This is a great idea, but I’m not convinced it would work in the SF bay area. There’s a statewide mandate to reduce commute miles (note that the metric is not

This is a great idea, but I’m not convinced it would work in the SF bay area. There’s a statewide mandate to reduce commute miles (note that the metric is not commute time, or commute pollution), and most cities have implemented this by introducing punitive light timings and removing car lanes. To make the latter politically acceptable, they usually add “bike lanes”, which have complicated concrete barriers lining them, and are painted with solid green paint that is slick when covered in wet leaves. Ignoring the obvious problems (the barriers would, at best, bend a rim if you swerved into them), they don’t aren’t designed to be possible to sweep, so they’re frequently too dirty to ride in, and many areas have stopped reliably trimming encroaching tree branches. (Sometimes, they convert car lanes to “bus lanes”, which are just normal lanes, but bus services are incredibly infrequent, so the lanes sit idle 99% of the time. Ironically, those lanes seem well maintained.). The upshot is that now bikes get to share one fewer lane with cars than before, for a given number of commuters, drive times are much higher, fuel economy is much lower, and (based on breathing the non-cabin-filtered air when riding my bike) air pollution on city streets is much higher. Of course, covid helped them meet their metrics, so there’s also a looming property tax and commercial real estate crisis.