On Monday, October 16, 2017 at 4:08:32 AM UTC-4, wrote:


Thankfully I live in a city that has miles and miles of bike trails in town and out of town. Several hundred miles in total trails. It definitely helps get people on bicycles. There is a bar/town about 10 miles down one trail. In the summer there are several hundred people riding to the bar and back several evenings a week. I don't really care if the net benefit is a detriment to them or not. Or whether they are healthy or not. As long as they are riding a bike, its good. The trails see a lot of activity. I don't know if these people would bicycle without trails or not. Some would not. Some would.

I think there's no doubt that bike trails get more people on bikes... on the
bike trails. They function as linear parks, and they're popular that way. As
I've said, I enjoy well-designed bike trails, except when they're crowded.
The random motions of pedestrians and novice cyclists can be scary.

Well-designed, well maintained Bike trails generally a good thing, but there are
a few detriments. One is that they are frequently promoted and funded as
"transportation" facilities. They really should be paid for out of park funds,
because in almost all cases, 99% of their use is recreation, not transportation.
That would allow their rather high cost to be applied to real bike
transportation problems.

They're also promoted (e.g. by Joerg) as facilities that will cause great
surges in bike mode share. But that almost never happens, mostly because most
of them use abandoned rail line routes that don't connect enough traffic
generators. So boosting mode share is a false sales pitch.

Another problem is the idea that if bike trails exist, cyclists should not ride
on roads. This idea is in the mind of some motorists, like those that have
yelled "get on the bike trail" when I was on a quiet country road nowhere near
a trail.

But that mentality also exists among some cyclists. The major long-distance
bike trail in our area has a gap of a few miles where the owners of the
right-of-way don't want to sell. It's no problem, because it's parallel to a
very quiet country road. But some riders complain that they can't ride beyond
the gap because they'd have to ride on (gasp!) a road. In one online discussion
where I pointed out how peaceful the road is, I was told "Some of us just don't
want to ride on roads."

So, while I'm OK with building bike trails, I'd like them to be promoted and
financed more honestly. And I think we need to do plenty of education, plus
enough legal work, to ensure that we aren't forced off the roads onto the
trails.

- Frank Krygowski