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Comment by nimbleplum40 | Hacker News Reader

When you say “cyclist friendly” do you mean “fully physically protected bike lanes”? Lots of cities paint on bike lanes (often in the door zone of parked cars…) then people are confused when cyclists often don’t use them. But if they aren’t safe or are always obstructed by parked cars, it’s really not that helpful…

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A lane of road was taken away in order to move things around and put in fully physically protected bike lanes. Then the cyclists proceeded to use only the single remaining lane.

The arrogance of cyclists is truly awe inspiring. Convince a city to spend multiple hundreds of millions on rebuilding infrastructure only to not only not use it, but actively and arrogantly NOT use it just to be the arrogant pricks that they have the image of.

I use to defend cyclists until that particular failure of a project. They worked overtime to ensure that the stereotype was no longer just a stereotype.

Very badly, it was actually a double failure. Due to traffic being restricted to fewer lanes, sitting there in idle increased drastically, actually making the bike lane infrastructure actively worse for the environment. This giving climate change denialists ammo for their handicapped idiotic propaganda.

Cyclists had a fully-protect lane free of cars and decided to ride in the middle of a lane filled with idling cars? I'm not sure where you live, but that's just not the behavior I've seen anywhere else...

I see it consistently everywhere that I’ve ever driven that has protected lanes.

Several cities have opted to remove their protected bike lanes for exactly the same reasons. Cyclists just don’t use them.

I'm not denying what you've seen, but it just doesn't match what I've seen at all.

> Several cities have opted to remove their protected bike lanes for exactly the same reasons.

Sure, but many cities are rapidly _expanding_ their network of protected bike lanes because of how widely they're used.

I don't have data to back this up, but I suspect that many more miles of protected bike lanes are being added each year than removed. For example, NYC [1]. For another, here's a compilation of many cities. [2]

What cities are removing bike infrastructure?

[1] https://www.nyc.gov/html/dot/html/pr2023/dot-expand-bike-inf...

[2] https://www.peopleforbikes.org/news/the-best-new-u.s.-bike-l...

I've literally never seen it on any street that has a proper bike lane, and I've driven in many places with proper bike lanes. Cyclists pretty much universally prefer safe proper infrastructure to sharing lanes with cars and painted bike gutters, for entirely obvious reasons. You're literally the first ever person I've encountered claiming otherwise, so I'm sure you'll understand why you're getting incredulous pushback here.

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