Why do some car lovers oppose bike infrastructure, when more bikes would mean fewer cars on the road?
Like you sit in traffic for an hour each day to work. Wouldn’t you want to halve that by having more other people use bicycles instead?
Why do some car lovers oppose bike infrastructure, when more bikes would mean fewer cars on the road?
Like you sit in traffic for an hour each day to work. Wouldn’t you want to halve that by having more other people use bicycles instead?
I’m Australian, so maybe my experience with cyclists and cycling infrastructure is different. We usually extend our roads and have a green lane for cyclists, or even dedicated cycling ways alongside the footpath (sidewalk).
People here whinge that these protected cycle ways get built. And I’m just baffled.
Expand the bike lanes into what? I don’t have the Australian experience. The places where infrastructure is compact enough to benefit from bike lanes in the US have already been expanded to be, effectively, wall to wall car ways with sidewalks. It does become a sort of zero sum game from a surface area argument of car vs bike vs pedestrian vs building. So, from a tangible perspective, cars lose ground. It’s too much of a mental simulation to imagine how reducing car lanes becomes a benefit to those that must drive because of a reduction of traffic and potential improvement to overall flow.
Oh I see. Most of Australian cities are actually suburban and have had wider footpaths than necessary, as well as parking buffers. It’s trivially easy to just convert one side into a protected bike lane.
I still argue that in a lot of urban areas where the road has swelled to its natural limit, depending on the road, it can be good to reduce the road by one lane and add a protected bike lane. But this is situational. Not every road needs a bike lane. But there should be bike lanes every so often, so people can safely get close to their destination without bothering motorists.
Fair enough. I agree that reducing a road by a lane can improve congestion, it isn’t always the case, and isn’t a simple sell.