Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Cambridge's Ambitious Protected Bike Lane Law

citylab.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

361–370 of 485 posts

Re: Cambridge's Ambitious Protected Bike Lane Law

#361

Post by karmakaze »

apeace wrote: post #356
callinyouin wrote: post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "I hope you get hit!" This, to me, signals the general attitude people have towards bicyclists in the US. The average person either doesn't care or, for some misguided reason or another, actively hates bicyclists. I've been yelled at by drivers for no apparent reason so many times I've lost count. I've had so many friends hit by cars. My partner was struck by a car last fall and broke her leg in two places. She's s…

I would never yell at a bicyclist, and certainly would never hope one got hit. But I have to say, as an NYC pedestrian, I actively hate bicyclists. They don't follow the rules of the road-- at all . Red lights? Stop signs? Ignored. Pedestrians crossing in a crosswalk? Probably fine to whiz past them with 6 inches to spare. I almost get hit by fast-moving bikes once or twice a year. A car has never even come close to…

Part of the problem certainly is impedence mismatch-different flows in a shared path. The solution to this part is infrastructure.

We also greatly need better awareness and it goes all ways. When learning to ride a motorcycle I learned how bad a pedestrian I was.

Re: Cambridge's Ambitious Protected Bike Lane Law

#362

Post by cannonedhamster »

TulliusCicero wrote: post #334
wtetzner wrote: post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think he means most people don't live close enough to the city that they could reasonably ride a bike to get where they need to go.

But can they bike from a train station in the city? Can they bike around the suburb they live in? Yes, they probably can.

Can they find a parking spot in the train station? No, no they can't.

Re: Cambridge's Ambitious Protected Bike Lane Law

#363

Post by cannonedhamster »

baron_harkonnen wrote: post #340
rayiner wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I see that graphic a lot, but it's not a very useful one, because it ignores residential patterns. Most people can't use a bike. So if you displace one car, you're not going to replace it with one bike, much less than 5 that would otherwise fit in the same space. The efficiency question is: what minimizes the amount of collective time people spend getting where they need to go. Bike infrastructure might actually make…

I think you could arguably entirely remove non-commercial vehicles form dense cities like Boston and New York. You could build massive parking garages at the limits of the city and suburban commuter could just park and take alternate transit from there. During peak traffic in both of these cities I've been easily able to walk as fast as traffic, forget how much faster public transit or biking would be. If you displac…

Not all of the mass transit in Boston is weather protected. Snow routinely causes train stoppages. The lines are also really old, being dug by hand when street cars and horse and buggy still existed. There's also the face of massive cost increases forcing people to take transit and park, not to mention the increase in commuting time by not getting directly to your location. I've been on some really great transit systems in places like Bucharest and Tokyo. Boston is an unfortunately poor comparison on some lines.

Re: Cambridge's Ambitious Protected Bike Lane Law

#364

Post by cannonedhamster »

adrianN wrote: post #240
rayiner wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I see that graphic a lot, but it's not a very useful one, because it ignores residential patterns. Most people can't use a bike. So if you displace one car, you're not going to replace it with one bike, much less than 5 that would otherwise fit in the same space. The efficiency question is: what minimizes the amount of collective time people spend getting where they need to go. Bike infrastructure might actually make…

Just building protected bikelanes is not enough for cities that were build over decades with a car-centric layout. You need to drastically reduce parking and increase the density. This is a process that will take a long time. Changing cities is hard.

Boston/Cambridge were built for horses not cars. A car centric layout would actually create way more space to accommodate the bicycles.

Re: Cambridge's Ambitious Protected Bike Lane Law

#365

Post by btrettel »

xxpor wrote: post #191
Filligree wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the US specifically? It's perfectly normal here. (Ireland.)

It's normal here in the US too, but that the problem people have. Vehicular cycling can really only be used by the strongest bikers, mostly young, mostly male riders. It excludes slower, older, and younger riders who might be intimidated by sharing a road with aggressive drivers going 45+ mph who pass with less than 3 feet of space. https://www.latimes.com/opinion/livable-city/la-oe-babin-pro...

I've heard this argument before. It is among the weakest against vehicular cycling in my view. It's a misrepresentation of vehicular cycling, which doesn't require cyclists to keep up with drivers. It also strikes me as an ad hominem attack, attacking vehicular cyclists rather than their arguments. A point I like to make is that perceptions of safety are not the same thing as safety, and I think vehicular cycling is all about that.

The strongest argument against vehicular cycling would be the evidence of where cycling infrastructure works well, which many people who accept the basic tenets of vehicular cycling (like myself) admit. I'd call myself about 1/2 vehicular, 1/2 infrastructural.

Re: Cambridge's Ambitious Protected Bike Lane Law

#366

Post by Someone »

novok wrote: post #294
teddyh wrote: post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Most people can't use a bike. Huh? What kind of people are you referring to? In my simple observation, most people can indeed use a bike. And in some countries, like Denmark, or China, it is my impression that most people do use a bike.

If your elderly or disabled. Although if you that level of elderly, you might not be able to use a car either, and the disabled often have motorized wheelchairs that could go as fast as bikes. For people who say 'but the disabled need cars', I want to offer some ancedata: I know a retired couple that bought a house in SF years ago because they wanted a working transit system when they can't drive cars anymore.

Elderly: https://bicycledutch.wordpress.com/tag/elderly/

Disabled: https://bicycledutch.wordpress.com/tag/disabled-people/

Less serious, but still a good demonstration of the inclusiveness of cycling: https://vimeo.com/131968609

Re: Cambridge's Ambitious Protected Bike Lane Law

#367

Post by btrettel »

TulliusCicero wrote: post #339
btrettel wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You won't find a cyclist who opposes dedicated, protected lanes that are separate from roads and sidewalks. "Vehicular cyclists" are opposed to bike lanes and are not uncommon. See elsewhere in this thread for discussion of them. I consider myself roughly 1/2 vehicular, 1/2 infrastructural. Both camps have good points.

I've seen vehicular cyclists have good points in theory, but in practice their results seem to be awful. Are there places practicing 'vehicular cycling' that have high rates of cycling and good levels of safety? Infrastructural cyclists can point to the obvious success in the Netherlands and some other bike-friendly cities/countries, at least.

> but in practice their results seem to be awful

Do you have evidence for this or is it just an assertion?

I don't think there are rigorous scientific studies into vehicular or infrastructural cycling. If the infrastructural approach is more popular it's probably because many people seem to accept the infrastructural arguments uncritically. The vehicular camp makes excellent points that I believe have greatly improved my own safety.

One point that vehicular cyclists make is that many people seem to assume that certain practices are safer, but reality is more complicated. For example, riding on the sidewalk is generally considered to be considerably less safe than riding on the road, even by many infrastructural cyclists. But it seems that most people assume that it's more safe.

As a point in favor of vehicular cycling, it seems to me that vehicular cyclists are indeed safer riders than infrastructural. Some might say this is due to experience, but that seems to be a lot of what vehicular cycling is about so I'm not sure that's an argument against vehicular cycling.

Also, I don't think vehicular cyclists are very interested in increasing the number of cyclists. I think there are major benefits to increasing the number of cyclists, and I think the "safety in numbers" effect is the biggest benefit to an infrastructural approach.

In terms of policy, it's a lot easier to build some infrastructure than it is to train drivers and cyclists. So any apparent success of the infrastructure approach may be due solely to that. Also, as I've pointed out on HN here before, not all infrastructure is the same. Most that I see in the US is awful and I would not be surprised if they made cyclists less safe. It seems that infrastructure in some European cities fixes the problems I have.

Ultimately I think both the infrastructural and vehicular camps have good points, and the best policy is a hybrid of the two.

Re: Cambridge's Ambitious Protected Bike Lane Law

#368

Post by T-hawk »

anonu wrote: post #160
just_steve_h wrote: post #61

I've lived in Cambridge or neighboring Somerville every year but one since 1989. The cycling infrastructure is much improved and still deadly. Just yesterday, I approached an arterial Street from a side street at 6pm. Cars on the arterial were moving about 8 MPH. I dismounted my bike, and began walking across the arterial in the crosswalk. As I re-mounted on the other side and resumed riding, a white man in a mid-siz…

> "I hope you get hit!" This is one thing I will never be able to wrap my head around - why would a human being say something like this to a fellow human? In my experience this comment brings together a few things: 1. Many drivers just have no respect for "Share the Road" and specifically no respect for cyclists 2. This type of "speak your mind" attitude is very New England and specifically Boston (and suburbs). 3. J…

> why would a human being say something like this to a fellow human?

Because what they see isn't a human, it's an obstacle.

Re: Cambridge's Ambitious Protected Bike Lane Law

#369

Post by rayiner »

baron_harkonnen wrote: post #340
rayiner wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I see that graphic a lot, but it's not a very useful one, because it ignores residential patterns. Most people can't use a bike. So if you displace one car, you're not going to replace it with one bike, much less than 5 that would otherwise fit in the same space. The efficiency question is: what minimizes the amount of collective time people spend getting where they need to go. Bike infrastructure might actually make…

I think you could arguably entirely remove non-commercial vehicles form dense cities like Boston and New York. You could build massive parking garages at the limits of the city and suburban commuter could just park and take alternate transit from there. During peak traffic in both of these cities I've been easily able to walk as fast as traffic, forget how much faster public transit or biking would be. If you displac…

I don’t disagree with that at all—that’s the ideal. But I don’t know what version of the United States you’re living in, but in mine, most cities don’t have that infrastructure, are too politically incompetent to be able to build that infrastructure cost effectively, and most of the few cities that do have it (like DC and New York) have let it decay to the point where it’s not timely and reliable.

One of the things transit advocates fail to grapple with is that our municipal political systems in the United States are broken. When it costs New York City 5-7 times as much money per mile of subway as it does Paris or London, you can’t build enough subway to meet peoples’ needs. (The debate over transit would be totally different if, for what MTA spends now, it was building five times as much track to meet peoples’ needs.)

Who would run the transit that goes from the edge parking lots to the city in your hypothetical? It would be WMATA. The same organization that, despite ample funding, let DC’s Metro decay to the point that they had to turn off automatic train control—a feature that was designed into the system at inception in the 1970s.

That’s the political reality we have to design our transportation systems against. Looking over the pond at what they do in Amsterdam or Paris is foolish—it’s like designing a plane for earth’s gravity based on what it would take to fly a plane on Mars.

Re: Cambridge's Ambitious Protected Bike Lane Law

#370

Post by closeparen »

apeace wrote: post #356
callinyouin wrote: post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "I hope you get hit!" This, to me, signals the general attitude people have towards bicyclists in the US. The average person either doesn't care or, for some misguided reason or another, actively hates bicyclists. I've been yelled at by drivers for no apparent reason so many times I've lost count. I've had so many friends hit by cars. My partner was struck by a car last fall and broke her leg in two places. She's s…

I would never yell at a bicyclist, and certainly would never hope one got hit. But I have to say, as an NYC pedestrian, I actively hate bicyclists. They don't follow the rules of the road-- at all . Red lights? Stop signs? Ignored. Pedestrians crossing in a crosswalk? Probably fine to whiz past them with 6 inches to spare. I almost get hit by fast-moving bikes once or twice a year. A car has never even come close to…

Bikes and cars have very different situational awareness, mass, agility, stopping distance, etc. It would be very surprising if the optimal rules for both were exactly the same.
Post reply on HN