There's also no reliable transit option to either location.
Am I suppose to just suck it up, throw out my vehicle, and bike 90 minutes there just to drop him off?
I would ask you to, in your words, "suck it up" with respect to some inconvenience in your car trip for that goal. Even then, you might be surprised - adding a bike lane might remove some car throughput, but would also remove some cars. On balance it could work out in your favor.
I entirely agree, but we all have to live with the world that we're currently in. It can take years or decades to re-envision a car-dependent area into something more car independent. For example, painting a white line over a highway's current gutter is not pedestrian/bike/transit infrastructure. It's dangerous for everyone. Yet, that's the type of "bike-friendly infrastructure" we get, and when drivers complain, it's viewed as drivers being anti-transit or anti-bicycle. No, it's just dangerous. The bike route shouldn't be inches from a high speed motorway.
> I would ask you to, in your words, "suck it up" with respect to some inconvenience in your car trip for that goal...adding a bike lane might remove some car throughput, but would also remove some cars.
No, it does not. Maybe in your area, it would, but here, it does not, because it's simply too far and unsafe to bicycle on the highway. It's dangerous and bad engineering. It's 5 miles (or 27 minutes according to Google) on major highways to the local elementary school. No one should ever be on a bicycle on these highways, regardless the fact that a small part of that distance might have a painted white lane denoting a bike lane full of road debris.
Instead, there should be a bicycle/pedestrian path that goes a more direct route - the distance is only 2 miles straight (or ~10 minutes), without crossing any major highways or difficult terrain. The school is also only 1.5 miles from a very nice park, but the highway would cross the path, so that conflict would need to be figured out.
Sorry if this comes of as combative, but what I'm pointing out that "painting a lane" simply does not work in the US, but that's all that is suggested and done. Streets and Roads need to be separate, and bikes should remain on streets or non-Road routes, and high speed vehicle travel should remain on roads. Not Just Bikes says this in his channel "Stroads are Ugly, Expensive, and Dangerous", but does so more to clarify/elevate the "Street". However, the discussion tends to miss that the "Road" is still important and needs to be respected. Putting a bike lane on a "Road" is another form of creating a "stroad".
What I think we need to reimagine is having the only connection between where people live and where they go to school be a highway. That's unfortunately a fundamental construct in suburban design - subdivisions hanging off of bike- and pedestrian-hostile highways - and it shows up everywhere. Creating new rights of way might be doable in some circumstances. But in others, these things are going to have to stop being highways (or at least lose some lanes) in order to get genuinely safe, separated walking and cycling infrastructure along existing rights of way.
Check out Not Just Bikes on youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC0intLFzLaudFG-xAvUEO-A/vid...