"... 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.
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63 comments:
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.
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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.
P.J. O'Rourke said it best. "The Bicycle Menace"
https://coldfury.com/2024/05/26/the-bicycle-menace/
P.J O'Rourke said it best. This is a better copy
https://www.mybikeadvocate.com/2009/11/cool-and-logical-analysis-of-motorist.html
Hokul is trying to do that with "Congestion Pricing."
Whenever I go to Baltimore, I just ride an unregistered dirt bike, and pull block long wheelies.
In Corona, where I live, the main East/West street is 6th street. It's currently two lanes in each direction and is bumper to bumper traffic during rush hours. (People are trying to get to the 91 freeway which is also bumper to bumper traffic during rush hours.) They're doing a big civic revitalization project and they're going to cut 6th street down to one lane in each direction to make bike paths and widen the sidewalks. In all honesty, it's rare to see a bicyclist on 6th street. Most people here work in Orange county. And the only way there (aside from a very long diversion up into Diamond Bar) is to take the 91 freeway. And bikes are not allowed on the freeway. The bicyclists usually ride on the wide rural streets to the south because it's so dangerous to fight rush hour traffic in the center of the city. Also, they bike for exercise, not commuting.
The renovation to the Longfellow Bridge is a classic example - built in 1907, the bridge carries nearly 29,000 cars every weekday. For more than a hundred years, it was two lanes each way between Boston and Kendall Square in Cambridge. Over the last 20 years, Kendall Square grew substantially, with building space quadrupling since 1980 due to the explosion of the biotech industry. Yet for some reason, when the City of Boston did a massive renovation of the bridge (at a cost of $306 million), they somehow decided to remove one of the Boston-t0-Cambridge lanes, reducing all of that traffic to a single lane. Genuis.
Why the focus on biking to work only - retired people bike too. I live in a very bikeable area. Many bike lanes are also used by pedestrians and those using skateboards, wheelchairs, scooters or rollerblades. There are many reasons and destinations outside of work one could bike to. I'm all for it. I love the fact I can jump on my bike and get to the main street of our city in 10 minutes for lunch, a library visit, or other errand.
The group was called Mass Resistance, and boy, were they a big pain. The last Friday of every month was their giant cycling takeover of Market Street during the evening commute all the way west to the Castro. Massive gridlock. They made a huge stink about passenger traffic on Market and how much congestion it caused. They were involved in getting cars banned on Market from 11th Street down to the Embarcadero. With bus routes and a streetcar line jockeying for position as well, Market is crazy. But that just pushed the commuting traffic onto other streets on the periphery.
San Francisco is a good cycling town, and the designated streets can get you from the bay to the beach, while avoiding the worst hills. But we have the benefit of wider streets, and no winter snow issues unlike Boston or New York.
Ditto for Boulder.
In Boulder CO - some over-paid city planner removed car lanes and turned them into bike lanes. Car traffic in that area is now a hot mess. Everyone hates it. If you look around for someone on a bike - lol - hardly anyone uses those new lanes (lanes formerly for cars)
Boulder has amazing bike paths - Bike paths that can get you from east to west North to south and more. Removing auto lanes is just dumb.
oh - and this city planner - she has now moved on! She carpet bombed us with terrible planning - and skipped off into the sunset with her bag of money and on to the next progressive enclave - to virtue signal on the road where it is not needed or wanted....
Back when I was in Austin, the back roads on weekends could be quite dangerous. Ditto for Boulder. Both Woke cities with large biking communities, and large packs riding hard on the weekends, plowing trough lights and stop signs, because tey old, thanks to the size of the bike packs.
I live in a city that has installed lots of bike lanes. The immediate result has been increased vehicle traffic and congestion, because they've reduced the number of driving lanes to make room for the bike lanes. And I still find riding a bike around town to be incredibly dangerous, especially at intersections. Then when you get where you're going, there's no lock strong enough to keep your bike from being stolen.
My son recently graduated from college with a degree that's applicable to city planning. He said his professors confirmed that one of the goals of bike lanes was to make driving inconvenient, and that they seemed to take pride in it. I happen to ride my bike a lot, and I even rode it to work in the Before Times, so I appreciate a good bike lane or bike path. I'm lucky to live in a city with newer infrastructure and wider roads that accommodate them for the most part.
Bad memories of Boulder. Daughter did her PhD there. Even she complained. Her first year there in grad school, 5 women lived together and had maybe 12 bikes (and a comparable number of pairs of skis). Everyone had a bike to get to/from school and a mountain bike. It was maybe 3-4 miles to school, and she could do it mostly without using bike lanes in streets. Rain, snow, or shine, until she crashed riding on snow. I felt I was taking my life in my hands when I would visit. She commented that, regardless of fault, you really, really, didn’t want to take out cyclists. Juries there are heavily stacked in favor of the bicyclists. And they know it.
So, she got a job in the Louisville/Lafayette are (maybe 10 miles back down US 36). But their product wasn’t at a good price point, so the business unit was shut down and sold off. New job is east of downtown, in Boulder. So she is now driving into Boulder every day, and having to deal with the crazy bicyclists, that she was happily a part of a half decade earlier. So, yes, I do laugh at her sometimes, in my weaker moments.
Bike lanes can make sense in certain circumstances that are not typical at all even in urban America. A high level of concentration is probably the main thing.
He was probably trying to attract the creative class to South Bend. Wonder how that worked out.
Good idea if your goal is getting people out of their cars, and hopefully living densely enough together. Except that most people don’t like living like that, and esp if they want to raise a family. No problem. The people who like that sort of thing, and are living in these cities, are the (leftist) voters who put Dem politicians into power who hire city planners who buy into this sort of thing.
It works, until it doesn’t. A lot of workers discovered that they much preferred not having to deal with this dense urban nonsense, when they worked at home during the COVID-19 lockdowns. Working from home, or at a suburban campus, is much more pleasant. And, it’s often not cost effective either for the employers. So, across the country, in these dense urban areas, office space vacancies have skyrocketed, and have instead been filling up with the homeless, ratcheting up the problem, as the urban environment gets less and less pleasant.
Back in the 80s, the head of traffic in Alexandria, outside DC, told my dad that they intentionally made a bad intersection worse, so people would avoid it. There was one near us where three thoroughfares crossed, and they did their worst. They also slowed N-S commuter traffic, to force more of eastern Fairfax onto the already-crowded interstate.
Bike lanes in Manhattan do get used, but predominantly by delivery guys on e-bikes, flouting traffic laws, going 25+ MPH, running lights, going the wrong way, and regularly killing and maiming pedestrians. And automobile lanes are reduced, adding to congestion and pollution. Other than that, bike lanes are great!
We aren't the Netherlands. Many American cities are in weather zones not really conducive to biking. I say this as a former paperboy delivering newspapers in winter.
Hokul is trying to do that with "Congestion Pricing."
If a business in the private sector tried this, the screams of "Price gouging!" would be deafening.
And no one voted for this. Some petty tyrant dreamed this up. It's annoying, a waste of money, and the weather will not change one bit because of this insanity.
When I rented a bike in Florida, they suggested riding just at the edge of the road and NOT riding on the shoulder because the oldsters would actually panic more. If you ride on the road, they told me, drivers would wait for traffic to clear and then pass.
You should see the mess Atlanta made with bike lanes on the narrow, historic streets around the MLK historical site and Auburn Avenue. And I have never seen a single bike on them. It’s a ghetto with retirement apartments, a tourist hotel district, and a large and dangerous public hospital — no place to be riding a bike.
The feds are putting in traffic circles everywhere in North Georgia. At sleepy rural intersections. Plus one convoluted spaghetti monster that confuse the tourists and locals. Being the birthplace of NASCAR, I can’t wait until someone figures out how to use them as really tiny racetracks.
The Washington DC Metropolitan area absolutely installed bike lanes wrong. Over and over they install a bike lane, taking away a car lane, and then dump the bicycles onto a road with neither shoulder nor bike path/sidewalk and tell everyone to share. It’s a menace, a waste of money, and virtue signaling. It never occurred to be before that it’s also gentrifying communities.
We’ve recently moved to an area in Florida with many paths and are so looking forward to riding bicycles here! This place planned it out correctly!
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