Reply to Connecticut Ave bike lanes are back!

Forum Index » Metropolitan DC Local Politics

Reply to "Connecticut Ave bike lanes are back!"

Subject:

Emoticons





More smilies

Text Color: Font: Close Marks

[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Why will it be a good thing for drivers that bikes will now just take the while travel lane to ride this making everyone behind them slow to a crawl? How is that better than a dedicated bike lane? [/quote]

[b]Its not exactly clear to me, but drivers probably think bike riders will either cease to exist or get in a car instead if there are no bike lanes. [/b]Why drivers want more cars on the road with them continues to confound me, so I'm guessing they think they just poof out of existence.

[/quote]

It's not exactly clear to me, but bike riders seem to think that drivers will either cease to exist or get on a bike instead if we just keep adding to the more than 150 miles of bike lanes DC already has. [/quote]

People use infrastructure after it is built. The more bike lanes (actual good ones that is) get built, the more people ride bikes. This isn't a mystery, as its well documented around the world. The pandemic put a dent in DC ridership, but its growing again. Keep building bike lanes, and people will convert car trips to bike trips (its often faster already!). Once they do that, they start advocating for more infrastructure and so forth.

That's what drivers actually fear, not that the bike lanes will be empty. The possibility of cars losing their primacy, and all the identity issues tied to that are the real issues. [/quote]

The only people with identity issues tied to transportation are bicyclists.  Everyone else just wants to get places as efficiently and hassle free as possible.[/quote]

Most people who ride bikes to work also don't have any identity wrapped up in it, and they also just want to get around without a hassle. For me, it's just as fast to bike to work as it is to Metro (and only about 5 minutes slower getting home), but it's better exercise than riding the subway is. It's not more efficient -- that's what makes it better exercise -- but "as hassle free as possible" is pretty much the exact definition of what people on bikes are hoping for from protected bike lanes.[/quote]

I get that and appreciate what you are saying.  The problem is that the advocates for this particular project are demanding that driving, on an extremely congested road during rush hour, become even more hassled.  Connecticut is just a very bad road for this type of project and the amount of people that benefit is so few.

Honestly, the real breakdown is between people that use the road during peak hours and those that use it in the middle of the day.  Something like making the third lanes car only during rush hour and bike/bus only during the day would have been agreeable to most but there is a subset of people that demanded punishment above all else.[/quote]

It is DDOT, not the bike advocates, who are  proposing and implementing 24/7 parking on both sides. Bike advocates supported the 24/7 parking on one side with bike lanes taking the other car lane. Instead the project opponents said that cars would be diverted on to side streets, that emergency equiment would get stuck in traffic and so on. But instead of addressing the project opponent concerns, DDOT simply said screw it, we will do Concept C except without bike lanes. It is really a worse solution for everyone. It is hard to understand why project opponents support this solution, given their stated concerns still exist.

Maybe for them, it wasn't about their stated concerns, but rather a weird anti-bike fetish?[/quote]

It really isn't.  The issue is that removing two lanes during rush hour will indeed do everything thing that the opponents say it will.  It will increase congestion which will increase accidents during the times that most of the accidents occur.  It will divert traffic onto side streets during the times kids are walking and biking to and from school.

It'll be fine midday but that's not when the majority of traffic is.

[b]The opponents don't support the new plan any more than the old plan[/b] because the same problems exist. It's still a bad plan.  The only difference is that there is a sense of schadenfreude regarding the people that pushed the entire mess in the first place.[/quote]

This is actually false. The Save Connecticut Avenue people have been posting around town that they are happy with the DDOT proposal. In other words, all of the doom and gloom they "opposed" was a ruse because all the really opposed was bike lanes.[/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