I commuted by bike for two years or so in Portland -- for work from North Portland to downtown across the Broadway bridge, and for fun when visiting friends all over south east -- and that wasn't my experience at all, Portland drivers were incredibly courteous to cyclists. You could take the lane when needed and no one batted an eye, people would correctly negotiate right of way with bikes at four way stops, etc.
Contrast that to Oakland where I live now where I receive death threats on a daily basis for riding in the bike lane. :)
Not that I want to complain -- I'll take this any, any day over the drivers in certain other northern cities named after 70s rock bands. Just a bemused observation.
Paradoxically, in these encounters I prefer the "rude" drivers that get out of the way as quickly as possible.
I was recently in Amsterdam where there are many many bikes and many variations on the scenarios that can cause this to occur. I felt like I started to observe communication on the faces and trajectories around me that tried to convey a message about a kind of conscious morality for influencing the outcomes that results in these scenarios. There seemed to be a kind of social encouragement toward modulating one’s trajectory when possible in advance of where uncertainties could cause delay in order to have the effect of minimizing the required velocity changes — an expression that seemed to say “if you put yourself into a situation where uncertainty about your trajectory is likely to cause a group velocity decrease, you haven’t found the ideal path. Keep an eye out for opportunities to improve the group outcome in the future and have a nice day.” (Edit: Culture in the Netherlands is rather amazing)
I think what you describe just minimizes fuel consumption though.
I had not really considered that people might view it differently but thinking back on my experience in Canada, I remember being surprised at how much people would accelerate when the light turned green and how hard they would have to brake just seconds later at the next red light.
I love riding, but I have been run over. No thank you. I will bike for transportation the day we implement Dutch style separated bike lanes (i.e. by an actual physical barrier, even if only a slightly raised bike lane)
Other than that, I drive my mountain bike to areas where there are no cars.
Edit: in the city I'm in now, we just 'created' a bunch of bike lanes. Which means putting paint on a continuous stretch of asphalt and expect vehicles moving at 10mph that weight 50 pounds to do just fine sharing the road with vehicles weighing 2000+ pounds and going 50+ mph. Ridiculous and a waste of my tax dollars.
Yeah, this kind of thing is really disappointing, but unfortunately predictable. There's a real chicken/egg situation. Few people will bike until there's safe support for it; until lots of people are biking, all the infrastructure just takes space away from the people using cars.
Detriot feels much safer. People mostly leave you alone. Wear the wrong colors could be an issue. The boards over windows is a little bit scarier but in Detriot you feel more prepared, even expect something to happen so it rarely does. In Oakland/SanF things can be very calm but turn really quickly.
As a bicyclist, I would love to have a dedicated network of bicycle track all over town. But it doesn't exist, yet.
Also, this is way fuzzier than you present. There's little conflict between cars and bikes on lightly traveled, spacious suburban streets or sleepy neighborhood county roads. Even on collectors & minor arterials, on an e-bike I travel about the same speed as a slow car.
Speed delta is not an incorrect observation, but varies in significance. In terms of priorities, highways are certainly top candidates for the first dedicated bike tracks.
Sure, some businesses complain, but overall number of bikes on the road seems to have increased.
https://cyclingmagazine.ca/sections/news/opposition-to-propo...
http://dailyhive.com/vancouver/mobi-bike-share-vancouver-rid...
Most cyclists are slower than the speed limit on most roads, but this does not occur "virtually always". Don't assume. Check the speed limit and the cyclist's speed!
As a cyclist, I find it really irritating to be dangerously passed by a driver, seemingly as punishment, catch up with them at a stop light, and then have them chew me out for not going the speed limit, when I actually was going the limit or faster. It's not hard for a fit cyclist to go the limit on a 15 or 20 mph road, particularly downhill. The problem here is that many drivers think anyone not going 30+ mph on those roads is being a jerk, and unfortunately some of those drivers believe dangerously passing slow vehicles is an acceptable response to their impatience.
But the reality is this: Going 30+ mph in a 15 mph zone is being a jerk!
Cars can be a great tool for humans to use and they are not yet running around without a human inside.
I think the most intrusive part of cars are when they are moving. That is when they are dangerous, mess with peds and bikers, and occupying roads that break up community space. Look at how much parking structures are as a % of the total building space in downtown SF or Manhattan. Not nothing, but pretty small. Maybe 5%. Probably less.
Problems with bicycle roads:
90% of traffic is much slower than me, which I do 20 km/h in cities (nothing special with some training)
They go up and down sidewalks and turn before intersections. This slows down everybody willing to go faster than 10 km/h
They are bumpier than roads
They are on the side of the road and more dangerous at any intersection, where they are close or before the stop line for cars coming from the side. Furthermore there is less space to look for incoming traffic. Being on the car's road is safer. I like bicycle roads when they are far away from car's roads, for example along rivers. Small low traffic roads are good enough.
On the other side, roundabouts and every other modern road layout that force cars and bikes to get close is dangerous for bikes. I feel safe to say that roads became less dangerous for cars in the last 20 years and more dangerous for bicycles.
I'd like to have the roads of the 70s: long straights, no speed bumps, no roundabouts (cyclists also don't like stop and go),
>> ban cars
> unrealistic statements
You, sir, are funny.
They only want change that doesn't involve money, effort or change, or what?
Banning vehicles has been shown to greatly increase shopping revenue and improve the healthiness of the area, so if a few businesses suffer, poor them... I'll not shed a tear for the strip malls.
I’m going to sorely disappoint you there…
However, if you want to talk about the United States, I would agree with you that it’s going to be expensive to shift the suburban sprawl away from personal vehicles. As much as that particular urbanisation failure is seen as typically American, it’s far from the exclusive option there. You will be surprised to learn that there are dozens of millions of Americans living in cities dense enough to justify not using cars as the default transport mode (“banning” isn’t a very accurate description of what that city did).
https://www.worldatlas.com/articles/the-most-crowded-city-in...
Electric scooters or bikes, typically the dockless kind, combined with existing (but re-inforced) public transport sounds doable, especially if you invest the same order of magnitude as local authorities spend on highways. That would require little investment (most of it would be private and from people keen on giving away billions).
it sounds like you assume that (an unnamed) we *has* to be in the United States.
I’m going to sorely disappoint you there…
You will be surprisedI'm joking just as much as the people saying that bikes don't belong on roads are.
If you are interested in a ROI based perspective on town planning, https://www.strongtowns.org/ makes a compelling case that sprawl is not economically sustainable.
DeVos is married to Dick DeVos, the former CEO of the multi-level marketing company Amway, and is the daughter-in-law of Amway's billionaire co-founder, Richard DeVos. Her brother, Erik Prince, a former U.S. Navy SEAL officer, is the founder of Blackwater USA.
What surprises me here is the fact that Amway has done so well in China yet is connected to Blackwater.
For me, high speed and low speed are both OK. I take longer rides that get me out onto the trunk roads where people drive 55+, but they usually give me plenty of room. What I'm not OK with is congested roads where drivers are not controlling their cars -- if someone stops suddenly, there will be a crash.
The city is gradually adding bike lanes on the more congested main roads when there isn't a good alternative. They're also designating some side roads as "bike boulevards" with "traffic calming" features that effectively discourage cars.
A way of planning for bike paths is if bike traffic gets heavy enough on a road, then set aside a portion of that road for bikes and leave the rest for cars.
Which fits well with dynamic speed limits cropping up in places that get regular bad weather
There is the source for California -- I see it gives exemptions for safety and law (I assume for road works, etc) but generally speed limits are objective based on conditions. It doesn't mean you can drive slow and impede other traffic traveling around you though, which is why there are laws for it. I don't see it enforced as much in San Diego, but when I lived in the Lake Arrowhead area it was enforced quite often on the highway up and down the mountain.
Quick edit -- that law is for highways, I haven't checked whether this also applies for other types of roads.
Note that “highway” in California law has a very broad definition; see https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/codes_displaySectio....
“Highway” is a way or place of whatever nature, publicly maintained and open to the use of the public for purposes of vehicular travel. Highway includes street.
Whether or not speed variances between vehicles increase accidents doesn't seem to be clear. With a quick search I found this(1) that indicates that speed variances don't play a role in causing accidents. I also found this (2), which says "that the greater the difference between a driver’s speed and the average speed of traffic—both above and below that average speed—the greater the likelihood of involvement in a crash". And I found this (3) which basically says the speed limit should be set at the 85th percentile of what everyone is driving. Kind of like how you should build sidewalks where people walk ("Don’t make any walkways this year. At the end of the year, look at where the grass is worn away. That shows where the students are walking. Then just pave those paths"), set the speed limit at the speed most people drive.
Everywhere in the US I've lived, the max speed limit laws were written like "whatever speed is safe for current conditions up to a maximum of XX Mph" So you can get a speeding ticket for going slower than the posted limit if conditions are bad. I've actually been pulled over going well under the posted max speed limit during a hard snow storm.
(1) https://www.caee.utexas.edu/prof/kockelman/public_html/TRB04... (2) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solomon_curve (3) http://onlinemanuals.txdot.gov/txdotmanuals/szn/determining_...
There are exceptions, especially in the US West, where interstates may be the only path for miles and miles through some mountain ranges. Of course, they mostly have wide shoulders where people ride.
A solution is to level the planes of separation between types of traffic in urban areas. With pedestrians closer to cars the cars have to go slower by nature. It's antithetical to the common logic and current policy of building walking paths completely separate from roads and all of the businesses attached to them.