Originally Posted by Paul L.
Would they be worth it if they didn't make things more safe but attracted more people to cycling?
It depends on how many were attracted, and how many of those actually stick with it.
(Although it does appear that the data saying that they don't make things safer appears to be aging in it's accuracy)
By the way, that link you posted appears to have only led to a thread where people discussed opinions of bike lane deaths. Was there an official study quoted there that you could give us the link to?
It's not just opinions of bike lane deaths. It's links to articles about actual bike lane deaths (jump to the end for the latest). Those incidents serve as evidence, not proof. I don't know of a study officially looking into this. Yet.
After all, if you talk to anyone who has had a relative killed due to being trapped in a car by a seatbelt, they often will have very poor opinions of seatbelts but that doesn't change the facts of what seatbelts do for the majority of the people.
But if some significant number of your friends and relatives knew of people killed by being trapped in cars by a seatbelt, and none of them knew of any that were in serious crashes, were wearing seatbelts, and survived, wouldn't that make you wonder about the efficacy of seat belts.
The problem with bike lanes is it's easy to assume that every time someone in a bike lane is safely passed, his life was saved by a bike lane. Of course, the notion that he would have likely been killed had the stripe not been there is absurd.