this post was submitted on 03 Dec 2023
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Bikers really need their own infrastructure that's kept entirely apart from where cars are. Bikes and cars sharing the same road is terrifyingly unsafe for both.
"unsafe for both"? What is the bike going to do to the car? Scratch the paint? Get blood on the tires?
That said, I agree that separated bike infrastructure saves lives and encourages biking by making people feel safer.
Easy enough to imagine a driver (understandably) swerving to avoid killing a cyclist and losing control of the car
Not to mention the psychological effects if an accident does happen.. 'Unsafe' doesn't have to only mean physical injury or death..
Being a shitty driver is indeed unsafe
I agree. As long as there are drivers, there will be shitty drivers, so it's worthwhile to design roads in a way that minimizes the chance that shitty driving will kill people.
That's a little melodramatic. I'm 100% on the cyclist side (don't even have a driving licence) but even I can see mixed traffic is dangerous for both.
What driver hits a bike unexpectedly (assuming no intent) and doesn't react in a potentially dangerous way? People crash cars trying to avoid deer even.
As someone who biked everywhere, daily, for years, I would have loved so much to have my own dedicated infrastructure, if only our own separate, Barrier-protected lane in the street.
I've been to cities where they have added in lanes separate from the road, going all over town, and they're usually packed with people using them.
People want this kind of thing.
In some ways, it really feels like city streets were made for people from outside the city driving in for a specific purpose, and public transit, sidewalks, and bike paths are for the people who actually live there.
The whole previous phase of ever-widening streets/highways and paving any open ground for parking almost feels like an attempt to make the cities more like a theme park you drive to and leave at the end of the day. I'm glad things seem to be trending the other way now, with more emphasis on infrastructure I can use living here.
I mean I get your point, but still agree with op. Running somebody over is unsafe and nothing terrifies me more than backing up in parking lots where kids might dart out unexpectedly.
There's bad drivers everywhere, but I'd hazard a guess that most of them do not want to kill a cyclist either..
Have you ever hit anything with a car before?
Um. No?
I mean, if a car doesn’t see a cyclist until the last moment, swerves to avoid it, and hits something else, the cyclist being there created a dangerous situation for the driver.
Even just considering a driver hitting a cyclist, the driver still has to live with that outcome for the rest of their life. Unless your expectation is that the driver is a psychopath who only cares about the condition of their vehicle, which I suppose is a possibility.
Ever seen a deer go thru the windscreen and kill the driver? Same thing can happen with a human
My bike is a fat bike with diy motor kit. It's really damn heavy. I wouldn't be surprised if it's on par with a light deer now. I wouldn't want to hit it at all but definitely not with anything smaller than an f150.
Even if they're separate, general-purpose lanes and bike paths and sidewalks have to cross sometimes. The biggest problem with the infrastructure pictured isn't the bike lane itself, it's the inadequate intersection treatment.
In particular, the car slip lane should've been removed and a stop bar before the bike lane crossing should've been added.
No, the bike lane should be raised above all of it so that bikes don't have to stop at all.
Great bike infrastructure is when bike riders don't have to stop for car traffic. It should ALWAYS be the other way around, or the paths shouldn't cross at all.
Why should cyclists be the ones who have to go up the slopes? If you're going to do that, raise (or better yet, bury underground) the car lanes instead.
I think they are saying the surface should be raised so the bike lane is level and the street passes over a speed table. This makes it evident that the street is crossing the bike lane, rather than the bike lane crossing the street. We are talking inches, not tens of feet.
That's inconsistent with the "so that bikes don't have to stop at all" part, but it would be much more reasonable than the nonsensical idea I was mocking.
Agreed.
If a city wants to reduce cars on the road, buses/trains/subways yeah that helps a little bit.
But make a dedicated network where it's only pedestrians, bikes and electric vehicles under a certain speed limit. Especially if it's covered in some way,
There a TON of people that would absolutely prefer that over cars
I hate riding my bike in the street for exactly this reason. I really shouldn't be of the mindset that every time I get on my bike could be my last.
The Woodlands Development north of Houston did this very well in the first phase of development. Bike paths wound through the woods on the backside of property while streets wound through the front. This gave more street facing property while bike travel was typically shorter distances. It was really amazing. It was abandoned for more square property lines and conventional development in later phases.