We Need to Dream Bigger Than Bike Lanes

This is the kind of thing I read a lot in micromobility advocacy articles, but it seems like it can't be true. How can a bike, scooter, or moped be either faster or higher-bandwidth than a car?

Also, serious question: if electric SDCs became widespread, would it still make sense to advocate things like bikes?

You can't transport a family of three or a baby as safely in a vehicle smaller than a car (as they lack things like walls and air bags), and the many obese, elderly, and disabled people in the US can't use micromobility easily.

Bicycles can do more on account of less spacing front/back and side to side. (This is sort of surprising given that bikes have a slower top speed, but it's really the time-spacing between vehicles, not their top speed, that matters when you're operating at capacity.) Bus can do more on account of being more passengers per vehicle. Trains are denser yet. All these have drawbacks on other metrics, of course.

Pushing people out of cars would probably speed up the cars that are used by reducing the traffic around them. Families can handle more than you'd expect, and I regularly ride the bus with elderly and disabled people, but even if you have someone that needs a car, they don't necessarily need a parking space at each end.

Streets are typically city-owned and managed though, and if you’re in a place with a tax regime like California’s, then you’re in a place that relies heavily on things like sales taxes and capital gains taxes which tend to go down the gutter, because good old fashioned property taxes, while extant, are not nearly adequate enough when 1. the assessed value of a property is completely disconnected from the market value which 2. leads to an illiquid property market which artificially inflates prices and 3. the actual property tax rate is largely outside the hands of the people who need to draw up a budget(supervisors, councilors, legislators).

So you want more and better bike infrastructure? I want more and better bike infrastructure. I know! Let’s pay for it! But how are we going to? We could tax and spend, but now you need to see if voters would like more and better bike infrastructure. Oh I know! We can tax the future taxpayers! Sell bonds. Kick the can down the road. I’m sure there is nothing wrong with that.

So now we know how we’re going to pay for it, how much are we going to pay? Well, how much do you like unions. If you’re a union guy, you have no incentive to get the job done any faster than on time, and plenty of incentives to not get it done on time. Well what about contractors? Small business owners have every incentive to get the job done on time because after this, they’ve got their next job to move onto. The more projects they can work in a calendar year, the more money they can make.

Ah, but you don’t want them to just go in wily nilly, make a mess of things and disrupt the flow of traffic and business, wake up the neighborhood and just make things generally unpleasant! You’ve gotta have rules! Sure, you’ve gotta have rules. In fact, you’ve gotta have an environmental impact report, confine portions of the project to certain days, confine actual work to certain hours, have adequate signage posted everywhere, and marketing fluff posted all over about how all this “stuff” is going to make life worth living (here) even better! All of which costs time and costs money. And quite a lot of this really just extends the time it takes a project to complete.

Like Irving Street, San Francisco. An extensive project to kick two or three bus stops down the road and extend the sidewalk a few feet on a couple of street corners which has taken, I don’t have a number on this, but well over a calendar year and has either just wrapped up or is about to wrap up. Actually I take that back, I just remembered part of the project is to move a couple of stops to 5th or 6th Avenue, the ones at 4th and 7th precisely are to be consolidated in the middle, and last I checked that ain’t finished. To say nothing of the numerous public meetings that must have gone into this project.

It was even a good plan, it just took too damn long. But hopefully we can repeat this process block by block, and create dedicated bike infrastructure of the kind that would make a Dutchman feel right at home, and if it takes 30 years and enough money to fund a train between San Francisco and Los Angeles, then who cares because we’re rich and therefore time and money don’t mean anything at all! Even if you only have the same 80 or so years to love and live as everyone else.

So let’s dream big, and maybe tackle the crisis or more like tragedy that is well, every single part of a modern day public project from start to finish so we can maybe build some bike superhighways from here to six blocks down the road within one human lifetime and only a little bit over budget.