alt Hacker NewsCities who want to keep cars out of bike lanes should stop offering “mom says we have bike lanes at home” repainting of streets. Create a curb and raise the bike lanes. It’s the only safe solution. I understand this is not realistic in a lot of scenarios but it is basically the only way you can achieve actual safety short of cement separators at the road level, which is basically a curb anyway. There’s just no reality where a bicycle can share the road unimpeded with a motor vehicle safely. No, plastic bollards are not enough. It needs to be either raised or a barrier enough that a car sideswiping it won’t cause the barrier to fail
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People undoubtedly said this was not realistic in many car-clogged European cities before some actually did it. “Realism” here is just a measure of the current number of votes you have for making things better.
The thing which I think would really help with bike lanes would be to standardize on placing underground utilities beneath them --- they'd be less expensive to dig up than a roadway structured for cars, and when maintenance is necessary, a cyclist can easily be diverted either onto the roadway (if staying on the bike) or to the sidewalk (if temporarily dismounting).
Bike lanes on a curb are significantly more dangerous due to turning car drivers often not seeing them (due to parked cars in the way) or interpreting them as “just a sidewalk” and not properly looking for cyclists.
I've seen people park in these curbed bike lanes too, completely blocking it off.
Agree with this.
The concrete barriers being added in Seattle help a lot.
Or they could fine them. And increase fine for each repetition so rich can't just pay to be jerks.
Bike lanes with curbs aren’t great. On garbage days trash cans often get parked in the bike lane and cyclists have no way of going around since the curb block their way. I’m perfectly comfortable with just lines for bike lanes.
Yes! Concrete please!
>There’s just no reality where a bicycle can share the road unimpeded with a motor vehicle safely.
that was among the promises of self-driving cars. Because of ultimately superior sensor suite and reaction time they can be safer than humans, in particular they would never "not see a bicyclist", they wouldn't cut impatiently, etc. . Instead that superiority is used these days to drive more "efficiently", to beat/cut the human drivers in a way not every regular human would be capable of. At least that is my anecdotal observation during the last several months (and these several months experience totally differs from the more than 15 years of having Waymo cars around in MV when they were i'd say among the safest to be around)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46199294
From the more recent - saw again a Waymo cutting like a ninja into a left turn lane at the same intersection as before, and at the other intersection a Waymo car missing the point to get in line for the right turn behind several cars already waiting in line in the bike lane, drives forward on green and makes the right turn as the second layer of the cake in parallel with those cars from the bike lane.
I think all that aggressiveness/"efficiency" comes as a result of the push to increase the customer satisfaction. All these years before driving actual passengers, Waymo (and i guess others) could allow themselves to be the safest, most courteous drivers on the road. Not anymore as such "inefficient" granma-style driving obviously would conflict with the passengers satisfaction.
My experience cycling regularly in NYC: bike lanes separated by curb, stoppers, or poles are more dangerous as cars stop at their entrances/exits and I am literally trapped or cannot enter them before/after an intersection. I'm not against them in principle, but without extremely strict enforcent of laws (let's say a ticket 5% of someone's annual income and a loss of DL on a repeated offense - this stuff endangers people's lives), they are sadly counterproductive. :(