Reply to Road Diets Coming to Fairfax County

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]"Road diet."

If the public actually wanted this, they wouldn't have to come up with an Orwellian euphemism to describe it.

"Road diets" in DC mean lots and lots of bike lanes than no one uses and worse congestion for modes of transportation that people actually use. [/quote]

I can understand that it may be hard to see people in the bike lanes from your basement in Chevy Chase. But I travel all over DC daily and see a lot of cyclists using them.[/quote]

The question is about utilization, not whether people use them at all. The utilization is so low that it doesn’t make sense to add bike lanes at the expense of car lanes. [/quote]

I'm not sure you understand how traffic works. Cities can build as many roads as you want and make them as wide as you want and the end result will always be congestion. Almost any large metropolis in the world - outside of a few in Asia and Europe that strongly discourage driving - will provide evidence of this. The only durable way to reduce congestion is to provide viable alternatives to driving your vehicle everywhere. Providing a safe means for people to use their bikes for short trips around town is one way to do this. Judging the success of bike lanes on their usage immediately after construction is silly. It inevitably takes some time to build out the network for bike trips to become a viable alternative and to build awareness of the alternative. It took me many years of living in the DC area before I rode my first bike, but my life became much easier after I took it up.[/quote]

Nonsense. DC has had bike lanes for 20 years. We have lots of experience with this stuff. It turns out that bike lanes only appeal to a tiny share of the population, and even that share is steadily shrinking. There's fewer people riding bikes in DC than there were five years ago. The bike lanes are so unpopular that the city, which has relentlessly promoted them, has rarely released usage data because the numbers are so low. [/quote]

You cry "Nonsense" and then proceed to fill an entire post with it. I've lived in DC over the past 20 years and can't recall any bike lanes that existed in 2005. Maybe there was one or two, but nothing like what the city has today, which is nonetheless a sparse smattering of disjointed segments rather than an actual network. The Capital Bikeshare data - which is freely available and in fact shows almost exponential growth over the past few years - strongly suggests that you are dead wrong about the number of people riding bikes. Any other fibs you want to share with us?[/quote]

Two things can be true:
1. People are renting Capital Bikeshare bikes in record numbers.
2. The routes for which Capital Bikeshare users ride the bikes usually don't involve bike lanes.[/quote]

The anti-bike lane poster claimed that fewer people are riding bikes in DC than five years ago. The Capital Bikeshare usage data demonstrates that this is very unlikely to be the case, Moreover, the claim that the DC government is not releasing usage data is simply "nonsense". See here: https://bikelanes.ddot.dc.gov/pages/manual-counts and here: https://ddot.dc.gov/page/dc-automated-bicycle-and-pedestrian-counters. Plenty of data that is freely available to anyone who can type words in Google.[/quote]

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