Vancouver didn't start from scratch, but aggressively built out its cycling infra over the past two decades. I love bicycles, I love green tech, and I love my e-bike! But I also note these concomitants:
- Rapid gentrification. Foot/bike accessible urban infrastructure turns out to be the hottest possible commodity.
- Luxury pricing of car parking, insurance, and spacing. This seems harmless until you remember that e.g. poor people shop at box stores (which depend on a car to access) in order to bring down the cost of living. Intentionally pricing car access as a luxury good makes the poor pay for climate progress. Making cars more expensive to own and operate is an inflationary force that disproportionately afflicts the poor.
- Gentrification + Inflation = Displacement. It's almost a joke at this point -- if your neighbourhood is putting in a bike lane, and you don't own your home, you are basically watching them tidy up for the next tenant, who will be like you, but better-off, and will pay more in rent.
When I see a bike lane getting put in, I know I'll be moving in a few years. And those twee little bicycle-lane-only traffic lights? Cute, right? Those are basically tombstones for your local art scene, because that whole block is 'going Vanhattan' (portmanteau of 'Vancouver' and 'Manhattan').
Now, there's nothing inherently wrong with bikes, and I listed the above adverse outcomes as 'concomitants', and not side-effects. I don't want to suggest that the lines of causality are that clear.
But talk about 'optimizing' cities is fundamentally talk about redistributing those cities, and redistribution creates (or effaces) winners and losers.