Korina

Interesting article. The comments are also interesting.

https://sf.streetsblog.org/2021/03/0...#disqus_thread

Notso_fastLane

When I lived in Germany, all of the bike lanes there (city of Hamburg) were different color pavement, some were actual brick. They had very good infrastructure for biking, which combined with the widespread public transportation, made it so I never even rented a car (I lived there for 16 months).

I would love to see that kind of infrastructure here.

epnnf

No bike lanes! Vehicular Cycling.

Rick

This is correct. Many who are interested in bike lanes, rave about the bike lanes in Europe and blindly accepts the poorly designed bike lanes in the US. Bike infrastructure in Europe is designed so people can efficiently get were they are going in safety. Bike lanes in the US are designed to keep bicyclists from slowing down the motorists at all costs.

Daniel4

Not necessarily. My comfortable ride is 15 km/hr. I can go faster of I'm in front of a car but no way would I be able to reach 50 km/hr or faster unless I'm rolling down a hill. So if I'm not in a bike lane, I will be slowing down traffic - unless there are no cars.

Protected bike lines provide an incentive for more people to get out of their cars and ride. Those are the people who just can't ride in traffic with cars and trucks there. So regardless of what you think of them, I would welcome them into the bike lane, on their bikes.

Rick

When I talk about poorly designed bike lanes in the US. I am talking about that painted lane garbage and some of the protected lanes that dump riders into the intersection with no consideration of lane position. I commonly ride down a 65mph highway and am not slowing down traffic. It is called lane sharing and surprisingly cars do have steering wheels.

Protected bike lanes with there uncontrolled intersections funnel you into a false sense of security. What happens when you and these people you welcomed into these bike lanes come to the end of it. A bike path or public path that has properly controlled intersections is welcome. US bike lanes are a far cry from being safe. I am a responsible person and avoid bike lanes even more than I do covid. I don't like safe spaces because they are not safe.

livedarklions

There's a subforum for that debate. It does not belong here by rule.

This thread is not about whether or not there should be bike lanes, it's about how they should be marked. Don't hijack it into the vc subforum.
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unterhausen

I think the color is less important than segregation. Color the asphalt or paint it, there is no effect if people can easily drive their vehicles on the bike lane.

It's good to see VC is still alive in the hearts of a vanishingly small population of cyclists. But it does seem like trolling in this thread.

Rick

I believe in responsibility not convoluted safe spaces.

Gresp15C

My view is that we're a long way off from when the color of bike lanes will matter. We're still just figuring out how to design our cities to make driving a car safer, much less riding a bike. Even in places with bike lanes, we still have to adapt to our surroundings. No cyclist who has survived for more than five minutes is likely to be confused when a bike lane ends or merges into traffic at intersections. Perhaps in places where dangerous intersections are the exception rather than the rule, some additional markings would be beneficial.

A good use for the colored paths is to warn pedestrians that they're about to walk across a bike thoroughfare.

As a practical aside, I suspect that the layer of colored asphalt is likely to spall off in regions with a hard winter. It might not be any more durable than paint.

livedarklions

Good for you, quit trolling.

unterhausen

Cities have been designed around parking and car traffic throughput for a very long time. It's not working. The huge streets needed for car traffic at rush hour encourage speeding and reckless driving, and the results speak for themselves. In a lot of cities, the majority of people that live there don't have a car, and those that do leave them parked most of the time. That's the advantage of a city. And so for some reason, the transportation is mostly designed for people that don't live there. It's upside-down way of doing things, and it's slowly changing. Or in the case of Paris, it's rapidly changing.

Rick

Many other countries designed their cities around the people living in that location. We didn't, France and others are people centric. The US is car centric. Will the colored patches in the road do anything to change this?

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.

tyrion

They should make all asphalt green, but paint the car paths black.

jack pot 

Bike Lanes should be demarcated by signs and paint > bicyclists get injured in bike lanes because motorists routinely use bike lanes as a drivable shoulder ............... there should be a moving violation offense for vehicles crossing into a bike lane

livedarklions

I was driving around in Madison in January 2020, and it was a bit icy. Even so, my impression was that there was a much larger proportion of the population bike commuting that time of year than I see in the summer in NH.

Gresp15C

The city has done a good job of maintaining cycling conditions even during the winter. There are some paved rail-trails that are useful for getting from A to B, one of which I use for my commute. When there's a snowfall, those trails are often cleared before the roads. Conditions are good enough that studded tires on a "regular" bike is pretty much the only gear accommodation needed, and some cyclists get by without studs by just being extra careful and walking their bikes across larger patches of ice. Ridership certainly goes down, a lot, but the "regulars" are out there year-round. Usually the worse the weather, the bigger the smile on their faces.

Something that often gets overlooked, is the amount of time it takes to develop a cycling culture. None of this happened overnight. Even in my time in Madison, the behavior of drivers and cyclists towards one another has improved, but that takes years. Also, finding the preferred routes that are convenient and avoid traffic is a gradually evolving process. Madison started out with a couple of assets. First, it's a college town, and making a large university car-friendly is simply insurmountable. The college and some other central employers have made it desirable to live in the middle of town. The people here have always been outdoorsy -- heck, we have ice fishing. And there's always been a moderate "hipster" movement that looks with envy at some of the more livable cities in the country and the world.

drlogik 

A painted surface is generally a dangerous and slippery surface. Paved and lined is better, paved with colored tarmac is even better.

livedarklions

I see a bike path and I want to paint it black.