Entirely separate paths for bikes are absolutely feasible in established cities (see New York which has huge protected bike lanes running north and south up and down manhattan) with little cost to car infra
>Bikes don't belong on the road with cars and they dont belong on sidewalks with pedestrians and they don't belong in between.
The NYC bike lanes are inherently problematic. These are the "in between" that I'm talking about. They are not entirely separate paths in the way that I mean. They are a new lane within the existing path. What I mean by a separate path is something that is above, below, or in an entirely different location than the road/sidewalk.
Normally, if you’re turning right you’re in the rightmost lane, so nobody to your right is going straight. And likewise for left. A bike lane puts straight-through traffic to the right of turning cars so they come in from your blind spot. A "yield to bikes" rule doesn’t help much when you can’t see who you’re yielding to. And car traffic presents the same problem for bikes. They have to deal with this by merging all the way across traffic or cross and become a pedestrian. The fact that they may have to become a pedestrian is a major flag that they inherently dont fit.
Parking and buses have the same problem. The sidewalk and the road were designed to touch. When you put a bike lane between them, every trip from curb to car, bus, etc. has to cross it.
It’s essentially splitting 1 road into 2 with separate rules. It's inherently problematic. You can't introduce bikes without increasing the rule complexity and worsening the experience for everyone else.
There is plenty of basic intuition here.
- Pairs. Each pair of modes (car,bike,pedestrian) needs its own set of rules. Two modes is one pair. Three modes is three pairs, so adding one mode triples the relationships.
- Introducing a "middle": Every segment of one street crosses every segment of the other. Adding a middle lane on both sides takes an intersection from 9 overlap zones to 25, and from 4 where different modes meet to 16.
- Fixed width: The street doesn’t get wider. Any space dedicated to bikes costs car lanes, parking, or sidewalk.
In europe there's also a great culture of bike /walking dirt only pathways too, but I agree its not very practical solution for cities
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/
Vehicular cycling techniques can help in situations where there is no bicycle infrastructure, but they are not safer than good bicycle infrastructure.
What was the result?
A stunning INCREASE in pedestrian deaths and no significant effect on bike deaths: https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/transportation/as-...
Edit: my personal theory is that these "improvements" on average do nothing whatsoever. They "worked" in some places in Europe because they made traffic so shitty that more people were forced to use bikes. In turn, this provided driver education, by showing them how badly average drivers behave.
Your personal theory is refuted by studies in the US, here's the classic lit review on this subject if you're interested: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC2776010/
No statistically significant correlation.
From my personal observations, sabotage of arterials resulted in a lot of traffic shifting onto the side streets that are much less safe. But our local DoT doesn't have enough traffic data to confirm or disprove this, I tried to FOIA it.
> Your personal theory is refuted by studies in the US, here's the classic lit review on this subject if you're interested: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC2776010/
Look at the dates on these studies. Nearly all of them come from the period of the global crime drop, a result of the leaded gasoline phaseout.
I recently tried to replicate some of the studies of bike lane effects and quite often found the _opposite_ of the original studies. For example, in Seattle the business tax receipts declined more steeply on streets within 1 block of a protected bike lane compared to controls.
Get your attempted study published and reviewed, then I'll take your observations seriously.
Go on, I'll wait.
Still waiting.
Oh, there are almost no publications? Wonder why. And the ones that do appear tend to be relegated to rarely cited journals. E.g.: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/19427867.2022.2...
> We examined changes in counts and per capita rates of all, pedestrian, and bicyclist fatal motor vehicle collisions between 2007 and 2019 for 18 U.S. cities that took early Vision Zero pledges. Only 2 of the 18 cities have experienced statistically significant decreases in total fatalities since taking a Vision Zero pledge and only one city experienced a statistically significant decrease in pedestrian fatalities.
They "worked" in some places in Europe because they made traffic so shitty that more people were forced to use bikes. In turn, this provided driver education, by showing them how badly average drivers behave.
That sounds like a pretty big win to me? Yes these programs are designed to make other modes of transport more attractive. What do you make of all the data that shows that adding lanes to a highway doesn't decrease traffic?
It's the root cause of all the current political problems in the US and Europe. It's a kind of pollution that offloads externalities (high living costs) from companies onto the population. Dense cities allow companies to more easily access larger pools of workers, without having to care about their long-term benefits.
> Would you prefer if we just focused on making car traffic as fast as possible and pushed aside other methods of transportation?
Yes. I would go as far as ripping out all the local transit (eventually). Self-driving cars have solved the only real problem with cars: people who can't or shouldn't drive (children, elderly, people with disabilities, etc.)
> Do you interpret these results as evidence that attempting otherwise is folly?
Yes. Quite simply: look at the stated goals of programs like Vision Zero. They are social engineering programs that simply use saving human lives as a justification to push their agenda. I hate that.
Other urbanistic programs are similar, and even urbanists admit that: https://archive.strongtowns.org/journal/2023/4/26/upzoning-m...
> That sounds like a pretty big win to me?
Sure. But at what cost?
> Yes these programs are designed to make other modes of transport more attractive
No. They are designed to make car travel intolerable. It's a zero-sum game, a bike lane almost always means removing a traffic lane.
> What do you make of all the data that shows that adding lanes to a highway doesn't decrease traffic?
It's a real phenomenon - induced demand. And it also applies to housing costs: increases in housing density do NOT result in lower housing prices.
And the fix is actually the same in both cases: eliminate the _need_ for more lanes or denser housing.
One other problem with cars is that not everybody can afford one, or really should need to have one in a big city. Even if Waymo were a free or cheap public service, it's still far less efficient and more disruptive than a robust public transit system. When dense cities are walkable and bikable, less people need cars for everything. That's hard to achieve with cars at 40mph everywhere. There's a place for cars but we've only created the problem by having them zoom around every inch of a city at the expense of everything else.
Also, tax the companies, easy. In America we've been manipulated to loathe the ideas of taxes. Taxes are what pays for things that are good for everyone.
That's incorrect. A typical bus/subway ride costs around $20, about the same amount as a car ride. We just heavily subsidize them, typical farebox recovery rate is around 15%, and that's not considering capital expenses.
Once shared self-driving cars become more common, we can just retarget the subsidies.
> Even if Waymo were a free or cheap public service, it's still far less efficient and more disruptive than a robust public transit system.
Self-driving cars with mild car sharing (2-4 people per car) will be more efficient than transit in almost all scenarios.
> When dense cities are walkable and bikable, less people need cars for everything.
Sigh. My point is that dense cities are now unliveable for the average person.
> or really should need to have one in a big city.
There shouldn't _be_ such cities. Giant metropolises are a failed experiment.
> Also, tax the companies, easy. In America we've been manipulated to loathe the ideas of taxes. Taxes are what pays for things that are good for everyone.
Yes. One good option is to tax the dense office space so that companies are incentivized to do remote work and/or offices in smaller cities.
I see what you're getting at now, but they're as popular as ever (arguably more so) despite the legacy flaws. With what we know and the tech we have now, the cities of the future could wipe the floor with anything we have today, if we had the gumption to do it right.
And the problem is that an average person _can_ _not_ avoid living in large cities. That's where all the good jobs are. My favorite example here is Tokyo: the housing market there is now completely unaffordable. In a country with _declining_ population.
This is not healthy. And this is _the_ reason for the recent unrest in the Western world. People are seeking easy answers: it's the fault of "corporations", migrants, NIMBYs, foreign investors, private equity, AirBnB hosts, etc.
> the cities of the future could wipe the floor with anything we have today
By not having any residents?
Imagine that you have an option to live in a single-family area with nice parks and plenty of personal space versus a closet-sized apartment on floor 11. What would you choose?
White flight and urban decay already happened though. Why are people moving back?
I believe the reason for the unrest is that technology and the attendant wealth consolidation have greatly outpaced our social systems and constructs. Life should be easier for people. We have the resources. We just don't have the collective will to make them work for the greater good. But yeah it's easier to point the finger at the bogeyman of the week.
You're referring to ideas I would consider to be in the tradition of the Garden City Movement. Certainly many people will always prefer the pace and the space of suburban life. But spend some time in the Eixample area of Barcelona if you get a chance. It doesn't have to be as crazy and inhumane as Manhattan or Tokyo. Some people figured out healthy city living 150 years ago and for some reason (cough, capitalism) the world largely ignored that information.
A reboot of those ideas with pre-planned modern infrastructure would crush. Move most high speed traffic underground. Make the ground level for people. Imagine an underground Waymo-Metro network that went in before the city above it.
Jobs.
"White flight" is also a US phenomenon, yet over-urbanization is happening everywhere. Look at Japan for an example. And it's a mono-national country without any significant internal racism or segregation.
Tokyo is also a nice counter-example for many proposals. It's building new housing as fast as possible (whole neighborhoods are construction zones!), it has a land value tax, it allows microapartments, it's building transit all the time. Yet nothing helps. Housing prices keep rising.
> I believe the reason for the unrest is that technology and the attendant wealth consolidation have greatly outpaced our social systems and constructs.
And over-urbanization is one of the reasons this became possible (not the only one, but definitely a contributor). An average company in a small town can't afford to treat people there like shit. They simply won't have any workforce or customers after a while. A company in a large city always has access to a pool of candidates.
> But spend some time in the Eixample area of Barcelona if you get a chance.
I grew up in Russia and Ukraine, and I also lived in Europe (Germany and the Netherlands). I got my driving license at 27 years and my first car at around 30 years of age.
And Spain has all the same problems as other countries: large cities are unaffordable, and small cities are dying. It's more relaxed in general, but the trend is unmistakable.
> Life should be easier for people.
Yes, and the only way to do that is to look at the root causes.
I think "make urban life better" has much higher potential than "convince people they don't want to live in big cities." I see the root causes as social and political more than technical. There are certainly advantages and efficiencies to be had with a dense population.
Unaffordablity due to wealth inequality and concentration is the major social dilemma of our time and I can't really connect it to people pushing for more bike lanes and park spaces.
> And since cycling has increased ~25% over the same time frame
The percentage of bike commutes in Seattle is in the noise, around 2-3% of the non-remote-work commutes. So the data is too noisy for any reasonable statistical significance.
For example, this year was deadly with 4 cyclist deaths (to date). In 2024 there were no cyclist deaths.
Option A: A separate, safe bike lane through the park, not useful for actual transit but nice for leisure.
Option B: A line of white paint at the side of the travel lane that will guide you into the “door zone”, along the right side of cars turning right (and right into you), and other dangerous situations.
Note that there was hardly ever Option C, actual bike infrastructure that was both safe and useful for transit. So this idea that one single cyclist “killed” good bike infrastructure is ignoring that it was never an option to begin with.
So the options at the time were riding on the sidewalk or in the street, and Effective Cycling became popular because it contained some genuinely good advice for cycling on a street with no infrastructure. Unfortunately Forester felt that this was the best and only way to safely cycle, which is why he immediately became popular with state and local DOTs who did not want to build bike lanes.
It is not an exaggeration, he set national cycling infrastructure policy in the US that stood for decades.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Forester_(cyclist)#1978_C...
In the US, not a single person, but the General Motors/Mack Truck/Firestone Tires/Standard Oil cabal exerted significant influence on shaping how our cities are built. Literally buying up streetcar companies across the nation to put them out of business, among other tactics.
For busy cycle routes, specific infrastructure to deal with this is installed like separate lights and banned turns to de-conflict the road.
Something similar to this dynamic happens anywhere you would "look both ways" as a driver but don't have far enough visibility to extrapolate a safe window of passage relative to the speed of oncoming traffic. It can happen when parked cars block your view of oncoming traffic, or when parked cars block view of the bike lane, or when parked cars, trees, hedges, fences etc block view of the sidewalk that a non-pedestrian is using.
Apparently the possibility of vision / line of sight is not the issue. Maybe the willingness, maybe the understanding that yes indeed, there is another lane next to the road, and maybe you should monitor it for traffic, especially before taking a right or left turn.
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!
I’ll take a full lane here in Miami. Screw these thin bike lanes next to the curb with F-150s and Cybertrucks. I’ve seen too many bike falls. Pass me safely and that’s that.