> painted bicycle gutters are NOT proper bicycle infrastructure either
To be clear, where I live there are recently installed “dedicated” bike routes which are separated from car traffic by concrete barriers and curbs, and also separated from pedestrian traffic by curbs and intermittent heavy ceramic planters. The problem is that the separations are interrupted to allow turns and deliveries. All of the separation is partial. I feel a ton safer in a painted gutter, and much safer still in the middle of a car-wide lane.
To make matters worse, the particular “dedicated” infrastructure I’m thinking of is on the left side of a one-way street and introduced complicated signal timings that surprise even regular riders and drivers. I’ve posted this before here and elsewhere: when I have to go somewhere in that part of the city and have to brave even a stretch of the route, I deliberately choose to be in car traffic even with drivers irrationally yelling at me to get in the bike lane and trying to run me off the road with their cars, because it feels safer than being in the bike space.
The theory of dedicated bike infrastructure is interesting to me, but what I’ve seen in practice where I live mostly motivates me to ride on roads with sharrows right in the middle of the road clearly indicating that I’m allowed to be there even if every single driver forgot their driving instruction.
Growing pains will be around for decades, unfortunately. Cycling needs to reach a critical mass before cities and regions decide to start de-prioritizing cars to alleviate exactly the issues you have with improved infrastructure. The Netherlands has been working on their infrastructure for over 40 years and keep finding new and unexpected problems that you simply don't discover until you have more bicycles than cars, like parking (when you start down this path you just imagine putting posts everywhere for people to lock up to, eventually you need dedicated parking facilities just to keep bikes from littering the streets like cars already do)!
We'll get there someday, every great journey begins with the first step, so until we catch up I wouldn't fault you for continuing to take a travel lane.
> Growing pains will be around for decades, unfortunately. Cycling needs to reach a critical mass before cities and regions decide to start de-prioritizing cars to alleviate exactly the issues you have with improved infrastructure.
No, we’ve been through those growing pains. Riding almost anywhere in the city is delightful and I have no issues with drivers or pedestrians. Walking is only an issue when cyclists take the sidewalk to avoid construction.
Literally the only place I fear for my safety riding in Seattle is in or beside the “dedicated” bike lanes which are poorly designed and dangerous. Several steps were taken before I could say this, I’m sure you’re correct that other places need to take them too. But in my city the steps which they took to make shared traffic routes safer have been much more effective at least for my own sense of safety than the hazardous steps they’ve taken getting dedicated infrastructure wrong.
Yes, exactly, my point is that the dedicated infrastructure in my city is designed poorly and that it’s worse than not having it. I’d love a well designed system, but I’m not going to celebrate one which “only almost got killed two times today” is how I’ve most often described it. In contrast, I’ve only almost been killed three times riding in shared bike/car traffic. Once my fault, once road maintenance, once an impatient driver.
I’d love to avoid cutting into the bike lane (required for right turns in most of the US), but some of those intersections are massive and the rest (1:18 in the video) replace the sidewalk with a bike lane. I don’t think either of those will be popular in American cities.
To be clear, where I live there are recently installed “dedicated” bike routes which are separated from car traffic by concrete barriers and curbs, and also separated from pedestrian traffic by curbs and intermittent heavy ceramic planters. The problem is that the separations are interrupted to allow turns and deliveries. All of the separation is partial. I feel a ton safer in a painted gutter, and much safer still in the middle of a car-wide lane.
To make matters worse, the particular “dedicated” infrastructure I’m thinking of is on the left side of a one-way street and introduced complicated signal timings that surprise even regular riders and drivers. I’ve posted this before here and elsewhere: when I have to go somewhere in that part of the city and have to brave even a stretch of the route, I deliberately choose to be in car traffic even with drivers irrationally yelling at me to get in the bike lane and trying to run me off the road with their cars, because it feels safer than being in the bike space.
The theory of dedicated bike infrastructure is interesting to me, but what I’ve seen in practice where I live mostly motivates me to ride on roads with sharrows right in the middle of the road clearly indicating that I’m allowed to be there even if every single driver forgot their driving instruction.