Originally Posted by Gresp15C

I live in Madison WI, which is about 250k people if you count the suburbs. So we're not quite up to the level where there is a significant car-free or car-light population, like there is in NYC. Still, there is a lot of centralized employment -- the state government, typical supporting industries like insurance companies, the universities, hospitals, etc. There is a bus system, but not a massive one. There are a couple of big trunk roads that get quite heavy traffic during commuter times. Nobody in their right mind rides on those streets. I have a general rule of thumb that I don't ride on multi-lane roads.

However, because there are still residential neighborhoods extending almost all the way into the downtown area, a major portion of our "bike infrastructure" is simply the residential streets, which have barely any traffic. The need for bike paths and lanes is simply to deal with the areas where there are no such streets, including some traffic bottlenecks due to the number of lakes that the city is built around.

There is a parking shortage downtown, which encourages people to take the bus. But it's not enough. A lot of employers subsidize the parking. Interestingly, the university does not, and so most of the uni employees have found alternative ways to commute.

It seems that the city is being pretty smart about adding bike lanes. They wait until a street or intersection has to be rebuilt anyway. A lot of rebuilding is going on because the underground infrastructure is reaching end of life. For instance my street needed new sewer and gas lines, but when they rebuilt it, they turned it into a marked bike boulevard. We don't follow the apparently widespread practice of painting a stripe in some arbitrary location and declaring it to be a bike lane.