UniChris

When you have 10 times the density, indeed, you have an entirely different transit planning problem! Look at the tiny distances people in the Netherlands are bike commuting, then look at where people in Houston need to go (also, don't forget the summer temperatures). Even more importantly than biking, when you compress things that much, transit works in a way it doesn't in most of the American landscape - and it's actually transit, not bikes, that has mass potential.

But I'm in no way dismissing of the values of being able to access at least some parts of life without a car (I often go weeks between using one myself). That's why I keep trying to steer your attention away from the already wonderfully bikeable residential street, and to how a solution needs to be found to make the (remarkably short in American terms) mile and a half trip to the nearby grocery store or movie theater something people will try. How many times now have I pointed out that it's necessary to widen North Park Drive giving it a shoulder so that cyclists have a space to ride that isn't literally the pavement of one of the two car-wide and heavily car-occupied lanes it has and also turn the disused rail corridor into a path that doesn't interact with cars at all. That's the sort of infrastructure that when done properly can actually start to make an area incrementally bikeable.

But incremental is all you're going to get - we're not going to bulldoze the country and rebuild everything.

You obviously have not bothered to inform yourself by looking at a picture of where this tragedy occurred. The road is somewhere between 35-45 feet wide: feet, not meters - there are more than three feet in a meter. Look at a picture of a car on the road in question, and ask yourself how many you can jam mirror to mirror from curb to curb.

And more importantly, it's an appropriate width, because it means that a driver can pass a cyclist with amply safe room, without needing to cross the center of the roadway in potential conflict with other traffic. Park a car on it as indeed pictures will show people occasionally but not oppressively do when visiting family or friends it would be impractical to reach by any other method, and it gets a little bit tight to be passed exactly were a parked car is, but both parked cars and traffic are sparse enough one can usually avoid having both at the same instant. What I like about riding on a road like that is exactly the de-conflction of its appropriate width - it means I'm not needing to manage constant background conflict in the way I am when I ride a narrower road where I'm trying to create a safe passing opportunity before a driver passes unsafely (typically giving me plenty of space by dangerously and illegally pulling into the opposing lane even where they can't see if there is any oncoming traffic). But even though it has sufficient width for its present usage pattern, it's actually not wide enough to put in that dangerous second set of bicycle sidewalks you want to install. Nevermind that doing so would only re-create the specific danger of crossing between sidewalks that was at actual issue here, it would also make the remaining ordinary lanes narrow enough that those of us who continue to do the safe, efficient, and proper thing of riding in the ordinary lane would now be in much more conflict with drivers - and those would be drivers incensed that we're not using the pretty (but deadly at every intersection) "bike lane".

I'm talking about changes we can make that will help. You are talking about fantasies out of touch with reality of the need - if you look, the places where a bit of your fantasies have been tried here, they were a problematic mistfit that have turned out to be hated by people actually trying to use them to make trips by bike. What experienced cyclists immediately recognize is that physically segregating lanes traps cyclists in the dangerously wrong place at intersections, while giving a false impression of safety precisely where there is the most danger. This child wasn't killed because there isn't a protected network - there is one, and he was using it. He was killed because he did not understand what he needed to do in the gap in that protected network that exists to let cars through. Even for cyclist who are aware of the danger present at teach gap, physical segregation makes it harder to see and be seen by the traffic with which there is potential for conflict. It also makes it hard to avoid out-of-place pedestrians, debris, potholes, and illegal parking - yes, drivers manage to park even in bike lanes walled off by concrete (depressingly often, the people doing it are the police themselves). These designs are falsely sold as making unskilled cyclists safer, but what they actually do is try to trick even skilled cyclists into dangerously assuming that they'll be seen and respected as through traffic. People who actually know how to safely cross paths with cars know that you can't assume that, and instead make a point to be where drivers are already looking for traffic, and to consider the likelihood that we haven't actually been seen - infinitely moreso if we're forced to enter an intersection from a a fundamentally improper lane position.

It is possible to use sidewalk-like infrastructure safely on a bike, but given the very high likelihood of not being seen when outside the travel lanes, to survive doing so, you have to remember that a sidewalk is designed for pedestrians, not cycling movement, and so you have to act like a pedestrian, not a cyclist at every intersection. Instead of getting into the proper position for your intent relative to that of other road users, preserving the potential for conflict right up to the intersection itself means you have to drastically slow there and check before actually entering it. That's not only a terrible slow and frustrating way to cycle any meaningful distance when the existing through routing offered to drivers is so much easier and more enjoyable to bike, it comes right back to the actual failure at issue here: failure to look before crossing the street.

No doubt you'll say that in a civilized country it would be the driver's responsibility to look not the cyclists - but trusting that idea with your life fails for a number of obvious reasons, including realities that a car is far easier to see than a curbside cyclist or a pedestrian, and the basic fact that I care far more about my safety than anyone else does, so I keep my ask to drivers simple - instead of asking them to have 100% perfection in looking for me in an illogical place, I ask them not to hit me when I'm already in the place they're used to looking for threats to their own safety. Most glaringly in the US, you can't change the rules in an obscure minority of the streetscape, while those everywhere else remain in accordance with lifelong habits of using road designs that have correct, rather than insane lane routings. Especially when it's actually the incumbent right of way and lane position rules that are the safest for cyclists. Deeply erroneous laws purporting to assign blame to a driver when a cyclist causes a collision by passing on the wrong side at an unsafe speed end up creating the deadly feeling of entitlement to treat mis-routed bicycles lanes as through routes and do just that - cyclists who don't understand how roads work get into collisions riding into easily recognizable conflict situations more aware cyclists well know to avoid - that kind of misbehavior might unfortunately now be legal, but can never be safe.

As an American cyclist, it's triggering to my collision avoidance to see drivers in Europe pull right up to a piece of occupied cycling infrastructure and stop very close to it, even though the rational mind says that 99.9% of the time those drivers there actually will stop. In the US, when a driver keeps moving right up to an occupied crosswalk, it means that they either haven't seen the pedestrian or intend to violate their right of way. Since in most of the US drivers aren't required to yield to cyclists who want to use crosswalks anyway, cyclists on our protected infrastructure learn to read driver behavior before we even get to the intersection - if an American driver is not yielding to a cyclist while still far away, they're barreling right through. In many situations, that's what they're actually supposed to do relative to a cyclist who isn't already on the road.

The cute but slow and inefficient cycling infrastructure in a place like the Netherlands is a red herring. Adjacent countries without that get nice cycling numbers and low fatality rates, too, despite having far more mixing between cars and bikes on the same roads. It's not the cycling infrastructure - it's the attitude towards cars and driving. An American driver in northern Europe would be a hazard to cyclists there, while a northern European driver would be just fine around cyclists on American roads. And I completely agree with you that reducing the emphasis on cars would be great - but it can't be done in gross ignorance of how on the ground reality forces people to drive even when they neither want or can afford to. Those 13 mph speed limits you keep demanding don't work when people's required trips remain as along as they are.

Before you can get people out of their cars, you need to give them a replacement - either a life with closer destinations, or mass transit that goes where they need to and does so as quickly as a car would, at the hour they need to actually make the trip.

Far from the luxury of the privileged that cars are in Europe, in the US, it's building a life where you don't need a car that is often a consequence of privilege - being able to afford to live walkably or bikeably close to the destinations you need to reach (or at least the transit hubs to them), having the time to make needed trips more slowly, having the flexibility to simply not make trips when the weather is unsuitable - those are the luxuries, while all but the very poorest here have cars because the more desperate your economic situation is, the more you're forced into things that cannot be accomplished in any other way than with a car - take some theoretically transit rich city, and then notice how those with cleaning jobs often have to do so after transit ceases running, and may be coming in from affordable communities well outside its range.