Why do some car lovers oppose bike infrastructure, when more bikes would mean fewer cars on the road?
Like you sit in traffic for an hour each day to work. Wouldn’t you want to halve that by having more other people use bicycles instead?
Why do some car lovers oppose bike infrastructure, when more bikes would mean fewer cars on the road?
Like you sit in traffic for an hour each day to work. Wouldn’t you want to halve that by having more other people use bicycles instead?
I used to ride a bike every day for 15 years, I’m currently a car driver.
The big problem is when design desisions are made without considering all users.
For example where I used to live they divided the pavment into two, one side for pedestrians one for bikes. The only thing making this divide was a line of paint. This meant that you had to dodge pedestrians who didn’t like the bikes encroaching on their area whilst also having to deal with crossing junctions.
If you stuck to the road in the same area you could get a much higher speed as you didn’t have to deal with obsticals. The big problem was now in the eyes of the car drivers you weren’t supposed to be on the road as you had your own lane on the pavement.
Similarly, in a nearby area they decided to try and take a lane away from the cars to make a cycle lane. The issue being they ignored the fact that most people needed to take a turn that crossed the lanes, the only way to do that was to leave the cycle lane and join the cars, but again you have your own lane and the car drivers don’t think you’re allowed in theirs anymore and you’ve made their traffic worse.
This kind of infrastructure led to so many negative encounters for me that I gave up riding all together.
The problem tends to be that these kinds of infrastructure changes are only done as token gestures and are rarely well thought out. When these kinds of changes are done well it can be fantastic but those occurrences are rare so everyone defaults to the defeatist stance of the changes will cause more problems than they solve.
It’s a catch 22, you need to build new infrastructure that is good and works, to stop people being against it but it can’t be built because people only know the bad examples that have been built in the past.
There’s been a bunch of bad design around me, too.
For example, they decided to eliminate a lane of traffic, shift the street parking out into the road farther, and build a “protected” bike lane between the parked cars and the sidewalk. Except there’s a bunch of driveways for parking lots, and side streets, for cars to want to turn into, and now all the cyclists were invisible to the motorists because they were separated by the row of parked crossovers. If you rode at anything more than a walking pace, slowing or stopping at every curb cut to look for cars, you’d get hit by someone that had no hope of seeing you.
I guess enough people got hit by cars, because after about a year they moved the car parking back against the curb, and the cycle lane back to the traffic side. Though the road was still less one car lane in an area where there had been a perfectly good bike lane before all the improvements. I used to ride that road a lot. I don’t anymore.
Another thing that’s popular now is painting the entire bicycle lane with green paint. Because cycling is green! But that paint is a lot more slick than pavement when wet. It’s awful to ride on.