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Comment by softwaredoug | Hacker News Reader

Where I live they will randomly build a bike path for a mile on the side of the road. But then it just ends. There's not a sense of how it could be built to connect people to the places they need to go. It's random and ad-hoc. Then people say "its pointless to build bike / ped infrastructure, nobody uses it!"

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Around here, there seems to be an unwritten rule that every place a trail crosses the road there must be a row of 20’ tall shrub blocking the entire line of visibility in both directions.

My favorite feature of bicycle lanes in San Jose is that cars cross them diagonally to get onto highway access ramps.

Nothing screams "safety" like an SUV coming at you from behind and left while accelerating to highway speeds.

I’ve lived in places where they’ll add the bike path during scheduled road work, as it’s cheaper to get it done while there’s a crew already onsite. It can be a bit stochastic at first like you mention, but over a while I’ve seen the corridor eventually fill out, making the most of a shoestring budget.

Perhaps something similar where you live?

This is a huge problem where I live too. The thing is, technically, everyone is equally connected, because people have a legal right of way on all roads using any means of transport (apart from motorways, but these are always redundant links). But practically, most routes are unsafe and just downright unpleasant to use in anything but a motorvehicle.

I don't know what metrics they are using to assess walking or cycling infrastructure, but it seems like it's just raw miles of pavement/tarmac. This is a useless metric. You can have 10 miles of pristine cycle path but if it goes nowhere it's not useful and nobody will use it.

The metrics need to be based on graph completeness. Important places are the nodes. You get to draw an edge if there's a reasonable route that is less than, say, 150% of the crow flies distance (or some more clever formula taking into account gradients etc., ie. it's allowed to be longer if it means not including a 25% gradient). Then your score is simply number of edges divided by number of edges in the complete graph (or 2E/(N^2*N) where E is number of edges and N number of places).

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