Many other cities are heads and shoulders ahead when it comes to rolling out proper separated bike lanes. Nobody is looking to NYC for leadership on anything in this field.
The cumulative investment in each of those has gotta be 100x as much as for biking, and you're accusing bikes of getting special treatment?
For the cost of a mile of new subway, you could probably coat most of NYC's arterials with protected bike lanes across the whole damn city. Not that I'm opposed to subways, but bike infrastructure is extremely cost-effective, redirecting money away from it is ridiculous.
So, here's my personal opinion. For the record, i live in a bike-friendly mid-sized central-european city, do own a car, walk a lot (if the bike is not an option) and use public transport - but whenever possible, i use my bike. For me it's the superior mode of transportation. It's the cheapest option after walking, healthy, fun, efficient and for 90% of my day-to-day transportation needs it's also the fastest option. The overhead of finding a parking spot (twice) is mostly nil and there are pretty much no bike traffic jams. I shop every day and carry the groceries in my backpack (upside: fresh produce every day, don't need as much storage space). Car usage is mostly limited to longer distances (i.e. visiting relatives) and transporting unwieldly stuff - i wouldn't even own one if i hadn't gotten this one for free. The same applies to pretty much all of my friends. If the infrastructure is there, they all prefer riding a bike.
That said, as a young adult (early twenties), my car was part of my male identity. All of my friends believed they were good drivers and could be promising race drivers if they wanted. That's all gone now; my car is not a status symbol anymore, but a utility. And i don't respect someone just because they drive a fast car, that usually just means they were willing to invest a bigger share of their income in that particular hobby. My previous car had 60hp and that was plenty enough for my needs. Cars never made me really happy; they meant long commutes, road rage due to other bad drivers and congestion and terrifyingly dangerous situations aplenty, even though i'm a careful driver.
So, back to the discussion. In my opinion, the biggest problems for cyclists are:
1. Infrastructure: It's not that we're unjustly taking away from the drivers to give to the cyclists - cyclists have been neglected for decades and what happens now is just that they get a little bit of what should have been theirs from the beginning. Cars take a bigger share than they deserve. There was a time where cars weren't welcome in the cities too, i took a huge marketing campaign and lobbyists to change that.
2. Infrastructure: bike lanes mostly suck, because they're crammed into existing spaces that were planned for cars and pedestrians; spaces where they just don't really fit. They're often too narrow, of disastrous quality (ever wonder why road bike cyclists without shock absorbers prefer the road even if there are bike lanes present? That's even legal around here!) and sometimes feature unnecessary stops that could have been avoided if the street had been planned with cyclists from the start.
3. Drivers: some drivers hate cyclists for no apparent reason. Luckily, this is not a huge problem here as almost everyone spends time on a bike, but the stories i have to read on reddit ... some cyclists are probably victims of carelessly attempted manslaughter (i.e. drivers throwing full cans at cyclists).
4. Storage: bike theft is a rampant problem almost anywhere (for several reasons, afaik there's no easy solution). You really shouldn't leave your bike outside overnight if it's worth anything (disregarding rust as this is a problem for cars too). But secure bike storage options are pretty rare if you don't happen to have the option of storing it in your flat.
You should try riding a bike. It's fun, it's healthy and you'll mature as automobile driver as you'll learn to get more perceptive. Don't get angry if you have to stay behind a cyclists for a couple of seconds until it's safe to overtake - you're actually losing only an neglectible amount of time. If you live in a city, try a bike commute; depending on the distance you might be faster than by car. In my case, due to traffic jams and searching for parking it'd probably have taken me three times as long to commute by car. My previous city has one of the best public transport systems in the world and still i was faster by bike).
And you should support biking, even if you drive a car: more people on bikes means less traffic, less congestion. Parking spots will probably be reduced, but there won't be as many car owners, so there's that - and you can easily fit 10 bikes on a single car parking spot. Less pollution, less noise, healthier people are probably reducing costs on public health care, but i don't know how true that'd be for the U.S. with a privatized system. Old people on e-bikes means fewer old people driving their cars at half the allowed speed.
Really
That on top of its health benefits, relative safety to those hit by bikes, its traffic efficiency, parking space efficiency, benefit to retail...
You bring up taxpayers. It is far, far cheaper to subsidize a bike lane than a new subway tunnel. And the bike lane is open more hours of the year, with more entrances and exits, more interchanges to other lines, a shorter distance point-to-point, with drastically lower maintenance costs. Taxpayers should be rioting over the costs spent on trains and traffic relative to bikes.
Yes, of course, NYC and Omaha need a different model when it comes to implementation.
What’s shared is the public/political will to challenge the status quo.
Pointing out the differences that you are isn’t terribly insightful. Anyone with solid algebra and geometry skills can see the variables involved and shape of the problem are different.
However, the initiative needs a more robust implementation, with more consideration of driver behavior and parking needs. This is evident as many delivery trucks, Ubers etc. park in the lane (albeit, with emergency blinkers on, but it's a moot measure regardless) and push bicyclists into traffic. So while the bike lanes probably improve safety and reduce deaths overall, it can and does introduce a new, very real hazard: the necessity of bicyclists to suddenly merge into traffic. And this abuse is pretty rampant.
The hanging fruit is simply implementing stiffer penalities for such violations but this seems lacking. Coupling this with more temporary parking zones might be a solution. Then again, I'm not a civil engineer, just my observations and half-baked thoughts concerning the matter.
I've watched people put an impressive amount of effort into delicately navigating between those posts so that they can parallel park their car next to the curb. i.e., in the bike lane.
Drivers park in clearly signed bike lanes all the time, and when cyclists alert them to this fact they often respond with anger, not understanding or contrition. Common excuses are “I’ll just be a minute” or so on. It’s just part of how driving causes people to behave - I see the same thing with my apartment driveway which is regularly blocked by people parking illegally to go to the bank, rather than drive a few hundred feet and legally park in a garage.
Now, I’m sure there are some ignorant people out there, but the majority of people will just do what they can get away with regardless of what the law or the rule is. It’s like educating people to not text and drive. Just doesn’t work.
For example, I have plenty of run-ins with stepping out of a storefront and nearly getting creamed by a cyclist who's zooming down the sidewalk at 10mph, too. And it's frequently the cyclist who yells at me for failing to anticipate them barreling down the sidewalk illegally.
With a bike people wouldn’t just dump it on the sidewalk typically because they’d be worried about it being stolen (of course with the rentable scooters and dockless cycles, people do exactly that since they don’t have to worry about theft).
To my knowledge, the rules covering bicycles and pedestrians have never been on Illinois's written test, they aren't necessarily covered in driver's (or other) education, and, since most motorists (and also, I'm guessing, cyclists) come from more suburban environments where there just aren't as many bikes and pedestrians on the roads, people simply don't know how they're supposed to behave on the streets. Which is a recipe for unnecessary chaos.
Case in point: About ten years back, when she was visiting, I had to tell my mom not to drive in a bike lane. She was surprised to hear that it was a bike lane; she though it was just a weirdly small shared-use lane with slightly confusing paint marks.
And no, while I appreciate the good intentions of whoever it is at the DOT who thinks composes these things, cute rhyming phrases in glowing amber letters over the freeway aren't going to cut it.
For that, super common to bike even in the winter. After all, you're already bundled up and will probably stay warmer just because you'll be outside for less time.
Anecdotally, I know a lot of women who ride bikeshare bikes for the 5-6 blocks it takes them to get home from the subway in the early-sunset months as a safety precaution against sexual harassment.
https://member.citibikenyc.com/map/
I mean they're not evenly distributed according to a perfect pattern or anything, but there's generally a bike within an avenue and a few streets.
Edit: As for summers, I've regularly biked in Texas throughout the summer over many years (I've lived without a car quite a bit in Austin). The peak of the day is rough, but the usual commuting hours aren't too bad. New York has nothing on Texas summers.
Don't know why I find this double negative so disturbing. Seems so unnecessary.
apart from that i guess you just have to ride carefully, but you the same applies to driving a car on icy roads.
but it's nice 7-8 months out of the year!
The biggest problem I have with biking in the winter is when it gets brutally cold, which doesn't happen that often, hardly at all in the past few years. There was this one particularly horrible winter several years back when it was terribly cold for weeks on end, and that was rough.
There are automated bike counters in certain places (e.g. bridge crossings), but I haven't been able to find the data for winter months. Citi bike data is probably a pretty good proxy, though. It's in the report I linked and in sibling from apaprocki
[0]: https://www1.nyc.gov/html/dot/downloads/pdf/cycling-in-the-c...
You can have a sense of it by checking with Google Maps street view on different places in Manhattan. It seems that there are way more cars and pedestrians than bike riders in most places.
Cyclists will deal with bad weather or bad infrastructure, but not many will deal with both at the same time. The solution is good infrastructure.
In fact, 5 of the last 8 years had zero pedestrian deaths due to collisions with cyclists. [1]
[1] https://www1.nyc.gov/html/dot/html/bicyclists/bikestats.shtm...
Are you literally "far more terrified" of pedestrians than cars, or are you looking for a way to appear clever and different than everyone?
Pedestrians pose no threat to me unless I'm breaking the law, i.e. bicycling on the sidewalk, running a red, running a stoplight, etc.
If cars are so safe then just ride in the middle of the street. It's perfectly legal- bicycles are classified as moving vehicles.
But if you want to follow pedestrian rules at vehicle speeds, then it's not going to work so well.
Cyclists are routinely killed by motor vehicles in NYC. It's not even close which one you should be more afraid of. The scariest thing in the world if you're a cyclist is a big truck. They are statistically most likely to kill cyclists. People on foot don't even come close.
Compare to LA, where people tend to wait for the signal to cross pretty consistently. That said, LA still has horrible pedestrian death statistics so who knows how much that matters.
LA is generally the opposite -- it's a city for drivers, not for pedestrians. So the norms are different.
Right turns at red lights are illegal in NYC, and most of the streets in the city are one-way, so for a pedestrian to cross the street against a signal with no oncoming traffic is reasonably safe.
To give a more concrete example. Say a traffic light has a pedestrian light attached. It will only allow pedestrian crossings when it does not stop the flow of vehicular traffic (say every 3-5 min, and only for 20 seconds at a time). But it does so regardless of actual traffic (no cars are passing the intersection when many pedestrians arrive), you can’t really blame the pedestrians of ruling this system as stupid and opting not to follow it.
Who says it's a mistake?
It has nothing to do with the signals and everything to do with the pedestrians. If you actually want people to respect the signals, place traffic police on every corner in Manhattan and issue jaywalking tickets to absolutely everyone, for months on end, and you'll see it. (You'll also see a backlash.)
Other than that, it's not happening.
https://www.nytimes.com/1998/01/13/nyregion/with-higher-fine...
(You will notice this idea is unworkable due to excessive manpower requirements. It is undesirable for other reasons as well.)
That's the kind of thinking that makes our roads so deadly. If a rule in particular seems really silly to you, file a complaint / suggest a change so that it takes more parameters into account but until it is changed, stick to it. Loose some seconds or even minutes, I don't really care. These security rules should be followed by everyone, and people with your line of thinking shouldn't be allowed to own a car.
I'm not a fan of cars already, but people driving cars while following safety rules only when it suits them is what make them a lot more deadly imo.
Sure I can, they have a shit culture with little regard for traffic signals. My city has the same problem. I'm the odd man out for waiting for a signal, and am mocked for it at times. Nothing wrong with the signals or timing as a pedestrian (as a cyclist that's another story), but people feel they are more important. That they're 15 - 90 seconds is worth more.
Similarly, had a man recklessly pass me in his vehicle while I was biking to work yesterday. He went fully into the oncoming well above the posted speed limit, and cut me off as I was turning from the forward-moving lane into the left-hand turning lane. All to get around me to a red light.
Some people feel their 15 seconds are more valuable than others safety. In the case of pedestrian jaywalking, that their safety isn't worth the inconvenience of using the nearest crosswalk.
Pedestrians aren't carrying a multi-tonne vehicle that can kill people. Traffic lights are for drivers, and it's drivers who should pay attention.
The first step to fixing traffic deaths is fixing the laws that make causing a traffic accident more affordable than paying attention on the road. Right now you can drive while using a cellphone and run over as many people as you want if your excuse is "they came out of nowhere".
The responsibility of not killing people is on the drivers.
When I first moved there I was annoyed by everyone ignoring the signals. Then I came to appreciate it as an efficient way of getting around the city. Pedestrians (and bikes and cars) all used the signals as general guidelines, but would go when it was safe, because otherwise you're never going to get anywhere.
I'm not saying that everyone everywhere should ignore traffic signals, but it seems to work well in New York City.
e-bikes have been legal in NYC for 1.5 years [0]
[0] https://mashable.com/2018/04/04/electric-bicycle-nyc-ban-end...
New York is really lagging behind where it should be. Despite being by far the biggest American city, it is overrun with cars. Protected bike lanes, street improvements to make crossing the street safer, and dedicated bus lanes will improve the city for all New Yorkers. If these changes take off in New York, they will trickle down to the rest of American cities.
New York is marveled at for being such a safe big city from the standpoint of crime, but when you factor in all of the carnage caused by cars, it’s a lot less safe than you might think.
Violent crime has been falling across the country, but pedestrian and bicyclist deaths have been surging. This is a sign of some very bad policy making. Walking should be one of the safest and healthiest things a person can do.