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Comment by candu | Hacker News Reader

Step N+1: advocate for better cycling infrastructure in your area / town / city. Places that are bike-friendly don't rely on driver or cyclist behaviour to prevent collisions; they build separated lanes, provide bike boxes in front of stopped cars, reduce speed limits, install automated speed enforcement, connect cycling paths through parks, and so on.

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"Better cycling infrastructure" should mean an effectively car-free network of streets. Yes this can be achieved while still allowing cars to access residences on these streets.

This is what has been frustrating for me as a life long advocate for decades. People think bike lanes are a solution. They are not, bike lanes are for cars, not for bikes. Bikes and public transit should each get about 5%-10% of car-free surface streets to create a safe, fast, reliable network for alternatives. Ironically, this would reduce traffic, as the main reason why traffic is so terrible is because automobiles have monopoly power over the infrastructure, so nobody can actually choose alternatives if they want to.

I'm a mod of /r/bicycling, and wrote a free ebook on how to get into biking years ago. Here is the chapter on safety:

http://howtobike.info/thebook?section=chapter3

while i can appreciate the idea, in LA, there's basically zero chance we get such a car-free network of streets, so i advocate for replacing free street parking with dedicated bike lanes. ideally, also narrowing the car lanes too for traffic calming and add some sort of barrier (even just periodic bumps or a hump). it's nearly as good, reduces externalized subsidies to cars, it's more achievable politically and civicly, and cheaper to boot.

p.s. - i got buzzed by an SUV riding my bike today. i caught up at the light and yelled at him but that's little consolation for such a dangerous action.

I mean, i just don't know what to say. Anything less is insufficient. Bike lanes "are for other people," which is the paradigm that propagates the bikes and ebikes never being a real alternative to the automobile.

In SF we are slowly, and contentiously creating this network. Perhaps it will fail, but it's mostly becoming real at this point. It will only take and extended period of gas prices to act as a catalyst.

you're letting perfect be the enemy of the good. you can get extensive biking infrastructure nearly immediately by doing a conversion of street parking. creating a separate, dedicated network is much slower and more expensive, if even possible. i've lived in SF and there is no way that the wealthy folks there, just like LA, will allow anything more than a few token bike lanes just to appease the peons and appear magnanimous.

i agree about gas prices needing to be higher though. i've long advocated for raising gas taxes (and removing indirect subsidies) to price in externalities and reconfigure markets (not just transportation, but housing, grocery, and everything else too) to be more efficient as a result. you could even fund bikes lanes with those taxes.

I'm not letting perfect be the enemy. I'll push for whatever infrastructure I can get, i just think a lack of ambition is also a flaw. Ask for what you need, not just what you think you can get. That's how SF got a near car-free route from the ocean to the ferry building.

> > "Anything less is insufficient."

sure, you can ask for anything. and not doing so isn't for lacking ambition. that's a projective ad hominem. sometimes people differ in what they perceive as wholly sufficient.

For most cities, you shouldn't hope to innovate; just partially emulating the Netherlands is the best you can hope for.

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