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Comment by Tiktaalik | Hacker News Reader

Same way as they did it in Paris: Take roads that are currently exclusively set aside for car use, and reserve a portion for exclusive cyclist use. This means building separated bike lanes (ie. not just some painted pavement).

"Build it and they will come"

The reason that cycling isn't that popular is because being chaotically mixed in with vehicle traffic makes it a dangerous activity, and people unsurprisingly avoid dangerous activities.

Creating separated AAA "All Ages and Abilities" bicycle lanes makes cycling safe and so then people feel encouraged to bicycle for whatever daily chores it makes sense to cycle for.

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This has been done in some cities, but those bike lanes are sitting empty, so there's more to it than that.

The bike paths have to be useful of course. You can make a nice bike path to nowhere and no one will use it because there's nowhere to go there. Even if it's Lime scooters or whatever using the bike paths, still an improvement.

Driving a car in Paris is also a nightmare so there's that additional motivator there.

Well the problem is that you need a cycling network and even the most cycling friendly of North American cities often don't have that.

So the common problem that holds back many cities is that you might have one or two AAA bike lanes, but then after that you're thrown back into the dangerous mix of traffic again.

Accordingly cycling growth will be limited outside of the narrow corridors where the best AAA bike lanes exist.

I don't know where you're referring to specifically, but a common thing I've seen is that cities will make some set of roads bikeable (usually roads they were repaving/redesigning anyway) but they're not really connected in a sensible way. It makes biking on the improved roads nicer, but most practical trips will still involve other roads which might be more dangerous, scary, or difficult.

I'm thinking of downtown San Jose, CA, where they do seem to have a full network of bike lanes often totally separated by cones, but maybe I'm wrong.

Having looked at those bike lanes with streetview it appears most of them are simply painted and don't provide any physical separation from traffic. Also, this: https://www.google.com/maps/@37.3428225,-121.8868874,3a,75y,...

Huh, maybe they took them out. And yeah that's the classic, those blocked lanes were a constant danger when I used to bike to work.

Adding scattered bike lanes in a haphazard way is insufficient. You need a network of physically separated bike lanes that connects an entire city. Any gap in the network makes it so the bike lanes might as well not exist, if you go from a nice ride to being in mixed traffic. Physical separation is also critical, because between the lack of enforcement of blocked bike lanes in most locales and the apathy of drivers that have no qualms blocking them, if you don't make it physically impossible to park on them, people will park on them, rendering them useless.

It's not reassuring to say that these lanes only work when they cover the entire city. If they start with a smaller bike-friendly part of town and it actually works, people will want to move there or expand it.

If they are more than just a line on the road and are actually safe to use, they are probably not as empty as they seem. Because bikes take up much less space and don't tend to bunch up as much like cars, it can seem like there must be a lot less bikes than there actually are. 30 cars over the course of 5 minutes are very noticeable and seem like high traffic. 10 bikes over 5 minutes seem like almost nobody, but the bike lane would then be moving a third as much people as all the car lanes combined.

It's so empty anywhere I go that it's an easy comparison. I can drive 15 minutes and see 0 bikes, 200 cars. I used to bike too. If there were anywhere near as many bikes as cars, I'd have sat next to them at traffic lights. Cars might bunch up more, but in any place with mid to heavy traffic, they're everywhere anyway.

You need to provide evidence and context.

This has not been done in a single US city. We only have patchwork networks, and a patchwork network of safe infrastructure is by definition unsafe infrastructure.

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