Hacker News Reader

Comment by ahoy | Hacker News Reader

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.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com