I think Forrester has some stats that show riding in a bike lane is more dangerous than sharing the road with traffic. But one could argue that bike lanes attract cyclists who haven't learned or thought about safe cycling, whereas the unmarked street scares that demographic away.
The problem city planners are having is that they want to be "bike friendly" in every way except educating road users. Some stripes on the road don't make cycling safe. Cyclists that think carefully and act predictably do, and no stripe on the road is ever going to do that.
We need drivers education classes that cover driving from the perspective of a cyclist. This will ensure that when drivers want to ride their bike, they do it safely, and it will ensure that drivers know to share the road with bicycles. (I would take it a step further and require licensing for bicycle-only drivers, but that is too unpopular to ever happen.)
> Some stripes on the road don't make cycling safe.
> Cyclists that think carefully and act predictably do
> require licensing for bicycle-only drivers
A lot of people have very visceral reactions to cyclists:
On the other hand, I could show you numerous examples of people behaving badly in cars. Car collisions with pedestrians are more deadly than bicycle-pedestrian collisions. Should I move that we ban all cars? Or maybe we should just get rid of all roads, because if people are going to drive cars and be dangerous, we shouldn't have the government subsidizing them?You argument in general, seems to be about cycle-pedestrian collisions/dangers. If we get rid of bicycle lanes, then we are either advocating that all cyclists use the sidewalk or the street. In this case, you'll either end up with either more pedestrians being hit by cyclists or more cyclists hit by cars. In either case, as the number of cyclists increases, this doesn't scale.