Hacker News Reader

This is solvable by narrowing the lanes. Wide, comfortable lanes invite speed.

Right. Low speed limits themselves are insufficient. You need to design or modify the road such that it actually feels like you have to go that slowly.

In my experience, cars actually go pretty slow in NY (Manhattan at least), even when there’s not a lot of traffic. I’m usually able to easily keep up with traffic on my bike.

This is definitely not true on the multi-lane avenues. You're thinking of the single-lane streets.

One good solution for the avenues would be to time their rolling green waves for an average of 15 mph. They just recently started doing this in Brooklyn on a particularly dangerous road.

I’m referring to 5th and 6th ave near the village which I commute on every day. Some aves are worse.

So you're referring to a few particular avenues in one neighborhood during rush hour.

I'm just pointing out that that's hardly indicative of the overall speed of traffic across Manhattan at all times. Vehicles go fast on the avenues when they can, definitely faster than you would want to try to keep up with on a bike.

Solved by making really thin streets and blind corners where cars have to slow right now to avoid hitting things on the edge.