Originally Posted by
Stubby
For 1% of the population........ go for it, and best of luck. You're going to need it.
If you look farther into the site they go on with criticize bike lanes and it looks like anything else that deals with bike infrastructure. I wonder how many folks are biking in Orlando FL. I'm going to make a guess and say it's very small.
Perhaps the AAA is funding the site to help discourage bike use.
I've seen that site plenty, and I mostly agree with the general philosophy there. And I don't believe that VC is a recipe for failure so much as it's an adaptation strategy. We're never going to get safe bike lanes everywhere I want to go. So, I need to use VC techniques on occasion, mainly on roads that have no bike specific infrastructure and would otherwise be unrideable. Maybe that puts me in your 1%, but really, we kind of all are in the U.S.
I'm not a VC "purist" or evangelist, but I think it has its place. Some roads it's absolutely necessary to ride in a vehicular fashion for safety. On others, bike lanes make the experience more pleasant, though I would argue not necessarily safer. I'm not against all bike lanes, but I do think that having no bike lanes is often better on streets that are otherwise perfectly pleasant to ride on (low speed, low traffic). No bike lanes are also often better than poorly designed and maintained bike lanes that are common many places. OTOH, bike lanes are nice on some high speed arterials, or on bridges, for example.
I do not believe a lack of bike lanes is the real reason so few Americans bicycle for transportation.