Hey Armstrong, I can't ride my bicycles

Dave Vandervies wrote:
In article ,
The Wogster wrote:

Jack May wrote:


The bike lane should be the same price as an equal width of highway lane if
you build it at the same time as you build the freeway. If a lane is 12
ft wide and you want a 4 foot wide bike lane along that freeway then maybe
$3M to $7M per mile.

Uh not really, road costs are split into about 3 parts, land,
preparation and paving. Land, well yeah probably about the same,
however most roads being designed these days, have a wider then needed
right of way, considering that two 6' wide bike lanes, equal 1
automotive lane, you can probably fit them into the existing right of
way. Preparation for a motor vehicle lane would require a road bed that
can withstand around 3000PSI,


Are you sure of that? I'd be surprised to see tire-on-road pressure
higher than air-inside-tire pressure, my expectations for that would be
about an order of magnitude lower than your number.


a 30lb bicycle, 200lb rider, and 70lbs of
extra gear, means 300lbs over 2 wheels giving at most 150PSI,


I don't know enough about How Things Work to comment intelligently on the
engineering aspects, but I think it's generally accepted that overall
weight is more important than tire-on-road pressure for road wear, and
bicycles are a few orders of magnitude lower than pretty much anything
else you'd find on the road for that.

It's the weight per axle divided by the size of the contact patches on
all tires on that axle. For example an automobile that weighs 3000lbs,
has two axles, (1500lbs each), and a total contact patch area of 8
square inches, (1500/8) = 187.5PSI. A road bike fully loaded that
weighs 300lbs, has two axles and a contact patch area of about 1 square
inch, for a total of about 150PSI. Now you get that big truck that
weighs 80,000lbs, has 5 axles and each of those has a contact patch area
of 16 inches, has a total of about 1000PSI. These are all back of a
napkin style numbers, actually some axles hold more then others....
Maybe someone with a P.eng could give us more info....

sure you
could overengineer the lane, but don't always need to. Paving, a 6'
bike lane, would cost half as much for materials, the same amount for
labour. Of course over-engineering the lane, means less maintenance
costs down the road.


How does the marginal cost of adding a lane's worth of width to a road
that's already being built compare to the overall cost-per-lane's-width of
building that road, and of building that lane's worth of width separately?
If it's relatively low, it would make more sense to build bike lanes
along with, and to the same standard as, the rest of the road (and
thus overengineered for their intended purpose) rather than treating
them separately.


It depends on the size of the road, a 2 lane road (speed limit 30MPH /
50KM/H or less), with houses on both sides, make the lanes wide, put
curbs on both sides, with a sidewalk on at least one side. Forget bike
lanes.

A wider road with a higher speed limit, could have marked bike lanes
with signage at corners (yield to straight through bike traffic), as a
reminder not to hit bikes that have the right of way..... Bikes who get
cut off by drivers ignoring the yield, should record the plate number,
time and location, and report it to police. Police would then mail you
the ticket.

For a major 4+ lane limited access highway, add a cement barrier, on the
left side of the traffic lanes (right in Britain), then a double bike
lane in each direction, a centre raised barrier separates the
directions, signage would indicate that slower traffic keep right, and
these bike lanes would also have speed limits probably between 70 and
100km/h (45 to 60MPH).

Police officers on bikes would patrol, looking for speeders and reckless
riders, any such would be fined, just like the butt-head who gets pulled
over in the hopped up and lowered Honda with the buzz-saw muffler on the
motor vehicle lanes. On/off ramps for the bike lanes, would be longer,
and go pretty straight up with a sharp turn at the top, this bridges
over the motor vehicle lanes, then slowly drops to a merge. The merge
shifts the bike lane back to the right side of the road, and has an over
head sign indicating the merge.

These lanes would be intended for longer distance rides.... In this
case, they could be engineered more specifically for bike traffic, and
would be resurfaced on an as needed basis. These lanes would have
strict speed limits and traffic rules. I see nothing wrong with using
tolls to pay for the bike lanes, just as I see nothing wrong with new
highways having tolls to help pay for building them.

Wanna see a cheesed off SUV driver, he's sitting on the highway in heavy
traffic going .1km/h and I go flying by at 40km/h on an old road
bike..... Then of course I need to change lanes, because the bike cop
has a guy on a 'bent pulled over for exceeding the 70km/h speed limit.....

One further point, official maps would indicate which highways have such
bikeways.

W