Guerrilla bike lanes: San Francisco makes illicit infrastructure permanent (2016)

) maybe "Landei" ? But it's never used in traffic context. We simply had a car-lobby creating vile words to modify law-makers behavior like it happened in the USA at ca. 1910.

I suppose it didn’t work that well because as a rule a car or bike hitting a pedestrian is still almost always at fault.

They made up the term jaywalking by combining "walking" with the term "jay" which was a slang term for a country bumpkin or idiot from out of town. They hired actors to spread the slur to refer to those out of towners that don't know how to "properly" behave around streets in a modern city. They even paid Boy Scouts to hand out warning cards and staged mock funerals

When normal crosswalks don't do do their job, it's only natural people will ignore then. In Buenos Aires it's literally safer for the pedestrian to look for a gap in cars, crosswalk or not, and cross there, than it is to attempt to walk on the crosswalk while there are cars driving in that part of the road.

* We don't have "college students". We have however real students, e.g. in University.

* Over here it's not custom to go with micro-management problems to an elected person, e.g. to the member of parliament of your area. Whenever I see the (partially propaganda) shows where russians ask the dictator Putin about day-to-day things and they even air this yearly in the TV I cringe. Or when I see in US movies that people go with low things to their congressman... that simple isn't custom in Germany. And thus the elected people are much LESS likely looking if people wanting something would elect them or not.

* Normally it is the executive, not the legislative, that decides over these matters. In Germany, the executive isn't elected by the public.

* In Germany we have the idea of "main point of living" (Hauptwohnsitz) and "secondary point of living" (Zweitwohnsitz). And in quite a few towns you have to pay an extra-tax on the Zweitwohnsitz. There are ways to mitigate this, but the easiest solution as a student is just to take your Hauptwohnsitz at your university town. And there you can then vote (you can't vote at your Zweitwohnsitz). And so it happens that the town magistrates of student towns are usually a bit different than of "normal" towns, e.g. the town mayors from the green party. All these young students voting more for this party than e.g. the german liberals.

So, all in all, from the POV of the story in Berlin ... little of what you wrote made sense. Except your first sentence. Infrastructure building is a slow, a tremendously slow process in Germany (however, once we have it, it's usual very nice. We germans call shit on our railway ... but it's lightyears better than e.g. the US railways system!). And even a zebra crossing falls under the infrastructure categorization.

Well of course. Just how there's no proof of "train need" before tacks get built. Why do we ever build tracks if there is no preexisting train traffic to justify the need?!

[1] https://medium.com/asecuritysite-when-bob-met-alice/traffic-...

Incarceration rate in the USA is also way higher than in Germany.

I'd wager people to come up with verifiable statistics where "breaking law" is more dangerous than in USA. They probably exist, in niche areas. Would still be fun to learn.

George: The info in the book doesn't match what's shown in the asset management photograph.

Boss: Update the book to whatever is on the road and go from there.

Sometimes it doesn't even require sacrificing a lane, because many North American cities have lanes that are wildly larger than necessary or even appropriate given the posted speed limits. The lanes can simply be narrowed, and then this also causes the drivers to naturally drive at safer speeds, reducing traffic accidents, speeding tickets, and the unplanned delays that those both cause.

Bike lanes making riders less safe has been known for decades. John Forrester’s book “Effective Cycling” [1] catalogues a lot of these dangers and warns cyclists to not assume that bike lanes are safer.

[1] https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262516945/effective-cycling/

For busy cycle routes, specific infrastructure to deal with this is installed like separate lights and banned turns to de-conflict the road.

Do you find two-way car traffic similarly inherently problematic? Left turns across oncoming traffic? I generally agree with you but it feels a little odd to rail against bikers in this way when car on car traffic is far more dangerous. But in car culture (which I am a card-carrying member of), we don't mind that!

And the whole idea is to encourage biking, ergo less parking is a good thing.

So stupid all the suburbanites blocking my driveway to come eat at nice restaurants because all they have out there is fast food; such a huge waste of resources

If you actually make a sufficiently high-quality bike network to convince people to bike that would otherwise drive, I would expect this to speed car traffic up by taking a lot of cars off the road.

The opposite is also true: If you take a place where people primarily walk and bike, and take out the sidewalks and bike lanes to widen the road, people will also be pissed.

All you're pointing out is that humans are resistant to change. We already know that is true. The question is not whether people don't like change, the question is: which is better urban planning? What is a better environment to live in?

There were well-maintained sidewalks everywhere I needed to go. The reduced amount of automobile traffic made it easier to cross smaller roads and intersections without risking my life. At larger intersections, I often received a crossing signal almost immediately upon requesting one, instead of waiting multiple minutes.

Negotiating interactions with cyclists was trivial, because I could always make eye contact with them. Unlike drivers, who barely pay attention to those outside of cars, have their heads buried in their phone, or are obscured behind tinted glass.

It was also the quietest major city I've ever visited, which I largely attribute to the prevalence of bikes instead of automobiles. Some of the semi-tractors / HGVs I saw making deliveries were even electric, which is a great reduction in noise and other forms of pollution.

If I ever have the pleasure of visiting Amsterdam again, I intend to rent a bike. I hope to explore more of the city via the obviously superior mode of transportation, as demonstrated by so many locals.

Tram lanes are a travesty, but bus lanes make pretty decent bike lanes. I biked through Seattle to work for a year or so in 2018/2019 where bikes are allowed in bus lanes, and it's a good compromise. There's a couple of streets where the bus lanes are always full of busses, but most of the bus lanes are a nice place to ride; unless they've got rails, of course.

Seattle has put in a lot more separated bike lanes since I've been there, but on routes I wouldn't have used anyway, so I dunno. There was one on my route that was terrible, but I don't think they used that pattern very often; they put a separated bike lane between parking and the side walk, and parking ended close to an intersection where many cars wanted to turn right; limited visibility and limited space made it hard to get to the center or left of the lane to avoid conflicts with vehicles turning right.

IMHO, there's a conflict between bike infrastructure appropriate for beginner / slow bicyclists and infrastructure appropriate for experienced / faster bicyclists. Separated lanes can be nice, but they make it harder to mix with motor vehicles when that's appropriate and desirable. If separated bike infrastructure makes me take a longer path or wait for a signal change to turn left, but lack of infrastructure (and the traffic situation) would have let me mix with motor vehicles and take a permissive left without waiting for a signal change, that's a negative for me --- but the extra wait isn't an issue for someone who wouldn't have mixed with traffic for that left turn anyway.

As someone who regularly walks on what is almost certainly the street with the busiest cycle path in the world[0], and who regularly walks through some incredibly congested mixed-use streets: it just... isn't a problem? Stay in your designated area, yield when you are not, behave predictably, and things will be Just Fine.

[0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2RQrKP9a0XE

"Turning left from the bike lane on the right is of course impossible"... if there is a lane of fast-moving automotive traffic directly on the cyclist's left. From the cyclist's perspective, the car lane is the "inherently problematic" one.

I don't think it's fair to say either is inherently problematic, just that there is inherent conflict with different mode types. Then, imho, you ought to look at the overall social cost/benefit of each mode type and prioritize accordingly.

I'm very glad I'm in a city with superb public transportation.

And yes, I do agree that many cyclists are almost suicidally bad at acting predictably, but many drivers are almost homicidally unconcerned with anything outside their tanks.

In NYC, it's an absolute melee and all modes are in the way of each other. Places like Amsterdam have a proud biking heritage. In a more suburban US city, it's pretty much all car on car, in a lot of situations being a pedestrian is crazy and unsafe, but bikes can coexist on the large open roads fairly well.

IMO prioritizing cars has had overall disastrous and dehumanizing effects. I think it's right for places to be pushing safer, more accessible, and less energy-intensive modes of transport, but there's a huge amount of inertia to fight at this point.

I also think that residential streets are often under-utilized, though (mostly existing to connect houses to thoroughfares), and I'm skeptical that drivability is being sacrificed all that much—I still don't have statistics but IMO there are plenty of places to drive and I don't find my neighborhood hard to navigate by car. Just one person's experience, but I think it's a nice, cost-effective solution that I hadn't seen before I moved here.

(I have a bike and commute with it most days, but I also have kids, so weekends are all driving, and I sometimes need to drive to work too, for one reason or another).

There is significantly more bike infrastructure now then in 2018. Plus the lime scooters and bikes have radically shifted the balance of bikes vs cars to the point where I'd say that bikes now rule the street in most of the dense parts of Seattle.

I would imagine there are at least 10x more people using those lanes than there was before affordable e-bikes and "bike shares" showed up. You've got people who would never, ever ride in a million years be caught dead on a bike using those bike lanes to run errands, go to visit people, commute to work, etc. Just sit down anywhere in the dense parts of the city and you'l see them go by constantly!

I doubt the people who put those bike lanes in back in 2018 and before ever could have imagined how popular they are now thanks to lime bikes, electric scooters and such. Its honestly pretty remarkable and thank god somebody had the thought to build up that stuff back then!

I can't argue that the bike infra improvements in Seattle haven't made a huge difference, but I'm not at all convinced this is because it is intrinsically unlikeable.

For what it's worth, the environmentally incredibly bikeable SD/LA has such bad infra that they have both fewer bikers and far more deaths.

Many such cases

IME it just makes it easier for cars and bikes to stay out of each others' way, which I think they both basically want.

And yes but those road deaths are caused by cars. There's just more victims on bikes because there's so many bikes around.

Let's say you have space for two lanes. You can either a) install two car lanes, so >95% of people drive, or b) install one car lane and one bike lane, so 75% of people cycle. Which one is more drivable? Hint: it's the one with significantly fewer cars.

Similarly: car infrastructure takes up a lot of space. If your destination is 10% closer because cycling means far less car infrastructure is needed, you'll actually end up driving there faster.

A street's car traffic capacity is far less important than its total traffic capacity, and the last-mile driving speed is a rounding error on the whole trip. If you like driving, you should be in favor of building more bike infrastructure!

Don't forget the short-sighted NIMBYism.

Not that there shouldn't still be some kind of standards and community approval, but I think we can afford to set that at a lower bar for certain categories of easily reversible projects.

And hopefully incorporating more of these ideas can teach us to be more efficient on transit infrastructure projects in general, where the US often significantly trails other countries on cost and implementation time.

If you haven't noticed this entire thread is about illicit infrastructure. There could be a moral argument to be had (which you are not making) but no one is denying the vandalism aspect.