You build bike infrastructure in the places where you want more of them, not the places where you have more of them. Or as we say in the active transportation advocacy business, they didn’t count swimmers to decide to build the Golden Gate Bridge.
You build a bridge to enable people to travel somewhere they want to go but currently cannot.
When you're building a bike lane you're trying to get people to switch from driving a car to cycling.
Driving is more convenient for most people. It's faster, it's easier, it's safer, and they are already used to it.
Simply plopping in a bike lane is not, ever, going to convince the majority to start cycling. All it will accomplish is pissing most of them off because a road lane that used to be a useful piece of public infrastructure for them is now a bike lane dedicated to some small fraction of people who cycle, and it negatively impacts their commutes and therefore their lives.
These sorts of statements are analogous to the median vs mean slight of hand (aka lying) that people routinely employ to intentionally mislead.
At the very best it's "not the whole truth". To just build stuff and have it be used to a useful degree you need latent demand for transportation of all forms. These assumptions are generally questionably optimistic or untrue outside of urban areas (like real ones, not the census definition).
A bike lane to a strip mall off the highway that has nothing else immediately around it does nobody any good. Slap up a bus stop. Even if the bus service is crappy it will still benefit somebody.
Secondly, there is a massive latent demand for cycling infrastructure in highly populated places that are suitable for cycling. That there are other places unsuitable for cycling is irrelevant. Another thing we often say on this topic is there are no transportation solutions to land use problems. But in America even when the development pattern is reasonable the infrastructure for cycling still doesn't exist. The dangerous, unpleasant, and inconvenient scattered bike lanes that we have in most American cities are acceptable to < 1% of potential cyclists, which is why the bicycle mode share in most American cities is << 1%.
A claim like that needs some evidence. I don't believe you at all that many people are eager to get rid of more convenient transportation (cars) for less convenient (bikes)
> The dangerous, unpleasant, and inconvenient scattered bike lanes that we have in most American cities are acceptable to < 1% of potential cyclists, which is why the bicycle mode share in most American cities is << 1%
These numbers suggest that if we had perfect cycling infrastructure that netted 100% of potential cyclists, we would still be seeing actual "bicycle mode share" usage of about 1-2% of commuters?
Seems like a poor use of infrastructure to me to cater to such a small demographic of cyclists.
So long as morons are browsing Instagram on their 3 ton deathboxes while speeding around town, it's just too risky. My coworker got tapped by an SUV in a very low-speed fender bender. He was out of commission for months, all sorts of broken bones, it was brutal.
I'm not going to ban you right now because, after skimming through your recent history, it looks to me like you've been making a good-faith effort to stick to the rules, which I appreciate. But if you keep resorting to aggressive/abusive posting, we're eventually going to have to. We've cut you a ton of slack over the years, but it's not infinite!
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34537078 (Jan 2023)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33914274 (Dec 2022)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33311881 (Oct 2022)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30890360 (April 2022)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26628758 (March 2021)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26307811 (March 2021)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25561372 (Dec 2020)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24724281 (Oct 2020)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24458954 (Sept 2020)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24380545 (Sept 2020)
If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future. They're here: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.