Entirely separate paths for bikes are absolutely feasible in established cities (see New York which has huge protected bike lanes running north and south up and down manhattan) with little cost to car infra

In Seattle, local residential streets are often designated as "stay healthy" streets, where bikes and pedestrians have right-of-way. You can drive a car there, but it will be slow (intersections are narrowed to discourage fast driving). Cars take parallel streets if they're going more than a block or two.

I haven't checked the statistics but it seems to work. There's one near me that's packed with bikes during coomute hours, and I think the cost to the city was negligible.

It's pretty easy to do in most cities, you just have to eliminate a lane of traffic and/or parking spots. It's quite rare for a modern city to have streets too narrow to do that.

> This is why both drivers and pedestrians hate bikers

Drivers and pedestrians hate each other too. Everyone gripes about any minor impediment to their own travel, particularly other modalities, but also their own. I mean, drivers universally complain about being "stuck in traffic", but they are traffic.

Can't recall which European city it was (not AMS) where it was impossible to ride bikes on footpath but easy for padestrians. Very interesting hurdles were added. I wish I was more enthusiastic about taking photos. I had seen it on a very small stretch though. Somehwere in Belgium? I can't recall. In fact some of those hurdles/obstacles looked very artsy :)

And also there were dedicated bike lanes which should be a must in any self-respecting place.

The cars are the problem, not the bikes or pedestrians.

Insulating bicycles from other vehicles is not the only path to road safety. When forced to interact with bikes more often, car drivers drive more safely and conservatively. Not sure that works everywhere or depends on better driver education and general empathy.

https://time.com/archive/6683576/signal-failure/

https://bikecity.amsterdam.nl/en/experiment-traffic-lights-d...

http://dutchcycling.nl/get-inspired/sarphatistraat-amsterdam...

Natives might have a different take, but I was recently in Berlin (which you might consider an 'established city'), and this seemed like a solved problem there. Bike lanes are at sidewalk grade, above the curb, with rumble strip or other tactile indicator for the boundary. You do NOT walk in the bike lane, it's just like walking in the car lane.

Considering the rise of additional micromobility vehicles, this is such an obvious solution when you see it in practice.

Tho Onion should have also had “'Infeasible,' Says Only Nation Where This Does Not Happen” to link to.

It's not really infeasible, we have this in Holland everywhere and our cities are a lot narrower than the US ones.

Copenhagen does this quite well: https://ramblershighway.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/201...

> Of course this is infeasible for most established cities.

It simply is not. The problem is sacrificing an unreasonable amount of space to drivers. There is a ton of space for human-scale vehicles.

Minneapolis is very successfully demonstrating that this is not infeasible.

Chicago is putting these in everywhere to varying degrees of robustness based on traffic flows and it's fabulous.

It is not at all infeasible. Many cities do this successfully.

The same person is a driver, biker or pedestrial at different times of the same day.

Toxic entitled drivers hate bikers. Some bikers are toxic on sidewalks. Most sane people are actually able to exist with all three.

> Bikes don't belong on the road with cars and they dont belong on sidewalks with pedestrians and they don't belong in between.

Bikes belong both on road and in between. Childrens bikes belong on side walk. Bikes moving in small speed can be on sidewalks too.

Bikes do pretty well on roads, especially in cities or quiet roads outside. We will all live in peace once we have self-driving cars instead of careless and violent human drivers. This already works pretty well in many cities in for example Spain.