On 4/4/2021 6:07 PM, Ralph Barone wrote:

snip

While not strictly “necessary”, car free facilities can certainly be more
enjoyable to ride, in much the same way that active logging roads aren’t
always the most enjoyable automobile experience.

This “linear park” is near my house and I ride it often. Many other people
also enjoy riding it.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gall...Regional_Trail

Exactly.

If the goal is to make riding more enjoyable, and to get more people out
riding, both for transportation or for pleasure, it's necessary to
understand what is preventing people from riding and address those
concerns. Proclaiming "well I have no problem riding in traffic and
therefore no one else should either" is exceptionally selfish and foolish.

In my area, the county water district encourages the development of
multi-use paths along waterways (creeks and rivers). Since roads usually
already have bridges over these waterways it's pretty easy to construct
a path that has very few, if any, surface road crossings. The waterways
also happen to often run from housing-rich areas to jobs-rich areas.

While you can't reach the same peak speeds riding on these paths that
you can on roads, the dearth of traffic lights and stop signs generally
makes your average speed higher, and it's a lot more pleasant to be able
to ride 10-15 miles without constantly stopping and starting. These
multi-use paths are extremely popular.

Cities and counties in my area have also constructed a lot of
bicycle/pedestrian crossings of freeways and railroad tracks that allow
cyclists to avoid dangerous intersections which are an impediment to
getting people on bicycles. Sometimes there are already arterial roads
that cross freeways but don't have freeway entrances and exits, but not
always.

Here's an example of a jobs-rich area where my wife's office is now, and
where my company used to be located, and right next to Intel's corporate
headquarters https://goo.gl/maps/HyTtkhAw7xjAbkLZ9. It was miserable
commuting across US 101 on a bicycle with those high-speed cloverleaf
freeway interchanges (freeway entrances/exits with traffic lights on all
the entrance and exit ramps are not so bad). The San Tomas Aquino Creek
trail goes under 101 about halfway between the two freeway interchanges.
The trail continues past Levi's stadium all the way to other trails that
connect up to jobs rich areas and you can go all the way up to Mountain
View by Google, and on to Palo Alto and Menlo Park (Facebook), or turn
east to go by Cisco. Even before it was an official trail, and wasn't
paved, you could use it if you were on a bicycle with proper tires.

Another once-miserable ride was to get to companies east of 101 in
Mountain View (Google, Microsoft, NASA, and in the past Silicon
Graphics, Alza, etc.). I once worked in that area as well, see
https://goo.gl/maps/94LuFXmmqdCEwMTg8. The Stevens Creek Trail is
very heavily used as a commuter route and has many intersecting shorter
trails. With the advent of electric bicycles it's become even busier.

Bicycle lanes on the shoulder of roads are even less costly, but the
reality is that painted lines have been ineffective at getting vehicles
to share the road. So a city could either hire a lot more police
officers to drive around constantly citing errant drivers or they can
put in inexpensive infrastructure that prevents errant behavior. That
errant behavior includes: a) using the bicycle lane as a motor vehicle
lane, especially as a very long right-turn lane, b) using the bicycle
lane as a parking area, c) using the bicycle lane as a lane to wait to
turn into a crowded parking lot, d) using the bicycle lane as place to
park construction or service vehicles working on a house or business, e)
using the bicycle lane as a loading and unloading zone, f) police using
the bicycle lane as a convenient place to pull motor vehicles over to
write tickets, g) motorists pulling off into the bicycle lane to take a
phone call or to enter an address into their navigation app or GPS, the
list goes on and on. These protected bike lanes don't have "walls" as
one clueless poster here likes to claim, unless a curb is really just a
very low wall, see https://goo.gl/maps/h3XUU5KCvk2PmBZx5.

A separated bike lane is not costly and solves most of the problems
listed above. The question to ask is whether public roads should be
designed for road users of all kinds, or should they be designed solely
for the convenience of motor vehicle owners. Most of the complaints
about the installation of protected bicycle lanes were along the lines
of "where am I going to park?" or "where will my gardener park his truck?"

Another issue to get people out of their cars is to address security
when parked. Installing lockers and/or secure parking devices helps with
this. In areas with parking shortages, the cost of these facilities is
lost in the noise compared to the cost of adding vehicle parking spaces
(there are often minimum parking requirements for office, retail, and
commercial space based on the type of business, and the number of
expected employees and customers). A parking garage costs between
$40,000 and $80,000 per space to construct, or you can pave over green
space for about $5000 per space, but few people think that converting
parks and playing fields into parking lots is a good idea).