5 ms·

How can we do the same in the US? I would love to take bicycle trips but that means having to share the lane with monster pickups and distracted SUV drivers.

by rwbt 2y ago

thejohnconway 2y ago
As unhelpful as this answer might seem, I think the answer is damn the SUVs, full bike ahead. Nothing will change until there are cyclists on the roads, then it starts to snowball. I’ve seen it happening here in London (UK).
Tiktaalik 2y ago
Same way as they did it in Paris: Take roads that are currently exclusively set aside for car use, and reserve a portion for exclusive cyclist use. This means building separated bike lanes (ie. not just some painted pavement). "Build it and they will come" The reason that cycling isn't that popular is because being chaotically mixed in with vehicle traffic makes it a dangerous activity, and people unsurprisingly avoid dangerous activities. Creating separated AAA "All Ages and Abilities" bicycle lanes makes cycling safe and so then people feel encouraged to bicycle for whatever daily chores it makes sense to cycle for.
- hot_gril 2y ago
  This has been done in some cities, but those bike lanes are sitting empty, so there's more to it than that.
  - chrisco255 2y ago
    The bike paths have to be useful of course. You can make a nice bike path to nowhere and no one will use it because there's nowhere to go there. Even if it's Lime scooters or whatever using the bike paths, still an improvement. Driving a car in Paris is also a nightmare so there's that additional motivator there.
  - Tiktaalik 2y ago
    Well the problem is that you need a cycling network and even the most cycling friendly of North American cities often don't have that. So the common problem that holds back many cities is that you might have one or two AAA bike lanes, but then after that you're thrown back into the dangerous mix of traffic again. Accordingly cycling growth will be limited outside of the narrow corridors where the best AAA bike lanes exist.
  - kbrackbill 2y ago
    I don't know where you're referring to specifically, but a common thing I've seen is that cities will make some set of roads bikeable (usually roads they were repaving/redesigning anyway) but they're not really connected in a sensible way. It makes biking on the improved roads nicer, but most practical trips will still involve other roads which might be more dangerous, scary, or difficult.
    - hot_gril 2y ago
      I'm thinking of downtown San Jose, CA, where they do seem to have a full network of bike lanes often totally separated by cones, but maybe I'm wrong.
      - kgabis 2y ago
        Having looked at those bike lanes with streetview it appears most of them are simply painted and don't provide any physical separation from traffic. Also, this: https://www.google.com/maps/@37.3428225,-121.8868874,3a,75y,161.48h,65.26t/data=!3m6!1e1!3m4!1s1eg9hMpn1H4gmF650dkXzg!2e0!7i16384!8i8192!5m1!1e3?entry=ttu https://www.google.com/maps/@37.3428225,-121.8868874,3a,75y,...
        hot_gril 2y ago
        Huh, maybe they took them out. And yeah that's the classic, those blocked lanes were a constant danger when I used to bike to work.
  - estebank 2y ago
    Adding scattered bike lanes in a haphazard way is insufficient. You need a network of physically separated bike lanes that connects an entire city. Any gap in the network makes it so the bike lanes might as well not exist, if you go from a nice ride to being in mixed traffic. Physical separation is also critical, because between the lack of enforcement of blocked bike lanes in most locales and the apathy of drivers that have no qualms blocking them, if you don't make it physically impossible to park on them, people will park on them, rendering them useless.
    - hot_gril 2y ago
      It's not reassuring to say that these lanes only work when they cover the entire city. If they start with a smaller bike-friendly part of town and it actually works, people will want to move there or expand it.
  - rthomas6 2y ago
    If they are more than just a line on the road and are actually safe to use, they are probably not as empty as they seem. Because bikes take up much less space and don't tend to bunch up as much like cars, it can seem like there must be a lot less bikes than there actually are. 30 cars over the course of 5 minutes are very noticeable and seem like high traffic. 10 bikes over 5 minutes seem like almost nobody, but the bike lane would then be moving a third as much people as all the car lanes combined.
    - hot_gril 2y ago
      It's so empty anywhere I go that it's an easy comparison. I can drive 15 minutes and see 0 bikes, 200 cars. I used to bike too. If there were anywhere near as many bikes as cars, I'd have sat next to them at traffic lights. Cars might bunch up more, but in any place with mid to heavy traffic, they're everywhere anyway.
  - getwiththeprog 2y ago
    You need to provide evidence and context.
  - tom_vidal 2y ago
    This has not been done in a single US city. We only have patchwork networks, and a patchwork network of safe infrastructure is by definition unsafe infrastructure.
lmm 2y ago
Ban street parking in cities, remove parking minimums from planning/zoning, and start enforcing laws against drivers killing people. (Heck, any kind of enforcement of speed limits and driving license requirements will help). Give bicycles priority at junctions and set up bike boxes etc. (don't bother with cycle lanes until you've done this, drivers mostly kill cyclists at junctions). Accept that it'll take time and be an incremental process.
hot_gril 2y ago
IMO the most realistic way to achieve this in the US is to build up some central no-car area that has ample parking around it. This may be composed of parks, malls, and closed streets that never made much sense to drive on anyway. As it becomes more desirable to go there, more people choose to live within walking or biking distance, and it expands. Meanwhile people from suburbs can still drive to there, park outside, and support those businesses. There are some good examples of this already. What doesn't work is taking an existing car-centric city and making it more annoying for cars. That doesn't shrink the distances for bikes or encourage growth around a focal point. Paris wasn't built around cars, though.
- lmm 2y ago
  > What doesn't work is taking an existing car-centric city and making it more annoying for cars. It may not work alone, but it's an important part of the process. Both the Netherlands and more recently Paris have found that carrot-only approaches don't work, you have to be prepared to make private car use worse, because otherwise most of the time a private car wins for the individual even as it causes a tragedy of the commons in terms of congestion.
  - hot_gril 2y ago
    The suggestion isn't carrot-only. Instead of making the whole city more annoying for cars, it's making part of it completely unusable by cars and leaving the rest alone, subject to change as the no-car area grows. It's like a crystal; you need a seed, not just saturation.
- piva00 2y ago
  > What doesn't work is taking an existing car-centric city and making it more annoying for cars. That doesn't shrink the distances for bikes or encourage growth around a focal point. Paris wasn't built around cars, though. Amsterdam was very car-centric in the 70s [0][1][2] even if the city was not built for cars. Over the decades it was reclaimed from cars and back into a pedestrian-friendly city, taking space/lanes away from cars to build cycling infrastructure, better separation between traffic (enlarged sidewalks in major streets, separate bike lanes, raised sidewalks for pedestrians on intersections, etc.). American cities have a lot more space to be taken away from cars, instead of stroads you could have bike lanes with pedestrian boulevards with vegetation/trees as separation from traffic, better public transportation with trams and busses on the same streets as cars to lower the speed, better connection to the transportation network for people coming from suburbs so they could switch to the cities' mass transportation; it's, to me, a very low hanging fruit on how to improve American cities urbanism but it takes political will and a change of culture, unfortunately I feel that the change of culture is the hardest part in the USA with its hyper-individualism. [0] https://i.pinimg.com/736x/09/d4/9f/09d49fbe98e46797d45e8c1774269302.jpg https://i.pinimg.com/736x/09/d4/9f/09d49fbe98e46797d45e8c177... [1] https://international.fhwa.dot.gov/pubs/pl18004/index_files/image012.png https://international.fhwa.dot.gov/pubs/pl18004/index_files/... [2] https://i.redd.it/vujg495x71l61.jpg https://i.redd.it/vujg495x71l61.jpg
Am4TIfIsER0ppos 2y ago
Make people as poor as we are in europe so they cannot afford a car.
dzhiurgis 2y ago
A priori you need the right density. Bikes are just not gonna work for low density suburbs since you’ll need to cycle for hours to get anywhere.

How can we do the same in the US? I would love to take bicycle trips but that means having to share the lane with monster pickups and distracted SUV drivers.

by rwbt 2y ago

How can we do the same in the US? I would love to take bicycle trips but that means having to share the lane with monster pickups and distracted SUV drivers.

thejohnconway 2y ago

As unhelpful as this answer might seem, I think the answer is damn the SUVs, full bike ahead. Nothing will change until there are cyclists on the roads, then it starts to snowball. I’ve seen it happening here in London (UK).

Tiktaalik 2y ago

Same way as they did it in Paris: Take roads that are currently exclusively set aside for car use, and reserve a portion for exclusive cyclist use. This means building separated bike lanes (ie. not just some painted pavement). "Build it and they will come" The reason that cycling isn't that popular is because being chaotically mixed in with vehicle traffic makes it a dangerous activity, and people unsurprisingly avoid dangerous activities. Creating separated AAA "All Ages and Abilities" bicycle lanes makes cycling safe and so then people feel encouraged to bicycle for whatever daily chores it makes sense to cycle for.

hot_gril 2y ago
This has been done in some cities, but those bike lanes are sitting empty, so there's more to it than that.
- chrisco255 2y ago
  The bike paths have to be useful of course. You can make a nice bike path to nowhere and no one will use it because there's nowhere to go there. Even if it's Lime scooters or whatever using the bike paths, still an improvement. Driving a car in Paris is also a nightmare so there's that additional motivator there.
- Tiktaalik 2y ago
  Well the problem is that you need a cycling network and even the most cycling friendly of North American cities often don't have that. So the common problem that holds back many cities is that you might have one or two AAA bike lanes, but then after that you're thrown back into the dangerous mix of traffic again. Accordingly cycling growth will be limited outside of the narrow corridors where the best AAA bike lanes exist.
- kbrackbill 2y ago
  I don't know where you're referring to specifically, but a common thing I've seen is that cities will make some set of roads bikeable (usually roads they were repaving/redesigning anyway) but they're not really connected in a sensible way. It makes biking on the improved roads nicer, but most practical trips will still involve other roads which might be more dangerous, scary, or difficult.
  - hot_gril 2y ago
    I'm thinking of downtown San Jose, CA, where they do seem to have a full network of bike lanes often totally separated by cones, but maybe I'm wrong.
    - kgabis 2y ago
      Having looked at those bike lanes with streetview it appears most of them are simply painted and don't provide any physical separation from traffic. Also, this: https://www.google.com/maps/@37.3428225,-121.8868874,3a,75y,161.48h,65.26t/data=!3m6!1e1!3m4!1s1eg9hMpn1H4gmF650dkXzg!2e0!7i16384!8i8192!5m1!1e3?entry=ttu https://www.google.com/maps/@37.3428225,-121.8868874,3a,75y,...
      - hot_gril 2y ago
        Huh, maybe they took them out. And yeah that's the classic, those blocked lanes were a constant danger when I used to bike to work.
- estebank 2y ago
  Adding scattered bike lanes in a haphazard way is insufficient. You need a network of physically separated bike lanes that connects an entire city. Any gap in the network makes it so the bike lanes might as well not exist, if you go from a nice ride to being in mixed traffic. Physical separation is also critical, because between the lack of enforcement of blocked bike lanes in most locales and the apathy of drivers that have no qualms blocking them, if you don't make it physically impossible to park on them, people will park on them, rendering them useless.
  - hot_gril 2y ago
    It's not reassuring to say that these lanes only work when they cover the entire city. If they start with a smaller bike-friendly part of town and it actually works, people will want to move there or expand it.
- rthomas6 2y ago
  If they are more than just a line on the road and are actually safe to use, they are probably not as empty as they seem. Because bikes take up much less space and don't tend to bunch up as much like cars, it can seem like there must be a lot less bikes than there actually are. 30 cars over the course of 5 minutes are very noticeable and seem like high traffic. 10 bikes over 5 minutes seem like almost nobody, but the bike lane would then be moving a third as much people as all the car lanes combined.
  - hot_gril 2y ago
    It's so empty anywhere I go that it's an easy comparison. I can drive 15 minutes and see 0 bikes, 200 cars. I used to bike too. If there were anywhere near as many bikes as cars, I'd have sat next to them at traffic lights. Cars might bunch up more, but in any place with mid to heavy traffic, they're everywhere anyway.
- getwiththeprog 2y ago
  You need to provide evidence and context.
- tom_vidal 2y ago
  This has not been done in a single US city. We only have patchwork networks, and a patchwork network of safe infrastructure is by definition unsafe infrastructure.

lmm 2y ago

Ban street parking in cities, remove parking minimums from planning/zoning, and start enforcing laws against drivers killing people. (Heck, any kind of enforcement of speed limits and driving license requirements will help). Give bicycles priority at junctions and set up bike boxes etc. (don't bother with cycle lanes until you've done this, drivers mostly kill cyclists at junctions). Accept that it'll take time and be an incremental process.

hot_gril 2y ago

IMO the most realistic way to achieve this in the US is to build up some central no-car area that has ample parking around it. This may be composed of parks, malls, and closed streets that never made much sense to drive on anyway. As it becomes more desirable to go there, more people choose to live within walking or biking distance, and it expands. Meanwhile people from suburbs can still drive to there, park outside, and support those businesses. There are some good examples of this already. What doesn't work is taking an existing car-centric city and making it more annoying for cars. That doesn't shrink the distances for bikes or encourage growth around a focal point. Paris wasn't built around cars, though.

lmm 2y ago
> What doesn't work is taking an existing car-centric city and making it more annoying for cars. It may not work alone, but it's an important part of the process. Both the Netherlands and more recently Paris have found that carrot-only approaches don't work, you have to be prepared to make private car use worse, because otherwise most of the time a private car wins for the individual even as it causes a tragedy of the commons in terms of congestion.
- hot_gril 2y ago
  The suggestion isn't carrot-only. Instead of making the whole city more annoying for cars, it's making part of it completely unusable by cars and leaving the rest alone, subject to change as the no-car area grows. It's like a crystal; you need a seed, not just saturation.
piva00 2y ago
> What doesn't work is taking an existing car-centric city and making it more annoying for cars. That doesn't shrink the distances for bikes or encourage growth around a focal point. Paris wasn't built around cars, though. Amsterdam was very car-centric in the 70s [0][1][2] even if the city was not built for cars. Over the decades it was reclaimed from cars and back into a pedestrian-friendly city, taking space/lanes away from cars to build cycling infrastructure, better separation between traffic (enlarged sidewalks in major streets, separate bike lanes, raised sidewalks for pedestrians on intersections, etc.). American cities have a lot more space to be taken away from cars, instead of stroads you could have bike lanes with pedestrian boulevards with vegetation/trees as separation from traffic, better public transportation with trams and busses on the same streets as cars to lower the speed, better connection to the transportation network for people coming from suburbs so they could switch to the cities' mass transportation; it's, to me, a very low hanging fruit on how to improve American cities urbanism but it takes political will and a change of culture, unfortunately I feel that the change of culture is the hardest part in the USA with its hyper-individualism. [0] https://i.pinimg.com/736x/09/d4/9f/09d49fbe98e46797d45e8c1774269302.jpg https://i.pinimg.com/736x/09/d4/9f/09d49fbe98e46797d45e8c177... [1] https://international.fhwa.dot.gov/pubs/pl18004/index_files/image012.png https://international.fhwa.dot.gov/pubs/pl18004/index_files/... [2] https://i.redd.it/vujg495x71l61.jpg https://i.redd.it/vujg495x71l61.jpg

Am4TIfIsER0ppos 2y ago

Make people as poor as we are in europe so they cannot afford a car.

dzhiurgis 2y ago

A priori you need the right density. Bikes are just not gonna work for low density suburbs since you’ll need to cycle for hours to get anywhere.