Fivethirtyeight did a study in Minneapolis on bike lanes constructed earlier this decade and showed that bike lanes did increase congestion for 10 roads they looked at.

https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/bike-lanes-dont-cause-t...

Anecdotally, the mid sized city I lived in added a bike lane experimentally on my commute to work. The lanes going into the city decreased from 4 to 3 and immediately increased the amount of congestion. It also slowed my commute anywhere from 5 to 10 minutes based upon what time I left.

And the sad thing was, nobody used the new bike lane. I never saw a single rider use those lanes during my morning commute.

https://bicycledutch.files.wordpress.com/2016/03/groningen07...

I was studying in Groningen and I can tell you this is a daily occurrence there, sometimes it's even worse since the photo is from a rainy day in winter :P .

From: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cycling_in_the_Netherlands

By 2012 cycling had grown tremendously in popularity. In Amsterdam alone, 490,000 cyclists took to the road to cycle 2 million kilometres every day, according to its city council statistics. This has caused some problems as, despite 35,000 kilometers of bicycle paths, the country's 18 million bicycles (1.3 per citizen old enough to ride) sometimes clog Dutch cities' busiest streets. This is being addressed by building even more bike lanes to tackle a problem many other cities in the world would envy — that of bicycle traffic congestion.

Also, it takes time to build biking culture. And as a side note, biking infrastructure in Groningen was build on anti-car sentiments. They wanted to get rid of cars from the city, not to relive car congestion. They did get rid of them especially from the center and the city is now lovely for pedestrians and cyclists. https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2015/jul/29/how-groningen...

Take for example this data in London, which was produced in response to a question from a member of the public having essentially the same bias as your statement "nobody uses this bike lane." In London some bike lanes have slightly increased travel times by car but cycling has increased more than 50%. The bike lane is five times more efficient at moving people than is the carriageway.

http://foi.tfl.gov.uk/FOI-1235-1718/20170317%20STB%20CSEW%20...

50% of anything near zero is still darn close to zero. But at the same token, a 5 minute increase for 1000 people is a loss of 5000 minutes.

> The reason people in cars don't notice bike traffic is because a bike is small and unobtrusive and silent.

False. A single bike sticks out like a sore thumb in traffic -- even if there's a bike lane. In this case, I was so pissed off at the increase of my commute I started to count bikes in the bike lane, and I saw exactly zero.

But that doesn’t matter - someone unilaterally changes something and everyone else is supposed to get with the program or find a hole to die in.

These days, I fly back and forth to work, so it makes little sense to use a bike.

> single bike sticks out like a sore thumb

Now it totally makes sense.

I’m all for bike lanes. And bicycle licenses. Can’t go up the 80 percentile hill in your town at 20 mph? You fail.

Bike lanes built one at a time, and not connected. So, if you happen to live and work along a single bike lane, great. If not, you're back in the car.

Lack of bicycle facilities at destinations. My office has a tiny, poorly constructed rack outdoors. I wouldn't trust it to hold my bicycle, even with a good lock. Much of the USA is warm or hot in summer, so anything more than a few miles on the bike results in lots of sweating, so showers at offices would be helpful.

In places where bicycle infrastructure is provided, it is well used. The first Reston Metro stop (Weihle Station) has a large, locked bike room with nice racks and a small workbench area. The station is located right off one of the regions main multi-use paths. That bike room is heavily utilized.

Sadly, the second Reston Metro station, Reston Town Center, doesn't provide any infrastructure at all. No bike storage, no parking, nothing. Not sure what the heck the county was thinking when planning this station.

That's probably the number one problem of bike lanes.

The second problem is that if you add a bike lane, you have to take something away. Usually it's parking or traffic lanes. And neither of those are super popular.

> Much of the USA is warm or hot in summer, so anything more than a few miles on the bike results in lots of sweating

Or there's snow on the ground 4 months out of the year, and makes it a real pain to commute on a bike. Or in several places, you have both. Chicago comes to mind.

Bike lanes are beneficial in urban areas, and that's pretty much it.

But when it comes to US, the bike lanes is the last thing when it comes to the kindergarten level of infrastructure planning. In my experience infrastructure in US was planned exclusively by NIMBYs...

And as others noted. A single bike line without connecting lanes will not change people's commute. Changing habit is also something that doesn't happen over a day or even a year. It might take 5 years for the effect to show.

https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2017/12/ride-ha...

But then... I haven't been to a city with a good motor vehicle infrastructure in a long time. Certainly none of the major US cities are designed well to handle even remotely appropriate levels of private motor vehicle use.

PS: I have a car in NYC. Use it for some cases, but would never drive daily in NYC.

Because 1) You're not allowed to build mixed-use areas thanks to NIMBYs

2) You're not allowed to build high or mid-density areas thanks to NIMBYs

3) You're not allowed to build real bike routes (the kind you'd let your 8 year old cycle to school alone on) because of NIMBYs

4) You could cycle the long distances needed on the road, but the US has made it legal to kill people with your car so long as you're sober, so this is dangerous.

Nobody's driving from NYC to LA for their morning commute. The size of the country is not relevant.

The size of the country is relevant; not everything is as dense as LA, NYC, SFC. Chicago being the 3rd largest metro area is also probably one of the least dense. I cannot reasonnnably bike from my home into the Loop. Between shit roads, bad neighborhoods and generally not wanting to die. Not to mention, it is infeasible at least 3 months of the year.

Also, your argument 4 is just wrong and FUD. It is no where legal to just hit a cyclist and kill them. Probably the slightest you will get is negligent vehicular manslaughter, if you are found to be at fault with no other extenuating circumstances. If you are not at fault, you might likely not face charges.

Obviously not dead, but I was the victim where a car ran a stop sign and T-boned while I was on a bike. The driver, who did stop and offer assistance, was ticketed (I think failure to yield right of way, failure to yield to avoid an accident), faced court, around $500 in fines and had to pay my medical costs (about $20k) amd to replace my bike (about $3500). His insurance took most of the brunt, but I was fully compensated for my losses.

No, the US accepts that traffic accidents happen, and absent irresponsible behavior like drunk driving, drivers should not be held responsible for accidents. When these accidents involve collisions between cars, they're usually simple fender-benders. When similar collisions happen between cars and bicycles, they often lead to serious injury or even death.

It's an extremely dangerous idea to have bicycles and cars travelling side by side in such close proximity with such narrow bicycle lanes. What we need is proper bike lanes with lane separators protecting them from traffic.

I can't go accidentally shooting people on the street and expect just a fine.

Generally people who kill others with their car get off fine, so long as they're sober. https://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/10/opinion/sunday/is-it-ok-t...

On the other hand if a gun range built a pathway for people downrange right by the targets, you wouldn't be the one responsible if you accidently shoot someone. It would be the gun range's fault for creating such a dangerous setup in the first place.

Dramatic upzoning is only brought to the table when the NIMBYs are seen as weak enough that it might stand a chance.

Property taxes can pay for these updates once the additional housing is built, it's self-financing. (Of course this won't work in CA, due to Prop 13. But then again, it was a ballot initiative, and those crazy folks in California voted for it. It's all self-inflicted pain on their part.)

2) Expecting your groundskeeper to drive a century on top of his (or her) actual job is pretty sick and cruel too

3) I'm pleased you mention Southern California as it's a useful case study of how to turn a pleasant area in to a dystopian hellscape. I've lived in Westwood (near UCLA), Santa Monica, and most recently San Diego (South Park - a fairly upscale neighborhood).

I routinely attended meetings of the planning group for South Park, where the attendees, all of whom were homeowners aside from me (and elderly), opposed ANY new housing of ANY sort ANYWHERE. They were blunt about their reasoning - it might hurt their home values. Of course, keeping homes expensive is a great way to ensure your groundskeeper can't live near work.

They also hated bike lanes, because they thought it would affect parking. It's rather sickening they cared more about places for cars to sleep than for people to sleep.

https://www.sandiego.gov/planning/community/profiles/greater... if you care to go yourself. The area's taxpayers will even give you free parking welfare.

Thankfully I escaped SoCal (and the US), but not everyone (including, perhaps, your gardener) is able to do that.

Is it really so shocking to live that close to a gardener? What is outlandish about that?

I think it's not that people refuse to live next to a gardener, it's that the job of gardener does not allow for an income that someone could afford to live close by given the housing market. It might not be 50 miles, but there are areas of affluence where it would take awhile for a low-income person to reach. There are also areas of affluence right next to considerably run-down (but famous) areas, such as Hollywood. Then again, I'm not sure how much housing there is in the run-down portions.

It may have started as NIMBY, but I think natural market forces eventually reinforce it to the degree that NIMBY isn't necessarily the largest factor at play at this point.

Manila by comparison is 71,263/km2 in it’s core. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manila

It's not dense relative to other types of metro areas, but I think it's probably fairly dense for single level housing in an industrialized nation.

My point wasn't to imply that Southern California was very densely housed, but that there may not be a huge amount of unutilized land left to build high density housing one, at least not enough to really change the dynamics. And once the conversation shifts from just what to build and where to also who to displace to build it, it's an much harder conversation.

I could be entirely wrong, I don't live in LA, but my impression every time I visit is that there's not a lot of unused land, even if the land that is used isn't used efficiently (population density wise). If that's true, it's not just a NIMBY situation (even if it might have traditionally been one), as it's also a "don't displace historical group X that's been living in this area for decades" situation (whether entirely accurate or not).

PS: It’s a question of underutilization, where it would be economically profitable to take each of these buildings down and replace them with more useful structures.

Therefore the riverfront should be low density huts forever I guess.

Out of respect for property rights though, please don't make it illegal for your neighbour to do this to their home should they choose.

Public transit is a bad joke too, the light rail in LA waits for cars to pass at intersections! I've never seen that in other metros, as rail always gets signal priority, but it is a great way to drive away riders...

I’m fully guilty of this myself too. But like all things it cannot keep growing indefinitely.

http://www.aei.org/publication/new-us-homes-today-are-1000-s...

Beyond that, the stats in that article are just plain bad because it ignores the fact that not everyone lives in a new house, but it still compares the average household size to ONLY new homes built in that year.

I would actually ignore the average household size. We already know that that that decreasing over time.

Note that I didn't intend my comment to be a personal attack on you. I'm merely trying to point out this trend. Apologies if I came off that way. But your case also highlights another fact that was rare back in the day -- using your house as an office is increasingly becoming viable or necessary for those doing remote work.

I didn't take it personally, but I also didn't quite know the best way to respond either. I probably didn't do the best job at it.

This is a catch 22 because the way our cities are designed in America makes them unaffordable. American zoning in most cities prohibits the kind of dense mixed use development that makes low cost housing near work possible. We need to reform the zoning code in most cities and improve bike safety, walkability and public transportation to make headway.

Mid-sized USA cities tend to have half decent transit around their urban core (often woefully under-served especially in cities that don't have either trains/subways or else dedicated right-of-way for buses, but none-the-less serviceable).

However, the thing that mid-sized cities almost uniformly lack in the US is any form of regional commuter rail.

It seems clear that commuter rail is not a silver bullet. Housing density is probably what we really need.

I have more trouble seeing where the 500 seat office for a global enterprise should go on my city block. it seems like that sort of space would lead to a dead feeling at night when everyone goes home and the space sits empty.

Turns out when you don't need to allocate space for 500 cars around a building, you can build it in a single city block and coexist with other types of buildings. And you even get a rooftop with a view as a bonus.