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Comment by SoftTalker | Hacker News Reader

Studies like this always seem to me to be a formality.

The conclusions are what the person paying for the study wants them to be.

If a local municipality is anti-car, they will run a study justifying adding bike lanes everywhere, even though once they are built you never see bicycles in them, and they create more difficulty for cars by narrowing or taking away lanes.

Or they'll install "traffic calming" speed bumps, chicanes, or curb-extension bottlenecks on neighborhood roads when (almost) nobody in the neighborhood wanted them.

On the other hand, if they are pro-development, their studies will show that a new or widened road will lead to more business development, more jobs, more tax revenue.

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At least in my city, devices were installed in many bike lanes in order to count the number of userd. They show that people do use them.

As for traffic calming, curb extensions, etc.: the city only started adding those modifications after pedestrian fatalities started going up and people started demanding them because they got tired of hearing about deaths all of the time.

None of this is because the city is pro/anti-development since most of the projects could be construed either way. In a lot of cases it was simply to see which measures were effective because we often lack the data to know what will be effective.

Your car bias is showing here. The reason bike lanes and traffic calming measures get installed is because people are literally dying due to poor road design that prioritizes car speed over everything else.

You might not want traffic calming, but everyone else who has to deal with your driving does.

And isn't it really about how people are driving? In my state, we drive like maniacs, constantly speeding at least ten MPH over the limit. The term, "drive friendly" is scoffed at. Slowing down to let someone on the highway is unseen.

On city streets, tailgating is common, jacked up pick-ups are drenching the interior of your car with their headlights after dark, making all your mirrors a blinding image. Can we please put our phones down for safety's sake? Sometimes I ride a motorcycle, so I'm hyper aware and see all kinds of just plain terrible driving practices. Most of it is simply a lack of patience behind the wheel. On the turnpike, when that car passes doing twenty over, do we really think they think about the possible consequences?

Yes, people in general are terrible at driving. Teaching them is hopeless that's why we need solutions that works. There are two right now: infrastructure that makes it hard and very inconvenient to go fast and heavy handed enforcement. The latter option only works in very well developed civilised societes like Switzerland or Nordic countries have. Most others are stuck with traffic calling measures as their population has too little too lose to care about safety.

The solution is easy, I just saw it implemented in a nearby town (8k people): make the road curb a little, never fully straight, add bollards everywhere on the side of the road, and narrow the road at every crossing (with metal/concrete bollards). Bollards are great: they protect pedestrian and are intimidating it seems. According to the mayor (I ate with him, friend of my mother) the architect who gave him the idea was a nudge expert, and they tested it first with thin, plastic bollards around the town (it worked, but wasn't protective enough). The city is halfway between two economic 'centers' (28k and 50k population) and see a lot of traffic as those cities grow. No pedestrian death in the last two years AFAIK, when pre-covid you had half a dozen injuries every year and a mortal accident every other year.

So the bollards do seems to work. Install bollards!

Absolutely this. If people are maniacs and can't control their speed themselves, design the roads so they can't drive at insane speeds on them. I live right across the street from a school. During school times, the speed limit is 25 miles per hour. The road is perfectly straight with clear sight lines and the lanes are literally as wide as freeway lanes (12') with bike lanes on both sides making it feel even wider. If you had no context of the road and what was off of it, you'd comfortably cruise at 55+ because the road is designed for that.

Throw in some strategically placed bollards or chicanes to change the geometry of the road and people will be forced to slow down.

http://www.thinkstreetsmart.org/uploads/1/2/7/4/127450599/ed...

We did a study in my neighborhood after two pedestrian deaths. The deaths definitely were the motivator for the community action and studies.

You know why the idiot traffic engineers made the streets so wide in the area where these oversized cars killed two people? “The average commute on the road would be extended by 1 minute.”

Bike lanes success are well measured and will often carry more people than a car lanes will.

They carry more bicyclists, you mean.

No, they also carry people on trikes, in motorized wheel chairs, scooters, joggers, people on those mono wheel things. Bikes might be the most popular choice, but many people are starting to refer to these lanes as “mobility-lanes” because they improve the lives of more than just bicyclists.

> Bike lanes success are well measured

Where? Outside of cities with very high density I don't see this being true. For medium density and less, what I've seen is that bike lanes remain empty. Bike counters basically show them to be failures, since the utilization barely increases over time or even lags population growth, while the car lanes remain fully utilized.

Are these the same bike lanes that start and stop randomly and are often just the shoulder of a 45-mi/h road with a bike, and implied middle finger, painted on?

Have you EVER tried to bike for commuting, grocery shopping, transportation in general, on those bike lanes?

If cyclists aren't using them, they're not doing it to spite you. They're doing it because there's no network and 500m of bike lane doesn't take them somewhere useful or because they're badly designed and dangerous or very unpleasant due to heavy car traffic, pollution, etc.

There is a bike lane going to a popular trail and crossing multiple major streets, also with bike lanes, as well as passing by multiple apartment complexes near my house. A two way lane with curbs and bollards, no cars parked there, with bike traffic lights and many side streets with 2 way stops (no stop on the street with the lane) or, at least, 4 way stops. I do drive on the same street from/to work as well as ride on the same lane to the trails. There are not many cyclists on it, orders of magnitude fewer than there are cars on the same street.

"Urbanists" greatly exaggerate the number of cyclists. And on top of being in the vast minority, cyclists don't ride many miles per day, they are limited by the biology. So, naturally, even if every motorist had the vehicle confiscated and replaced by a bicycle, you would not see nearly as much traffic of cyclists. And in reality the vast majority of the tiny minority of cyclists also own a car and use it for most trips, only riding for exercise/fun.

Even smaller cities and towns can have good bike infrastructure. But it requires good interconnected infrastructure which largely doesn't exist in the US or Canada.

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

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