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Comment by panick21_ | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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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