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Do you think the total damage to life and limb would go up or down? I strongly believe it would go down.
In areas where the slowest transport method has enough political power they can just ban all other transport methods in their space. And they are likely to want to ban faster transport methods first. Imagine if cyclists outnumbered cars ten to one. They'd probably just lobby to ban cars.
If some space must be carved out of somewhere for the sake of cyclists, I think sidewalk space should be carved out before street space. And that cyclists should be held to sidewalk rules rather than street rules, since they can more easily follow sidewalk rules.
Bicycles are far more efficient than cars
By moving people from cars to bikes saves a tonne of space. One of the main problems in cities is that too much space is taken by cars which makes the city spread out and hostile to walking and cycling. This also makes public transit hard as people don't want to walk to it. When everything is spread out walking, cycling and public transit doesn't work well.
I'm fine with motorcycles being on the road. They would share most of the efficiency gains of size with bicycles, without as much of the discrepancy in capabilities.
I've also been to cities in India. As insane as they are about safety I still didn't really see human powered bicycles on the road all that much.
They were generally far denser than western cities. And the cities were not originally created with cars in mind. They still had plenty of cars.
The reason is pretty straightforward: cars are a clearly superior product in terms of travel comfort and safety.
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It would go down (if enforced) because there wouldn't be any significant amount of biking any more. Which makes it a really dumb idea from the viewpoint of a bicyclist.
I just don't believe that cyclists are such huge divas that they will take a slightly worse experience for a significant improvement in personal safety. If they feel that way why do any of them wear helmets? That is also a comfort vs safety tradeoff, and everyone has seemingly been fine with that mandated tradeoff. Why not this one?
Riding on the sidewalk is not a "slightly worse experience". It's a plain awful experience.
Where I live it is an objectively better experience than being on the roads if you care at all about personal safety.
What are your specific objections to sidewalks? And could either of those objections be solved by:
Until someone else pointed it out I had no idea just how fast cyclists expected to be able to go on their preferred pathway. I'll admit I have little tolerance for this complaint since they would happily have all drivers significantly slow down to accommodate them.
Unless your roads are unpaved, I do not believe that.
Yes, one of the whole points of a bicycle is to go significantly faster than walking. Last week I was out on my bicycle (on the roads) and averaged 16mph, with a top speed of over 40mph (downhill). Even 16mph is considerably faster than is practical on a sidewalk. When I was going slow, cars mostly passed me with no issues ("mostly" because there's often someone timid who will hang back when there's plenty of room to pass safely). When I was going down that hill, the cars were hung up behind a slow truck so I was actually going faster.
As I've said elsewhere in the thread, I would not, and I object to the bicyclist-activists when they make these demands. If you want to go out on the road and have your bicycle be a vehicle, you have to accept the ordinary risks of doing so.
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At least where I live, sidewalks are designed to move people at a walking pace. Even running is sometimes a bit hard! They have sharp corners, frequent low hanging branches, sometimes steps, and nobody bothers to fix discontinuities of a few inches. It works on a bike if you're going real slowly, but part of the general complaint here is that "bike speed" is pretty varied between kids with training wheels and spandex-clad roadies that are closer to car speeds.
Yes, speed is exactly the problem.
If the posted speed limit is higher than a vehicle's maximum speed than it is dangerous for that vehicle to be there. Most vehicles in most circumstances travel much slower than their maximum speed.
I think bicycles should be expected to slow down on dangerous areas of a sidewalk, just like cars are expected to slow down in dangerous areas or when the speed limit is reduced.
Speed limit signs on sidewalks would be much cheaper to implement than bike lanes.
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