Originally Posted by
RazrSkutr
You appear to be stuck in a Manichean struggle with VC (it's always a sign that your thinking is off when you agree with Bek too much).
Meanwhile, the real changes in the U.K. are passing you by: campaigns such as "20 is plenty" which emphasize lowering traffic speeds to something manageable for cyclists are having some success. Note that the
recent calls for keeping London's Blackfriars Bridge safe for cyclists don't include a demand for a cycle-superhighway.
Transport for London (the cycle-superhighway a.k.a strip of blue paint) pushers are the ones who want to add lanes to the bridge and increase traffic speeds.
V.C. has a place too, and many UK cyclists are more open to it than their US counterparts.
There's a time and place for everything, including bikelanes/bikepaths, but these usually aren't in cities with multiple intersections disrupting them.
Circumstances and history are greatly different. British governments have never had the anti-cyclist, cyclist-inferiority policy that American governments have had for seventy years and reinforced with bikeways for the last forty years. A history of doing things for cyclists instead of to cyclists makes all the difference.