Originally Posted by
hagen2456
Do you really feel that you responded adequately to this part: "safe (in appearence as well as reality)"? I mean - one thing is that you seem to think that "sharing the road" will be just fine under any and all circumstances, but most ordinary people seem to disaggree, as it APPEARS dangerous. Thus, your post is not at all to the point. Further, your belief that "obeying the rules of the road" IS safer that the kind of infrastructure I'm alluding to with the links, does seem to be no more that mere belief in light of all research.
To sum up: Not only will common sense tell us that sharing the road is dangerous, so does science. And this science has been applied with quite good results in the Netherlands, in Denmark, in some places in Germany and Sweden, and even in Bogota, it seems. I hope for you Americans that this body of knowledge will be used in your cities, too, both for your sake and for others'.
As I said in an earlier post: Your effort is to an extent praiseworthy, as long as it has to do with staying safe under certain given circumstaces. However, by insisting that yours is the only rational way of cycling, you thwart efforts to improve the general conditions for cyclists. You are, in a way, deeply reactionary, clinging (as I and others see it, desperately) to a mode of cycling that will in the long run be counterproductive to the safety of other cyclist, and prevent the potential cyclists, as well as society at large, from getting all the benefits of cycling in stead of driving cars.
Your first argument is that the Dutch system appears to be safer. Well, if that is the reason for that system, then there is no safety reason for requiring cyclists to operate in that manner instead of obeying the normal rules of the road, and therefore no legal justification for that requirement.
You refer to science as demonstrating that sharing the road is dangerous. In what way does science do this? When the head of the bicycling facilities engineering section of Dutch government appeared at a conference in Montreal, I asked him on what science did they base their designs upon. He replied that they had no science to determine the value of their designs. Only in recent years have car-bike collision studies been made of the similar Danish system, and those studies demonstrated empirically what we had predicted from engineering analysis decades before, that the separated system increased car-bike collisions at crossing points while reducing them between crossing points. Since the great majority of car-bike collisions occur at crossing points, this demonstrates that, when scientifically studied, that system increases car-bike collisions rather than reducing them.
You opine that vehicular cyclists are thwarting efforts to get the Dutch system installed in America. Well, we have good reason to do so. What has been produced so far in the USA is, nearly always, worse than using the roadways, and we have laws that force us to use such facilities. What other response should be expected? Indeed, even with bike lanes, the best advice to cyclists is to obey the rules of the road for drivers of vehicles while ignoring the bike-lane stripes, because it is difficult to figure out how to outsmart the defective parts of bike-lane systems.
It is clear from your final sentence that your motivation is the anti-motoring one of producing a large switch from motoring to bicycling. There are several problems with your efforts to produce that result. The first, as mentioned above, is that the Dutch system is not safer. The second is that you have no evidence that this system will be accepted in the typical modern city of the USA. The third is that there is no evidence that this system, if installed in the typical modern city of the USA, will actually produce the desired large switch from motoring to bicycling. The conditions are entirely different. In Amsterdam, bicycling is advantageous in its competition against walking. In Indianapolis, for example, bicycling has great disadvantages against its prime competitor, convenient motoring.