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Bicycle lanes are in no way the lowest of low hanging fruit for many cities. The last time I reluctantly went to Washington DC to take my child to the zoo, literally every square inch of asphalt was in use for some purpose, not always it's intended. You had two lanes and street parking (with myriad confusing signage about when and how it can be used) to make deliveries, do construction, go straight, turn left or right from a single lane, bike, be a taxi/uber picking up passengers, and more. And with this myriad array of mixed uses, all of which are 100% necessary, and everyone fighting for space, you want what effectively amounts to 1/3 of it reserved exclusively for bikes.
Yeah, I get if you are a bicyclist that doesn't sound too hard. Be literally anybody else in the city however...
Street parking, especially free street parking, is not as necessary as it's often treated as by people that want to park for free on the street.
Who said anything about free? I didn't say anything about free. I don't think I've ever seen free parking in DC.
It’s basically never free.
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Adding more bike lanes might be a bit of a Jevon's Paradox.
If you make it easier to bike, more people will bike, which will cause more bikers to be hit by cars since you can't totally segregate car and bike traffic. Obviously, at the limit, if everyone bikes it gets super safe. But that's clearly not going to happen. Even in Amsterdam, bikes get hit by cars.
And although I can understand how frustrating it can be to be a cyclist, bikes are part of the problem too. They are just fundamentally difficult to interact with as a motorist. They are small, often poorly lit, and moving fast (sometimes the opposite direction of traffic). They don't stop at stop signs, they zoom around pedestrians, they pass stopped cars and then turn in front of them. As a driver, when I cross an intersection in Seattle, I have to look out for other cars, pedestrians, bikes, and electric scooters, all traveling at different speeds and in different directions. It's like playing Frogger.
And, as @WhiningCoil pointed out, adding more bike lanes might also not be cost effective. In a place like Toronto or Seattle where the climate and geography are not suitable for bikes, less than 5% of person miles will be done by bike. I wouldn't be surprised if it was less than 1%. Dedicated bike lanes shouldn't take up more asphalt than their share of traffic. Certainly, in Seattle, adding more bike lanes has made traffic worse, not better. As for myself I sold my bike a long time ago. Biking in the city is just no fun and unsafe no matter how many lanes they build.
Is that true ? If a large number of people start cycling, fewer people will use cars. So you can add traffic calming measures to make cars go slowly.
Grade separated bike lanes keep cars and humans separate everywhere except intersections. At intersections, they're no different than pedestrians.
Bikes and cars are only substitute goods in a small percentage of use cases.
The Netherlands disagrees.
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