Originally Posted by
John Forester
Your other answer is to provide the niche use of students going to school. Important for them, but not transportationally significant for society at large.
Now you advance the new argument that even very small increases in bicycle transportation will greatly reduce motoring travel time. I have seen neither analyses nor empirical data demonstrating the accuracy of that argument.
Working backwards; I'll assert that individualized motorized transport reaches a saturation point where it ceases to be idyllic and by necessity people seek out alternatives, one of which is biking. I am not asserting that biking will reduce the saturation so motoring becomes idyllic again but I am asserting that roadways cannot be infinitely expanded so there is no saturation, no congestion and no people seeking alternatives like cycling for transportation.
Looking at the saturation point in some detail lets say at one traffic light the rate of cars is such that one does not make it through, then at the next cycle its two cars that don't make it through so over a course of an hour we have 40 additional cars backed up and that's with just one car (a very small percentage) over the capacity of the light. In addition traffic jams happen when roads are at or near capacity as demonstrated here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Suugn-p5C1M Then there is the
road network paradox That by trying to increase capacity with new routes actually slows the system down. Basically once the road system is at the saturation point small increases in traffic have a devastating effect.
Next, a local situation where we had a week long convention which brought in ~1000 new drivers to the city from the 4 corners of the state (a few hundred coming in from any one point.) Coincidentally the number of additional cars ~ matched our bicycle modal share of 0.4%. Guess what, traffic delays all over the city of over an hour. So I will assert that Baltimore cyclists are saving drivers time even at our dismally low modal share.
If there is any place where congestion is not in the news and traffic delays are not a rush hour news item then sure bikes as transportation is not significant for that place. But otherwise your ideas are very much like the archaic storm water management that insisted we could channelize storm water. The more people channelized storm water the more previous efforts broke due to the lack of capacity that the new efforts imposed on the old. Trying to channelize transportation into one mode might work in one place but breaks other places. So your argument is like saying since a water retention pond can only process a small area worth of storm water and wastes valuable real estate so it is inferior to a storm sewers that can handle larger volumes over a larger area and takes up no real estate. Local trips is the majority of our transportation need and trying to channelize that into one mode and one road is dysfunctional. As collage students know that the bicycle is important for localized travel other segments of society are catching on as well.