[squidfood]

In my city, they've just taken some two lane roads down to one lane and eliminated car turning lanes, to add bike lanes. Those bike lanes see maybe 1 bike every 15 minutes, while the cars are now significantly more backed up (I've noted an extra 5-10 minutes of idling to travel a mile during busy times, no idea how many cars total in a day).

Without denigrating the need for bike safety and separated lanes, I really wonder about the numbers on the carbon trade-off there!

[crzwdjk]

It's a good question. Whoever is responsible for the road/bike lane should probably be doing some traffic counts to see how things are working out, but who knows if they've bothered to collect the data.

One problem with just going by your impressions is that cars take up an awful lot of space and a road can look full of cars, even if they don't represent a majority of people. On the typical NYC (or Boston) street, pedestrians outnumber cars 10:1, but get much less than half the space. For another example, the Dan Ryan Expressway in Chicago has 7 lanes in each direction, and two subway tracks in the middle. The subway can (and likely does) carry more people than all the expressway lanes.

Another problem is that in urban settings specifically, the capacity of a road is pretty much always limited by conflicting traffic at intersections, and so the exact number of lanes doesn't actually make a difference as long as it's enough to feed cars through the green lights at an optimal rate.

[Analemma_]

To some extent, that's working as intended. If bike lanes reduce throughput for cars and decrease their utility, that pushes people towards using means other than cars, even if that doesn't mean biking.

[squidfood]

Except: I don't see any evidence that it has worked at all - at least not in the 2 years the lanes have been there. Nice idea, but data would be nicer. (aside: always nice to see downvotes for wanting observations and data - if the data belies my observations, I'm all for that).

[timthelion]

This really comes down to a "moral health of the citizenry". In Germany and the Netherlands these programs work. In the US, less so. If you were to take a %100 data based approach, and not take into account the choices of people, you would no longer be studying sociology but rather mind control. If you have a way, that actually is effective at changing peoples behavior, regardless of what the people want then that is mind control. Do you think that mind control is what we need in order to fight global warming, or do we just need to become better people?

[squidfood]

In this city's case, they've dragged their heels on public transport - nothing near what I found in Amsterdam, for example. Slowing down car drivers by 5 minutes will not get them to switch to the public transport that would add 30+ minutes. Include better public transport, and more people would switch. But throwing up obstacles without providing alternatives doesn't do the job (and based on my city, there would have to be some mind-control to get more public transport funded, unfortunately).

[timthelion]

This is a difficult one. The selfish behavior of Americans does seem to be causing a real world crisis. Per capita, a few countries (the middle east and the US) produce significantly more CO2 emissions per capita than the rest of the world [1]. This is expected to cause everyone significant problems and is already taking a major toll on the forestry and fishing industries. Theres not a lot that the rest of the world can do to put pressure on the US. A war would only create more polution and wars suck. Trade embargos are difficult given the US's geopolitical possition. This may well be, in the end, a tragedy situation of game theory in which everyone loses and there is no way out. There is no real way to privatise the atmosphere to get rid of the tragedy of the commons going on there.

It actually kind of reminds me of the old "nuclear deterent" theory. The idea that if you attack me, I'll create nuclear armagedon. If there was a way for Germany to produce so much CO2 that everyone would die, then maybe Germany could tell the US, "if you don't stop producing CO2, we'll produce a lot of it ourselves". Really, I don't know though. So far, I'm not optimistic.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_carbon_di...

[timthelion]

This comes down to a tragedy of the commons thing. No data needed. Cars are using a commons (the roads and the air) and causing a tragedy.

[mikestew]

The implication seems to be that they took away a car lane to make a bike lane. It's entirely possible that the car lane was going away anyway, and they simply used the left-over space to make bike lanes.

So why did they take away the car lane, if not to make bike lanes? From what I've read, and observed here in Redmond, WA, is that the current fashion is to reduce four lane streets to three lanes (two directional, one center turn lane). The goal is to slow traffic in residential areas and...I forget what the other goals are. Anyway, it's a thing now. In your situation, perhaps they took away lanes to meet the current fashion, bike lanes just being the icing on that cake, or maybe they really did do it put bike lanes in.

[squidfood]

Here, they took a 3-lane two 2-lane+bike. Center wasn't turn lane, it was an alternating-direction in morning/evening. It was definitely part of a citywide "make bike lanes" initiative, if slowdowns were considered, that was the icing.

[antisthenes]

Not enough incentives to use bikes in the policy then.

Not all countries and people are the same, so what maybe be enough incentive for 1 person or culture (oh, they made bike lanes? I'm going to bike to work now! versus oh, the road still has cars on it? I'm not biking, because it's not safe!) is not enough for another.

Either way, the only one to blame here is the local government for either not doing enough research initially or not incentivizing people to use bikes over cars enough (e.g. we'll pay 50% of your new bike price up to $X )

[dakrootie]

Dude, I'd actually pay a toll to have safe, isolated bike lanes wherever I wanted to go. If there's not enough demand/money for bike lanes I'm sure others would pony up too. The lack of human-navigable roads in my neck of the woods (Florida) is astounding.