Reply to D.C. needs to get a lot more car friendly

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][b]The premise of a lot of cycling people is that there is pent up demand of people who want to bicycle but who don’t because they feel unsafe.

What if people just don’t like riding bicycles? It’s seems like an impossible thing for these pro-bike people to fathom.

One of the most supposedly most successful bike paths in the country is the CCT.  Even on its best days of the year it’s a fraction of one lane of average daily traffic volume on any basic arterial road. The other successful bike in the city, the 15th Street cycletrack, on peak days does not even replace 25% of the average daily traffic volume of the one lane that it replaced. Meanwhile, cyclist complain that they feel unsafe because the two way traffic is too narrow and they are lobbying to widen it.

The fact is, even successful bicycle infrastructure is extremely inefficient and wasteful use of public resources in doing the thing that transportation infrastructure is supposed to do, move people around quickly.

Sooner or later smart cities will come to this conclusion too.[/b] [/quote]

The proof is in the pudding. Look at bike lanes in the city. They're empty. People simply aren't using them. We can't dedicate all of our resources to the tiny number of white people who are really into bikes. [/quote]

Clearly you don't actually live in DC and only know your commute and the immediate area around it.  There are some bike corridors that do get a lot of use.   Also, it's not just "white people" who bike in DC.

But whatever.  Let's apply your own logic of "they aren't used, so the resources should go elsewhere" - the formerly-4-lane L St NW corridor that was lamented earlier in this thread is only that busy for a short period of time during rush hour.  So why should we then put all the resources into it when that's not warranted 90% of the time?   That's YOUR logic here after all...[/quote]
The data is online. No one needs to guess. The number of people using bicycles right now is indistinguishable from zero. While it may go back up when the weather improves, it’s a terrible use of public resources. 
[/quote]

One goal of devoting public resources to improving bike infrastructure is to make it easier for more people to bike to work, which would... increase the number. Cars driven by individual commuters are also a terrible use of public resources, for reasons other than just the sheer number of people who benefit, which probably should not be the sole determining factor.[/quote]
But no one is biking to work right now. It’s a bad use of public resources to pay full cost to maintain roads and then force them sit idle for months. The government should prioritize use of public resources to ensure that their utility is maximized. I’m not arguing for cars. I’m arguing against setting aside scarce resources for bicycle lanes which have low capacity rates. Even bad transit serves more people, more efficiently than protected bicycle lanes. You want to save the climate? Even a few thousand people on bicycles isn’t going to do it. Turn protected bicycle lanes into protected transit lanes instead and run trolley buses along the same corridors. It will have a much larger impact.  [/quote]

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