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

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[quote=Anonymous][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. [b]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.[/b]

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]

Where is the evidence for this claim? I have seen it - or some variation on it - raised time and again on this thread, but never, ever, [i]ever[/i] with a single shred of evidence. Not thought experiments, evidence. Where is the evidence that bike lanes make traffic a lot worse?

The rest of your post embodies the Yogi Berra quote: "nobody goes there anymore, it's too crowded." If it's too much trouble to go downtown, why is the traffic so bad? Could it be because of all of the people who want to go downtown?[/quote]

Well, there's more than one way traffic can get worse, isn't there? One is obviously is you increase the number of cars. The other is if you decreases the capacity of streets to accommodate traffic. The latter is what happens when you add bike lanes -- you reduce the amount of car traffic the road can handle. You can end up with worse traffic even if the total number of cars has declined. [/quote]

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