[yftsui]

Does more bike lanes result in more bikes? The bike lane city added near my home is barely used, while local businesses are suffering as the bike lane took away street parking, ppl need to drive more to find parking then walk back or just skip those merchants

[bryanlarsen]

The bike lanes in Toronto are very well studied due to obstructionists like Doug Ford asking for more studies continuously. The bike lanes in Toronto significantly increased store sales along the streets where they were installed.

[acdha]

They do, when built properly - if the city just builds a few random patches which don’t connect anywhere useful it works about as well as it would if the roads were a random mess of gravel, highway, and “coming soon” signs.

Two other notes: people don’t survey bike traffic and often underestimate it because bicyclists are quiet and take up far less space. Similarly, small business owners famously underestimate how many customers walk, use transit, or bike because if they personally drive they assume everyone else does, too, and it’s a tempting target for blaming every problem on because it means they don’t have to change any of their decisions. This has played out multiple times where I live where it’s the bike lane conspiracy scaring away their customers, never Walmart or the pandemic, even if other businesses blocks away from the bike lanes had the same problem.

None of that says your city can’t have done something stupid, of course, but I’d look for harder data rather than trusting anything “everyone knows”.

[yftsui]

I love the fact that bike lane supporters are always winning in these arguments: if bike lane works we should get more; if bike lane doesn't work it means it is not enough thus we should get even more.

[stop50]

Would you use an car if you have streets that are like bike lanes now? lets make a thought experiment:

You are an car driver. There are car lanes and tank lanes. the car lanes are less than a percent of the tank lanes. Regulary people die, because a tank driver overlooked a car, car lanes are often obstructed by parking tanks. Nobody but an minority of car drivers care. In newspapers often the car drivers get the blame when an accident happens if they are reported, often even deadly accidents are unreported or just an small note.

[acdha]

Look, almost every large study has found that bike lanes reduce congestion because, when you get down to it congestion is made up of cars and the only way to have less of it is to reduce the number of cars on the road. Whether that’s biking, transit, carpooling, etc. doesn’t matter as long as you’re reducing the total number of cars – the math of needing over 100 square feet per person is just brutally unforgiving. Urban areas don’t have the space, rural areas usually don’t have the money, and nobody wants the health impacts or pollution.

[bryanlarsen]

There's probably a point where additional bike lanes are not helpful. But Toronto is very far from that point.

Car driving in the Netherlands is far superior to driving in Toronto. Once Toronto gets to the bike lane saturation that Dutch cities have, we might be close to reaching the point where more bike lanes make things worse rather than better.