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YES, but.... there's a whole part of this that is missing. Bentonville and Fayetteville have built almost 1000 miles of bike specific, particularly Mountain Bi

YES, but.... there's a whole part of this that is missing. Bentonville and Fayetteville have built almost 1000 miles of bike specific, particularly Mountain Biking specific trails, right through town. This is not the faux "bike friendly" BS crap with "bike lanes" that painted in traffic that everyone ignores... These are not an attempt to squeeze bikes into an automotive infrastructure and all the other crap politicians pull... these are trails through the woods, backyards, down neighborhoods, paralleling sidewalks, etc. This is making Biking a first class citizen. Very few people are comfortable riding bikes in automovtive traffic. You will eventually get hit by someone posting selfies on instagram or playing their friends in wordle. If cities want actual change, they need dedicated infrastructure for bikes, and these two cities have shown that it absolutely works.

meetups323 5y ago
> Very few people are comfortable riding bikes in automovtive traffic. You will eventually get hit by someone posting selfies on instagram or playing their friends in wordle. And what's worse, I've had drivers stop to yell at me for riding on the (completely empty) sidewalk when crossing a narrow bridge busy with car traffic. As if hundreds of bikers don't die every year from getting whacked by careless drivers.
- thesuitonym 5y ago
  I can do you one better, I've been yelled out by drivers for riding my bike through a bike lane that happened to be in the way of the turning lane. You just can't win if you're trying to cycle in the US.
  - fuzzer37 5y ago
    Because bikes DO NOT belong on roads. Getting hit by a car while you're on a bike is deadly. A bike running into a pedestrian on a sidewalk is an inconvenience.
    - alistairSH 5y ago
      Then give them someplace appropriate! As soon as I have dedicated/safe bike lanes, I’ll get out of your road. Until then, please try not to kill me.
      - notch656a 5y ago
        I disagree agree with poster, but to play devils advocate bicyclists are a free rider problem on public roads. It's pretty clear based on the design of most roads they were designed for motor vehicles, not bicycles. Fuel taxes are a major way these roads are funded and maintained, and bicyclists don't pay registration / licensing / fuel tax. Especially in heavily urban areas, roads have extremely high land value that bicyclists are unjustly profiting from. It's not clear to me why there should be any right for bicyclists to be allowed on the road.
        8note 5y ago
        I'm not clear that there should be any right for cars to be on the road either. Roads are for people to walk on, historically, and it's adding cars that made them dangerous. They're paid for by people who largely don't need them, too - the folks who live in the inner city
        notch656a 5y ago
        People driving fuel consuming vehicles are paying for the roads via fuel tax, and registration fees to the states maintaining those roads. These drivers are funding these roads thus it makes sense for them to be compensated for their payment. It's conceivable a bicyclist can get away without paying any tax whatsoever on the road, especially if their income is small. Free rider, welfare queens of the road. >Roads are for people to walk on, historically, and it's adding cars that made them dangerous In urban areas that's actually typically what the sidewalk for, and it's often illegal to walk on the road. But this is why I'm against public roads, there are all sorts of bad problems associated with this being a public good.
  - wolverine876 5y ago
    > I've been yelled out by drivers for riding my bike through a bike lane that happened to be in the way of the turning lane. You just can't win if you're trying to cycle in the US. Some people are jerks in every situation. I don't believe bicyclists stand out as victims, except the expectation that they ride in traffic and the consequences of colliding with a car.
xerox13ster 5y ago
Having lived in Bentonville, the trails are absolutely meaningless if there aren't sidewalks off the trail with which to get to final destinations. I was a pedestrian cyclist there from 2017-2020 and I frequently was walking or riding in the roads or ditches when the sidewalk ran out. Sure, I could get across town, but when I get there, who knows if there's sidewalks? If I wanted to go grocery shopping and be on a sidewalk/bike trail, I had to go an extra mile out of my way to go under the overpass and through the community college to get to neighborhood market. That trip was already a mile if I rode along the road, so double the distance. That's not making cycling a first class citizen! That's hiding cyclists from cars who are the real first class citizen. I know, I grew up there. Fayetteville and Rogers get this right(ish), Bentonville wants to pretend they have it right so talent will move there for Walmart after Walmart spent decades making sure brain drain was inevitable by keeping the area "small town" (they bragged about this during my corporate orientation) and fighting density that could have naturally precipitated good pedestrian and biking infrastructure. And the separate bike lanes through the woods are not some grand way to make cycling first class they are NECESSARY or the rural drivers who come into the "city" would be playing chicken games and trying to run cyclists off the road. When I grew up this was a common thing to joke about!
- black_puppydog 5y ago
  > who knows if there's sidewalks? Living in Europe this question doesn't compute at all. Such a foreign idea to even contemplate. If it doesn't have a sidewalk, it must be a country road or a highway right? Couldn't happen in a reasonably densely populated area...?
  - reaperducer 5y ago
    What a strange thing to read. I've been to dozens and dozens of urban places in Europe that have streets without sidewalks. Or in many of the places, the sidewalks exist, but are useless because cars are allowed to park on them. I've never understood how people in wheelchairs are able to get anywhere in most of "civilized" Europe.
    - 5y ago
AtlasBarfed 5y ago
Minneapolis has a lot of bike paths through its city parks (there are a lot of parks in Minneapolis: the chain of lakes, the Mississippi river, etc) and they really enhance the city when snow isn't on the ground. They enhance the use of parks, they don't make parks more noxious, they increase property values, they keep the city valuable. E-bikes are going to magnify the value of cities with good biking infrastructure. All of a sudden car trips become bike trips, and there are no concerns about hills or headwinds or towing a burly of stuff: the electric motor handles some or all of the required needed power. Need to haul ten bags of groceries and a kiddo up the big hill on the Mississippi? the electric motor will get you there. It hopefully will reduce the amount of surface area dedicated to cars, and switch those over to more parks and more recreation.
- bluGill 5y ago
  e-bikes in parks need to be limited in speed though. Don't turn our parks into dangerous for pedestrians bike freeways. Bicycles in walkers do not mix very well, while it isn't as deadly as a car, getting hit by a bike still hurts.
- dillondoyle 5y ago
  Minneapolis takes biking seriously. In huge amounts of snow and horrible weather!! Weather down there seems even more conducive. My dad can bike from their house to downtown in 15 minutes (more like 30 as getting older). It's amazing. Completely protected separate bike lane going through old rail corridor. I can bike to whole foods from there too without having to go on a busy street. They are expanding light rail there too but seems like similar to most cities it isn't great yet. Hopefully we'll see more density around the stops. My city Denver feels the same it's not actually used as much as it could be.
tombert 5y ago
In NYC, a lot of people (especially cops) seem to be under the impression that bike lanes are just extra parking.It's pretty irritating because going around them involves getting on the street, which isn't usually an issue, but occasionally roads in NY get extremely busy, and people in here seem to lack the ability to read speed limit signs (at least in Brooklyn).
- ahoy 5y ago
  I think thats because, for all the progress NYC has made in installing bike infrastructure, they've done basically nothing to reduce the number of cars on our streets.
  - bitcurious 5y ago
    https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/29/nyregion/nyc-congestion-pricing.html https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/29/nyregion/nyc-congestion-p... https://mashable.com/article/nyc-city-council-lyft-uber-cap-minimum-wage https://mashable.com/article/nyc-city-council-lyft-uber-cap-... Two specific policies, but there’s also just the fact that every bike lane/pedestrian street/bus lane/low speed limit/etc. makes the city less car friendly and at some point that makes a difference.
  - lotsofpulp 5y ago
    There should be a banner for any transit discussions that state you cannot optimize environments for both individual cars and non individual car transportion.
  - tombert 5y ago
    It's strange, because NYC is simultaneously overpopulated with cars, but is also one of the only places in the US where you can reasonably live without a car (I don't have one).
    - Kluny 5y ago
      It's even stranger when you realize that probably only 20% of trips in New York are conducted by car, and yet they are by far the largest physical presence everywhere you go. Actually quite obnoxious.
johnatthebar 5y ago
Agreed that the recreational biking infrastructure in NW Arkansas is great, but not enough Fayetteville people bike for transportation for that to be a big part of this outcome. It's just 1% of all commutes, for example. Compare that to 4%-10% in university towns that use a lot of on-street bike lanes that take you more directly to destinations: Eugene, Corvallis, Bozeman, Madison, Fort Collins, Palo Alto, Berkeley, Ann Arbor. (Not saying those cities are perfect either, to be clear.) It's true that shitty bike lanes on auto-oriented streets are shitty, and that off-street paths are great. But lanes and paths are not the same thing, and neither of them is the reason this policy is working in Fayetteville.
lamontcg 5y ago
> You will eventually get hit by someone posting selfies on instagram or playing their friends in wordle. You will eventually get hit by someone who punishment passes you and is dangerously negligent because they've dehumanized you, and they just don't care if they do violence to you, and its you're fault because you're slow. Or you will get hit by people who simply don't register bikes and consciously or unconsciously think that bicyclists must yield to cars, sometimes turning left in front of you with no time for you to stop. Or you will get right hooked by someone who just passed you a second earlier and that is too long for their minds to track the fact that you're still there, or they again think they're entitled to drive however they want and you need to yield to whatever they do.
- WalterBright 5y ago
  I bought a dashcam for my car because of bicyclists: 1. randomly wandering out of the bike lane and into the car lane 2. stopped in the middle of the car lane around a blind curve 3. drafting 3 feet behind the panel truck in front of them at 40 mph 4. riding two or three abreast, with the 2 or 3 well into the car lane 5. continuing to cycle at 25 mph in the right hand bike lane while the traffic is going much slower, and there's a right hand turn coming up (it's difficult to spot these bikers while driving, heck, even cars are hard to see there which is why overtaking on the right is illegal) None of these incidents were kids on bikes, they were all middle aged adults who really should know better. I talked to a couple of these cyclists (in their tour de france outfits, naturally) once, and they laughed and said if they get hit by a car it'll be their big payday lawsuit. I replied getting crippled isn't worth a billion dollars. Ride defensively, folks, regardless of what the law says or who is at fault.
  - mindslight 5y ago
    Comments like yours are exactly why I'm somewhat predisposed against bike lanes - there is no such thing as a "car lane". By all means yes, get a dashcam. The more evidence, the better. While driving, I've had a few cyclists come around around blind corners going the wrong way. Any type of road user can be an idiot. But the main commonality of your list is people clashing with your own personal expectations. Don't assume that evidence of such will exculpate you (eg #2).
dahfizz 5y ago
The town I grew up in spent millions of dollars criss crossing the whole place with bike trails. Cyclists still just rode on the roads.

meetups323 5y ago

> Very few people are comfortable riding bikes in automovtive traffic. You will eventually get hit by someone posting selfies on instagram or playing their friends in wordle. And what's worse, I've had drivers stop to yell at me for riding on the (completely empty) sidewalk when crossing a narrow bridge busy with car traffic. As if hundreds of bikers don't die every year from getting whacked by careless drivers.

thesuitonym 5y ago
I can do you one better, I've been yelled out by drivers for riding my bike through a bike lane that happened to be in the way of the turning lane. You just can't win if you're trying to cycle in the US.
- fuzzer37 5y ago
  Because bikes DO NOT belong on roads. Getting hit by a car while you're on a bike is deadly. A bike running into a pedestrian on a sidewalk is an inconvenience.
  - alistairSH 5y ago
    Then give them someplace appropriate! As soon as I have dedicated/safe bike lanes, I’ll get out of your road. Until then, please try not to kill me.
    - notch656a 5y ago
      I disagree agree with poster, but to play devils advocate bicyclists are a free rider problem on public roads. It's pretty clear based on the design of most roads they were designed for motor vehicles, not bicycles. Fuel taxes are a major way these roads are funded and maintained, and bicyclists don't pay registration / licensing / fuel tax. Especially in heavily urban areas, roads have extremely high land value that bicyclists are unjustly profiting from. It's not clear to me why there should be any right for bicyclists to be allowed on the road.
      - 8note 5y ago
        I'm not clear that there should be any right for cars to be on the road either. Roads are for people to walk on, historically, and it's adding cars that made them dangerous. They're paid for by people who largely don't need them, too - the folks who live in the inner city
        notch656a 5y ago
        People driving fuel consuming vehicles are paying for the roads via fuel tax, and registration fees to the states maintaining those roads. These drivers are funding these roads thus it makes sense for them to be compensated for their payment. It's conceivable a bicyclist can get away without paying any tax whatsoever on the road, especially if their income is small. Free rider, welfare queens of the road. >Roads are for people to walk on, historically, and it's adding cars that made them dangerous In urban areas that's actually typically what the sidewalk for, and it's often illegal to walk on the road. But this is why I'm against public roads, there are all sorts of bad problems associated with this being a public good.
- wolverine876 5y ago
  > I've been yelled out by drivers for riding my bike through a bike lane that happened to be in the way of the turning lane. You just can't win if you're trying to cycle in the US. Some people are jerks in every situation. I don't believe bicyclists stand out as victims, except the expectation that they ride in traffic and the consequences of colliding with a car.

xerox13ster 5y ago

Having lived in Bentonville, the trails are absolutely meaningless if there aren't sidewalks off the trail with which to get to final destinations. I was a pedestrian cyclist there from 2017-2020 and I frequently was walking or riding in the roads or ditches when the sidewalk ran out. Sure, I could get across town, but when I get there, who knows if there's sidewalks? If I wanted to go grocery shopping and be on a sidewalk/bike trail, I had to go an extra mile out of my way to go under the overpass and through the community college to get to neighborhood market. That trip was already a mile if I rode along the road, so double the distance. That's not making cycling a first class citizen! That's hiding cyclists from cars who are the real first class citizen. I know, I grew up there. Fayetteville and Rogers get this right(ish), Bentonville wants to pretend they have it right so talent will move there for Walmart after Walmart spent decades making sure brain drain was inevitable by keeping the area "small town" (they bragged about this during my corporate orientation) and fighting density that could have naturally precipitated good pedestrian and biking infrastructure. And the separate bike lanes through the woods are not some grand way to make cycling first class they are NECESSARY or the rural drivers who come into the "city" would be playing chicken games and trying to run cyclists off the road. When I grew up this was a common thing to joke about!

black_puppydog 5y ago
> who knows if there's sidewalks? Living in Europe this question doesn't compute at all. Such a foreign idea to even contemplate. If it doesn't have a sidewalk, it must be a country road or a highway right? Couldn't happen in a reasonably densely populated area...?
- reaperducer 5y ago
  What a strange thing to read. I've been to dozens and dozens of urban places in Europe that have streets without sidewalks. Or in many of the places, the sidewalks exist, but are useless because cars are allowed to park on them. I've never understood how people in wheelchairs are able to get anywhere in most of "civilized" Europe.
  - 5y ago

AtlasBarfed 5y ago

Minneapolis has a lot of bike paths through its city parks (there are a lot of parks in Minneapolis: the chain of lakes, the Mississippi river, etc) and they really enhance the city when snow isn't on the ground. They enhance the use of parks, they don't make parks more noxious, they increase property values, they keep the city valuable. E-bikes are going to magnify the value of cities with good biking infrastructure. All of a sudden car trips become bike trips, and there are no concerns about hills or headwinds or towing a burly of stuff: the electric motor handles some or all of the required needed power. Need to haul ten bags of groceries and a kiddo up the big hill on the Mississippi? the electric motor will get you there. It hopefully will reduce the amount of surface area dedicated to cars, and switch those over to more parks and more recreation.

bluGill 5y ago
e-bikes in parks need to be limited in speed though. Don't turn our parks into dangerous for pedestrians bike freeways. Bicycles in walkers do not mix very well, while it isn't as deadly as a car, getting hit by a bike still hurts.
dillondoyle 5y ago
Minneapolis takes biking seriously. In huge amounts of snow and horrible weather!! Weather down there seems even more conducive. My dad can bike from their house to downtown in 15 minutes (more like 30 as getting older). It's amazing. Completely protected separate bike lane going through old rail corridor. I can bike to whole foods from there too without having to go on a busy street. They are expanding light rail there too but seems like similar to most cities it isn't great yet. Hopefully we'll see more density around the stops. My city Denver feels the same it's not actually used as much as it could be.

tombert 5y ago

In NYC, a lot of people (especially cops) seem to be under the impression that bike lanes are just extra parking.It's pretty irritating because going around them involves getting on the street, which isn't usually an issue, but occasionally roads in NY get extremely busy, and people in here seem to lack the ability to read speed limit signs (at least in Brooklyn).

ahoy 5y ago
I think thats because, for all the progress NYC has made in installing bike infrastructure, they've done basically nothing to reduce the number of cars on our streets.
- bitcurious 5y ago
  https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/29/nyregion/nyc-congestion-pricing.html https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/29/nyregion/nyc-congestion-p... https://mashable.com/article/nyc-city-council-lyft-uber-cap-minimum-wage https://mashable.com/article/nyc-city-council-lyft-uber-cap-... Two specific policies, but there’s also just the fact that every bike lane/pedestrian street/bus lane/low speed limit/etc. makes the city less car friendly and at some point that makes a difference.
- lotsofpulp 5y ago
  There should be a banner for any transit discussions that state you cannot optimize environments for both individual cars and non individual car transportion.
- tombert 5y ago
  It's strange, because NYC is simultaneously overpopulated with cars, but is also one of the only places in the US where you can reasonably live without a car (I don't have one).
  - Kluny 5y ago
    It's even stranger when you realize that probably only 20% of trips in New York are conducted by car, and yet they are by far the largest physical presence everywhere you go. Actually quite obnoxious.

johnatthebar 5y ago

Agreed that the recreational biking infrastructure in NW Arkansas is great, but not enough Fayetteville people bike for transportation for that to be a big part of this outcome. It's just 1% of all commutes, for example. Compare that to 4%-10% in university towns that use a lot of on-street bike lanes that take you more directly to destinations: Eugene, Corvallis, Bozeman, Madison, Fort Collins, Palo Alto, Berkeley, Ann Arbor. (Not saying those cities are perfect either, to be clear.) It's true that shitty bike lanes on auto-oriented streets are shitty, and that off-street paths are great. But lanes and paths are not the same thing, and neither of them is the reason this policy is working in Fayetteville.

lamontcg 5y ago

> You will eventually get hit by someone posting selfies on instagram or playing their friends in wordle. You will eventually get hit by someone who punishment passes you and is dangerously negligent because they've dehumanized you, and they just don't care if they do violence to you, and its you're fault because you're slow. Or you will get hit by people who simply don't register bikes and consciously or unconsciously think that bicyclists must yield to cars, sometimes turning left in front of you with no time for you to stop. Or you will get right hooked by someone who just passed you a second earlier and that is too long for their minds to track the fact that you're still there, or they again think they're entitled to drive however they want and you need to yield to whatever they do.

WalterBright 5y ago
I bought a dashcam for my car because of bicyclists: 1. randomly wandering out of the bike lane and into the car lane 2. stopped in the middle of the car lane around a blind curve 3. drafting 3 feet behind the panel truck in front of them at 40 mph 4. riding two or three abreast, with the 2 or 3 well into the car lane 5. continuing to cycle at 25 mph in the right hand bike lane while the traffic is going much slower, and there's a right hand turn coming up (it's difficult to spot these bikers while driving, heck, even cars are hard to see there which is why overtaking on the right is illegal) None of these incidents were kids on bikes, they were all middle aged adults who really should know better. I talked to a couple of these cyclists (in their tour de france outfits, naturally) once, and they laughed and said if they get hit by a car it'll be their big payday lawsuit. I replied getting crippled isn't worth a billion dollars. Ride defensively, folks, regardless of what the law says or who is at fault.
- mindslight 5y ago
  Comments like yours are exactly why I'm somewhat predisposed against bike lanes - there is no such thing as a "car lane". By all means yes, get a dashcam. The more evidence, the better. While driving, I've had a few cyclists come around around blind corners going the wrong way. Any type of road user can be an idiot. But the main commonality of your list is people clashing with your own personal expectations. Don't assume that evidence of such will exculpate you (eg #2).

dahfizz 5y ago

The town I grew up in spent millions of dollars criss crossing the whole place with bike trails. Cyclists still just rode on the roads.