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Comment by realityczeque | Hacker News Reader

Your windshield perspective is showing. The reason people in cars don't notice bike traffic is because a bike is small and unobtrusive and silent. Fifty cars in the same place is an epic disaster but fifty bikes in the same place is not a problem.

Take for example this data in London, which was produced in response to a question from a member of the public having essentially the same bias as your statement "nobody uses this bike lane." In London some bike lanes have slightly increased travel times by car but cycling has increased more than 50%. The bike lane is five times more efficient at moving people than is the carriageway.

http://foi.tfl.gov.uk/FOI-1235-1718/20170317%20STB%20CSEW%20...

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> In London some bike lanes have slightly increased travel times by car but cycling has increased more than 50%.

50% of anything near zero is still darn close to zero. But at the same token, a 5 minute increase for 1000 people is a loss of 5000 minutes.

> The reason people in cars don't notice bike traffic is because a bike is small and unobtrusive and silent.

False. A single bike sticks out like a sore thumb in traffic -- even if there's a bike lane. In this case, I was so pissed off at the increase of my commute I started to count bikes in the bike lane, and I saw exactly zero.

Have you considered using the bike lane yourself?

To start off that’s ableist. And reeks of privilege (can he afford to live a biking distance to work?)

But that doesn’t matter - someone unilaterally changes something and everyone else is supposed to get with the program or find a hole to die in.

I don't think its ableist, I wasn't suggesting that there shouldn't be a road for cars, or that they should even bike themselves. I was just wondering if they had considered why they didn't want to use it as that might shed light on why it wasn't a successful bike lane.

Like the motorists changed laws concerning pedestrian traffic and road laws?

Yes, but I have a life long history of listening to horror stories of people on bikes getting hit by cars.

These days, I fly back and forth to work, so it makes little sense to use a bike.

The paper has the number of bikers. But I’m sure your statistically representative research of ‘watching for bikers while driving once’ is much more worthwhile.

My apologies. It was 0 over the course of 30 days of commuting. Exactly 0.

> so pissed off

> single bike sticks out like a sore thumb

Now it totally makes sense.

Well when you have to dodge an unfit person going up a hill you notice.

I’m all for bike lanes. And bicycle licenses. Can’t go up the 80 percentile hill in your town at 20 mph? You fail.

There are plenty of places in US that are exactly as OP has described. This is not because bike lanes aren't inefficient per se, but because they're often built in the wrong places, or lack other infrastructure.

Lack of related infrastructure is a real problem.

Bike lanes built one at a time, and not connected. So, if you happen to live and work along a single bike lane, great. If not, you're back in the car.

Lack of bicycle facilities at destinations. My office has a tiny, poorly constructed rack outdoors. I wouldn't trust it to hold my bicycle, even with a good lock. Much of the USA is warm or hot in summer, so anything more than a few miles on the bike results in lots of sweating, so showers at offices would be helpful.

In places where bicycle infrastructure is provided, it is well used. The first Reston Metro stop (Weihle Station) has a large, locked bike room with nice racks and a small workbench area. The station is located right off one of the regions main multi-use paths. That bike room is heavily utilized.

Sadly, the second Reston Metro station, Reston Town Center, doesn't provide any infrastructure at all. No bike storage, no parking, nothing. Not sure what the heck the county was thinking when planning this station.

> Bike lanes built one at a time, and not connected.

That's probably the number one problem of bike lanes.

The second problem is that if you add a bike lane, you have to take something away. Usually it's parking or traffic lanes. And neither of those are super popular.

> Much of the USA is warm or hot in summer, so anything more than a few miles on the bike results in lots of sweating

Or there's snow on the ground 4 months out of the year, and makes it a real pain to commute on a bike. Or in several places, you have both. Chicago comes to mind.

On street parking is a horrible thing to have in any urban area. That MUST be banned.

Bike lanes are beneficial in urban areas, and that's pretty much it.

But when it comes to US, the bike lanes is the last thing when it comes to the kindergarten level of infrastructure planning. In my experience infrastructure in US was planned exclusively by NIMBYs...

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