The basic idea of “experimentation is good” holds for bike lanes as well — before making a permanent strategy decision for an entire city they could try painting bike lanes in a neighborhood or for one commute where people are willing to try biking. When it works out, it’s easier to convince car people that they’re better off when there are fewer cars on the road even if the road is smaller.
Bike lanes in neighborhoods aren't as necessary as the traffic is slow and there isn't much in neighborhoods to bike to - grocery stores, jobs, and so on. This is pretty much a recipe for failure.
Instead, we need major corridors to have safe bike lanes. The major route between residential and business areas is a good place to start since the scariest traffic is there.
True, in the example I gave above, the first part of the commute was on quiet neighborhood streets, that part was pleasant even with no bike lanes (the neighborhood even had speed bumps to keep traffic speed down), it was the last 1.5 miles where I had to cross the freeway and ride on an a narrow road with fast traffic where it became unpleasant.
If there's no shops or jobs in the places people live, maybe that needs to be fixed first? Putting the jobs close to the people sounds like it would solve a lot of these transit issues by needing less of it.
I generally agree with you. Having a grocery store within walking distance and safe walking has been one of the joys of moving to Norway from the states. Not having a car is very freeing and puts some room in finances. The closest I've come to this sort of safe walk was living in a small town, and even it paled to the town of 180k I'm living in now: I didn't have house-to-job sidewalks in the small town and couldn't have done this living just a little out of town.
I also think that getting jobs and places close to residential areas is a separate issue as we still need the bike lanes on the most unsafe areas. The two main things I think of are:
1. The folks working at major employers need bike access as well. Factories, call centers, distribution centers and large offices. Some of these places just aren't suited for neighborhoods, though they can be close by. It is much easier to get proper use of bike lanes if some or many of the big places have such access.
2. It actually takes more work to get the places closer, at least in the states. This is in no small part because of zoning and red tape. I don't really want to downplay that it'd take a slight difference in society as well - along with the likely need to subsidise som of the places.
Wrong. A painted bike lane provides no sense of security, and is for the most part completely ignored by car drivers. You can use temporary solid barriers, concrete or those water fillable plastic ones, or bolted posts instead. Anything that atleast damages a car on impact really. However, a switch to cycling needs to be systemic and can take a fairly long time, so I'm not sure how a limited and 'one street' experiment would fit unless you are just incrementing on an already well established cycle lane network.
> A painted bike lane provides no sense of security, and is for the most part completely ignored by car drivers.
If car drivers completely ignore a painted bike lane, that needs to be followed up by the police. So they need to be part of the experiment :) I agree that solid barriers are often better, esp. on roads with high speeds, but where I live painted bike lanes work in many cases.
> a switch to cycling needs to be systemic
I think there's room for experimentation before the systemic shift - e.g. find one residential area and one commercial that many travel between, make good, temporary bike lanes and paths between them, let those that want borrow bicycles for the duration of the experiment and see what happens. If it works, make it permanent and move on to new places.
("one area" can obviously be "a few areas", and the commute can be to a school/university/whatever, and there could be a grocery store on the way, and...)
> A painted bike lane provides no sense of security, and is for the most part completely ignored by car drivers. You can use temporary solid barriers, concrete or those water fillable plastic ones, or bolted posts instead. Anything that atleast damages a car on impact really.
These cause problems because then the bike lane cannot be cleaned and also, these barriers cannot extend through intersections where the majority of collisions happen.
Around here we have quite a few of these types of protected bike lanes, and I can assure you there is no problem cleaning them. The same equipment used to clean sidewalks works just fine.
