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#21
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More from the UK: "Bike lanes save lives of drivers as well ascyclists, study finds"
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#22
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More from the UK: "Bike lanes save lives of drivers as well ascyclists, study finds"
On Friday, May 31, 2019 at 6:29:59 AM UTC-7, wrote:
On Friday, May 31, 2019 at 12:43:29 PM UTC+2, sms wrote: On 5/30/2019 10:14 PM, wrote: snip Maybe you should come and look here in the Netherlands how we do it. Along roads with a 80 km/hr speed limit all the bicycle lanes are seperated.. I think that you must have better drivers than in my area. The big issue here is vehicles on slower roads not staying out of the non-separated bike lanes. No bike lane at all is better than a bike lane with a vehicle parked illegally in it because it causes cyclists to suddenly veer into a vehicle lane to get around it. I think the big difference is that drivers are used to bicyclists because they ride a bicycle themselves or have in the past. Getting a drivers license is much harder here I think. Getting along with cyclist is a big part of driving lessons. 'look in your mirrors', look over your shoulder', 'use your indicators in the correct' are phrases you here a lot during driving lessons. Lack of education or intelligence is a serious problem here and a problem with bike lanes generally. If motorists simply understood that a bike lane was a "lane" and that they had to look for traffic before changing lanes, at least half of the right-hooks would be eliminated. I think very few drivers know the traffic laws or what their obligations are to bicycles and pedestrians. And a lot of pedestrians think that the laws requiring vehicles to yield to pedestrians in crossing facilities give them carte blanche to just leap into traffic. I have pedestrians step in front of me when I'm in the intersection first -- and they get huffy that I didn't slam on the brakes and go OTB when they stepped or ran off the curb (often runners who don't stop at intersections). And don't get me going on runners in the bike lanes.. -- Jay Beattie. |
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More from the UK: "Bike lanes save lives of drivers as well as cyclists, study finds"
Andre Jute writes:
On Friday, May 31, 2019 at 1:37:31 AM UTC+1, AMuzi wrote: "need for future research" Boilerplate. Just as teachers' union officials always add something about higher school taxes for the government schools, outcomes and efficiency be damned. What researcher ever called for less research? -- Andrew Muzi www.yellowjersey.org/ Open every day since 1 April, 1971 Hold on a minute there, young man. I have often said that my research projects would go faster if I were funded to do them in St Tropez, especially the one which requires measuring the upper thighs of women to check whether Dr Kinsey got it right when he claimed that in the generation since pasteurisation of milk American women put on 3 inches around the upper thigh, and of course how universally relevant his claim has now become, urgent work that no one else is even suggesting. Nothing like undulant fever for keeping a girlish figure. |
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More from the UK: "Bike lanes save lives of drivers as well ascyclists, study finds"
On Thursday, May 30, 2019 at 1:00:54 PM UTC-7, Frank Krygowski wrote:
On 5/30/2019 11:48 AM, sms wrote: Well actually it's from the U.S., reported in the UK. https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/bike-lane-cycling-road-safety-driver-deaths-fatalities-a8934841.html "With added bike lanes, fatal crash rates dropped in Seattle (by 61 per cent), San Francisco (by 49 per cent), Denver (by 40 per cent) and Chicago (by 38 per cent)." Cue the "Danger Danger" people to dispute the study. Maybe it wasn't the bike lanes at all, maybe it was more people wearing helmets--wait that couldn't be. Maybe it was more disc brakes. Maybe it was risk compensation. Did gardening injuries go up or down? Right, we're not allowed to dispute the study, because it conforms to Scharf's prejudices. Scharf saw the British propaganda ad for the study. I saw the one published in America. I'd read the paper, but the advertisement seems to be premature; the article's not available yet. But the American promotion publicity for the paper makes it clear that Ferenchak and Marshall remain masters of propaganda by implication. They said "Researchers looked through 13 years of data from 12 large U.S. cities with high-bicycling mode shares, including Denver, Dallas, Portland, Ore., and Kansas City, Mo. During those [unspecified] years, the United States saw a 51% increase in bicycling to work and the number of protected bike lanes double each year starting in 2009. In a longitudinal study, the researchers investigated over 17,000 fatalities and 77,000 severe injuries." But if there was such an increase - which is debatable - "protected bike lanes doubling each year" had approximately zero relation. Why? Because there are still only about 300 miles of "protected" bike lanes in the entire nation, out of 400 million miles of roads. "Protecting" a block here and a block there - which is what's usually done - seems very unlikely to have a national effect. Also, there's the inconvenient fact that "protected" bike lanes continue to be built ("Faster than ever!" proponents would say) yet bike commuting actually dropped in recent years. See https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/...ms/2319972002/ which points out that the national bike mode share has dropped, and in certain cities, dropped precipitously despite the building of new facilities. The League of American Bicyclists' rah-rah publication https://bikeleague.org/sites/default..._2017_KM_0.pdf (with no mention of the national drop, and with numbers massaged to be as perky as possible) mentions Pittsburgh's 45.2% _drop_ from 2016 to 2017, a time when I know firsthand that the city has been furiously installing bike accommodation of all kinds. Similarly, Portland keeps adding new gizmos, but sees no parallel increase. (Just a 1% increase from 2011 to 2017, and a 0.1% increase from 2016 to 2017.) In other words: The "dose response" is absent. Bike lanes, included "protected" ones, are more common each year, but bike commuting is not increasing in parallel. That shoots down facility count as a driver for bike mode share. And U.S. bike mode share remains less than 1% overall, meaning we're talking about low counts and rare events that are subject to outsized random variation. Ferenchak and Marshall seem to have settled on a career path of massaging numbers any way possible to promote bike segregation. I'm sure they're welcomed and coached by others with that same objective. But they're not doing actual cyclists any good. -- - Frank Krygowski Locally there is a road that has a bike lane on it for about half its length. The right lane to the curb is approximately 12 feet. While riding in the bike lane the cars drive near the dividing line to the left hand lane of the two lane road in each direction road. Where the bike lane ends they immediately move over to within four feet of the curb. That these lanes are effective is undeniable. I do not pay much attention to people who worry about cars but the actions of drivers that almost entirely ignore the presence of bicycles when lanes aren't marked is pretty clear. There are several places in which cars try to keep me out of their lane coming up to a stop light and I am forced to take the lane. When you are coming to a stop why would you attempt to cut someone else off? Especially since you have to turn left and then a bike lane is there. Yesterday some jerk woman was turning right in a right turn lane, I took the next lane over which was going straight. She pulls up to me and says, "You have to learn how to ride a bicycle." I was a little tired after 35 miles as fast as I could go so I didn't say anything. There should be some method of reporting these people so that they can be retested for rules of the road knowledge. Surely the cops will do NOTHING at all unless there is a reportable accident. They watch drivers endangering bicyclists all the time and do nothing. Even in San Francisco where they have now closed off a couple of main streets to rail buses and bicycles only, cars will pull onto these streets and the cops look the other way. I can accept that as a learning curve as long as they do not threaten cyclists but that isn't the case. If the police are not going to enforce the driving laws, the bicycle lanes appear to be a workable solution. |
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More from the UK: "Bike lanes save lives of drivers as well ascyclists, study finds"
On Thursday, May 30, 2019 at 4:43:08 PM UTC-7, sms wrote:
On 5/30/2019 4:07 PM, John B. Slocomb wrote: snip "While the policy implications of this work point to protected and separated bike infrastructure as part of the solution, we need to keep in mind that these approaches are complementary and should not be considered in isolation. Moreover, our results - particularly the safety disparities associated with gentrification - suggest equity issues and the need for future research." It's also important to understand that a city doesn't need to cover every single foot (or mile) with protected bike lanes in order to make a difference. Selecting the areas where problems most often occur is often sufficient, and choosing one route out of many possible routes for a protected bike lane is adequate, you don't have to have every parallel road with identical infrastructure. This is what cities around here do, we look at where protected bike lanes will have the most effect and concentrate our financial resources on those areas. Also, be very careful when looking at the statistics of how ridership levels change. Sometimes an area will have a steady increase over a long period of time then all of a sudden have one bad year. An anomaly can be a weather event, a natural disaster, or a host of other things. Some people intentionally take numbers completely out of context in an effort to mislead people. I can tell you that bicycle commuting in Silicon Valley probably fell significantly for 2019 because we've had an extremely wet winter and spring. Last year we had an unprecedented number of bad air days due to large wildfires which led to less cycling. For example lets look at Pittsburgh, PA. From 1990 to 2017 they had a 240.4% increase in those 27 years. From 2006 to 2017 they had a 67.4% increase over 11 years. From 2011 to 2017 they had a 2% increase over six years. But there was a drop of 45.2% from 2016 to 2017. You can't ignore a long-term huge increase and then look only at a single year─ that kind of cherry=picking of statistics is extremely dishonest and is something that you often see when someone is trying to manipulate statistics to suit a particular agenda. In San Francisco the main routes through the city are protected with bike lanes. Since these routes tend to be also fast speed limits the lanes are effective. |
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More from the UK: "Bike lanes save lives of drivers as well ascyclists, study finds"
On Thursday, May 30, 2019 at 5:09:44 PM UTC-7, Frank Krygowski wrote:
On Thursday, May 30, 2019 at 7:43:08 PM UTC-4, sms wrote: On 5/30/2019 4:07 PM, John B. Slocomb wrote: snip "While the policy implications of this work point to protected and separated bike infrastructure as part of the solution, we need to keep in mind that these approaches are complementary and should not be considered in isolation. Moreover, our results - particularly the safety disparities associated with gentrification - suggest equity issues and the need for future research." It's also important to understand that a city doesn't need to cover every single foot (or mile) with protected bike lanes in order to make a difference. Selecting the areas where problems most often occur is often sufficient, and choosing one route out of many possible routes for a protected bike lane is adequate, you don't have to have every parallel road with identical infrastructure. This is what cities around here do, we look at where protected bike lanes will have the most effect and concentrate our financial resources on those areas. Yet Streetsblog, StrongTowns and others recently staged demonstrations in which they put red plastic cups upside down on white bike lane stripes. They photographed cups that had been hit by cars and said "See? Stripes are NOT ENOUGH! It's time to build PROTECTED bike lanes!" There was no "... on certain streets..." or other modifiers. Similarly, the first paper by Ferenchak and Marshall said shared lane markings are not enough, and that barrier separation is necessary. Why? It wasn't because their (admittedly screwy) mashup of data showed no safety benefit for sharrows. It was because other treatments claimed more safety benefit. So if you have a street too narrow for a bike lane? No sharrows! Plow it up and widen it so there's room for barrier protection! What nonsense! Also, be very careful when looking at the statistics of how ridership levels change. Sometimes an area will have a steady increase over a long period of time then all of a sudden have one bad year. An anomaly can be a weather event, a natural disaster, or a host of other things. Some people intentionally take numbers completely out of context in an effort to mislead people. I can tell you that bicycle commuting in Silicon Valley probably fell significantly for 2019 because we've had an extremely wet winter and spring. Last year we had an unprecedented number of bad air days due to large wildfires which led to less cycling.. For example lets look at Pittsburgh, PA. From 1990 to 2017 they had a 240.4% increase in those 27 years. From 2006 to 2017 they had a 67.4% increase over 11 years. From 2011 to 2017 they had a 2% increase over six years. But there was a drop of 45.2% from 2016 to 2017. You can't ignore a long-term huge increase and then look only at a single year─ that kind of cherry=picking of statistics is extremely dishonest and is something that you often see when someone is trying to manipulate statistics to suit a particular agenda. Yes, let's talk about interpretation of data. Pittsburgh had a huge increase from 1990 to 2017. According to Bike Pgh, the main advocacy organization there, the first commuting-oriented bike lanes went in during 2007. See https://www.bikepgh.org/about-us/history/ That means almost all the growth trumpeted by Scharf happened _before_ the relevant facilities. Many more bike facilities were installed since then, but the growth was minimal - Scharf claims only 2%, and a big drop last year. ISTM the 1990 - 2011 growth couldn't be because of facilities. Instead, the growth was probably driven by the same factor that caused San Francisco's bike mode share to jump when no facilities were built. It became (perhaps briefly) quite fashionable to ride a bike. I'm all for increases in bicycling. But I'm not in favor of the current craze for saying "Riding is too dangerous unless you have barriers protecting you" or "Car tires must never touch the pavement where a bicyclist will ride." I'm not in favor of "Any bike facility is a good bike facility" - the mentality that's painted hundreds of miles of bike lanes within door zones, or to the right of right turn only lanes, or hidden behind parked cars. In general, I'm not a fan of either horror literature or fantasy literature. It's regrettable that so many "bike advocates" engage in producing both.. - Frank Krygowski These are not totally effective because there are so many incompetent drivers and in California there are a lot of unlicensed drivers as well. Asian women in large SUV's do not feel the need to remain in the middle of their lane and wander all around over the lines on both sides. I find this really puzzling since all of the state, counties and cities are having very bad financial problems and this would be an immediate and LARGE income stream and yet they throw it away. |
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More from the UK: "Bike lanes save lives of drivers as well ascyclists, study finds"
On 5/31/2019 7:16 AM, jbeattie wrote:
snip Lack of education or intelligence is a serious problem here and a problem with bike lanes generally. If motorists simply understood that a bike lane was a "lane" and that they had to look for traffic before changing lanes, at least half of the right-hooks would be eliminated. I think very few drivers know the traffic laws or what their obligations are to bicycles and pedestrians. And a lot of pedestrians think that the laws requiring vehicles to yield to pedestrians in crossing facilities give them carte blanche to just leap into traffic. I have pedestrians step in front of me when I'm in the intersection first -- and they get huffy that I didn't slam on the brakes and go OTB when they stepped or ran off the curb (often runners who don't stop at intersections). And don't get me going on runners in the bike lanes. One of the biggest reasons for protected bicycle lanes is to make it physically impossible for clueless and inexperienced drivers to do stupid and illegal things. You'll never achieve this with either education or law enforcement, the problem is just too big and there is neither the will nor the money to solve the problem in any other way. Now if we could find a way to physically force pedestrians to look up from their phones when crossing a street that would be something that we should implement. We have several crosswalks in my city where this would be useful. I really like what the City of San Jose (Gateway to Cupertino) has done downtown with their protected bike lanes, especially at intersections. Intersections are the most problematic area for protected bike lanes. But some drivers are unhappy, especially with the protected bike lanes next to the curb and parallel parking between the vehicle lanes and the bike lane. In the past, a driver would open their door into the bike lane, endangering bicyclists. Now they are opening their door into a traffic lane and have to be careful getting out. |
#28
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More from the UK: "Bike lanes save lives of drivers as well ascyclists, study finds"
On 5/31/2019 10:16 AM, jbeattie wrote:
Lack of education or intelligence is a serious problem here and a problem with bike lanes generally. If motorists simply understood that a bike lane was a "lane" and that they had to look for traffic before changing lanes, at least half of the right-hooks would be eliminated. While I agree that American motorists need education pretty badly, I'd also say the same about people who design bike lanes. Those designers give motorists a difficult and unfamiliar problem. In 99.9% of the cases where a motorist turns right, he's already in the rightmost lane. There is no "straight ahead" lane to the right of him, and it's obvious why. Roadways are normally designed with "destination positioning" to avoid that obvious conflict. Can you imagine signs on a six-lane freeway telling the person in the _middle_ lane that he's supposed to shoot rightward to an exit? Or signs telling the person in the right lane that he's supposed to watch out for that? It's geometric nonsense. So motorist assume nobody will be passing them on the right as they turn right. And if anyone is passing on the right, they're very likely in one of the driver's blind spots. You can hope and pray that Portland motorists will catch on to the weirdness and be extra careful; and you can hope and pray the motorist has good flexibility (to pivot around and search for bicyclists); but there will always be less agile motorists and those who are encountering the weirdness for the first time. -- - Frank Krygowski |
#29
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More from the UK: "Bike lanes save lives of drivers as well ascyclists, study finds"
On Friday, May 31, 2019 at 11:06:10 AM UTC-7, Frank Krygowski wrote:
On 5/31/2019 10:16 AM, jbeattie wrote: Lack of education or intelligence is a serious problem here and a problem with bike lanes generally. If motorists simply understood that a bike lane was a "lane" and that they had to look for traffic before changing lanes, at least half of the right-hooks would be eliminated. While I agree that American motorists need education pretty badly, I'd also say the same about people who design bike lanes. Those designers give motorists a difficult and unfamiliar problem. In 99.9% of the cases where a motorist turns right, he's already in the rightmost lane. There is no "straight ahead" lane to the right of him, and it's obvious why. Roadways are normally designed with "destination positioning" to avoid that obvious conflict. Can you imagine signs on a six-lane freeway telling the person in the _middle_ lane that he's supposed to shoot rightward to an exit? Or signs telling the person in the right lane that he's supposed to watch out for that? It's geometric nonsense. So motorist assume nobody will be passing them on the right as they turn right. And if anyone is passing on the right, they're very likely in one of the driver's blind spots. You can hope and pray that Portland motorists will catch on to the weirdness and be extra careful; and you can hope and pray the motorist has good flexibility (to pivot around and search for bicyclists); but there will always be less agile motorists and those who are encountering the weirdness for the first time. I don't think its difficult at all, and I watch for traffic in the bike lanes all the time when I'm driving. Moreover, the existence of a cyclist is often obvious because he or she is overtaken and passed prior to the right turn. It is certainly more of a problem when a car is being passed on the right by a bike in a bike lane, but then again, the motorist can see the bike lane and can simply look before turning. It's a lane. There are problems with certain MV lane and bike lane configurations, but the usual right hook across a bike lane, IMO, is not one of those. We now have a statute saying as much -- where the bike lane is deemed to continue through intersections. Another approach that would work, too, is the California approach where cars are allowed to occupy the bike lane when setting up for a turn. That gets the cyclist into the lane and going around, which is what I do whenever possible anyway. In Oregon, cars are prohibited from being in the bike lane except when actually turning across it. -- Jay Beattie. |
#30
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More from the UK: "Bike lanes save lives of drivers as well ascyclists, study finds"
On 5/31/2019 1:00 PM, jbeattie wrote:
snip I don't think its difficult at all, and I watch for traffic in the bike lanes all the time when I'm driving. Moreover, the existence of a cyclist is often obvious because he or she is overtaken and passed prior to the right turn. It is certainly more of a problem when a car is being passed on the right by a bike in a bike lane, but then again, the motorist can see the bike lane and can simply look before turning. It's a lane. There are problems with certain MV lane and bike lane configurations, but the usual right hook across a bike lane, IMO, is not one of those. We now have a statute saying as much -- where the bike lane is deemed to continue through intersections. Another approach that would work, too, is the California approach where cars are allowed to occupy the bike lane when setting up for a turn. That gets the cyclist into the lane and going around, which is what I do whenever possible anyway. In Oregon, cars are prohibited from being in the bike lane except when actually turning across it. The first time I took the written driving test I missed the question about turning right when there's a bike lane. But what California does makes sense. There are solutions for protected bike lanes at intersections with traffic signals. First you don't allow right-on-red. Second you have a phase where the light is only green for the protected bicycle lanes. At intersections without traffic signals you have to take other steps to minimize right-hooks. But even when there's no bike lane, and the cyclist is riding on the right side of the road, you have the danger of a right hook. In a perfect world, drivers would all behave properly and there would be no need for any bike lane, whether painted or protected. We're not there yet. What amuses me is when someone insists that a protected bike lane is unnecessary because there have been very few problems with either a painted bike lane or no bike lane. This misses the point. The reason why there are few problems is because so few people feel safe riding under those conditions. On Tuesday night we interviewed 52 teenagers for our teen commission. Several mentioned about how they would not be allowed to ride their bicycles to school until there was more protected infrastructure. If you want to get more people riding, you have to make them not only feel safe, you also have to make their parents feel that it's safe and you also need to design the protected bicycle lanes so they actually are safe enough. If you just want hard-core riders to be out there using bicycles for transportation then you don't need bicycle lanes at all. |
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