Build it and they will come - but where are they?

On 4/21/2018 4:14 PM, Frank Krygowski wrote:
On 4/21/2018 4:03 PM, sms wrote:

In my house, the new infrastructure has resulted in an
100% increase of household members cycling to work.


OK.

In our house and in our previous house, I cycled to work
using no special segregated infrastructure at all. Nobody
else cycled to work. But given that my wife had home health
medical clients all across the county, that's not surprising.

Near the houses of each of our adult kids, there are bike
lanes and/or separate MUPs. Nobody in those families cycles
to work. One still rides occasionally, including some trips
to the store, but puts in far more miles running. The other
doesn't ride at all, despite bike lanes right outside the
front door.

More interesting to me is visiting the town where one kid
lives. Yes, there are bike lanes. Yes, they have gravel in
them. They just don't have bikes in them - IOW, I see about
two bikes per year using the lanes.

One of those lanes is on my normal route to their local
hardware store. It runs along the curb past a playground all
the way up to a T intersection, where almost all traffic
turns right. It's an invitation to a right hook crash.


Frank, you don't see the big picture.

If a couple million dollars of pavement and striping in
Santa Clara increased a household's commuters from one to
two, then it's clear that if the nation would merely replace
all structures with underground bunkers and pave everything
dead smooth, without curbs or automobile lanes, we could
have 330 million commuters! Extrapolate, man!

--
Andrew Muzi
www.yellowjersey.org/
Open every day since 1 April, 1971