Originally Posted by Scavenger
The first thing I'm wondering is who is going to pay for all that road-work? It sounds expensive. I can just hear the howls of protest at the city council meeting. I'm proposing perhaps a hundred miles of bike-roads. Not just a couple of intersections.
Guess that depends on the area. I haven't seen to many protests about expenses related to bike facilities here. The new Alta Vista corridor will have bike lanes and a side-path, for example.
Originally Posted by Scavenger
The double entry at intersections might work in non-snow areas. But around here the plows have to have access to the full width of the road. The separate lane at intersections could only be done with painted islands, which would get covered by snow and slush. Speed bumps would be hard to plow as well.
We are in a heavy snow area, and several downtown streets have double-entries (they want to avoid non-local car traffic). I'm not sure how they do the snow removal, perhaps the same plow that does the sidewalks. We certainly plow speed bumps all over the city.
Originally Posted by Scavenger
Regarding blocking off the road, I think that would really antagonize mv drivers. I know when I get "trapped" I'm NOT at all happy. As a cyclist, I wouldn't want to shoot myself in the foot like that. The point is not to ban mvs from the bike-road, only to discourage them. A stop EVERY block would do that.
Creating a dead-end for cars (but nor for bikes) can be met with praise from local homeowners who don't want high-speed traffic running from one highway to another through their peaceful neighbourhood. I can also think of at least one instance in Ottawa that allows through traffic for bikes and buses, but not cars.
Originally Posted by Scavenger
The great advantage of using signs to make a bike-road, instead of physically changing it to be unfriendly to cars, is that you do not diminish the road's utility for cyclists. I would hope that bike-roads would eventually become bike-highways with huge bike traffic. You'd want a good road for that, not one full of speed bumps and islands.
Inlands don't make the road any less good for cyclists, and speed bumps don't extend to bike lanes or to the edge of a WOL.
I agree that all of the above issues have to be considered, and I am not generally an advicate of making roads less car-friendly as such, but they all work to some extent. There are plenty of other methods too, of course, I only listed what I am used to seeing locally.