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

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Most recent available Census ACS data (2019) shows the following stats on commuting by DC residents
127k drive alone
21k carpool or vanpool
133k take mass transit
51k walk
25k ride bikes, motorcycles, or take taxi
28k worked from home

Fewer should be driving alone, more should be taking mass transit and other methods.

[/quote]
As indicated by this data, it would not even be justifiable if these were combined bicycle, motorcycle and taxi lanes. But they are solely bike lanes, [/quote]

What is the cost, as you see it, of the bike lanes? In most cases, they don't take up a full lane of traffic; they maybe take out some parking, but not always. Most of the bike lanes I ride in when I commute to my office aren't set off with any physical barrier at all, so if cars really need to be in them, they can be (and often are). Significant portions of the city still have "sharrows"-style bike lanes, which are just regular street lanes indicating that you should try not to hit the cyclists in them.

But the whole point of installing more bike infrastructure is to make more people feel safe biking. So arguing against it because not enough people are using it yet is sort of circular. Also, it's far worse to have bikes riding on the sidewalk than it is to have them riding in the street -- much more dangerous to more people if they're mixing with pedestrians. Unless you want to argue that we should ban bikes in order to make it as easy as possible for cars to get around the city, bike lanes are the better option for any riders who aren't comfortable in the street.[/quote]
How much should it cost to make people feel psychologically better about their transportation choices?

The way DDOTDC is rolling out protected bike lanes right now, they on average consume about a third of right of way in the streets where they are installed. DDOTDC estimates that bicycles represent about 4.5% of DC resident commuter modal share, which would be 1 in 20 of DC commuters and clearly very generous. This is less than half of the modal share of people who walk to work. Allocating a third of right of way to such a small modal share is inefficient and makes little sense considering low capacity throughput rates for even the successful bike lanes. For example, the 15TH ST Cycletrack, which cyclists used to complain was too crowded to be safe, had peak utilization of about 2/3 of the single vehicle traffic lane it replaced. Even if every single vehicle was single passenger, it’s just less efficient at moving people around but some leeway should be acceptable and can be granted because at least it’s maximizing utilization for the modal form of transportation that it’s designed for. What’s should not acceptable is to allocate right of way that served 2000 transportation users needs per day in vehicles for a 38 bicycles.

Where bike lanes get high utilization they should stay. If they don’t, they should be removed and the resources allocated to alternative transportation options that are more efficient, and hopefully transit. [/quote]

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