Originally Posted by
WalksOn2Wheels
Clearly reducing lanes on busy streets is a bad idea. Clearly. I can get behind that. But the site further reveals that this particular individual is straight up anti-bike. He likes to play it off by insisting that "recreational bicycling" is the majority of bike riders. Seemingly with the idea that recreational=not on streets. But he's basically a used car salesman who at every opportunity insists that "utilitarian" biking will never increase, ever, and that people will always choose cars as primary modes of transportation. He sells it every chance he gets.
Au contraire! Traffic is an incredibly unintuitive phenomenon that is studied by engineers, mathematicians, physicists, and so on, occasionally using resources like some of the world's biggest supercomputers to create detailed models. for example, it's possible to widen a highway and get more congestion. It's also possible to narrow a busy road and get less. The latter case is called "traffic evaporation." A google search will turn up many references and discussions. For some detail on the mathematics involved, try:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Braess'_Paradox