Reply to Will DC resume commuter traffic patterns in the fall?

Forum Index » Metropolitan DC Local Politics

Reply to "Will DC resume commuter traffic patterns in the fall?"

Subject:

Emoticons





More smilies

Text Color: Font: Close Marks

[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]

Bike lanes reduce the number of people who can use roads, which reduces the circulation of people in a city. Not sure what's controversial about that observation. [/quote]

Bike lanes[u] increase [/u]the number of people who can use roads.

I mean, just think about it. What occupies more space, 1 person on a bicycle, or 1 person in a car?[/quote]

Look at all the bike lanes the city has put in downtown. What is that going to do? It's going to discourage people from coming downtown because it's going to be too much of a hassle to park, and traffic downtown will be a lot worse.

Some fraction of the people who drove downtown will still come downtown via other means, such as the subway. But most will probably just go somewhere else because there's nothing *that* special about downtown that people can't get elsewhere. (Lots of people can also just work from home). A few more people will ride bicyclists downtown but probably not that many because the number of bikers in DC is small to begin with. The net effect will be the reduce the total number of people who come downtown.

That will disrupt the entire economy downtown. The amounts restaurants pay for rent for example are keyed off assumptions about how many people they'll serve. If their customer bases suddenly shrink, because now it's too much trouble for people to actually get to their restaurant, then those rents suddenly don't make sense. [/quote]

How many new bike lanes have even been planned and built during the pandemic? Many of the bike lanes you're objecting to were already there. The reason people aren't coming downtown right now is because offices are still closed; it's not because there's marginally less space to drive (or, mostly, park) in on the way there. What evidence do you have that bike lanes -- and bike lanes alone -- are responsible for reducing business to restaurants in the urban core?[/quote]

Options

	Disable HTML in this message
	Disable BB Code in this message
	Disable smilies in this message

Review message

Search Recent Topics Hottest Topics