WaltPoutine

What you say is interesting and in some ways true. In molecular biology there are numerous arguments concerning the "purpose" or "function" of cellular machinery. There are many mechanisms which originally evolved for one particular purpose (or none at all, e.g. spandrels) and then gradually became adapted or re-purposed to new ends. Sometimes tracing the original "design constraints" of the original function give clues as to why the present machinery does an imperfect job. In a similar way it can be useful to consider all the different pressures which have given rise to the current use/function/design of bikelanes.

The recent pressure from motorists is something which only a True Believer In Facilities would find hard to ignore or deny. Keep it up chaps!

WaltPoutine

Because bike lanes offer neither the advantages of sidewalks obtained by pedestrians or the benefits of freeways used by cars.

I don't mind the freeways being removed as I don't drive but I find the sidewalks useful. Bike lanes however cause me inconvenience and danger and I'd rather not have them. K THX BYE!

Script

How much time have you really spent riding on WOL's as opposed to opining the result?

My experience with WOL's further encourages me to side with the BL folks. Maybe it has to do with the areas I ride, but WOL's cause motorists to weave and not be sure where in that big lane they're supposed to be. Your statement about not generating any other complication is not true.

It seems to also make the motorist forget about any kind of space to pass as well. They'll speed by two abreast being more concerned with staying away from the motor vehicle in the other lane than giving me space.

CTAC

What advantages?

Script

Keeps 'em out of the bike lanes and off the freeways?

Allister

You apparently missed the 'if there's room' caveat.

Don't be so melodramatic. It's just another lane.

Incompetently discourteous is a double negative. If you're incompetent at being discourteous, that means you're courteous, right? Anyway, I think you meant 'incompetent and discourteous', no? In which case, I think aside is the best place for them, if not off the road altogether. Them buggers are a bloody menace. Same goes for car drivers of a similar ilk.

Allister

And while you continue your bleating, in the real world, designs are improving by people who think engineering problems should be solved rather than moaned about. Where have you been?

All your complaints about 'contradicting the rules of the road' can be solved simply by directing the bikelane to the left of right-turning traffic, which seems to be the standard on all new lanes marked around here. Seems simple enough to me, and you could save yourself hours of typing on here.

Allister

I'm not sure he could if he wanted to.

There's a lot of political capital in being seen to be green. If they accidentally do some actual good in the process, that's a plus.

TRaffic Jammer

*snikker*

WaltPoutine

They provide a good place for cafes to put tables in the summertime.

maddyfish

Thats' an electric scooter right?

maddyfish

As long as the cars have 'must use' laws and may only use the freeways that's fine.

Indyv8a

All this complaining and tossing of insults, yet who is offering a true incentive to get out and ride for practical purposes? Who is doing an actual study of safer conditions for cycling? Where can we get data actually related to bike usage, skill and safety? Please, can we stop being collectively stupid and snide and get this on track?

Bekologist

who is offering a true incentive? the accomodationalist notion of well designed and implemented bike infrastructure.

John Forester

You are asking quite a reasonable question, but the answer is unpleasant because there is so much superstition on one side. I assume that your question was asked about American activities and conditions. In any case, I answer with respect to American activities and conditions.

The essential facts have been known for thirty years and have never been successfully challenged. That is, the best way to reduce American cycling casualties and to improve American bicycle transportation is to improve the traffic behavior of American cyclists, getting them to operate in the vehicular manner instead of the ways in which they do operate. Going beyond that, toward a society that accepts vehicular cycling as the proper mode of operation, would be better still.

However, the vehicular cycling policy is not popular. American society, for various reasons, has always believed, wrongly of course, that vehicular cycling is a dangerous activity that requires great skill. American society educated its children to cycle in a childish manner that placed exaggerated priority on staying out of the way of same-direction motor traffic lest the cyclist be killed by that same-direction motor traffic. The American bikeway program is the physical implementation of that popular view and its early bike-safety training.

Some people believe that it is extremely important to transfer a significant portion of American personal motoring to bicycling. Nearly all of those people have chosen the bikeway policy, for either or both of two reasons. They either believe the superstition that bikeways make cycling much safer, particularly for beginners, or they cynically recognize that the public strongly believe that superstition.

The anti-motoring bikeway promoters base their strategy on two assumptions.

The first is that bikeways make cycling safe, particularly for beginners. The second is that if cycling is seen to be much safer, then a transportationally significant portion of motorists will transfer a transportationally significant portion of their trips from motoring to bicycling. The first assumption was disproved by the facts thirty years ago, and that situation has not been changed by later information, which only confirms the early data.

The second assumption is based on the idea that Americans motor so much because they are afraid of cycling. It is certainly true that Americans are afraid of cycling, but that does not mean that they motor for that reason. Americans motor because it is convenient, because it suits their purposes. Furthermore, Americans have developed their cities and all their urban activities, except for older urban cores, in the ways allowed by the convenience of motoring. This means that an ever-decreasing proportion of motoring trips are suitable for cycling. I think that this reasoning, far from being only hypothetical, is the explanation for why the thirty years of the American bikeway program have not produced this hoped-for transfer of a transportationally significant portion of motoring trips to cycling trips.

The anti-motoring bikeway advocates are in the position of trying to argue in a supposedly reasonable way for a program whose only support is the superstition of the cycling-ignorant American public. In such a situation, nastiness all too frequently comes to the fore.

Well, there are the two sides. The vehicular cycling side does the best for cyclists, but will not make bicycle transportation popular. The bikeways side does harm to cyclists by reinforcing the popular cycling-ignorant superstition, and probably will never make bicycle transportation popular. I know which side I prefer.

To make bicycle transportation popular in America will require a great change in those conditions that cause motoring to be more useful than cycling. If such occurs, bicycle transportation has the possibility of becoming popular, but predictions of this magnitude have a very high error rate and should not be counted on until imminent.

Bekologist

blech. your entire argument is based on the fallacy that the best way to improve bicycle transportation in america is to improve the cyclists! wrong.

that presumption falls flat in the face of worldwide evidence of higher modal shares and lower accident rates in well accomodated communities, john.


it is VEHICULAR CYCLING as a model for improving bicycling transportation that has failed Britian and the USA, john. miserably. your putsch failed.

The Accomodation model of well implemented redesigns of public space and transportation cooridors with bicyclists bears the nearly universal fruits of higher bicycling participation and lower accident rates.

The Human Car

Well you and the local bike historian are going to have to have some words is all I can say. And great point that something has to already exist before it can be invented.

So going with your argument then it is recreational/sport use of the bicycle that just can't be because it is beyond the consistency in function of the original intent. As original intent defines the scope and that scope can never change. For example phones were meant for long distance communications so they can never have clocks, calenders, alarms, cameras, games and play music as that is all outside the consistency in function. Public opinion about the nature or function of nursery rhymes can never change from the original intent. Some things stick to the original intent and other things can take on a life of their own that goes far beyond what was originally intended. It all comes down current use defines what a thing does, history really does not need to enter into it, especially if it is used to counter current use/intent.

I'm sorry but my statement (in blue) and your rebuttal (in black) is the same. As to the points you added:

Bike lanes:
1) Contradicts the rules of the road
The contradiction of the bike lane continuing to the right of a right hand turn lane is no longer accepted practice. You keep making this statement yet you claim a VC can ride bike lanes without a contradiction of the rules of the road this seems contradictory to me, when I call you on this somehow "rules of the road" becomes what's in the mind of drivers which is the same as your point 2 so rather then having two objections you only have one.

2) Stigma on cyclists as being only fit for the side of the road
They also create an impression that bikes are vehicles that are fit for the road and not sidewalks and wrong way cycling. You seem to conveniently forget that sidewalk and wrong way cycling are significantly more of a safety issue for cyclists then the dreaded right hook. So without bike lanes we have the stigma on cyclists as being not being fit for the road at all.


WOL:
1) Contradicts the rules of the road
The contradiction that two vehicles can share the same lane side by side is what put right hooks up on the top ten list of cyclists problems in the first place.

2) Stigma on cyclists as being only fit for the side of the road
Few state have mandatory bike lane use laws but all states have mandatory stay to the right laws, so WOLs contribute as much to the stigma as do bike lanes. WOLs may fix some problems but they also create other problems. Proper and safe use of a WOL by a cyclist is at best undefined by the rules of the road, that has its advantages and disadvantages but it does not make it clear winner.


Hmmm, I'm thinking the same thing. You are the one with the argument that rests on static consistency in function as defined by original intent that equates to "If god wanted men to fly, he would have given him wings." if that is not unthinking prejudices I don't know what is.

John Forester

It is only your superstition that enables you to believe that the correlation between bikeways and bicycle modal share is actually a causal relationship, because neither facts nor reasoning provide a better explanation than does superstition.

The Human Car

This is a Segway:


An electric scooter (2 wheels in-line) follows the same rules as a cyclist except they are not allowed on MUPs. Unless it is an electric scooter (3 or more wheels) that is designed to replace a wheelchair, then pedestrian rules apply (including driving against traffic when no sidewalk.) I find it interesting all this mishmash of laws.

The Human Car

FWIW I tried to get a cyclists usage count before our bike lanes went up, it fell through for reasons not explained. I'm currently working on getting more detailed crash data so hopefully we will have some stats on the safety end at least.

John Forester

You play with words like a lawyer rather than paying attention to facts like a scientist or engineer. And your words disclose that you don't understand English, either. To accuse me of saying that something had to exist before it could be invented. I never wrote such a thing; it is only your inability to understand standard English that caused you to reach such an absurd conclusion. Ideologues such as you are the bane of civilized existence, for you muddy all the waters to which you pay attention.

For all of you who are interested in the history of the invention of the bicycle, I suggest Andrew Ritchie's "King of the Road", ISBN 0-913668-42-7, published in England by Wildwood House, in the USA by Ten-Speed Press, 1975. Need I keep on repeating that most of the necessary information about cycling has been known for decades?

randya

Pot meet Kettle

Indyv8a

I know I dropped that accusation in another thread.

Let's ask another question then. Are the goals of "separate facilities" and "vehicular cycling" mutually exclusive? Would operating in a safe and predictable manner on roads or paths not be the best way? Can we design separate facilities that actually work with the current facilities?

It would seem to me, and I believe from my limited reading in John's work and others that better facilities and better cyclists, AND better drivers would all be beneficial. Beyond that I think we'd need something like $15 a gallon gas.

(Why do I feel like Don Quixote?)

StrangeWill

I find it interesting, the idea to create large infrastructure for bicycles only, putting them on high importance of that of a car in terms of special means of transportation for only that vehicle, and we still complain.

If anything, I think the bike lane serves as a message, it is quite the viable means of getting practically anywhere, you even get your own lane. Vehicles of different sizes can be restricted to certain lanes on certain roads except under certain conditions (making turns and such), why not bikes? What makes us so special that we can't follow the same rules as other vehicles?

Mainly, as I mentioned before, the most important thing is it sends a strong message, without a bike lane, and without a shoulder, people STILL think we should have to buy a car to be on that road. (before anyone wants to make any stupid points about how people think)

I'm not going to get into the whole "VC" or other elitist bull****, because it seems to be making too much out of something so simple.


If bike lanes are like sidewalks, so are truck only lanes.

randya

Many people believe that one of the solutions is better motorist education, which the VC summarily reject.

Separate facilities are generally only needed on higher speed and volume arterials. Cycling conditions are also substantially different in older 'pre-automobile' urban areas and newer 'post-automobile' suburban areas, so a 'one-size fits all' solution is nearly impossible to arrive at.

There was discussion here a year or so back of 'adaptive cycling' or matching cycling methods and road treatments to the immediate local roadway network. (also summarily rejected by the VC)

The intransigence of the VC in general and John Forester in particular, is a major stumbling block.