4 ms·

I get your complaints but in a lot of areas the alternative to the painted-on lane is to have no lane at all, and having the lane at least establishes a princip

by rtpg 5y ago

I get your complaints but in a lot of areas the alternative to the painted-on lane is to have no lane at all, and having the lane at least establishes a principle. I feel safer in it, and cars in my area tend to take it seriously. I don't think there's really a solution to the turning problem, unless you're proposing tunnels at every intersection for cars/bikes. I'm hopeful that newer cars' safety features help to fight this back (I would also like people to, yknow, pay attention when driving). My principle (especially after getting a drivers license and realizing how little visibility one actually has while driving) is to not listen to music (so I can actually hear cars etc) and to basically slow down at every interesection that has even a bit of doubt. It's annoying but at least I'm not rolling the dice on every intersection (or at least not as much)

lmm 5y ago
> I get your complaints but in a lot of areas the alternative to the painted-on lane is to have no lane at all, and having the lane at least establishes a principle. It establishes the wrong principle - it makes drivers feel entitled to exclude cyclists from the main road lanes. A bike lane that isn't wide enough, isn't adequately maintained (sweeping, filling potholes...), leads to blind corners, or just dumps you out into the main lanes at junctions, is worse than useless - it actively makes cycling more dangerous, because drivers feel no need to share the main road lanes. > I don't think there's really a solution to the turning problem, unless you're proposing tunnels at every intersection for cars/bikes. The solution is to have bikes be part of the main traffic stream at that point. If you have a bike box at the front of the queueing area, and ideally a bike phase on the lights, that can help a lot.
- porknubbins 5y ago
  I ride in bike lanes, road sides and sometimes in the middle of the lane. When I started cycling seriously I tried to go full vehicular cycling, but a lot of the time it endangered more than it helped and made drivers angry. 10K+ miles later the one thing I’ve learned is not to be dogmatic, there is no one safest way to ride for all roads and environments. Some roads are way better with bike lanes and some bike lanes are terrible. I just do whatever seems safest.
  - lmm 5y ago
    I've ridden a similar distance and I've actively given up on ever using bike lanes except for lanes that I specifically know are properly laid out and maintained, or a handful of places that do decent lanes (the Netherlands, London post-2010). It's just far too common for a bike lane to end up being a trap, and you have no way of knowing it's going to dump you into a blind corner / high kerb / unavoidable debris / muddy field / ... until it's too late. I agree with doing what seems safest, but you simply can't trust an unknown bike lane, so using one is just too high risk.
- einpoklum 5y ago
  It's a perfectly fine principle when bike lanes are universal. In the Netherlands, for example (well, much of the Netherlands, I haven't been everywhere), the bikes are on the bike lanes, the cars are on the car lanes, and that's that. You have no motivation to go on the car lanes (except on small alleys with no lanes), since the bike lanes just get you wherever you want to go.
ashtonkem 5y ago
There’s only no choice in a lot of areas if you accept as axiomatic that we must have street level parking. While that’s a framing that anti-bike advocates like, we could also decide to make driving and parking harder in order to make other, more efficient forms of transit better. Personally I’d argue that it’s extremely odd that we dedicate so much public space for people to leave their private property laying around.
- rtpg 5y ago
  I'm for reducing the number of cars on the road, but I do think that street parking is already a pretty big step up from the alternative of like huge parking lots. And like for deliveries... what do you want people to do? Not stop in front of the place they are delivering? If there's an argument for it being a public space, it's also a public space for things like deliveries, dropping people off, etc. "People should be more careful" is a glib thing to say for this stuff, and I think we should make improvements to things, but if we're talking about public space, cyclists are _also_ not the only thing on the road and accomodations can be made for stuff like delivery
  - quantum_magpie 5y ago
    >And like for deliveries... what do you want people to do? Not stop in front of the place they are delivering? When you make a delivery, do you just stop dead in the middle of the lane you were driving on? If yes, please proceed. If not, why not? Don't you want to stop in front of the place you are delivering to? Why do you think that it is ok to completely block bicycle lane for the same purpose, but it's not ok to block a car lane? For an extra point, assume the car lane is a single-lane one-way road, and the delivery takes 5 minutes.
    - rtpg 5y ago
      Where I live, there are many "1.5 lane" roads. Roads that are both ways, but there's not _that_ much space. Sometimes people pull over. You then have to drive around people. So, yes, you stop "in the car lane" and it affects people. There are also times where you change lanes because of obstructions. Just like intersections, stop lights, so many things that prevent the "just speed right ahead without any concern in the world" use case. There are safety reasons for isolating bike/pedestrian traffic. But acting like it's uniquely unfair to bikes to have any form of obstruction... this is what roads are. Shared area for movement.

by rtpg 5y ago

lmm 5y ago

> I get your complaints but in a lot of areas the alternative to the painted-on lane is to have no lane at all, and having the lane at least establishes a principle. It establishes the wrong principle - it makes drivers feel entitled to exclude cyclists from the main road lanes. A bike lane that isn't wide enough, isn't adequately maintained (sweeping, filling potholes...), leads to blind corners, or just dumps you out into the main lanes at junctions, is worse than useless - it actively makes cycling more dangerous, because drivers feel no need to share the main road lanes. > I don't think there's really a solution to the turning problem, unless you're proposing tunnels at every intersection for cars/bikes. The solution is to have bikes be part of the main traffic stream at that point. If you have a bike box at the front of the queueing area, and ideally a bike phase on the lights, that can help a lot.

porknubbins 5y ago
I ride in bike lanes, road sides and sometimes in the middle of the lane. When I started cycling seriously I tried to go full vehicular cycling, but a lot of the time it endangered more than it helped and made drivers angry. 10K+ miles later the one thing I’ve learned is not to be dogmatic, there is no one safest way to ride for all roads and environments. Some roads are way better with bike lanes and some bike lanes are terrible. I just do whatever seems safest.
- lmm 5y ago
  I've ridden a similar distance and I've actively given up on ever using bike lanes except for lanes that I specifically know are properly laid out and maintained, or a handful of places that do decent lanes (the Netherlands, London post-2010). It's just far too common for a bike lane to end up being a trap, and you have no way of knowing it's going to dump you into a blind corner / high kerb / unavoidable debris / muddy field / ... until it's too late. I agree with doing what seems safest, but you simply can't trust an unknown bike lane, so using one is just too high risk.
einpoklum 5y ago
It's a perfectly fine principle when bike lanes are universal. In the Netherlands, for example (well, much of the Netherlands, I haven't been everywhere), the bikes are on the bike lanes, the cars are on the car lanes, and that's that. You have no motivation to go on the car lanes (except on small alleys with no lanes), since the bike lanes just get you wherever you want to go.

ashtonkem 5y ago

There’s only no choice in a lot of areas if you accept as axiomatic that we must have street level parking. While that’s a framing that anti-bike advocates like, we could also decide to make driving and parking harder in order to make other, more efficient forms of transit better. Personally I’d argue that it’s extremely odd that we dedicate so much public space for people to leave their private property laying around.

rtpg 5y ago
I'm for reducing the number of cars on the road, but I do think that street parking is already a pretty big step up from the alternative of like huge parking lots. And like for deliveries... what do you want people to do? Not stop in front of the place they are delivering? If there's an argument for it being a public space, it's also a public space for things like deliveries, dropping people off, etc. "People should be more careful" is a glib thing to say for this stuff, and I think we should make improvements to things, but if we're talking about public space, cyclists are _also_ not the only thing on the road and accomodations can be made for stuff like delivery
- quantum_magpie 5y ago
  >And like for deliveries... what do you want people to do? Not stop in front of the place they are delivering? When you make a delivery, do you just stop dead in the middle of the lane you were driving on? If yes, please proceed. If not, why not? Don't you want to stop in front of the place you are delivering to? Why do you think that it is ok to completely block bicycle lane for the same purpose, but it's not ok to block a car lane? For an extra point, assume the car lane is a single-lane one-way road, and the delivery takes 5 minutes.
  - rtpg 5y ago
    Where I live, there are many "1.5 lane" roads. Roads that are both ways, but there's not _that_ much space. Sometimes people pull over. You then have to drive around people. So, yes, you stop "in the car lane" and it affects people. There are also times where you change lanes because of obstructions. Just like intersections, stop lights, so many things that prevent the "just speed right ahead without any concern in the world" use case. There are safety reasons for isolating bike/pedestrian traffic. But acting like it's uniquely unfair to bikes to have any form of obstruction... this is what roads are. Shared area for movement.