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Comment by toast0 | Hacker News Reader

Bike lanes are a double edged sword. Yes, there's subjective safety, but as much as the white line (or sometimes more) holds cars out, it also holds bikes in.

Once you have a condition where you need to move left, out of the bike lane, it's a big step. But depending on your route, you may need to avoid pavement issues, trash or other debris in the bike lane, vehicles crossing the lane, or you may need to turn left or pass slower bicycles. And the aditional problem that if there's a marked bike lane, drivers will expect bicycles to remain in it.

Sharrows don't provide subjective safety, they just remind everyone that bicycles are allowed there, and should be expected there. (Of course, when they're marked too far to the right, it's worse than not having any markings)

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This is an interesting point, and it was made by UK cycling bodies back when the private car had only just started to dominate UK streets. They argued that dedicated bike paths would limit the freedom of cyclists, since they would be obligated to use these paths.

In hindsight, this was a missed opportunity to build this infrastructure at a time when cycle usage (and therefore public support) was very high... and cycle participation has plummeted in the decades since to 1.7% of all journeys. Now, cyclists have the right to use all UK roads (except motorways), but only the bravest actually do so.

Meanwhile, the Netherlands has fantastic cycle infrastructure and participation is very high - although still lower than it once was in the UK! I don't think it is hyperbolic to say that given what we now know about climate change, harmful emissions and the health consequences of inactive lifestyles, this is a national tragedy.

Good cycle infrastructure encourages more people to cycle, and the rights of cyclists are better protected in societies where more people cycle.

These mostly sound like variations of "the bike lane is poorly designed/maintained" or "the bike lane isn't wide enough". If the rightmost lane of a cars-only road was treated as a poorly maintained gutter this would be an issue as well, but society treats cars as the norm and bikes as marginal. Same goes for the "cars in bike lane" issue; double parking is also an issue, but somehow we have decided that that is less tolerable than doing so in the bike lane.

As far as width goes, in European areas with high cycling rates bike lanes are very wide, nearly a car lane wide, so one can pass. American ones tend to be very narrow because cycling use is low and biking is treated as marginal.

You can have roads without bike lanes at all that are still safe for biking, but they have to be sufficiently narrow and slow. Most American streets are extremely wide, and so people often speed, which is an extremely common complaint in American residential neighborhoods. The difference is that most people will ask for a stop sign, which sometimes doesn't do anything, or they ask for speed bumps, which cost a lot of money.

A car making a right turn is also going to be a lot more dangerous situation when there are bike lines than if the bicycles are sharing lanes with cars. I was curious about how it's handled in Copenhagen (since that is usually held up as a particularly bike friendly city), but it seems to be an issue there as well, according to this article[1]. What's interesting about this article is that it suggests that a large part of the bike safety efforts are directed at getting cyclists to adopt safe behaviors. It seems like most of the discussion in states is directed at everyone except the cyclists themselves.

[1] http://www.cycling-embassy.dk/2015/10/23/how-to-decrease-rig...

>What's interesting about this article is that it suggests that a large part of the bike safety efforts are directed at getting cyclists to adopt safe behaviors.

What? From the article

> we can conclude, that very rarely it is the cyclists who make the mistakes. Therefore, we mostly collaborate with the truck drivers and the authorities in solving the problems.

It's not a huge problem, its just one of the main recurring accident types. At most crossings the closed bike lane opens and becomes an combined right-turn lane and bike lane. It's routine to for +10 cyclist to merge with cars turning right. The fatalities from right turns are almost exclusively due to trucks and lorries that have hard time viewing cyclist in the mirror when they are close together.

Remember the majority of the population here cycles. So it is more of a public campaign to be aware of one of the more dangerous situations and provide information on how to avoid it.

It's one of the things Copenhagen can learn from the Netherlands, where it's a solved problem at most intersections:

https://youtu.be/XpQMgbDJPok

https://youtu.be/FlApbxLz6pA

Also see https://youtu.be/HjzzV2Akyds from 6 minutes on for right turns in Copenhagen.

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