People don't think "car supremacy is being challenged," they think "my commute is annoying already and now it's about to get a lot more annoying."
I like bike infrastructure and use it frequently and I'm way closer to the yuppie-urbanist edge of the spectrum, but it's important to understand where people are coming from if you want to sell it to them democratically. "Car supremacy is being challenged" sounds to them like "fuck you and how you get around town," and it's unsurprising they react emotionally to that.
I don't believe anywhere with mass transit offers this kind of experience during commute hours.
I think this is a fairy tale story about transit that just plain does not and cannot exist for a meaningful amount of time, especially as cities become more and more densely populated.
Maybe places you've lived haven't had nice transit or you didn't live in a good place to take advantage of it, but I promise it's out there. It's just hugely underfunded and struggling because of all the concessions we've made to private vehicle ownership.
The trip home was always way more full though.
I think we need to start talking about how dedicated bike lanes can benefit _drivers_:
- more people getting around by bike (b/c it feels safe) means fewer cars in front of you
- absence of dedicated / protected bike lanes pushes bikes (and ebikes, scooters) etc into the main part of traffic, which can slow down traffic overall, and makes driving more stressful (b/c drivers have to watch for these). Creating bike infrastructure gives them a safe place to go that isn't directly in front of your car.
- more people arriving to a destination by bike/scooter/whatever means less competition in that area for the street parking that does exist
Is anyone suggesting that?
A typical urban cyclist in the Netherlands ("not particularly hilly") averages about 15 km/hour. https://holland-cycling.com/blog/260-amsterdam-has-slowest-c... .
I can picture a spandex-wearing boomer that likes to hitch his bike to the back of a car and drive several miles away to a recreational bike trail for exercise, then drive home as being a NIMBY. I think that's a totally different kind of person, though, than someone who wants to commute to work and pick up groceries using their bike instead of a car, though. And to be fair, a lot cycling has historically been catering to the spandex recreational cyclists.
Assuming it is a personal attack is not rational though.
According to the article, there are apparently 40 years of studies showing these business owners that bike lanes are good for business. Business owners are usually trying to make good business. What other selling points do they need?
I don't really get what's supposed to be so special about a car that we should feel good about letting others "walk up to and lay a hand on" it.
The above was discussing lack of rationality from car drivers.
Someone touching your bike is a awfully close to touching you. I think it's rational to be a bit suspicious when a stranger gets that close to you, no matter what they are doing, but especially if they are touchy feely.
People touching my car will quite obviously do no damage to it or me. If I'm in the car, I may lock the doors/roll up the windows, if they aren't already. If you want to move the goalposts now and say a stranger isn't merely touching your car, but keying it, that's a different situation, and unrelated to the discussion. I don't know exactly what a rational response is to irrational behaviour. :)
I live where road salt destroys cars, not someone touching it. Yet somehow people think it is important to have a nice car even though it won't be nice in a few years no matter what. It isn't even worth the investment in keeping a car nice - regular washes keep the rust away for not very much longer.
Even construction of roads takes years--public transit takes longer. Everybody present suffers the effects of the construction for benefits that may or may not materialize in a reasonable timeframe.
As for bike infrastructure, the fundamental problem is that you cannot share car and bike infrastructure. Bikes are simply too vulnerable to cars. That means that bike infrastructure needs to be separated which, by definition, takes space away from cars. If you have a new development, you can do that since nobody has an expectation. However, if you take something away and make life more irritating for people, they're going to naturally complain. Loudly.
Finally, public transit doesn't do any good until it hits a critical mass. Modern cities don't always help that--most US cities don't have a core that everybody works in--where people work is smeared out across a geographic area. You have to reverse that, but those same people are also the people that don't want to commute anyway and want to work from home so you lose a lot of possible users of your system.
Taking away a car lane in actual reality, doesn't necessarily make driving worse. A single lane can be better for drivers, cars chugging along calmly in single file, and can be more efficient than the reptile brained jostling for position that arises when you have two parallel driving lanes.
Drivers have an adverse reaction to cyclists, specifically them. It is not rational, it is a weird freudian thing. The rational brain rarely comes into it.
The only way that happens is if people now refuse to use that road because the capacity has reduced. People who used to drive that road but now are not driving on the road are still pissed off about that bike lane.
Bikes are in conflict with cars. Full stop. Quit trying to bamboozle people about this--they are not fooled, you come off as a liar, and you just piss them off.
And you don't have to lie--car-centric culture is a huge problem. The fact the people need to keep driving long past an age when they should be is a problem. The fact that people need to drive simply to have access to certain goods and services is a problem. Solving these issues and making cars less necessary and less desirable also makes life better for bikes.
When sufficient people can avoid a car such that your two lane road is now underutilized enough that shutting down a lane doesn't matter, no one will care that you put in that bike lane. That should be your goal if you don't want people to oppose you.
Of course, reality, it's multifaceted etc etc.... but more lanes/more capacity is only true on paper, not in practice.
Sorry. I'm going to ask for a reference.
I'm also going to challenge you because I have dealt with an old city with sections with mostly 2 lane roads and driving through it SUUUUUUCKS (see: Pittsburgh--particularly the areas Wilkinsburg, Squirrel Hill, Shadyside, Bloomfield, etc.).
In all of the places that I have lived (all in the US), roads are expensive enough that they rarely get overbuilt past 2 lanes unless required by capacity (generally) or by law (rarer). A 4 lane road almost always indicates that the original 2 lane road hit 100% capacity at least some hours of the day and was painful enough that somebody, somewhere had enough political pressure to kick off the project to upgrade the number of lanes.
I am trying to think of a 4 lane road anywhere I have lived that could be downgraded to 2 lanes and am really struggling. Maybe Western Pennsylvania, somewhere. Some of the towns where the mills and mines collapsed probably have some overbuilt roads.
It's kind of interesting because I find that this discussion mirrors the people pushing roundabouts in the US without understanding traffic differences. UK traffic is medium speed and medium density for most of the day in most areas where roundabouts work best. The problem is that US traffic tends to be 100+% during a couple of hours in the day and much lower utilization at other times--roundabouts fail really hard in those conditions.
No, they aren't. In particular, if you're a driver going from one side of the city to the other (or whatever) if the portion of cars in front of you which are local, short trips without much cargo could instead be converted to (e)bikes alongside you, you'd face less traffic and arrive sooner.
And for the last couple years, I've heard _so many_ people talk about how much they enjoyed riding their ebikes, I think we're really at the point where a bunch more of those shorter trips _can_ convert away from cars. The infrastructure that lets people feel safe without a car around them and _also_ gets them out of traffic (and prevents them from slowing down cars) can be a benefit for both drivers and cyclists in the right context.
Sorry, I thought this was clear from my comment: according the article, bike lanes are good for business. Rational business owners want business to be good.
Where I live with have extensive bike lanes. They are good for every bar and ice cream shop along the way: people use those bike lanes on nice Saturdays for a ride to the bars and ice cream shops on the way, and you can see all the bike racks outside of those businesses along the route. However this is bad for businesses not on the bike route as they lose out. It is also neutral for all businesses along the route that are not about alcohol or ice cream - nobody goes to the furniture store on a bike.
If you really want to spends thousands of dollars on a couch or kitchen table, just ask the store to deliver.
And today is a Thursday even!
The reality is a lot of small minority owned businesses couldn't survive the years of construction and reduced parking, and the trains didn't bring more shoppers through.
A lot of homes and buildings were sold as taxes went up, but the new development were all luxury style apartments.
The people who benefited were commercial developers and yuppie types, and the lower class, largely minority people who made up most of the area were pushed back into other neighborhoods.
It turns out, judging the effects of an action like development requires a lot of local context, and people can quite rationally be upset that they are going to be sacrificed for someone else's gain.
FWIW the Civic Center area of SF used to be the theater district before BART was built through there in an extremely invasive cut and cover way, which led to theaters shuttering and being replaced by ... seedier operations.[0]
[0] Source: I remember reading this somewhere like ten years ago
I lived relatively close to it for a few years (all before the rail was put in and during construction), but definitely wouldn't live there again.
New luxury are a good thing - it means there is more housing in your city. Sure the local area looks more expensive, but rich yuppies need to live someplace. The real question is are you building enough that the poor can afford to live someplace, or pushing poor out completely. All housing starts out as luxury housing and then 20-40 years latter becomes were the poor want to live. So if you have a problem with housing costs today the problems are rooted in the decisions of 1985! You cannot correct them overnight. However crying the rich benefit so we do nothing just ensures the problems will remain in 2065.
The cost of vehicle ownership needs to be offset by suburban real estate to justify it.
When much our our auto infrastructure is operating over capacity at peak times, the idea of doing anything but doubling down on automobile infrastructure means these folks will be doomed to have suboptimal transit for the rest of their lives.
Transportation alternatives only help folks who haven’t built their lives around a car.