Comment by sleepybrett | Hacker News Reader

Comment by sleepybrett | Hacker News Reader

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Assuming a perfectly gridded city core. Take the road every n blocks in each direction and make them bicycle only. A simple two-lane road would be enough. Place bollards at intersections that intersect a car lane for increased safety. Possibly paint those bike only lanes with large obvious markings to make it even more obvious. The bikes could follow similar traffic laws, one lane each direction, stop lights, the whole bit.

These roads can be maintained just as they are for cars, except they would need much less repaving work as bicycles do not cause as much wear and tear as a car or truck.

As this develops you can narrow the actual roadway for those roads and increase sidewalk size where appropriate. With some of this increased sidewalk space you place racks for locked parking.

I'm a recent bike purchaser, I've had my ebike for about a year. I love my little cargo bike and take it all over my moderately sleepy city neighborhood to run errands, see friends, etc. I'm very nervous, however to take it anywhere near the downtown core. Too much traffic, bike lanes are generally 'paint only'. If I had separated infrastructure I would certainly travel downtown more often (there is a lot of separated infrastructure that can get me from my house to the edge of downtown, but once i'm downtown it's a shitshow). So I think that priming the pump with safe infrastructure is necessary to increase the use of modes of transport like bikes/ebikes/scooters/monowheels/etc.

Once the use is up, the secondary effects will follow. More bike repair 'garages', more secure space to lock up in parking garages w/ charging (most ebikes just charge on a 110v wall wart (in my case a pretty beefy one) but that just means simple dc hookups.. I'm not sure if the current crop of ebikes have standardized on a particular voltage but over time in this scenario I suspect they will.

I guess my point is that re-engineering is already happening in many cities. For years it was paint only bike lanes, now in my city (Seattle) we're starting to see even more bike lanes, though most paint only or shitty lane separation 'flags'. But also some more separated infrastructure. Hell last I checked they have fallen short on spending the budgets we give them for this stuff already.

Car infrastructure was built up very quickly and without much actual thought. Hopefully we can do better.

In lots of cities you can add bike lanes without any issues, you don't even lose capacity. I would start by simply having save bike lanes along all roads.

Your suggest of making part of the grid bike only is also a good one, but its more radical.

People will not even consider that unless there are already many bikers using these roads. You need to first have a bike lane and then you can make the argument it should be expanded.

> would need much less repaving work

Bike lanes shouldn't be paved at all. Its much better to use tiling methods, better for water and repeatability. You never basically need to repave them if cars don't destroy them.

This is acceptable only if the bike lanes are meaningfully and permanently separated from motor vehicle traffic. Most "bike lanes" are simple stripes painted alongside the road shoulder which cars/delivery trucks/etc. will happily use as parking, or which become blocked by snow or construction signs and force cyclists to weave around (and into car traffic).

I'm tired of the half-measures. Actively car-hostile urban planning is the dream, but at the very least we need to elevate alternative modes of transportation to the same level as the car.

>Actively car-hostile urban planning is the dream

Hopelessly impractical. Cargo delivery (to/from warehouse and stores), disabled or otherwise mobility impaired persons, etc. all need road vehicle access, and retrofitting a city to be bike-only would be astoundingly expensive and disruptive.

IMO it would be better for a city to be built from the start with passenger/bike and tram/light rail as a direct replacement for road vehicles (including cargo tram lines that share infrastructure with passenger trams but branch out into clusters of buildings, or run every other block, such that endpoint delivery is not overly difficult).

> IMO it would be better for a city to be built from the start

sure .. but we aren't in that situation, unless a major metropolitan area gets fucking carpet bombed. Every city started as a village, they grow. They are generally not planned from the beginning to be a city.

You can't rewrite this shit from scratch, you refactor it. Look at european cities that date back centuries. Weird little cramped streets that were designed for walking and narrow carts that got made into barely usable motorcar roads. Lets refactor that stuff back, and while we are at it let's refactor some of the nearly infinite roads into some safer ped/bike traffic.

> unless a major metropolitan area gets fucking carpet bombed

We can dream, right?

> Look at european cities that date back centuries.

Actually, don't bomb those. Those are the nice ones.

> disabled or otherwise mobility impaired persons, etc. all need road vehicle access

I appreciate your heart is in the right place, but disabled and mobility impaired persons benefit from bike infrastructure too. Please don't use them as an excuse to continue car hegemony.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xSGx3HSjKDo

> disabled or otherwise mobility impaired persons

I'm willing to extend acceptance to electric trikes and even golf carts. That should be sufficient.

Even for those, you want to make sure they don't start to crowd out smaller vehicles though.

I propose a kinetic energy limit of 6 kJ, including mass of rider(s). That's 100 kg (220 lbs) moving at 11 m/s (25 mph).

For comparison, a modest handgun round apparently exits with a muzzle energy of about 400 J. So we're still talking about significant energies.

Beyond that -- where physical disability causes a risk to others, we do limit rights. If you have epilepsy, you may lose your license. If you are unable to move without the aid of a massive contraption, you also don't get to use the shared infrastructure, the end. The net result would still be more inclusive overall, simply because these small vehicles would be one to two orders of magnitude cheaper than cars.

I haven't seen these 'tiled' streets but I would imagine that any gap or offset in tiles would be really shitty for people using things with smaller wheel diameters like escooters and especially skateboards.

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