Second-order effects. Bikes are nothing but misery generators. They are the absolute WORST commute mode, so people (on average) choose literally anything else when they have that option. We have plenty of proof for that. There are cities with great bike _and_ car infrastructure, and the percentage of bike commutes is about the same as everywhere else.
So the only thing that bike lanes do is sabotage cars and other ground transit.
As a double whammy, bikes are inconvenient (or illegal) to take onto the most rapid and ground transit. And bikeshares are not reliable enough for daily commutes.
All these factors motivate people to move closer to the downtowns, because it becomes inconvenient to live afar. This in turn increases the price of real estate near downtowns, resulting in real estate developers building denser housing. This in turn results in higher rents, smaller units, more crime, etc.
Yes, I have researched this, and I have numbers to back up my words.
Really? because I live somewhere where this works quite well: cycling is on average the best way to get around, especially in terms of door-to-door time, and it's something that a huge fraction of people use. I have basically zero reason to buy a car: even if there was zero traffic on the road it's not worth the quite substantial cost.
(And, to a large extent, the biggest contributor to it being a good place to cycle is the fact that everyone does it: a whole city's worth of protected bike lanes can't make up for a driver who's not used to driving around cyclists. But it is certainly possible to make road layouts that make safe cycling basically impossible, and American city planners seem to have mastered that)
So in other words, your city made it extremely inconvenient to use anything BUT bikes to get around. Which is exactly my point.
Do an experiment, drop 10 points randomly within your city. Now plot routes between them using various transport modes. I bet that transit will be 3-4 times slower than bikes.
> I have basically zero reason to buy a car: even if there was zero traffic on the road it's not worth the quite substantial cost.
I guess you have zero kids, and your country has a collapsing population? The absolutely telling metric is the number of families with two or more kids, because it's the point where bikes become utterly inconvenient.
> But it is certainly possible to make road layouts that make safe cycling basically impossible, and American city planners seem to have mastered that
Oh yeah. I know that firsthand.
My neighborhood just got bikelaned. Now I have a traffic jam outside of my house half of the day, delaying thousands of people for at least 10 minutes every _day_. The local bus now takes 10 minutes more on average for the roundtrip. And all that for 30 meters of bike lanes. That is almost entirely unused because it ends up against the bottom of a steep hill.
But good news, everyone. Our new housing units are the smallest in the nation and our housing prices are growing fast despite the slowing economy!
> So in other words, your city made it extremely inconvenient to use anything BUT bikes to get around. Which is exactly my point.
No, most cities worldwide are designed to make using anything but a car to get around extremely inconvenient. Best seen in the US.
> I guess you have zero kids, and your country has a collapsing population?
Is there anything about kids in particular that makes them unable to walk and/or bike?
The really young kids go into strollers and bike/cargo bike seats.
> My neighborhood just got bikelaned. Now I have a traffic jam outside of my house half of the day, delaying thousands of people for at least 10 minutes every _day_. The local bus now takes 10 minutes more on average for the roundtrip. And all that for 30 meters of bike lanes.
A narrowing of a single traffic lane on a 30m stretch causes all that? That's obviously untrue.
> And all that for 30 meters of bike lanes. That is almost entirely unused because it ends up against the bottom of a steep hill.
Yeah a bike path that's not connected to a bike path network is of zero use. But then Rome wasn't built in a day was it?
> Is there anything about kids in particular that makes them unable to walk and/or bike?
Time and inconvenience if you're not using a car. It more-or-less requires a full-time commitment from at least one parent. That's why you see a sharp drop in large families in cities.
> The really young kids go into strollers and bike/cargo bike seats.
Try that with 2 or 3 children.
> Yeah a bike path that's not connected to a bike path network is of zero use. But then Rome wasn't built in a day was it?
It is connected. We literally buried about 200 million dollars into building a bike network that spans the city. It sits unused, not even replacing the traffic that it displaced. The percentage of bike commutes is around 2-5% depending on the survey, almost identical to 10 years ago.
But the good news is that our downtown is now full of shuttered storefronts, with most commercial blocks having at least one available for lease.
Can you elaborate?