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Comment by notauser | Hacker News Reader

The cycle lane on Kensington High Street (a major London East-to-West route) actually sped up car journeys.

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2021/jan/01/removed-lond...

When it was removed the study "calculated that average trip times eastbound increased from 5min 39sec to 8min 14sec, with those westbound rising from 5min 48sec to 6min 27sec."

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Trip times, but how many trips were taken? Make the roads painful/expensive enough and the one car still using them will have a very quick journey. Conversely, filling up the bike lakes with lots of bikes will increase bike trip times. I prefer to measure the efficiency of a road by the number of people it carries across all types of vehicles. Bus lanes over bicycle lanes imho as buses can more more people per hour down a single lane than anything else.

That makes no sense: second hand effects are always weaker than first hand effects. Why would the cars not use the road if the journey is quicker?

... so why the heck did they not un-remove it after that

When a wealthy driver from Kensington or Chelsea sees a person on a bicycle, their face turns red, their heart rate increases, and their body starts to twitch. In extreme situations, they may imagine the letters they'd like to write to the Daily Mail and Daily Telegraph complaining about the abomination -- this is most common when they're driving a vehicle designed for off-road expeditions through central London.

There was a similar issue with articulated buses. These were removed by their leader, Boris Johnson, at colossal expense. Some drivers in Chelsea are still suffering the after-effects of seeing these vehicles on the road.

Hah - what a stereotyped world you live in! There are plenty of EV owning cyclists in Kensington & Chelsea.

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