How to Build a Bike Lane in America | Hacker News Reader

How to Build a Bike Lane in America

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32 pointsPaul-Craft9 comments

Bike lanes on roads are the wrong solution (albiet a cost effective attempt to avoid spending real $$$). Bike lanes should be separate to avoid casualities and at least on roads drive opposite to the flow of traffic instead of mixed traffic.

My concern here is those building bike lanes are building it for a near future where cars are banned so my initial points are invalid to them.

While it would be nice to have bike lanes flow against the flow of traffic, it’s not realistic- sometimes the bike lane is blocked and you necessarily have to mix with traffic.

> My concern here is those building bike lanes are building it for a near future where cars are banned so my initial points are invalid to them.

I'm not sure if you are referring to some sort of conspiracy theory (e.g. the current conspiracy theory about 15 minute cities) or something else, but this doesn't really make sense. If cars were banned there wouldn't be any need for "bike lanes" so why would people bother building bike lanes in anticipation for a future where cars are banned?

I mean cars for the average joe.

Of course the roads would still be there but everyone driving on it would be a worker of some kind (trucks, usps, ups, ambulance, busses etc).

In that case, having a bike lane on the road is fine. They already did it with busses. Entire lanes here are painted red with bus only on them. They'll just do the same for bikes. One green lane for bikes, 1 red lane for city vehicles (busses, cops, ambulances), 1 normal lane for annointed drivers (delivery trucks etc).

> conspiracy theory

It's already happening. Manhattan just added a $15 dollar toll , entire lanes are being devoted to busses, neighborhood streets are being closed to through traffic. Give it 997 more cuts to get to what i'm talking about.

You still need protected lanes in your personal-car-free future. You can't trust bus drivers and delivery truck drivers to not hit cyclists; if anything, they're more dangerous because their vehicles are so large and visibility is poor. And don't forget all the exhaust fumes from these things.

Even if you make all these vehicles driverless and electric, cyclists aren't going to want to regularly ride inches away from them, just like they don't want to ride inches away from a speeding train even though the train can't easily leave its tracks. Cyclists make mistakes too, and making a small steering error, or hitting a bump in the road, could have catastrophic results in the environment you seem to be promoting. Cyclists need their own road, and until that happens, riding on the sidewalk is the proper place for them.

Bike priority infra is absolutely anemic compared to car centric infra. Even in New York. Your concern makes no sense in that regard. As much as I’d love to see it.

nyc in particular: 650 miles of bike lanes and 6300 of roads (not including lane-miles). thats 10x before considering the several order difference between the cost of roads and bike lanes. imagine if they just received 5% of the funding cars do

edit: turns out that source was old. they have 1500 miles of bike lanes, but my point still stands.

This is a really interesting comment. I never considered that people would see the removal of cars from dense CBD areas as a sort of slippery slope towards removing them everywhere, and that context helps explain why they believe in the 15 minute city conspiracy.

As an Australian it seems obviously ridiculous to remove all cars, given that huge areas of the country are necessarily unreachable by anything else, but it would actually be pretty feasible to remove privately owned passenger vehicles from the inner suburbs[0] and make public transport free. I'm not even sure it's a bad idea.

[0] This is a dialect-specific phrase and "suburb" in Australian English means roughly what "neighbourhood" means in American English, but I'm not sure what the American word for "somewhat dense ring around the very dense centre of a city" would be

How about: In cities: reserve 50% of the existing roads to non-car users.

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