FenderTL5

That's a great idea.
Nashville has been working on connecting the greenway system. However, the challenge here has been private property owners, some being commercial, who are unwilling to allow the city to use a portion of their land for the greenway extensions.

So we have a series of greenways that are not connected. You can ride a beautiful greenway 6-10 miles and back for recreation but not on any meaningful commute route.

spare_wheel

And it's intentionally maddening because european cities are often designed so that urban-center trips require one to drive to a ring road on the periphery. The whole point is to make public and active transport more convenient than driving in urban centers.

mikeybikes

These are all good things for streets like mentioned in the OP to help calm traffic. I think though, those types of treatments should be evaluated on a street-by-street basis.

I do think a flat 20mph speed limit unless otherwise posted would be nice instead of our standard 25mph. In fact, just lower speed limits everywhere. I don't like my city being separated by 45mph-55mph arterials.

KD5NRH

We've just got the one at the moment, and it's a prime example of useless design; 1.8 miles long, and the ends are less than a mile apart. Just curves along the river through undeveloped land, parallels a street for a whole block in the middle, and then follows the river again until it ends on a dead end street just the other side of downtown. No real access to anything other than the park itself, and even that is pathetic since they stopped that end of the trail under a bridge at a small runoff ditch just outside the park. You have to dismount and lug the bike through a ~5ft wide, 3ft deep trough, then 50 yards across the grass to get to another improved surface. (Or you can cut off to a small side street and cross the state highway the bridge is for.)

KD5NRH

Fine for the people that live in the urban centers, but a real hassle for anyone visiting. Ever tried to learn the bus routes in an unfamiliar area, where you don't even know the streets yet?

jwarner

I think this is how it should be in my opinion. We, as a culture or society (in the US anyway), seem to have lost the ability to move under our own power, even when all we have to do is go a few blocks (or around the grocery judging from the number of people/ whole families I see driving around the motorized carts). This, and the associated health problems such as obesity are self-perpetuating, and (I am guessing) expand logarithmically as new generations learn from old, and children leave childhood larger and larger (once they have those lipid cells, they can only reduce their size, not get rid of them) and with poorer habits and expectations.

Imagine the cost, health, and societal benefits if we restricted movement in dense urban areas to human powered or public transportation, and started making those driving automobiles pay for the privilege of not carpooling and/or drives of less then [insert some reasonable distance] miles. Don't make driving illegal, but make other forms of transportation more attractive and practical financially and socially.

Just my opinion, and I realize this would take some time and big paradigm shift across the board, but you know how to eat an elephant don't you? One bite at a time.

genec

Wait a minute... it sounds as if you are proposing a bicycle freeway... heavens, what a concept... easy connections to and from certain core areas of town from which one can then take surface streets to finish a journey. OMG, whatever will they think of next.

/sarcasm off.

Really it is a brilliant plan. And yet it is constantly downplayed as not workable, few areas have tried it, therefore "it just can't be done." And yet this same plan works for automotive traffic.

Of course such a plan would require funding, and where ever would that come from... nah, never mind, just expand the freeways... sigh.

kickstart

History has already shown us what it takes to make such sweeping changes to a society, and how it fails miserably.

Some things must evolve on their own as they are now, we just need to be patient.

genec

No, it doesn't fail miserably... that is the lie. Such sweeping changes to society are only difficult when there are so many ways that the paradigm shift is thwarted by huge subsidies to other less efficient means of movement... the way the automobile is currently heavily subsidized in America.

KD5NRH

Lots of Federal matching out there for MUPs, actually. Unfortunately, my town wasted about $2M (total city+state+Fed money) to build an 8' wide sidewalk to nowhere.

Bosque river trail in Stephenville, TX, United States | MapMyWalk

spare_wheel

Tromping around the ruins of societies that had "come to jeebus" moments is one of my hobbies. Just sayin'

B. Carfree

It's not so much the funding that stands in the way as the simple fact that it would be near-impossible to build a bike version of a freeway without negatively affecting motorist convenience. Motorist entitlement trumps all (for now).

genec

Really... different grade level roads, sidewalks and railways manage to do this all the time. I fail to see how this could come even close to being a terrible inconvenience to motorists.

I guess the term below grade or above grade crossing is just a falsehood?

Here is what wiki says about such things...

I-Like-To-Bike

Sayin' incomprehensible gobbledegook seems to be another.

Looigi

We have a mup like that in town here. It's about 4 miles long. It's pretty useless for commuting or any kind of "serious" bike riding, but it does get a fair amount of use on weekends by walkers, dog walkers, and people tootling around on bikes, often with kids. It's more like a long skinny park rather than transportation infrastructure.

And unconnected to that, for a few blocks on Main Street downtown, we have my least favorite cycling infrastructure items, sharrows. They only serve to confuse and imply that rules of sharing the road are somehow different between roads with and without sharrows.

intransit1217

This.

Highway H, not far from me has been recently repaved, and maybe widened just a touch. Outside of the white line is marked for bikes now. And they painted channels between the turn lanes and thru lanes at the intersections. H is a two lane 45 zone. I should write to the city and thank them.

spare_wheel

Au contraire -- there has been incredible progress in deciphering mayan hieroglyphs. Diamond's "Collapse" is a good introduction to what happens to societies that develop the collective denial evident in this comment thread.

spare_wheel

Oil prices gyrate in the short term but the trend is up, up, and away.

squirtdad

+1