Bike lanes on Richmond-San Rafael Bridge are contributing to pollution, drivers say
Bike lanes on Richmond-San Rafael Bridge seen as contributing to pollution, traffic
cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/32627207
Honestly unsure what they were thinking with a 5 mile bike lane where the major population centers are a few miles from each end of the bridge and with no safe bike infrastructure between the bridge and those pop centers. Sure you can ride across the bridge but…to where? This project almost feels designed to fail and make bikes look bad.
I'll bet the lane is there purely to satisfy some requirement for including non-car infrastructure, regardless of whether it makes sense in this particular location. It's the same way we get fun bike lanes like these:
Do you live here? There are major population centers on both sides of the bridge (Richmond on one end, San Rafael on the other) and the Ohlone trail + Richmond Greenway means you can ride a bike from Emeryville all the way to the bridge quite easily.
That said it's a beast of a commute to ride. I'd say 90% of the bikers I see on there aren't using it to commute but are using it for exercise/pleasure cycling. I do see about 10% of bikers on ebikes that could make this a viable commute.
I lived there a while ago. Emeryville is what, several miles from the end of the bridge? Pleasure riding sure, but as the article said, no one is actually using these to get to work.
Some years ago now, a bunch of bike lanes got added to the streets in my city. The city did a big project of adding them and afterwards proudly declared that X number of kilometers of bike lanes had been made.
When an investigation was done into how the decision process had gone for where to add them it turned out that the only consideration had been "how cheap is it to add bike lanes in these locations?" Not "would bike lanes actually be used in these locations?" They were solely trying to maximize the kilometers-of-lane-per-dollar-spent so that they could put out that headline with as big a number as possible.
Subsequent studies showed that a lot of those lanes weren't being used by bikes in any significant number. Bike lanes had been added on streets that ran alongside sidewalks that were already designated bike paths. I'm a bike rider myself, some lanes were added in my neighborhood but they somehow managed to put them everywhere except the routes I usually took. The city wound up spending a bunch more money to remove a bunch of the bike lanes that were doing nothing but increasing congestion.
It may be that this was a similar situation, where someone wanted to proudly show off headlines of how they'd pushed for bike access and got X numbers of kilometers installed and those were the only real metrics that mattered.
i noticed this in sf too.
Your argument seems to be that nobody should ever start anything unless it's a complete, end-to-end solution at the end of Phase 1.
When the period of evaluation is only 4 years and nothing is done to integrate the solution, then yeah, you probably shouldn’t waste time/money on it.
It has been proven time and again that adding lanes does not reduce traffic, but reducing number of lanes actually can.
https://www.sfchronicle.com/opinion/openforum/article/adding-freeway-lanes-traffic-20390021.php
If my math is correct - those sick bikers are just carbo-loading & farting so much they don't even use pedals.
(It's the only way it would make sense.)
I can't say anything about your math, but I can say that you didn't read the article.
(Oh, did the fart-propulsion give it away? I'll add the "/s" next time.)
the core issue is that there is too little road space for the number of cars that ply that route and too much road space for the bikes that are ridden there.
it seems to one that an easier fix would be for more people to give up driving in favour of riding bikes.
You’re out of your mind if you think taking out car lanes is going to make people start a 15 mile bike commute to work.
That bike lane is 100% recreational.
Well, that's exactly what I do since last year. I use an electric bike (converted from a mechanical one), and if it takes time, it is actually faster than taking my car (40 minutes vs 1h+).
And I do it even in the winter, when we get bellow zero temperatures. I just dresses warmly.
Edit : The bike (Le Petit Porteur Longtail, wasn't yet electrified at the time of this picture)
That's pretty much what I do daily.
have you tried car pooling or transit?
no the bikes are the problem!!!
I'm genuinely too fatigued to figure out the logic behind this brainfart.
Can someone eli5 pls
Entitled people will grasp at any straw to blame everyone but themselves. While very blue, the Bay Area is still very car centric and people lose their minds over the slightest inconvenience against driving. I suspect their rationale here is that taking a lane away for driving and giving it to bikers means more traffic on the bridge and more pollution. Let’s not forget that all the people in Marin county routinely block initiatives to expand large scale public transit (ie our subway system BART) from SF and Contra Costa counties. They just want to drive their car and keep the “undesirables” out of their neighborhood.
Makes sense, thanks.
Just one more lane bro
What’s wild to me is that you can fully support bike lanes, but the moment you suggest we educate cyclist on how they work and cyclists flip out. Like the mere mention of education sends them into convulsions.
My town put up bike lanes everywhere, and I constantly have to dodge bikes on the sidewalk when I’m walking my toddler. And the bike lane next to the sidewalk sits empty right next to us. Most of the bike lanes are not on the road and if they are it’s never on a main or busy road. I’ve heard complains that bike lanes can be scary for the cyclists, well you zipping by me and my kid is scary for the pedestrian.
So I think educating cyclists on how bike lanes work and enforcing them is crucial, otherwise what’s the point of them? The sad part is when I say “we should build bike lanes and make sure the people using them are educated on how they work and how the road laws and pedestrian yielding works” and everyone loses their mind.
Its not about education its about proper planning to make them simple. When the lane lasts for half a street then randomly ends or has no plan that's why people stop using them.
For balance this should also be cross posted to Fuck Bikes.
