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Comment by chrisco255 | Hacker News Reader

Have you been to the United States? The idea of loading 3 kids on some bikes and riding 10 miles to school, then 15 miles the other direction to work in the midwest on a winter day (temps get into negative fahrenheit in many parts of the U.S.) (or the south/southwest on a hot 100F+ summer day) is laughable. God forbid some after school activity is another 10 miles out of your way or you need to pick up something on the way, or carry them to your parents house which is another 25 miles away.

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No one is coming to put a bike lane on the kind of seasonally impassable dirt road that is reasonably found 10 miles from the nearest school. If you want to live deep in the middle of nowhere, no one’s stopping you. But when you come into the kinds of communities that actually sustain the institutions you need (school, work, etc) they aren’t obliged to give over all their public space and put their lives at risk for your truck to move as freely as possible.

The closest religious school I'm considering for my son is over 20 miles away currently, and obviously I can't move over night to reduce that. I also don't live on a narrow dirt road - I live in a city in a community with probably hundreds of houses

There's also no reliable transit option to either location.

Am I suppose to just suck it up, throw out my vehicle, and bike 90 minutes there just to drop him off?

Car primacy is not the same thing as the ability to drive at all. Cars are obviously useful, and lots of trips wouldn't be feasible without them. But streets in populated areas shouldn't be designed around this kind of trip as the only or primary use case. People choosing the local schools, for example, should have streets on which they can can feel confident walking or cycling, and not need their own vehicles just because you're using one.

I would ask you to, in your words, "suck it up" with respect to some inconvenience in your car trip for that goal. Even then, you might be surprised - adding a bike lane might remove some car throughput, but would also remove some cars. On balance it could work out in your favor.

They say the car erased distance. I don't think we should go back to a primitive era of distance being literally insurmountable, but I do think it would be healthy to rediscover a bit of respect for it.

> People choosing the local schools, for example, should have streets on which they can can feel confident walking or cycling, and not need their own vehicles just because you're using one.

I entirely agree, but we all have to live with the world that we're currently in. It can take years or decades to re-envision a car-dependent area into something more car independent. For example, painting a white line over a highway's current gutter is not pedestrian/bike/transit infrastructure. It's dangerous for everyone. Yet, that's the type of "bike-friendly infrastructure" we get, and when drivers complain, it's viewed as drivers being anti-transit or anti-bicycle. No, it's just dangerous. The bike route shouldn't be inches from a high speed motorway.

> I would ask you to, in your words, "suck it up" with respect to some inconvenience in your car trip for that goal...adding a bike lane might remove some car throughput, but would also remove some cars.

No, it does not. Maybe in your area, it would, but here, it does not, because it's simply too far and unsafe to bicycle on the highway. It's dangerous and bad engineering. It's 5 miles (or 27 minutes according to Google) on major highways to the local elementary school. No one should ever be on a bicycle on these highways, regardless the fact that a small part of that distance might have a painted white lane denoting a bike lane full of road debris.

Instead, there should be a bicycle/pedestrian path that goes a more direct route - the distance is only 2 miles straight (or ~10 minutes), without crossing any major highways or difficult terrain. The school is also only 1.5 miles from a very nice park, but the highway would cross the path, so that conflict would need to be figured out.

Sorry if this comes of as combative, but what I'm pointing out that "painting a lane" simply does not work in the US, but that's all that is suggested and done. Streets and Roads need to be separate, and bikes should remain on streets or non-Road routes, and high speed vehicle travel should remain on roads. Not Just Bikes says this in his channel "Stroads are Ugly, Expensive, and Dangerous", but does so more to clarify/elevate the "Street". However, the discussion tends to miss that the "Road" is still important and needs to be respected. Putting a bike lane on a "Road" is another form of creating a "stroad".

If you're plugged into Not Just Bikes then I'm guessing you've heard the phrase "paint isn't infrastructure." Painted bicycle gutters are not anyone's idea of a solution here, more of a lazy DOT's way of shrugging at the problem without rocking any boats.

What I think we need to reimagine is having the only connection between where people live and where they go to school be a highway. That's unfortunately a fundamental construct in suburban design - subdivisions hanging off of bike- and pedestrian-hostile highways - and it shows up everywhere. Creating new rights of way might be doable in some circumstances. But in others, these things are going to have to stop being highways (or at least lose some lanes) in order to get genuinely safe, separated walking and cycling infrastructure along existing rights of way.

US suburban sprawl, enormous parking lots, and generally inefficient land use is what puts everything 10 to 15 to 25 miles away from home. It didn't have to be like this.

Check out Not Just Bikes on youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC0intLFzLaudFG-xAvUEO-A/vid...

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