "cyclists fare best when they act and are treated as drivers of vehicles" and are not segregated from them. There are studies in this area pointing in both directions. One such concluded that putting bikes on multi-use trails makes cyclists less safe. A lot depends on the design of the bike paths, and a badly designed one can increase the risk over none at all.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Effective_Cycling

Vehicular cycling is, to put it lightly, controversial.

In the US specifically? It's perfectly normal here. (Ireland.)

It's normal here in the US too, but that the problem people have. Vehicular cycling can really only be used by the strongest bikers, mostly young, mostly male riders. It excludes slower, older, and younger riders who might be intimidated by sharing a road with aggressive drivers going 45+ mph who pass with less than 3 feet of space.

https://www.latimes.com/opinion/livable-city/la-oe-babin-pro...

I've heard this argument before. It is among the weakest against vehicular cycling in my view. It's a misrepresentation of vehicular cycling, which doesn't require cyclists to keep up with drivers. It also strikes me as an ad hominem attack, attacking vehicular cyclists rather than their arguments. A point I like to make is that perceptions of safety are not the same thing as safety, and I think vehicular cycling is all about that.

The strongest argument against vehicular cycling would be the evidence of where cycling infrastructure works well, which many people who accept the basic tenets of vehicular cycling (like myself) admit. I'd call myself about 1/2 vehicular, 1/2 infrastructural.

Their argument is that bicycle collisions increase at intersections and, I assume, decrease in segregated bike lanes. That is understandable since most automobile accidents also happen at intersections.

That's a very US-centric (and outdated) viewpoint, coming from a perspective of bike infrastructure being entirely non-existent in the US back in the 1970s. Contrast with Amsterdam's approach, where cycling is a properly treated third form of at-grade transit that has all its own paths just like cars and pedestrians do. That's way safer and has much higher usage than you'd ever see if no separate paths were provided for cyclists at all.

I don't know a single cyclist who agrees with that statement.

I've been a transportation cyclist for roughly a decade and I agree with everything he said. Many cyclists do, particularly more experienced ones.

Bike lanes can be helpful, but they are not the panacea many people make them out to be. I think the main benefit bike lanes have is increasing the number of cyclists which leads to the "safety in numbers" effect. I think far too many bike lanes are made poorly, however, and these ones seem to be less safe than if there was no bike lane.

And yet protected bike lanes are proven to vastly increase the number of people who are willing to bike, which then makes biking safer for everyone because of sheer numbers. I'm a confident enough cyclist to bike in the street, take the lane, and ignore all the honking assholes, but my girlfriend isn't. The protected bike lanes are great because it means we can bike to things together.

I don't know if the increase in the number of cyclists outweighs the problems with the intersections.

I get the impression from your various comments here that you have never rode a bike in the US, so perhaps our experience differs.

On my daily commute in Austin I cross I-35 via a bike lane that is sometimes semi-protected. I think many inexperienced cyclists think that this is "safe" because it's sometimes protected, but I consider it to be actually a fairly dangerous intersection that I take reluctantly. Whenever the bike lane crosses a car lane, there are signs saying to yield to cyclists, yet I can only think of a single instance where a driver yielded to me without me having to use my air horn.

I can't find the details right now, but a local bike activist's wife actually stopped cycling because she found this intersection so dangerous:

https://bicycleaustin.info/forum/viewtopic.php?pid=5464

(I don't see a mention of the particular intersection in that link, but as I recall this was it.)

Perception and reality can differ a lot, and I think that's what my criticisms come down to.

I don't know how your impression could be more wrong; I ride my bike to work in NYC every day. I've literally said as much in many of my comments here, and talked about my personal experiences. You have responded to some of these comments.

Sorry, I must have missed that in my haste. Your experience nonetheless differs from mine and from that of most US cyclists, I believe.

Most of the US doesn't have protected bike lanes, but that's what we're talking about here. I'm talking about my experience with one of the better protected bike lane setups in the US, and the advantages it grants.

Come visit some time. I'll show you the bike lanes myself.

Given my experience in Austin, it's necessary to highlight the difference between a good bike lane and a bad bike lane. Politicians usually don't know the difference. In practice it seems you typically get bad bike lanes.

When you have "protected" bike lanes with no protection against turning vehicles that are constantly full of debris (e.g., the "chipseal" finishing technique they use on the roads here makes the bike lane basically gravel in many places), it's easy to see what a bad bike lane looks like.

The protected bike lanes I used in Baltimore were only better in the sense that they tended to have a smoother finish and much less debris. (Yes, the road quality in Austin is worse than Baltimore.) I still had many problems with turning drivers not checking the bike lane.

Anyhow, I might take you up on your offer sometime. :-)

If you really want to see cycling mecca, you've of course got to go to Amsterdam, but it does at least sound like we're better here than in Austin. Though of course there's still much more work to be done.

It’s sad to me that I immediately knew the crossing in Austin you were talking about and it made me shudder. Thankfully I’ve never had to use it as a cyclist. However I do live near a “protected lane” in Austin that puts both bike lanes on one side of street. All that ends up doing is ensuring drivers never check the bike lane when they turn through it. It’s awful.

It sounds to me like it's a very poorly designed intersection that isn't actually protected, then. I know some intersections like that here in NYC and yeah, they suck (one example being 2nd Ave in Manhattan through midtown at the bridge and tunnel). When there's a reasonable alternate route available I'll tend to take them.

You have to strive to separate bikes from traffic because no matter how much bike culture you have baked into your laws and society, it only takes one careless driver of a 3000lb hunk of steel to lay you out at 25mph. Doesn't matter if you do everything right as a cyclist, you can't change the fact that you are a flabby soft bag of water and a car is 20x your weight.

Ahoy ahoy.

I'm a single cyclist and I agree with that statement. Separated bike lanes, as implemented on my commute in Seattle are the places where I'm most concerned about my safety. I'm not yet to the point where I just bike with cars to avoid them, but it's probably going to happen. Some of the separated lanes are nice though, Western ave by the market, going uphill is a long stretch with pretty inactive driveways and it's nice to have space to go slow; although, the separation means street sweeping doesn't happen, so glass from broken bottles stays on the ground for weeks.

We could have a true scottsman argument about well implemented separate bike lanes vs vehicular cycling, but I don't have the opportunity to use a well designed system, I just have the system that's in place. Putting me on the wrong side of parked cars, so I can't see traffic, and traffic can't see me means instead of worrying about doors, I need to worry about whole cars taking my lane to turn right. If I needed to turn left at one of these intersections, there's no way for me to get in the right lane position at the right time, unless I avoid the lane for the whole block.

For me, biking is utilitarian; it's literally the fastest, least hassle way for me to get to the office, given I take a ferry to Seattle. Forcing me into a bike lane where I can't make turns, or pushing me onto a multi use trail with pedestrians slows me down and reduces the utility.

Forester and his acolytes are widely discredited.

By who?

I'm a long term cyclist (> 100,000 miles) and I live in the Metro Boston area and have bike commuted into Cambridge before.

I read Effective Cycling a long time ago and took it to heart and I put a large amount of my safety over the years down to following the "Vehicular Cycling" model. Drivers are WAY less likely to honk or yell at you when you follow this model too because you are behaving in a way that is consistent with the rules of the road. In the end the law in 99% of places actually mandates you ride according to Vehicular Cycling.

I don't have a problem with bike lanes but they are all highly imperfect. Boston, MA has a very large # of very very very dangerous bike lanes because the bike lanes encourage/force the cyclist to behave inconsistently with other traffic.

A lot of the bike lane advocates appear to be from the anti-Vehicular cycling.

The problem with a lot of the bike lanes is even they are protected it is impossible for them to protect against collisions at intersections. Most of these bike lanes place the cyclist who is traveling straight off to the right side of the vehicles which are trying to take a right turn at the intersection. This is an absolute disaster in the city and we had a high profile fatality of a woman cyclist a few years ago in Boston that was directly caused by this kind of bike lane.

You can't protect straight traveling cyclists going through an intersection where the cars need to turn right and left. As soon as they get to the intersection the cyclist is placed in the most dangerous place for them.

If the lane is unprotected the cyclist can exit the bike lane and enter the "travel straight" lane of traffic and avoid this. If the bike lane is protected the cyclist might not be able to do this at all and is forced into the "travel straight to the right of the right turning traffic."

If the road designer insists on putting a protected bike lane to the right of the right turning traffic the only thing I see being safe is a stop light for both the cyclists & cars, and the cars can't take a right when the cyclists have a green light and the cyclists can't go straight when the cars have a red light. The cars would have to be given a "No Right turn on Red" as well.

Again my experience is a lot of the advocates of some of this non-vehicular cycling stuff do not have that clear of a picture of what is actually safe because:

- They don't actually ride that much

- They spend a lot of time riding on Multi-Use-Trails instead of roads.

- They use sidewalks a lot of the time and advocate use of sidewalks

- They often think the rules of the road are invalid for cyclists

- Never got a motor cycle license or learned to ride a motorcycle

- Maybe don't drive cars at all

My experience is there is a cavernous gap in behavior between these folks and long term long distance riders & racers. The long term long distance riders & racers fall into vehicular cycling and are very very safe over the years.

This same kind of thing happens with left turns. The Vehicular cycling way to do this is signal left and move across the lanes of traffic as you approach the intersection and get to the left turn lane, just like a car or a truck. I've been doing this for decades safely and without conflict on roads as busy as 8 lanes wide. It works incredibly well. The non-vehicular way (Forrester always called this the "cycling inferiority complex" way of riding) is to hug the right side of the road even if you're in a right turn lane, and then take a left across all the right turning & straight turning traffic in an incredibly dangerous way that is also illegal.

Any cycling behavior that would get you a ticket if you did it on a motorcycle or in a car should be a red flag behavior for you because the ticket would be issued because you were engaging in flagrantly dangerous behavior.

A cyclist who is experienced in Vehicular cycling can move in and out of the bike lanes when they are safe or not safe and get the best of both worlds.

I agree with you in the sense that especially in America a lot of the bike lanes are really just faded single lines littered with gravel, and practically speaking following the Vehicular Cycling model has been very successful for me in interacting with cars.

However, while I can nimbly integrate with traffic being in shape and experienced, trying to get friends and family who are not experienced in this are usually met with an awful time, further discouraging bicycle use.

A fully segregated path, where you can get comfortable and learn without impatient drivers honking or zooming past 45+MPH would be infinitely valuable in helping. Cities need to stop half-assing bike lanes and either provide a safe, effective path or not bother because like you said they can even more dangerous.

There are plenty of intelligent solutions to the intersection problems, as well.

https://www.industrytap.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/01/duth....

I'm a huge fan of protected bike lanes. Chicago has a few of them, and they are far less stressful to ride on compared to just basic striping on the road.

By far the biggest issue I have with striped bike lanes is trying guess when an Uber driver is going to do something crazy when picking up or dropping off a passenger.

I've been politely asking the Lyft and Uber drivers to next time not stop in the bike lane, and reactions have been positive.

I kind of wish they were required to have "check for cyclists before you open door!" signs like I've seen in some taxis.

My biggest problem with unprotected bike lanes here in Manhattan is that they are so frequently illegally blocked, not just by Taxis/FHVs but also by people parking in them. And a lot of the unprotected bike lanes are basically just the door zone of a line of parked cars, so you need to ride to the far outside of it to avoid getting doored.

There's entire block-long stretches that I'll stay out of the unprotected bike lane entirely for, because it's so frequently blocked or so close to parked cars that it's more dangerous to be in there.

The protected bike lanes, on the other hand, are much better. I wish we'd get this law here.

It's the same in London too. Outside the city center nearly all of the 'Cycle Superhighways' are just bus/taxi lanes. And someone driving a 15m long vehicle who has spent the last 10 hours dealing with stupid drivers isn't going to pay as much attention to cyclists as they should.

It's so bad. I bike daily to work, and take a very extended route that tries to go purely on protected bike lanes, but there are still so many vehicles on them. Cops need to start ticketing heavily for this, but the problem is they are routinely the ones blocking the lanes. NY is getting much better for biking, but there needs to be a shift in actually protecting bikers, since obstructing vehicles causes traffic and inconvenience whereas obstructing cyclists leads to injury and death.

Excellent point, the relative lack of blocking is one thing that makes protected bike lanes better.

To be honest, though, I'm not entirely a fan as protected lanes make left turns much more difficult to the point where to make a left turn I usually make a right turn and then a U-turn in a protected bike lane.

That just means that the protected bike lanes aren't implemented well enough. Amsterdam has plenty of different solutions for this problem; each direction of turning bike traffic accommodated to the same extent as turning car traffic is here.

I don't disagree with that at all. The problem is that the correct sort of protected bike lanes never seem to appear in the US.

The fine for parking your car in a bike lane should really be a tow. Predatory towing companies in my town can grab a car in 10 minutes; it's spooky. They even have scouts. I feel like towing companies should be chomping at the bit to get action on this parking ignorance with bike lanes, which seems to be universal in any city with them.

Definitely. There's so much money to be made here in ticketing and towing people that are parking illegally. You would easily pay the salaries of the people doing it and then also send a lot more revenue back to the general treasury.

It always astounds me that they don't have more enforcement agents out there. On my 10 minute bike ride I routinely see at least one ticketable infraction per minute. Hell, give me a ticket book (and a percentage cut for my trouble) and I'll gladly go earn ticket revenue for the city myself.

In SF, striped bike lanes are frequently painted next to parallel parking. The likelihood of getting a door prize makes riding in those lanes far more dangerous than riding in the car lane.

Apropos of nothing, but the dutch reach should really be taught in every driver's ed class.

I used to bike every morning from my house on Morrison Ave in Somerville to Riverside Boat Club, then from RBC to Central Square. I would then bike the reverse in the evenings.

Rides could be treacherous because the tension between drivers and cyclists when they share the road. There is a hard division established for commuting by foot (sidewalks) and drivers (roads), but none for cyclists. Both cyclists and drivers feel entitled to roads, but there are few parameters around how they interoperate with one another.

I think designating a division for cyclists is a great idea in a city with a high volume of cyclists.

Just got back from a trip Amsterdam. If you want to see what the future of Cambridge could be - take a trip there. The cycling infrastructure is phenomenal and very heavily used. It seems the majority of streets had dedicated and protected cycle lanes on both sides. Even more impressive is that it doesn't stop at the city limits. It goes far far out into the countryside. They even had parking garages for bikes.

I also wonder what all our resident PRIVATE PROPERTY enthusiasts think about on-street parking: what other of my 250 sq.ft. objects may I store on public property for free?

how big is your car? Damn....

10 feet long, 2.5 feet wide

so 25 ft^2?

> 2.5 feet wide

no passenger seat or they all sit behind you in single file?

Remember, this is from a bicyclists perspective.

are you responding to a particular point in the article or just your own strawman?

The subject was the complaints of drivers about losing on-Street parking to a bike lane.

Not a straw man at all!

"for free"? What about at least property taxes?

Huh? Property taxes are paid regardless of whether you store a vehicle on the street or not. They really have nothing to do with it at all.

You have an option to store it a vehicle, it's your choice not to use it. I was just calling out the "free" part of the argument, property owners are definitely not getting anything for free.

On-street parking isn't limited to property owners. Anyone can use it.

And no, not everyone can make the choice to use it. There simply isn't enough space, and if everyone drove then traffic would be horrendous. In Manhattan only 1 in 5 people even own cars, for example, and yet on-street parking is always completely full everywhere. So it doesn't make sense to offer it for free given that most people cannot use it. People who don't use it should not be paying for it and people who do use it should be paying their fair share.

Define "anyone can use it"? Most likely it's going to be owners or their tenants, to whom owners right of parking generally extends.

Regarding 1 in 5 people own a car, that I think pretty much works out to full parking everywhere, since the area of the street available for parking is definitely not 1 per capita, but probably way less.

I can also apply your logic to school system. Why am I paying school taxes if I don't have children?

As a biker in Cambridge, I have mixed feelings about this. Biking in Cambridge is subpar, I lived in Berkeley, CA 4 years and biking was MUCH more comfortable there. I'm worried this will hinder the progress and slow down constructing new bike lanes. I want more protection BUT I also want bike lanes every where. If they're not gonna construct more bike lanes because now it has more regulation, this is a negative development. If this will not happen, this is a positive development. Time will show. I'm hopeful but skeptical.

Cambridge also seems to have a disproportionate number of unsafe bicyclists (and pedestrians) for some reason. Maybe it's all the students. It's probably a net good thing that cycling lanes are being improved although there are certainly tradeoffs given the traffic and parking situation. However, whenever I'm driving home up Beacon Street after dark, there are invariably cyclists zipping around with no lights, going up streets the wrong way, and pedestrians dressed in dark colors randomly quickly stepping out from behind parked cars into the street.

The bike lanes that now exist probably make things safer overall but there's a lot of dangerous behavior out there on the part of many types of infrastructure users (including cars as well).

> Cambridge also seems to have a disproportionate number of unsafe bicyclists (and pedestrians) for some reason.

There's a certain "vicious cycle" element to this. If bicycling generally appears unsafe, then mostly (over)confident, risk-tolerant people will do it. Those are the same people who are comfortable getting away with unwise things like running stoplights the wrong way at dusk on their no-brakes fixie with a single tiny red blinkie mounted high on their messenger bag. ;)

It's also tied into a common argument against biking infrastructure: "Why would we build this? There aren't any people biking now." Chicken-egg, but there are many people who won't bike if it seems unsafe. And those people have a good chance of behaving more sensibly when they are convinced to ride.

Right. The argument "not that many bikes, why build bike lanes?" is a bit like "nobody crosses the river on a raft, so why build a bridge?"

I feel like unprotected bike lanes are near useless. Atleast in NY, drivers don't really care. Ubers/cabs will pull over quickly to let people off blocking them. Pedestrians don't look for bikes when they cross them, and bikers are often forced to leave the lane due to obstruction.

Same in Boston area, and I think this is a cultural problem that needs to be solved. I never had this problem when I was living in the Bay Area.

Protected bike lanes are key. I commute to work by bike, and use biking as my main form of transportation. My city has created many bike lanes, and encourages bikers to prefer those roads. Unfortunately, bike lanes have really just become double parking zones for delivery workers, ride shares, and people just who don't feel like looking for a proper parking space while their partner shops. Having to go around people double parked in the bike lane feels much more dangerous than biking on a regular street, since I have to go out into the middle of the road to pass them.

I live and work in Cambridge and one of the new separated lanes is on my regular route to work. The design, I think has been mostly an improvement, with quibbles. There's definitely less chance of getting doored, but I don't like that the lanes go right through bus stops. Also, cars turning at intersections don't see you on the other side of parked cars.

A big plus, though is that the city actually keeps the lane cleared in winter. The regular bike lanes get to be pretty bad and blocked by parked cars when there's a lot of snow.

While Baltimore is reversing protected a bike lane implementation as a result of pressure from retail business and constituents who prefer cars. (The neighborhood in question is one of the most affluent in the city.)

https://www.baltimoresun.com/news/maryland/baltimore-city/bs...

Also note: this same road was the location of a cyclist killed by a drunk bishop.

https://www.nytimes.com/2015/01/10/us/baltimore-bishop-charg...

My city did that. Only they waited for most of the businesses to fold first. What a great reward for weathering the recession those businesses got. Turns out when you kill parking in favor of bike lanes in a small city that does a lot of business by being a commerce destination for the surrounding towns it doesn't work well. Also nobody bikes here because the entire city is hills (plenty of people walk though) so bike lanes are an attempt to solve a problem that doesn't exist but they tried it anyway because they're politically fashionable, details of the specific situation be damned

I think you're really overstating the case in blaming bike lanes for the majority of closures of businesses in a given area.

This part of Baltimore doesn't fit this model, however, since parking was not removed. The bike lane was inserted between the parking zone and the curb. Previously, the bike lane was between the rightmost travel lane and the parking zone.

Poor driving, or factors related to poor driving, may be a contributor.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/transportation/2018/08/30/dc-...

Or, it may just be an anti-cycling bias, but I don't have evidence to support this.

I'm not saying Baltimore did that. I'm just saying you can't just go around with a hammer looking for nails because you have a politically popular hammer. It's not going to work in every case.

in this particular neighborhood, the bike lane was also fairly unpopular with local cyclists too, who felt they were being forced to bike through the dirtiest, most obstacle prone portion of the road.

As both a driver and former cyclist, this is a great development that all cities should be doing.

This is a shift from car centricity to a transport centricity for roads. Looking back in time we had one from horses to trolleys to cars. Now we could be beginning to see them in a broader light. Transport is growing now to include all kinds of electrified (and Rapid!) transit, eg scooters, ebikes, hoverboard... When i lived in Cambridge, ell before the concept of a protected lane, bicycling was commonly known and utilized as the fastest means of transport: the pinnacle of sneakernet.

Every city should be doing this. It's shameful how little attention we've paid to cyclist safety with city designs up to this point.

Its especially frustrating how cities will try almost anything to alleviate traffic instead of encouraging cycling. Its less taxing on the roads, it doesn't pollute, it doesn't require a schedule and best of all it takes up peanuts in space compared to a parking spot.

There is already barely any parking in Cambridge, driving there already sucks... Let's see how much worse this is gonna get.

Good. Parking and driving are not well-suited to narrow roads in high density cities. There have been tons of studies that show this. This is as a Cambridge resident who struggles to find parking when I occasionally have to. Parked cars are truly a blight on our beautiful streets. Protected bike lanes are definitely [edit: probably] part of the route towards greater livability.

I agree mostly, except that there needs to be a usable non-bicycle alternative to cars too. I love riding, but not everybody can do it all the time, for a large variety of reasons. Reducing in-city car usage is good, but just forcing it to be even more unpleasant is not going to solve anything.

I take the T and the buses pretty often. They're quite usable.

Sounds like a job for.... public transportation!

Indeed, cycling and public transit go hand in hand. Even in the Netherlands, people don't ride bikes exclusively. For longer distances, they may ride their bikes to the train station, then take transit to the city center, or something like that. This makes it a lot easier to live without a car.

Completely agreed.

The major problem with protected infrastructure is that they do a poor job at managing intersection conflicts. Intersections are where the majority of collisions happen. If traffic cannot see other traffic when approaching an intersection, then some type of signage or traffic signal is required to control approaches to the intersection. But if you have too many modes of transportation making use of the intersection, then the phased signals start taking too long and you start having compliance issues. This then leads to more collisions.

I live and work in Cambridge, MA. In my opinion, Cambridge and Somerville are not very bicycle friendly due to the fact that main streets were laid out before cars were common. As a result, there is basically only one route (via Beacon) to work for me via bicycle. Grid-cities like SE Portland, OR where I formerly lived, were much easier because you can ride on a street parallel to the artery, not on it. Its nice to see what Cambridge is doing, but its a much harder job than other cities face.

I work in Kendall sq and have wanted to ride my bike into Cambridge the past 5 years.

I’m (almost) deathly afraid to ride make the short 4 mile trek across the river for exactly this reason. I lament every day I get on the T to slog for 45 minutes on a decrepit, slow, and usually broken train system. I arrive to work bothered by my commute almost every day.

For Boston/Cambridge being such a bio and tech hub, it’s entire transit system (roads, busses, trains, biking) is amongst the worst I know of in the US.

Sad.

I try to cross the street in my downtown are just walking from my parking garage to the office and some driver's think I don't have right of way and turn left or make right turns into me, because as a person, I don't count, even though I have the walk signal.

I'm almost tempted to just start video recording when I'm making the trip, and start reporting these people after getting their plate number.

So all new street construction has to include bike lanes. Is there any provision to ensure a steady pace of road maintenance/upgrades? I think this strategy has a real risk of stagnating the already slow rate of road maintenance in a lot of places.

In places like Cambridge where there is money, it seems like a smart move. But making construction more expensive won't work everywhere.

As much as I hate Cambridge I'm having a hard time finding fault with this. Bike lanes fit their needs really well.

Are there scooter companies in Cambridge? I've been hoping they would spur some major cities to invest in bike lanes but I'm not sure if that's the case here.

Either way, solid win all around.

> Are there scooter companies in Cambridge?

Not currently, very briefly scooters appeared before they were shooed out

There aren't scooter companies here in NYC but there's plenty of people that own them and ride around on them. It seems easier to deal with than bikes, since you can just take them inside with you at your destination. I use my own bike for my commute but then Citibike for any other trip, as I don't want to worry about my bike being parked outside. You wouldn't have that problem with a scooter.

The entire state of MA is highly unwelcoming to anything with two wheels and a motor that is less than a motorcycle (and even then it kinda sucks for them too). You say "scooter" or "moped" and suburban soccer moms and uptight politicians get images of New Dehli in their heads and that's too low class for MA so any organized attempt at doing that gets blocked by the power of arbitrary enforcement.

As another commenters mentioned they were there briefly before the .gov told them to get lost. The other thing about MA is that it's highly totalitarian. The government is mostly benign and the single party nature of the state means it doesn't cause too much discontent but trying to pull an Uber and provide a service that has popular support before the regulators can kick you out doesn't really work in MA because the people have little choice in the manner, the .gov can just say "this isn't good for you" and that's the end of it.

Eastern MA is like this, but Western MA is surprisingly bike-friendly. The Amherst/Northampton/Easthampton area is wonderful for biking.

Yes! I stay in Amherst and it is lovely for biking.

MA already had laws statewide mandating bike lanes on new construction and renovation. This has led to the situation near my house where a highway intersection (Route 1 and 495) was rebuilt and a bike lane added for about 1000 feet on a road that has a 55mph speed limit. There is no bike lane on the rest of Route 1, just around the intersection where the construction happened. Now we have a bike lane that will never be used confusing the drivers trying to figure out where they should be when taking the entrance ramp onto the highway. This is a suburb around 40 miles outside of the city.

I’m all in favor of bike lanes but these types of blanket mandates aren’t the solution because it eliminates the community’s ability to use common sense and apply the law logically. So you wouldn’t be encouraging biking across a ramp with no signals and cars going from 55 mph to 65 mph for example.

This is what you get when the state government is basically the standard oil octopus with its tentacles into everything and the majority of state decisions are made by people who don't acknowledge anything outside of I95. They could have just passed local laws but doing it state level lets them pat themselves on the back more so of course they do it to the detriment of everyone else.

>eliminates the community’s ability to use common sense

The higher entity telling the lower entity they can't be trusted to think for themselves is a really common theme in MA politics if you're looking for it. I'm not sure how we got here but it sucks.

Well, it seems to me that constructing bike lanes piece-meal as roads are re-built is the most cost-effective way to do it, even if it results in a super fragmented bike lane network at first.

As far as bike lanes across freeway entrance ramps goes, great, if it's done right. The bike lane should be painted solid green or red where it crosses the ramp, with a "Yield to " sign. The rebuilt interchanges in my city are like this, and the coloured lane is a visual obstruction that forces drivers to take notice of any cyclists on it. I've both cycled on and driven across these lanes, and they work well, far better than the alternative.

Also, bike lanes on 55 mph roads is fine if there are no alternative roads for cyclists to use. Often, this just means paving a wide shoulder and putting regular "" signs as reminders to drivers. Even if only a few people a day ride it.

Edit: it looks like the commenting platform strips out the "U+1F6B2 BICYCLE" character, used twice above.

Single party nature of the state? The governor is Republican

And has been for most of the last three or four decades.

Look at the 2016 election county map. MA is really thoroughly blue. Having a (relatively) politically homogeneous state minimizes the amount of people who find the actions of a powerful state government to be distasteful.

Also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Republican_In_Name_Only

I lived in Boston/Cambridge about eight years ago and found it to be the most bicyclist-unfriendly city I had ever lived in (there are certainly worse, I just haven’t had that misfortune). I’ve been honked at by obnoxious drivers before, but only in Boston would drivers routinely slow down to call me a “f----ing f-gg--t” for being on the road.

NYC drivers might be jerks, but I never got the impression that they were actively malevolent.

Brian McGrory, editor of the Boston Globe, penned this great little op-ed, “Make Boston Bicycle-Free” back in 2011. I wonder how he feels about this win for the f-gg--ts in his city. http://archive.boston.com/news/local/massachusetts/articles/...

It's gotten far better. As a grad student who races for MIT and trains on the roads around Boston's suburbs, I've found most drivers to be surprisingly patient with us cyclists. There's the fair fraction of drivers who turn without signaling, but the only anger I've gotten from drivers is when I've run a red light (deserved it). The suburbs to the west are packed with road cyclists, and good weather weekends mean the roads are full of cyclists. The protected bike lanes have helped road commuters, and prevent angry interactions. The stereotype of Boston drivers being extraordinarily unfriendly to cyclists is outdated by now.

I'll second this. I commute to downtown via the southwest corridor bike path, and most of the drivers are pretty patient and give me enough space once I get on to the roads. The worst parts of the commute are usually the torn up roads by mass Ave.

Good to hear. I dropped by Boston last summer and was mildly shocked by how friendly everyone seemed, was wondering if I was just interacting with tourists or if they introduced prozac to the water supply.

Curious, why do you hate Cambridge so much? I find it a reasonably great place, but I'm just a graduate student here.

Here is my list:

* Its ridiculously ugly. * The layout seems designed to amplify the wind and somehow manages to do it in all directions. * Building restrictions that prevent affordable housing from being built. * They're happy to hike prices on parking to reduce cars, but the Red Line is unreliable which forces people to use cars. * Central * They managed to make bike lanes that are more dangerous than roads * Northbound Longfellow Bridge * Try turning on to Technology Square from Broadway * Mass Ave in general

All that plus the ivory tower politics the people of the wealthy parts of the Boston ares push at the state (I have no problem with them sinking their own ship) is why I don't like it. The greater Boston area in general thinks the world revolves around it and they're a) wrong and b) entitled jerks for thinking that in the first place.

[edit: just wanted to say these are my initial opinionated responses to your points. Not stating these as facts necessarily]

* Eh. Running around the Charles in the fall is glorious. Mt Auburn cemetery is awesome. There's a crazy diversity of architecture from Mass Hall in Harvard Yard to the Stata Center.

* It's a windy city. The average wind speed of the Boston area is higher than Chicago.

* Affordable housing is a serious issue in a lot of cities, especially ones with a rapidly growing population of high-salary tech jobs.

* As much as people hate the Red line, it's old, and it works. Yes it's delayed often, but at rush hour it's packed with people who don't want to use cars.

* Central is central. There's tons of ok restaurants, and it's lively enough for me. As 'downtowns' go, it's not intolerably dirty or worse, dead. As public art goes, it's not Lisbon, but it's quite fun.

* They're clearly trying to improve the bike lanes. It's gotten a lot better over the 6 years I've been here.

* More specific road issues: yes, it's in a state of change, and there are a bunch of old streets. I'll always have complaints about cities. Considering it started as the oldest grid-planned town in the US, it's not all that bad.

These do not seem like very legitimate complaints.

1. The city is generally considered nice looking. What about it do you find ugly. It has a very nice 19th century feel to it.

2. Idk about the wind. The city is windy, but so is all of Boston. Maybe it doesn't have anything to do with city planning.

3. It is a step in the right direction. The busses and red line (despite the admittedly bad reliability) are more frequent and numerous than most cities in the US.

4. I have biked in Boston, NY and Cambridge. Cambridge was the safest of the bunch. It is rated as one of the best biking cities in the US. NY was easy, because everyone was going slow, but was full of the not nice type of surprises. Boston in the other hand is a proper death trap.

The housing restrictions are a pain. I will give you that.

Also, if those are your main complaints about a city. Then I would have guessed that you love it, not hate it.

It will be interesting to see what effect this has. A few things I predict:

1. The price of housing with off-street parking will rise even faster now.

2. A lot of off-street parking in the neighborhoods will be eliminated, forcing some people who have to drive to work outside the city to move.

3. The speeds of cars will increase because the roads will feel wider

How wide are the typical lanes there now? I believe the newest best practice is for 10 ft wide lanes, though many cities have been making them 12 ft for a while. Narrower lanes are great for slowing traffic down.

Emigrate to the Netherlands. No, seriously. Vote with your feet.

Not really viable for most people though is it? And "it's fine in the Netherlands so we don't need to bother here" isn't a great attitude either.

It is funny to see Cambridge labelled a 'Boston suburb'. That was clearly written by someone who has never visited Cambridge, MA or even the Boston area.

Never been there, could you explain?

I live in Cambridge, MA and would need it explained.

Cambridge is a city of 100k people, not a suburb. For comparison, Boston has 600k.

I wouldn't describe Cambridge as a suburb, but plenty of suburbs have populations larger than 100k.

The key distinction is that suburbs are largely residential and composed of lower density housing, which does not describe Cambridge accurately.

Waltham is further away too and has > 100k people. It's hard to say if these cities are suburbs or not.

Waltham, Newton, Cambridge, etc.. are very dense.

There is a clear delineation in density with a lot of these. Usually it's whether the town/city is inside 95, but Lexington is not very dense and is inside.. I think Lexington fits the mold of suburb where as Newton & Waltham feel urban.

What about Somerville? I've been there a few times and at least the parts I was in felt more like a small city than the suburbs. Everything was well-connected with mass transit and walking seemed to be a very popular mode of transportation (which it isn't in the 'true' suburbs I've been to).

It's about density and available space. I don't think most people around here think of Cambridge as a suburb of Boston. I'd say Newton is a suburb of Boston. Lexington too. But not Cambridge or Somerville.

Suburb evokes lots of single family homes with yards, and a fairly car-centric environment. That doesn't fit Cambridge, which is much more urban. That said, there are ultra-wealthy pockets of Cambridge that look and feel a little more like a suburb, but they are small.

Like SF, Boston is somewhat unusual in that the city itself is pretty small both in surface area (48 sq miles) and population (~685k). The Greater Boston area is a different story, of course (cf. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greater_Boston). But that includes Cambridge, and Somerville, and all the neighboring cities to Boston.

Someone else in this thread said that Cambridge is to Boston like Oakland is to SF. That sounds about right, though Oakland is much bigger (both in population and surface area) than Cambridge.

Its pretty urban (houses here don't have yards, Three-deckers are the norm) and usually considered part of the Boston metropolitan area, not a suburb of Boston.

It's a full blown city. It's basically Boston but with shorter buildings and slightly further left politics.

https://www.cambridgeday.com/2014/02/02/this-isnt-the-most-e...

Slightly more direct answer than the others... If you look at the map, most of Cambridge is as close to downtown/historic Boston as much of Boston itself.

Also, outside the immediate Boston-area, MIT and Harvard are usually thought of as being in Boston. But, they're actually in Cambridge.

For most people, Cambridge is "the side of Boston to the north of the Charles River" - for many, it's just a neighborhood in Boston (no offense meant to any Cambridge natives).

https://www.google.com/maps/place/Boston,+MA/@42.3145182,-71...

Makes total sense. Thank you!

If you're in the Bay Area, it's Boston's equivalent of Oakland (but with different socioeconomic demographics). More urban than suburban, and a city in its own right, but somewhat subsumed in the larger city's shadow.

As far as daily life of someone living in either city, they're effectively one metropolis. Many, many people live in one and work (and shop, and play) in the other.

You have twin cities situation going on here.

Although it is more akin to a left brain-right brain situation. 2 similar structures separated by one physical divide.

It helps to think of Boston and Cambridge as one city. (Though I am sure many don't like that) The city of Boston itself is pretty small to begin with anyways.

I really appreciate the mental model expressed here: https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2018/2/15/how-to-turn-a-...

The TL;DR is that a street is in a dense area that's slow speed and welcoming to all forms of transit, A road gets cars at a fast speed from point A to point B, and a "stroad" is the worst of both worlds and a common anti-pattern in many sprawly areas.

Asking for anyone who might know: how is it that this article is at the #1 spot on the front page already. It was submitted by an account created 21 minutes ago, and it seems unusual that it would displace things like the Assange story, which has over 800 comments.

62 upvotes is a lot.

I’m guessing a lot of hn users live or lived around Cambridge.

Up-vote rate over time is highly weighted and it's east coast business hours right now so there's a lot of people from MA mashing the upvote button.

The voting mechanism here is a bit opaque. I think it also considers trends. So a an article with 60 votes in a short time period will probably climb higher than an article with 800 votes but slow increase.

Activity on the submission (views and comments) probably also has an influence.

Can confirm--in Cambridge and smashing the up-vote because I like bikes!

> it seems unusual that it would displace things like the Assange story, which has over 800 comments.

Lots of comments on an article can hurt its ranking, per https://github.com/minimaxir/hacker-news-undocumented#flame-...

My guess is that it got a lot of upvotes quickly because it's on a topic people care about (bike lanes), has a clear headline and comes from a trusted source (citylab).

The upvote/time ratio is what propels it to the top of the front page.

I've wondered the same. I've seen very short lived and ... really questionable articles that rise to the top with no comments very fast.

Not implying anything is inherently wrong with that, but it is interesting.

Cambridge can't even fix potholes and plow snow, but this is where they decide to spend money. Some real galaxy brains.

(insert bike credentials here)

For me one of the largest (if not THE largest) factor* in bike safety is route choice, and the main factor in that for me is density and speed of car traffic. As comfortable as I feel "vehicular" cycling (e.g. cutting across lanes to take a true left turn, taking the lane to avoid the "dooring zone" along parked cars), those are the moments when I am most exposed and at risk. Likewise the safest intersections are those that do not have cars passing through!

As an example, a colleague of mine commutes from near my house to our office, and we take very different routes - him along a major artery with (mostly) protected bike lanes, me along back streets with sharrows or no bike markings at all. Even in a protected line, he has to contend with fast and constant traffic alongside him, frequent intersections where he has no protection and is even harder to see (since he's popping out from behind a line of parked cars); the intersections are constantly in use and drivers turn and accelerate faster to make smaller windows in the faster traffic. My commute along back streets is leisurely; I can ride in the middle of the street without fear of getting doored or getting overtaken at speed unexpectedly, and intersections are calm. Of course the major artery is more direct (and so perhaps slightly faster), but it's also a major designated bike route and for that reason sees a lot of bike traffic even though I think it's less safe.

Of course in denser neighborhoods and cities it may be difficult to find "back streets" with minimal car traffic and which still get to where you're going. Still, I think that should be a goal of new bike infrastructure development - I'm happy to act like a car, make turns from the correct lane, stop at red lights, signal, etc., and I don't need a protected bike lane either - a normal road with light, slow car traffic is fine. A set of these which connects the major neighborhoods in a community (e.g. running parallel to arteries but not quite in the central areas) makes for a very nice bike experience (c.f. Berkeley's bike boulevards which is naturally my inspiration here!).

So, when this article mentions the requirement of protected bike lanes on all streets, while I think that's great and I love seeing bicycling given more consideration in urban planning, I also think that it seems a little coarse. Some roads don't need to have any bike traffic at all, some roads can be wonderful for biking without any modification at all, and some roads ought to be made better for biking but in more nuanced ways (primarily traffic easing - roundabouts, narrower roadways, removing through-access, etc - that discourages car traffic without impeding bike traffic). Of course if you want to build independent bike trails (or non-grade lanes, or other more significant changes) that's wonderful too!

Other important factors IMO:

Cyclist density - everyone should bike! Probably preaching to the choir here but there's safety in numbers, drivers get used to seeing cyclists and how they behave, and it makes it easier to advocate for better infrastructure. Also relevant on a micro-level for route choice * Cycling experience/behavior - including "vehicular" maneuvers, general awareness of dangerous/risky situations and driver behavior * Lights

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