"... but mainly to make car traffic worse enough that people will be discouraged from driving.... The city has built about 20 miles of bike lanes in the past five years, but despite that, the portion of D.C. residents who bike to work peaked in 2017 and has decreased each year since, falling from 5 percent to 3 percent.... Rodney Foxworth, a longtime civic activist who now leads an anti-bike lane group, says the city 'has a bias in favor of bike lanes no matter whether residents or businesses want them, and a lot of these lanes are being installed in Black, low-income communities. There is a nexus between bike lanes and gentrification.'... Adding bike lanes 'is meeting a relatively small demand' from cyclists in an older, largely African American area, [VJ Kapur, an advisory neighborhood commissioner,] concedes, 'but we are working to make the roadway safer. We are not scheming to induce developers to displace folks from the neighborhood. Change is occurring. Bike lanes potentially yield a visceral reaction because they are alien, visible implements going into a neighborhood that has looked very much the same for a long time.'"
From
"The truth about bike lanes: They’re not about the bikes/D.C. is building miles of bike lanes, though fewer people are biking to work" (WaPo). That's an opinion column by Marc Fisher.
পোস্টগুলি
৩৬টি মন্তব্য:
The only viable bike lanes are the ones that are part of planned communities, not ones that sacrifice viable road space. The latter are not only a waste of a traffic planner's efforts; they're often highly hazardous as well, terminating in odd ways around intersections, ways that leave both the cyclist and driver at risk of collision in the worst possible place. Add to this, the fact that cyclists routinely ignore traffic laws, especially stop signs and stop lights, as well as that special flavor of arrogance and asphalt entitlement that seems to develop with the application of Spandex.......
So true.
Milwaukee is currently doing the same bullshit. You know who loves bike lanes? The predominantly white laptop class. Did you know that a significant fraction of all government employees, city, county, state and federal never returned to their office buildings? Who has the wherewithal to move taxpayers dollars to projects near and dear to their hearts? Predominately white government employees. Follow the money and you’ll always get the correct answer when dealing with government shenanigans.
Milwaukee is becoming undrivable. They are taking out so many lanes some intersections that were never a problem now take three lights to get through.
Boston is making many radical changes to discourage humans from living or working there, including bike lanes. It’s working…
It never ends. The “do gooders” who know better than us and seek to rule us, not by being elected to do so, but by forcing it on us through a corrupt bureaucracy owned and controlled by the left.
Years ago they came through my neighborhood which is a straight road going uphill and a series of courts branching off the main road. At each court they cut into the curb (on both sides) and added a mini driveway/slope apparently so wheelchairs could get up the hill (despite the fact that I’ve never seen a single one try to do so, before or after. Good use of public funds tho…
I had very mixed reactions to Butt-edge-edge's "racist roads and bridges" speech because he's largely correct. But leave it to him to so ham-handedly explain it. I was appalled at the lost opportunity to show how many of the road projects back them WERE racist. Instead, that idiot muffed it.
I live in the Hawley Farms neighborhood of Milwaukee. All the main streets have bike lanes. In my eight years I haven't seen people use them.
I have over 350,000 miles of bicycling on roads and avoid bike lanes. They accumulate broken glass and bits of wire, they create impossible conflicts at intersections. Much better for cars and bicyclists is wider traffic lanes. A wide lane creates a distinct line of gravel and road debris where cars never go, and a bicyclist is safe just on the traffic side of that line.
Baltimore is doing the same. When I tell fellow residents that there is a war on cars, they look at me in disbelief and dismiss me as a crank. Yet most of the bike lanes that have been installed make things much harder for cars with at best minimal improvement for cyclists. City authorities claim it is about safety for cyclists and pedestrians, yet they promote the use of the motorized scooters that have high rates of accidents and recently allowed the installation of gigantic electronic billboards on the side of downtown buildings. These new billboards are a terrible distraction to drivers, thus creating new dangers for pedestrians and cyclists. I have noted that most of the advertisers are public or "non-profit" organizations. It seems like permitting these bill boards was really a way to funnel public money into the coffers of the sign owners (can you say campaign donors).
In Tempe AZ, the city put in bike lanes to satisfy the bike riders. Then it took them out to satisfy the car drivers. Win Win.
I believe a lot of localities put them in because they can get Fed money if they do.
When Mayor Pete was the mayor of South Bend, he added bike lanes and changed some streets that were 4-lane to two lanes, and changed one-way streets to two-way. So I doubt that he'll be criticizing bike lanes. Although very few people use the bike lanes, the other changes to the street layouts did make South Bend a better city to drive in, in part because the one.way streets encouraged people to drive through the city as a short cut, even though they weren't stopping in the city at all.
Bureaucrats have to put something down on their annual reviews just like the rest of us. That's why you get things like bike lanes that get used by 5 people a day. Hopefully we'll soon see a reduction in useless Swamp rats who are responsible for this stuff. That combined with the CNN layoffs will do a lot towards calming peoples fears about crops rotting in the field when Trump deports all the illegals.
So minorities and bike fanatics are in conflict? Is there some way to pit vegans against both?
Take your average type-A asshole out from behind the wheel of his car and put him on a bike, and what have you got? An average type-A asshole on a bicycle.
when Democrats tell you what they are.. Believe them
You know where bike lanes work? College towns. Young, healthy, cash strapped students just trying to get to campus and maybe the bar later on. Unless you have that type of demographic in your town, bike lanes are a net loss.
There are smart and dumb ways to install bike lanes. My municipality chose the dumb way, creating a driver backlash. One administration spends millions installing the lanes, then the next one spends millions removing them. Over and over again.
Sure, there are lots of streets with bike lanes, but they often go from nowhere to nowhere and the intersections are still dangerous as they have cars and bicycles interacting on haphazard ways.
That's why you see a spike in ridership that then trails off--there is pent-up demand for decent bike lanes, but after people try them out, they still find too many dangerous situations, so they stop.
Good use of public funds tho…
city workers got Paid to do this..
city supervisors got Paid to supervise this..
city managers got Paid to manage this..
Good use of public funds indeed! once you realize, that The Purpose of Government is to GET PAID; it ALL makes much more sense.
Look at schools.. WHAT is The Purpose of schools?
(hint, if you said 'to educate students', you're mentally stupid)
This notion is not a new discovery, btw. Back when that radical bike club from San Francisco was rolling out nationally, the group and the politicians who loved them made it quite clear the goal was to annoy vehicle drivers with a Cass Sunstein nudge. I still want to nudge him right in the nose...
I dunno if bike lanes are worthwhile, but I wouldn't use the number of people who regularly bike to work as a tell-all metric. I'd say MOST biking takes place outside the commuter context.
Bike lanes are pure virtue signaling to satisfy strident liberals. I rarely see them in use in downtown Omaha.
Any by all means, let's have a full critique of Pete's work at Transportation. Who can ever forget the video of him getting out of his SUV and few miles from his office and have his bike removed from the back of the SUV for the photo op. What a fake!
Bike lanes are good. And more people should use them. Too many fatties sitting behind the wheel of their monster SUVs and Trucks and driving 1-4 miles to work. I'd bet many of them drive 2 blocks to mail a letter.
As for the racist angle, if black folks don't like bikes, that's their problem. Why should i care? The streets and bike lanes are for everyone, whatever color.
Interesting data point; just my personal experience: Traffic in Manhattan is now so ridiculous that taking a taxi or an Uber anywhere is not very efficient. The subway was the only way to get anywhere in a reasonable amount of time. But, last August, I tried the shared bikes (both regular and electric). There are now bike lanes almost everywhere in the city, it's quite impressive. You can get pretty much anywhere via bike lane, and you zip right past all of the traffic. Of course, I was there last week, but didn't use a bike at all because it was too cold as far as I was concerned (not that that stopped the natives).
Unlike RH, I like the illusion of safety that a bike lane gives me. I need a false sense of security to get on my bike and share the road with moronic unfit drivers. I've found the best bicyclists lack imagination. Like a brave soldier who thinks only the "Other guy" gets hit, many bicyclists cant imagine being run over.
I've never understood why private autos aren't banned from Manhattan and the whole place turned into a big bike/pedistrian zone with a few taxis. IRC, william f. buckley proposed that in 1965.
Yes, this seems to be the case in Baltimore. Federal money is available, so it will be spent to benefit the companies with political connections that get the work, even if it provides no benefit to residents.
We have a name in Los Angeles for efforts to reduce the number of traffic lanes on our congested streets: a "road diet." One more form of government overreach, they're often done with little public and neighborhood council input.
Unforeseen problems "have included cut-through traffic on nearby residential streets, emergency vehicles stuck in the near-gridlocked traffic, and pedestrian near misses with speeding bicycles" writes local publication Westside Current. And sometimes bikes collide with right-turning vehicles they can no longer see due to the changed parking lanes.
.
Come to Chicago. With over 90 years of Demmie governance, we have become the future. It doesn't work.
Because of loss of traffic lanes to bike lanes, the city is becoming undrivable. Try going north on Dearborn Street from Chicago Avenue. Three northbound traffic lanes have been narrowed to one.
Has Meadehouse seen the hash Madison has made of Segoe Road, with bike lanes, cutouts, and center medians? Good grief!
My wife pointed out it's going to be virtually impossible for the plow drivers.
Just got back from Oslo which is so eerie with hardly a car in sight. The streets are full of busses, trains, trolleys, bikes and pedistrians. If there is no place to park you just have to leave your car at home.
And Madison....yes, what a mess. All for the 20 people that ride the bus.
Madison has reduced main thoroughfares to one lane in many places with their new bus scheme. Commute times can be a real slog. I have zero doubt this is on purpose. I can largely avoid it, being retired, but I did that anyways before they put it in.
tcrosse said...
“Take your average type-A asshole out from behind the wheel of his car and put him on a bike, and what have you got? An average type-A asshole on a bicycle.”
Completely unrelated, but BMW makes both cars and bicycles.
The Tucson area may be the bike lane and bike path capitol of the US. We sponsor the Tour de Tucson that brings in the pros to race.
The problem is that when the cyclists ride/train in packs, they take up the entire road.
"[Bike lanes] are often installed not to satisfy the barely measurable trickle of residents who pedal to work but mainly to make car traffic worse enough that people will be discouraged from driving" This is correct. In the nearby city, they have built bike lanes in a part of town largely inhabited by black folks. This did two things: Removed one lane, each way, from a 4 lane road, and eliminated on road parking. I have never seen a cyclist there, and I use that road at least once a week. The residents have taken to parking on the grass, just off the road. I cannot imagine they are happy.
একটি মন্তব্য পোস্ট করুন