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Cycling commissioners say painted bike lanes don’t make cyclists feel safer

theguardian.com

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Re: Cycling commissioners say painted bike lanes don’t make cyclists feel safer

#71

Post by jessaustin »

dmurray wrote: post #64
jessaustin wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Could you define that term? All I'm getting are "a formal pledge or promise" and "the occupation of an undertaker".

Undertaking = passing on the left, in a system where traffic is meant to drive on the left and pass on the right. By analogy with overtaking, for passing on the right. Cyclists (in a bike lane or not) undertaking heavier vehicles certainly are involved in a lot of serious accidents. However it's a very twisted view of reality to say that this causes accidents. The proximate cause is the heavy vehicles turning left or…

Oh that's a nice word! Being alive is better than being right, so blind spots are a bad place to be. Actually it's fine to be right behind a big vehicle, but I never want to be beside them for more than a couple of seconds...

Re: Cycling commissioners say painted bike lanes don’t make cyclists feel safer

#72

Post by frabbit »

choeger wrote: post #19
alrs wrote: post #9

Bike lanes exist to get bicycles "out of the way," which is why we have a decades-long alliance between the car-insurance lobby and the sell-bicycles lobby to get bikes off the road and on to facilities. This is a losing strategy for people who actually ride bikes, the correct one is to lower speed limits.

> This is a losing strategy for people who actually ride bikes, the correct one is to lower speed limits. I do not think that this is going to cut it. On a good day I easily do 30kph on a good road (that's why I prefer the painted lanes, btw., they tend to give you access to paved roads). With wind, or exhaustion, or any number of reasons, that speed can drop downwards to 20kph. Now I am definitely not the most well-…

Speed limits apply to motorized vehicles. Not to bicycles.

Re: Cycling commissioners say painted bike lanes don’t make cyclists feel safer

#73

Post by frabbit »

Al-Khwarizmi wrote: post #14
alrs wrote: post #9

Bike lanes exist to get bicycles "out of the way," which is why we have a decades-long alliance between the car-insurance lobby and the sell-bicycles lobby to get bikes off the road and on to facilities. This is a losing strategy for people who actually ride bikes, the correct one is to lower speed limits.

I'm in favor of reducing speed lines, but I don't think that is enough. I haven't seen a city with more bikes (or where cycling works better) than Copenhagen, and it's full of bike lanes (the vast majority of them proper, segregated bike lanes, not painted, of course).

Which cities have you cycle in to compare them with Copenhagen? (Assuming you did actually cycle in Copenhagen).

Re: Cycling commissioners say painted bike lanes don’t make cyclists feel safer

#74

Post by frabbit »

alrs wrote: post #9

Bike lanes exist to get bicycles "out of the way," which is why we have a decades-long alliance between the car-insurance lobby and the sell-bicycles lobby to get bikes off the road and on to facilities. This is a losing strategy for people who actually ride bikes, the correct one is to lower speed limits.

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.

Re: Cycling commissioners say painted bike lanes don’t make cyclists feel safer

#75

Post by jimmux »

einpoklum wrote: post #70

This is BS title. Painted cycling lanes are an important part of the cycling environment. No, in themselves, they don't make me - as a cyclist - feel safe. But _without_ them, I will never feel safe. They need to be _added_ to by education from a young age and during driver training, as well as through cultural products such as TV programming, films, books, social media etc. And by "education" I mean the education to…

I don't feel safe on some of the marked cycling lanes I use regularly, but you're right that it's still a good step toward education and acceptance.

There's a marked lane on my commute that I now ride much more carefully than the roads I use, because pedestrians are more likely to step out, and cars open doors without looking, because the lane seems to give them a false sense of safety. But with time they can learn that it should be the opposite.

I'm mostly grateful for clearly marked lanes when there's an incident and I can simply point out that yes, I do actually have a right to be riding there and they should have been looking where they're going.

Re: Cycling commissioners say painted bike lanes don’t make cyclists feel safer

#76

Post by Al-Khwarizmi »

frabbit wrote: post #73
Al-Khwarizmi wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm in favor of reducing speed lines, but I don't think that is enough. I haven't seen a city with more bikes (or where cycling works better) than Copenhagen, and it's full of bike lanes (the vast majority of them proper, segregated bike lanes, not painted, of course).

Which cities have you cycle in to compare them with Copenhagen? (Assuming you did actually cycle in Copenhagen).

Madrid, Barcelona, London, Paris, Berlin, apart from other smaller cities in several countries. And yes, I also cycled in Copenhagen. Have to confess I haven't been to Amsterdam, which is also considered an extremely bike-friendly city, though.

Re: Cycling commissioners say painted bike lanes don’t make cyclists feel safer

#77

Post by C1sc0cat »

dmurray wrote: post #64
jessaustin wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Could you define that term? All I'm getting are "a formal pledge or promise" and "the occupation of an undertaker".

Undertaking = passing on the left, in a system where traffic is meant to drive on the left and pass on the right. By analogy with overtaking, for passing on the right. Cyclists (in a bike lane or not) undertaking heavier vehicles certainly are involved in a lot of serious accidents. However it's a very twisted view of reality to say that this causes accidents. The proximate cause is the heavy vehicles turning left or…

No if you take very risky action you do cause accidents - and you do bear some responsibility.

Re: Cycling commissioners say painted bike lanes don’t make cyclists feel safer

#78

Post by em-bee »

jessaustin wrote: post #47
protonimitate wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Intersections are dangerous for sure, but I think it mostly depends on the city and driving culture each has. One thing that segregated lanes help immensely with is double-parking in painted bike lanes, and bus routes that weave in and out of bike lanes to make their stops. Ideally we'd have both segregated lanes and protected intersections.

bus routes that weave in and out of bike lanes Have you really found this to be a problem? Everywhere I've lived and cycled, buses are the most predictable vehicles on the road. When they approach from behind, they leave plenty of space. They rarely go very fast. They stop often enough that you'd never get stuck behind them. Unlike a lot of other "professionally driven" vehicles, they know where they're going and don…

> They stop often enough that you'd never get stuck behind them.

depends on your locality. the experience i have is that because of the stops, the bus travel speed matches that of a bike. so when you are close to a bus you are passing the bus every time it stops only to be passed by the bus on the way to the next stop.

you then always have to watch out to not get in the way of passengers, or in the busses blind spots.

a totally seperate path gives me the peace of mind that i only have to worry about pedestrians and not try to avoid getting into the way of bigger vehicles.

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