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Bike infrastructure means some brick separators and painted lanes. It takes less than a month to build city-wide rudimentary protected bike lines. BRT is simil
by screye 3y ago
Bike infrastructure means some brick separators and painted lanes. It takes less than a month to build city-wide rudimentary protected bike lines.
BRT is similarly quick to implement, if a little more expensive. Remove 1 lane of parking from major downtown roads & replace with a painted BRT lane. Order about 50 buses to run in 1 way loops around the downtown area. Have high frequency BRT between the out-of-downtown parking area <-> downtown core.
Either should be doable under 1 year.
The blockers are all political.
- crote 3y ago> Bike infrastructure means some brick separators and painted lanes. The biggest issue with bike infrastructure is that the people responsible for infrastructure genuinely believe this. The end result is usually a scattered bunch of stupidly dangerous "bike lanes" which aren't of use to basically anyone. You need a separate biking network, which interfaces with car traffic as little as possible. This means you're essentially building "cycling highways" through car-free or car-minimal residential streets. Doing this properly means re-engineering those streets and intersections basically from the ground up, not just putting some paint on a highway gutter.
- TexanFeller 3y agoThank you for saying this, the half measures currently being implemented most places are indeed woefully inadequate. The “bike lanes” near me are just painted lanes that frequently intersect turning cars. I would LOVE to bike to work, but not if I have to fear serious injury every day.
- tomatocracy 3y agoI cycle quite a lot in London which has put a lot of these in and honestly I think most of the separated lanes etc are a waste of money - they only really make a difference on the busiest roads with the narrowest lanes or at the most dangerous junctions. What does seem to be hugely underestimated is the need to provide lots of decent secure cycle parking at every destination.
- jandrese 3y ago> It takes less than a month to build city-wide rudimentary protected bike lines. Citation needed. Maybe a month of actual painting time once you've done all of the planning, but planning the routes and going through all of the approvals and meetings is absolutely not possible in a single month. Not even a single year.
- BobaFloutist 3y agoIf you do it on every street you don't have to spend any time planning the routes.
- jandrese 3y agoAbsolutely not true. Every intersection is its own special snowflake and if you don't consider the intersections your bike paths will not be usable.
- hodgesrm 3y agoMaybe instead of planning bike lanes we should be addressing the root causes of why it takes such such an absurd amount of time to make changes like this. Once we do that we can get back to bike lanes.