On Sat, 3 Sep 2016 17:04:34 -0400, Frank Krygowski
<
frkr...@sbcglobal.net> wrote:
>
> We have advocates demanding deficient, even insane designs, because
> "any bike facility is a good bike facility." Then when the design
> injures or kills a cyclist (as in this case) we have people claiming
> "well, the concept is good, they just messed up when they built it."
That's because the bike facilities are about politics and not about
riding bikes.
We have numerous examples of this in the Twin Cities and of horrible
compromises when the bike lobby ran into more powerful lobbies- such as
bike lanes on the left side of one way streets (so as not to
inconvenience the buses) which dump the rider into head-on traffic when
the street changes to 2 ways once out of the downtown area. Or one
street where the bike lane is the buffer between three lanes going one
way and a contraflow bus and cab lane going the other way.
Our newest "bike facility" put two bike lanes down a narrow, high
traffic street/bus route. Much of the length of the street was too
narrow to accommodate parking and now has two very narrow traffic lanes
(the same width as the buses) and two narrow bike lanes shoehorned into
what had been two traffic lanes. On the rest of the street, where there
was parking, residents and business have lost that. It's terrible. The
experienced cyclists warned the city about this repeatedly, but the city
council aligned with the "Bike Coalition" over good, practical advice.
(Our city council has fallen prey to a bad case of "we know betterism"
in the past few years, forgetting that they got elected because the
previous city council did the same and pissed off the constituency and
had a bit of a house cleaning).
There has been a dramatic local trend over the past decade of taking
high-volume four lane through streets and converting them to two lane,
high-volume through streets with islands and bike lanes- making for
horrible driving, pedestrian and cycling experiences. Apparently in
some idiot handbook of road design this is considered better- that roads
should be inadequate for all uses, not just some.
On the up side there has been some development of "bike boulevards"
through the metro areas on quiet streets that are pretty good for
getting from point A to point B. More of those would be a much better
idea than further pissing off the rest of our fellow citizens.