It doesn’t, but it does mean that you can’t dedicate 100% of street space and 75% of space for businesses to cars. And some drivers seem to interpret losing any sliver of their dominance over the streets as “hell for cars,” making this a tough battle.

Bike lanes and pedestrian sidewalks can transport more people per minute than the car lane(s).

So if/when you do need to use a car, you'll actually find less people in your way.

well, they have some strong arguments.

In my Country cars are worth 77 billion euros in taxes every year.

If my country was a free market utopia like US, people would be screaming that they paid for those roads and it's their right to use them exclusively.

Bikes aren't worth that much, unfortunately.

Are roads funded exclusively from tax collected from car taxes? Aren’t bicycle and public transport users also funding roads also? Even if indirectly, by going to a shop that use those roads for supplies.

As far as I heard, roads cost a LOT to maintain (and more to build). 77 billion might be a small bucket in the ocean depending on the country.

This is public space, your freedom to drive a car impacts my commute time by bus.

This is a piece I don't know how to explain coherently - cities function _as poorly_ for passenger vehicles as they do for bicyclists.

Tons of queueing time, low reliability, noise, hassle, expense, lack of perception of progress.

I think a good city engineer would:

1. start gathering benchmarks for travel time by mode across the city, at various times of day. 2. Start counting intersection vehicle through-put 3. Start counting intersection "vehicle dwell time" (an intersection that has 15 cars stopped waiting for a light to change is wasting an incredible amount of time)

And then with this data, start modifying how the intersections are laid out, run experiments. There's 50 things someone could experiment with, some of which would be worth retaining and expanding.

American traffic 'planning' is so boring and so openly ineffective. It's a traumatizing institution to be a part of, if you have a sense of awareness and responsibility and agency.

https://youtu.be/d8RRE2rDw4k?t=402

Chuck Marohn measured his average speed at rush hour, and found it was about 16km/h ... So despite the roads having a speed limit of 50 km/h or more, his average speed was less than 16, because of all the traffic lights. And this was in a tiny town of only 14,000 people. Incidentally, 16 km/h is the average speed of a cyclist in Amsterdam

> Incidentally, 16 km/h is the average speed of a cyclist in Amsterdam

Unfortunately this only says that removing traffic lights would drive cars' average speed up and many bikers aren't actually stopping at traffic lights.

Maybe average speed is not that important as a metric and we should not optimize for it.

I would prefer a 15km/h average speed for cars, but to avoid any intersections with other users and flow interruptions: people should not cross streets, they should pass over them on bridges.

Crossroads should not exist, only roundabouts.

Etc.

Anyway, in most of Amsterdam the average speed of cars is between 15 and 30km/h [1], while bikes on average go at 14.9km/h.

[1] https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Map-of-average-traffic-s...

My gut feeling is that the "coordination cost" of big heavy cars needs to be paid one way or another.

You can reduce the coordination needed, sure, but the car-centric design of North America cities requires a lot of it.

> many bikers aren't actually stopping at traffic lights

I jump the light as much as I jaywalk - only when I have looked both ways and am sure of the safety.

what I meant whit this

> removing traffic lights would drive cars' average speed up

is that knowing that cars are slow because there are a lot of traffic lights to stop at, it's not very helpful.

The only thing that we can logically conclude with that information is that traffic lights take down average speed.

On the other hand, being bikes' top speeds much lower than cars and being subject at the same traffic lights, the only thing that we can conclude is that they don't stop at traffic lights as much or they pass cars stuck in traffic, even if it's probably forbidden.

Which is okay, everybody does that, but, again, not very helpful.

It only says that bikes don't respect every traffic laws in the book.

Not a big deal, but we can't use that information to optimize traffic.

It is not because of this, but because Amsterdam created entirely separate bicycle routes that have grease separated intersections with main roads for cars. So they simply don't have as many traffic lights for bikes because of that. Also, even if the are traffic lights they're much smarter at adapting to traffic and have much faster phases than in America.

> avoid any intersections with other users and flow interruptions: people should not cross streets, they should pass over them on bridges.

No, the cars should be the ones going over bridges or through tunnels. Doing it the other way around is prioritizing cars and dehumanizing pedestrians and cyclists.

Bikes sound so good if you live somewhere with an eternal summer (or spring) and where it never rains or snows or gets below 20 C.

Bicycle was mandatory, and actually pretty useful: it's a great form of transport to get around on when you're a teenager!

If you don't want to lose a whole day just to go to town, either own a car or better be wealthy enough to pay for a 20km taxi ride (X2).

Most people won't cycle in a mountain region where temperatures in August are 40° C on average, nor do they possess the health to do so.

Plenty of European regions are just as deplected of good city with wonderful public transport networks, specially on the southern countries where the people love to spend their vacations and end up renting cars if they actually want to move around in a timely manner.

My city is approaching it differently, instead of bike lanes they are just adding significantly more sidewalk and marking the left side as where bikes should ride. The sidewalk can be fully utilized by everyone all of the time. During big crowded events it’s just sidewalk.

Young people, old people, poor people, some disabled people etc can't drive. Many more can bike, especially with el assistance / tri-wheels.

Every single person no matter how old, poor, or disabled can utilize roads meant for vehicles year round. There is no "public transportation" for bike lanes.

Every single person no matter how old, poor, or disabled can utilize sidewalks even if that means assistive devices like wheelchairs.

This is not true of bike lanes at all. My grandmother even with a try-wheel and fully electric would still be unable to use the bike lane. People seem to forget that one of the ways people can become disabled as they age is balance.

Infrastructure that accommodates bikes is a good thing, dedicated infrastructure for them isn't.

dae if you really cared about the disabled you would hunt the abled for sport isn’t an argument. Providing for the disabled is making accommodations. Blanketing a city with dedicated infrastructure that in practice is inaccessible to people who aren’t young, somewhat in shape, and abled is silly — that takes away space from the abled. And trust me I’m not weaponizing the disabled, it’s entirely selfish of me because with 100% certainty in my lifetime I will be disabled temporarily from injury and permanently from age.

Ban cars entirely for all I care, I’ll fully support you turning city centers into pedestrian only areas with scooters and small electric golf carts for those limited mobility. Even in a world entirely without cars bikes lanes are still dumb.

The bicycle hate runs deep. Why?

Dedicated bike infrastructure also reduces conflicts with pedestrians. Often better to have two separate ways, than one big with everyone intermingled. If you are unable to even comprehend that, I question your bias in this.