[ghaff]

Except that bike lanes often cut into lanes for auto/truck/bus traffic. Traffic has gotten worse over the past few years since a lot of bike lanes were put in. Maybe that's a reasonable tradeoff (probably), but bike lanes almost certainly didn't make things better for drivers. (ADDED: Around where I live I suspect bike lanes serve more as an alternative to walking and public transit than they do cars. Again, they're probably for the best but they don't really help drivers.)

[xracy]

Citation needed for "Traffic has gotten worse over the past few years since a lot of bike lanes were put in." For one thing, it's not even a causal statement, but you're implying it is.

For another bikes take up ~half the space of a car going in the same direction. So the inclusion of bike lanes and their usage would only improve traffic because it removes the actual cause of traffic (cars) from the road.

[gibolt]

Not 1/2, closer to 1/10 (for the exact space of the car). Cars also need far more buffer space, parking space, overall road area for maneuvering around a city. If completely replaced, infrastructure area could probably be reduced by ~20-100x

[xracy]

I'm being real generous here that on a 4 lane road, if you want to add bikes I would just take away 1 lane of car traffic, and that would allow for bikes to be insulated from the cars in both directions.

But I definitely agree with you that we could probably 1/100th the size of roads (and open up a whole lot of space for property development), if everyone biked everywhere. (Not useful as a goal, just useful as an idea for space requirements.)

[AnimalMuppet]

Depends. If 90% of the traffic is still cars, bike lanes make it possible for the 10% that is bikes. But the 90% now have fewer lanes.

You sound like you're assuming that, given more bike lanes, 50% of the traffic will ditch their cars and ride bikes. (At least, your logic doesn't work without that assumption.) I don't think that's a valid assumption.

[trgn]

I guess it depends on the location. More lanes don't equal better traffic. In my city, every road is pretty much a 2-3 lane highway for cars, and it seems like a huge waste of space. Invites speeding, crashes.

There's been road diets, where they've been reduced to single lane, and these had had no effect on travel time. Did reduce crashes a lot, less of that aggressive jostling for position, just cars chugging along calmly in single file.

There's been years long construction on a few big buildings, blocking whole lanes, forcing cars into single file; absolutely zero effect on travel times.

When there's snowfall, only middle lanes are cleared. Zero effect on traffic flow.

Imho traffic flow is pretty much determined by number of cars and number of intersections, and very little by number of parallel lanes. So much room for dedicated bike or bus lanes, it's really AND/AND, really everybody wins, and it's such a tragedy that my city just doesn't seem to understand that. All it takes is paint and bollards.

[ghaff]

I was speaking of a specific city that has added extensive bike lanes. No idea of causality. Maybe a lot more people have decided to drive in and out all of a sudden.

I was mostly objecting to the comment up-thread implying that bike lanes are inherently win win. They can be a good idea on net while increasing driving times.

[xracy]

Yeah, your trying to hide your argument in specificity makes it an "anecdote" and not anything meaningfully contributing to the conversation. So you can either find specific sources that demonstrate more than that "you feel like traffic has gone up due to bike lanes in city X", and that would be an interesting content/addition to the discussion or you can mark it more clearly as an opinion, and people will be more likely to ignore it...

[cozzyd]

Bike and bus lanes have only improved traffic for me. But I don't have a car...