[digging]

> kind of obvious that if you build out dedicated bike lanes, cyclists are more likely to prefer them to alternate routes.

That's not obvious at all; it's not even true. It's not uncommon in US cities to install long, wide bike lanes on major roads which see close to 0 daily users. Significant problems include:

- complete lack of physical barriers between cars and bikes

- bike lanes terminating at dangerous roads

- density is still low and there are dangerous parking lots at every destination

- bike lanes are exposed to direct sunlight in 100F+

- a non-trivial number of American drivers need extremely little push to intentionally hurt or kill bibcyclists

[ThunderSizzle]

While those are "dedicated bike lanes", it wasn't infrastructure built for bikes. Typically those are existing road safety shoulders converted to a bike lane.

I dont count that as dedicated bike infrastructure.

[digging]

If your definition of bicycle infrastructure excludes anything insufficient to facilitate increased usage, then yes we can agree it is obvious that building such will facilitate increased usage, but that's a useless statement.

But if we talk about all bicycle infrastructure, which is a conversation useful to have, it is clear from the multiple issues I pointed out (not limited to lack of physical separation) that simply building bike infrastructure ad-hoc and without holistic change is not useful.

[ThunderSizzle]

Almost all of your points are because what you are describing isn't bike infrastructure, it's a line of paint on a highway's shoulder that use to be a pull-over safety shoulder - that's why they terminate randomly, don't have any barriers, there's random/low density, and direct sunlight). It's literally a political line in the road to get federal money from the DOT, which is why it shouldn't be counted as bike infrastructure. It's a literal line on a state highway.

Any real conversation about bike infrastructure would need to start with recognize a political line in the road is not real bike infrastructure any more than Amtrak using freight lines is a real passenger rail route.

[digging]

One of those points relates directly to paint-only bike lanes. None of the others do.

Any conversation about expanding bike infrastructure needs to acknowledge existing bad bike infrastructure and common bad techniques in order to explain why we can't expect results if we use them again. Otherwise, they'll just get used again and waste more money. If all you say is "You literally have no bike infrastructure" to a city that literally has spent money and effort creating (bad) bike infrastructure, I don't see how that's helpful.