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PaperclipPerfector  2mo ago (text post)   29557 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 26, 2024

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Bicycle lanes are the lowest of the low hanging fruit for many cities. They are cheap, simple, ways to reduce traffic congestion, promote healthy and active living, and protect the lives of cyclists. It is so incredibly frustrating how much of an uphill battle it is to get them built. I think there's this enduring perception from people who exclusively drive that bike lanes are something for hobbyists rather than a way for people to get where they need to go. Every attempt to get new lanes built is met with a torrent of backlash.

Citation? Typically bike lanes in my city just end up cannibalizing real roadway and provide little, if any, protection to the few bikers who use them. "Building" bike lanes is, in my experience, a total misnomer, its just drawing extra lines. Its not like you can move the buildings 3 feet back on each side of the road.

That's because a bike lane is not just drawing a line. A perfect bike lane looks like this:

  • sidewalk
  • bike lane wide enough for passing
  • door opening lane, ideally raised to prevent illegal parking
  • car parking lane
  • another door opening lane
  • finally, a car driving lane

And the intersections have to be redesigned as well to prevent drivers from turning right into a bike in their blind spot.

So it indeed requires ripping up all the buildings in a city to have a good bike lane.

In case you're not being ostensibly obtuse: you can also just reduce the number of car lanes on multi-lane roads. Not all those strips replace one full-size lane each.

I worked in Shanghai for a bit. They had something like this in parts of the city. Pedestrian sidewalk, full sized lane just for bikes and scooters, low concrete barrier, lanes for cars. If I had a complaint it would be that the bike and scooter lanes were much too wide. I once was on a company bus whose driver decided to drive down one for a bit in order to skip traffic. Which felt like an act of insanity to me, but I understand that is a very American sort of opinion. Needs, but sadly lacks, proper entry barriers only wide enough for a scooter.

But in American cities I don't see how they would make these. We already have building, sidewalk, lane, lane, sidewalk, building. No room for extra-wide bike lanes with barriers on each side. And for the streets with four lanes, they can't sacrifice two lanes for bikes without causing an extreme car traffic problem and two mostly-unused bike-only lanes. That would be great misallocation of scarce shared resources.

But in American cities I don't see how they would make these. We already have building, sidewalk, lane, lane, sidewalk, building. No room for extra-wide bike lanes with barriers on each side.

It's: building, sidewalk, bike lane, narrow barrier (since there's no parking), 20mph lane (one way only), sidewalk, building. You even get to widen the sidewalks a bit. Since American cities are built on a grid, you can easily alternate the direction of one-way streets.

I do like one-way lanes in urban cores. But thinking about this, we don't need two barriers and two bike lanes if it is a one-way street.

We could instead have building, sidewalk, parking or one-way car lane, a second one-way car lane, barrier, one-way bike lane, side walk, building. That just doubled car capacity or puts street parking everywhere for free.

And 20mph max speed is way too slow for virtually all roads. Even driving by an elementary school during pick up or drop off time is faster than that.

20mph is perfect for city streets. In Europe, school zones are usually limited to 20kph, or about 12mph.

20mph is excessively slow. 12mph is comical.

I get I'm just voicing American opinions about this, but Europe sounds like it is in sorry state if they do this. Is around 20mph limits commonly implemented where you live, or is this very aspirational on your part? Are you some ultra-slow-driving contrarian going against the rest of society, or is this the norm where you live?

I see 20kph signs next to every school.

30kph zones are common in Germany, I want to see them in Russia on all urban streets that are two lanes wide or narrower.

I mean 20 mph is the typical school zone limit anywhere I've been -- do you live somewhere where you can zoom by schools doing 40 and the cops aren't camped out there all the time running up their numbers?

(This does seem quite slow, but kids are really dumb. Maybe it's a hangover from when kids actually walked/biked to school?)

I just googled it and the law is 25mph in some places such as the places I've lived and 20mph in others. Google says some school districts can go as low as 15mph, but I've never seen that. I suppose I happen to be used to 25mph.

And no, I have not seen 40mph signs in front of elementary schools when children are present. And at my local schools lots of kids walk and bike to school. Not driving near masses of them at 40mph is sensible.

The California Vehicle Code (CVC) also sets the following statutory speed limits:

15 mph in alleys, at blind intersections and at blind railroad crossings

25 mph in residence and business districts, school zones and playground areas when children are present, and at senior citizen facilities.

These speed limits may be posted or unposted.

And also:

What is the speed limit in most school zones?

25 mph Around Children

The speed limit is 25 mph within 500 feet of a school while children are outside or crossing the street.

https://www.dmv.ca.gov › handbook Section 7: Laws and Rules of the Road (Continued) - California DMV

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