The problem with American cities is that we only have two spaces: the road and the sidewalk. Bike lanes are sometimes added to roads, but they're still just lanes on the road. The roads have all been built and designed for cars. Sidewalks have been built for pedestrians. Bikes, scooters, skateboards, etc. just don't fit well into either space.
There's a great YouTube channel, BicycleDutch [1], that goes into some detail about the Dutch approach to thoroughfares. They almost always build three spaces: a road for cars, a path for bicycles, and a sidewalk for pedestrians. This results in a huge number of people using bicycles to get around; in Amsterdam 30% of people always commute with a bicycle and over 40% usually do.
Of course, it generally wouldn't be practical for an American city to just convert all its roads to also include a separated bike path. Instead they could look for areas where a bike path could be built without costing too much, drawing political ire, or significantly interfering with current use. Railroad tracks are good opportunities. As an example, Minneapolis converted an unused railroad corridor to a separated bike path, called the Midtown Greenway [2]. As of 2016 34,000+ people used it daily [3]. Portland, OR, has converted two former railways into bike paths, the Springwater Corridor trail [4] and the new Trolley Trail [5]. We have plenty of other separated paths here as well.
Where there just isn't enough horizontal space, a more radical approach would be to build an elevated bike path over a few major thoroughfares (i.e. main downtown streets) or freeways that connect commuters to other separated or multi-use paths. Xiamen, China, built an elevated cycle path -- really more of a bicycle highway -- last year [6]. Dallas [7], Phoenix [8], and Detroit [9] have all built parks over freeways that contain some mixed-use paths, though not always with transportation in mind.
Ultimately bicycles/scooters/etc. don't really fit well into the current American infrastructure, but it seems like a solvable problem.
Right, so the whole "just add bike lanes" thing is said to get the general idea across, it's not an A to Z solution.
First off, the starting point matters. As you show with your example, trying these ideas in US cities is... hard to say the least. There is way too much cultural momentum behind car infrastructure.
As for the low bike lane usage you noticed, a lot of factors are involved.
1. You say "bike lane", is that a lane on the road, in effect shared with cars? Forget about high usage. The key is to get as much physical separation from traffic as possible. An easy rule of thumb is: would you let your 12-yo kid travel on said lanes on their own? If not, there's your answer. The paths must feel safe to people other than 20-40 y/o able-bodied males.
2. Once your paths are nice and separated, consider that the number of paths, how connected they are, and where they lead to all matter. A single path from nowhere to nowhere will not be used. 200 miles of paths can mean a strong network or 200 1 mile long disjoint paths.
3. You need the law to prioritize cyclists (and pedestrians for that matter). See another user's post on how the law is in the Netherlands: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29878551. The bare minimum would be giving cyclists on cycling paths the right of way at intersections.
4. The rest of infrastructure, especially intersections, must be built with cyclists in mind. The Netherlands is again king at this, e.g. https://youtu.be/g0F_hTGYa0Y?t=712. The difference between the thought Dutch traffic engineers put into designing for cyclists and the US engineers should be evident. At the very least, the bike path asphalt should be colored differently at intersections.
5. It takes time, especially somewhere as car-centric as the US. You can't expect people to switch to biking overnight.
6. Car-centric design stretches cities out, lowering density. Cycling and walking have limited range, so the average US city is going to inherently get lower cycling uptake.
In the US, obtaining right-of-way to build bike lanes in metropolitan areas is infeasible. I've sat in neighborhood meetings with my state's Department of Transportation engineers and planners discussing main artery expansions, and they explained that there isn't sufficient demand for bike paths to include them in any new planning funded by taxpayers; whenever they've tried to include dedicated bike lanes in the past, they were shot down first by politicians looking to curry the fiscal conservative votes, then by special interest groups protecting a car-based culture (housing developers, chambers of commerce, etc. all see dedicated bike lanes as yielding less traffic to their planned projects). However, obtaining right-of-way to privately build an elevated path, they conceded, while not easy, was more feasible because someone else foots the bill. The problem is no one has figured out a design that can feasibly pay off.
If you can obtain the right-of-way for an elevated path, then what would you design for it that makes it pay off at least a little above break-even?
Generally, I take this as a sign that in the US, unless you deliberately attract a demographic to a specific concentrated area that consciously chooses biking as a major transportation mode, namely, a master-planned community/town built around biking and public transit, cyclists are SOL to comprehensively expand biking for the foreseeable future in most US metro areas outside of "bike ghettos" where there is a strong cycling culture. I'd love to see as much biking for normal daily activities as we saw in mainland China before they opened up to the West, but in the US in many areas it is legitimately risky to bike (despite the actual risk of fatality on a bike gradually dropping over the past three decades).
So a related hypothetical is, if you were in a high-density (say, 30K per square mile scale density) city designed from the beginning for walk/run/bike/public-transit transportation, what kind of bike paths would you want?
The article describes intra- and inter-neighborhood scale at best, but doesn't address efforts to solve US commuter distances, which invariably involve highways. That seems an insoluble challenge at the moment in the US.
I do not understand why this idea is voted down. In contrast to the insistence in the Netherlands in the late '70s that urban planning must cease to create a hostile enviornment for self-mobile humans there has been a long-standing and well-funded push to develop bicycle lanes backed by both federal and state governments and lobbied for by organizations like the Thunderhead Alliance explicitly to remove bicycles from the road network which we all pay for.
The Netherlands is as good as it because they insisted on the fundamental right to security, safety and convenience of all the people to use public space.
Accepting a narrow, little painted lane where you cannot dawdle and chat two-abreast and have to stop at a novel intersection design every few hundred meters is not progress. It's a step away from a reasonable cycling environment.
Cycling organizations in the USA are dominated by well-organized lobbyists from the bicycle retail industry and their hangers-on.
I really think we should build better infrastructure for bikes in the US. this has been done in so many European cities even over the last couple of decades/half century. It is very difficult to have cars and bicycles coexist without them both having their proper lanes. Especially with cities like Boston I really hope this can become a reality.
there's not a single city in the US that has a real bicycle network
despite all the improvements even cities like NYC still doesn't have this
imagine a city that's made up of a neighborhoods with high quality roads inside them but unconnected and separated by patches of sand dunes or dirt fields with between them
would you look at that and conclude "nobody drives here, these people must hate cars, we shouldn't invest in roads then, roads and cars are a useless technology, hiking on foot or riding a camel or donkey is superior!"
of course you wouldn't
but that's exactly what it's like being on a bike in ALL cities in the US - islands of a few (mostly unsafe) bikeways here and there, but not a complete, safe network to connect them in a meaningful way, so it's little wonder they're not as used as they could be (although despite that, esp in nyc, bikeways ARE heavily used)
if you wouldn't ride in them, they're not safe
if you wouldn't let your kids or nephew johnny ride in them, they're not safe
meanwhile in the Netherlands, Valencia, Seville, Barcelona, Paris and a bunch of other places in the world, they HAVE started to build meaningful, safe bikeway networks, and what do you know, then, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands and millions of people (including families and kids) end up using them daily
taking cars off the road and freeing up space for ardent motorists who always complain about traffic
it's a win win but most motorists are too blind to see it
I know this would be a lot harder, but I think the best solution would be some city redesign where we separated bike and automobile routes, or at least minimized the places where they are together.
The Dutch reach _is_ clever, but it takes a lot of retraining of existing motorists, so it will take concerted awareness raising and probably a fairly long time-frame to take effect here.
After biking around the Twin Cities bike freeways I'm in the mindset that sidewalks and bike lanes need to be done away with for dedicated multi use paths. people can walk, roller blade, scooter, bike, skate board on paths away from lifted metal bricks on wheels and feel safe
And that looks trivial to work with. I'm from Europe where most towns have grown very organically over centuries, there are fewer multi-lane streets (and it's essentially unheard of in residential areas) and it's crowded. Quite a few people would welcome better bike infrastructure over here, but it's hard to do. The opposite seems to be true in the US.
You are right about that. I'm hoping eventually this will become popular enough that cities will open more dedicated bike paths separate from traffic. I've even heard rumors of our city closing and dedicating the main street downtown for bikes and pedestrians.
A 2 key points about well designed bike lanes that aren't bought up enough are:
1. raised / structural separation between the road and bikes path.
2. bike paths can be used for just about anything that is not a car/motorbike or a pedestrian. Skaters, skate boarders, mopeds and bikes can all share a common separated path way.
I have tried biking in Boston and it is a nightmare. Bike Lanes marked on the road are taken as suggestions by cars, rather than a proper space for bikes. Taking the side of the road causes cars to pass me too closely and taking a lane draws verbal abuse ( happened 3 times in 1 month...then I stopped). Technically Boston suburbs allow bikes to ride on empty sidewalks, but that draws silent stares and again occasional verbal abuse.
In addition to that , everyone from pedestrians to car owners seem to be complaining about the new bird bike scooters and boosted boards. With major ride sharing companies trying to move to 2 wheelers and community shared biking hubs becoming a thing, giving all the problem children their own space would be an excellent solution.
All of these alternate means of transportation run at about the same speed and can't cause fatal damage on collision. Definitively separating them from cars should significantly improve safety.
IMO, biking might be the solution that allows for zoning laws to be lax, as increased density wouldn't affect traffic as adversely. The increased density should also cut commute times. Aren't those literally the 2 biggest complaints about tech hubs in US ? The decreased pollution and healthcare benefits just the cherry on top.
The US simply isn't going to tear up a significant chunk of streets in any city and lay down enough bicycle-only infrastructure any time soon.
So, it's a lot more effective to co-opt the existing infrastructure and lobby for speed limit changes, access changes, road humps, etc.
> I've seen that: dedicated, separated bike paths are unused, and cyclists continue to ride in the street with the cars.
Generally this is on bike paths that were put in to satisfy some "green initiative" but don't actually go anywhere useful. It also sometimes happens on "bike paths" that cross too many roads; you're better off riding on a parallel roadway that's actually optimized for traffic flow.
I have rarely seen idle bike paths when they exist in a downtown where people work.
Strange argument, you do realize that the same fact applied to all the large cities now known for cycling ? search for Amsterdam from the 1970s for example.
Things that play against many American city is that density might not be sufficient, but for cities like SF density is probably enough and you have so much space dedicated to cars that you can reclain.
On Market Street i can see some non protected bike lane that were already reclaimed from car lane. In some years this might turn in protected bike lane.
By just reducing the width of car lanes (which help reduce speeding) you can probably build bike lane in many US streets ...
This is really noticeable in places in the US where things are close enough together to walk or bike but nearly every trip is still made by car because there's no safe way to do anything else. There's actually quite a bit of stuff within easy biking distance of where I live, but up until recently there was no safe way to actually bike there because all the infrastructure was high-speed, multi-lane streets without even a shoulder. Recently the city has been investing more in wide, separated paths for biking and walking places and it's starting to make a difference.
Easily the biggest problem in the US with biking is that the infrastructure is, nearly without exception, absolutely atrocious.
Nobody would accept having only 'painted walk lanes' on busy streets to get around, much less having them appear and disappear from the road seemingly at random, and yet that's the default state of bike lanes in nearly all US cities.
If biking had as much infrastructure as even walking -- meaning, physically protected lanes on most streets -- Americans would bike in enormous numbers.
That's a very US-centric (and outdated) viewpoint, coming from a perspective of bike infrastructure being entirely non-existent in the US back in the 1970s. Contrast with Amsterdam's approach, where cycling is a properly treated third form of at-grade transit that has all its own paths just like cars and pedestrians do. That's way safer and has much higher usage than you'd ever see if no separate paths were provided for cyclists at all.
While I understand the safety arguments for encouraging people to ride on separate bike infrastructure, I generally think this is a pretty short-sighted attitude; cycling will never achieve the level of convenience necessary for it to attain a reasonably high transportation modal share if the recommended practice for cyclists is to take circuitous recreational paths through parks instead of the much-more-direct routes available to motorists. Look at any cities in Europe that have reached moderate cycling modal share (Amsterdam, Copenhagen, etc.), and you'll see that while grade-separated cycling infrastructure is common in high-traffic areas, it follows the same routes as cars (complete with traffic lights), and that cycling on same-grade painted lanes is common in lower-traffic areas. Nobody is pushing cyclists in these cities onto inefficient completely-separate bike infrastructure.
There's a great YouTube channel, BicycleDutch [1], that goes into some detail about the Dutch approach to thoroughfares. They almost always build three spaces: a road for cars, a path for bicycles, and a sidewalk for pedestrians. This results in a huge number of people using bicycles to get around; in Amsterdam 30% of people always commute with a bicycle and over 40% usually do.
Of course, it generally wouldn't be practical for an American city to just convert all its roads to also include a separated bike path. Instead they could look for areas where a bike path could be built without costing too much, drawing political ire, or significantly interfering with current use. Railroad tracks are good opportunities. As an example, Minneapolis converted an unused railroad corridor to a separated bike path, called the Midtown Greenway [2]. As of 2016 34,000+ people used it daily [3]. Portland, OR, has converted two former railways into bike paths, the Springwater Corridor trail [4] and the new Trolley Trail [5]. We have plenty of other separated paths here as well.
Where there just isn't enough horizontal space, a more radical approach would be to build an elevated bike path over a few major thoroughfares (i.e. main downtown streets) or freeways that connect commuters to other separated or multi-use paths. Xiamen, China, built an elevated cycle path -- really more of a bicycle highway -- last year [6]. Dallas [7], Phoenix [8], and Detroit [9] have all built parks over freeways that contain some mixed-use paths, though not always with transportation in mind.
Ultimately bicycles/scooters/etc. don't really fit well into the current American infrastructure, but it seems like a solvable problem.
1: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC67YlPrRvsO117gFDM7UePg
2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Midtown_Greenway
3: http://www.minneapolismn.gov/www/groups/public/@publicworks/...
4: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Springwater_Corridor
5: https://ncprd.com/parks/trolley-trail
6: https://www.mnn.com/green-tech/transportation/blogs/china-cy...
7: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Klyde_Warren_Park
8: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Margaret_T._Hance_Park
9: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interstate_696
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