Dr Engelbert Buxbaum wrote:
What would be so bad about having narrower or fewer lanes for cars?
After all, more people using bikes means fewer cars.

Only it doesn't. The tiny trickle of people using bikes could increase
by a factor of 100 and they'd still be less than 1% of traffic, hardly
enough to justify robbing the majority of even a single lane.

Depends on the situation. On small roads with little traffic, simply
filter into car traffic and make a normal left turn, similar to a car on
a multi-lane road. On major crossings, use the traffic lights for
pedestrian/cycle traffic. Since the cyclist can cross a road together
with pedestrians, no additional waiting times are necessary.

So cyclists are allowed to ride in crosswalks in Europe? In the US this
is illegal (unless they dismount first) but commonly done anyway, often
by pulling out in front of cars as if the biker had the legal status of
a pedestrian (which he does not).

The real problem are cars making a short (that is right, in most places)
turn across a cycle path. Again, the legal situation is absolutely
clear, a vehicle turning across another lane has to give way to traffic
on that lane. But it takes some education of car drivers to point that
fact out to them, including legal pressure applied over a number of
years. I had some "close encounters" 20 years back, now this is much
better. By the way, the same problem also exists on roads without bike
lanes.

I take it that Europe does not allow the car driver to take the bike
lane a few metres before the intersection, thus preventing this
conflict? (In California this is not only allowed, it is compulsory.)

This reminds me of the situation in England, where I used to work for a
couple of years. They had an extensive system of tram ways, which was
disassembled in the late '60s because everybody had a car and the costs
of public transport seemd unnecessary. They actually had a royal
commision, headed by some lord or such thing which determined this.

As a result, people drove their cars more, and traffic in the cities
collapsed, with concomittant environmental problems. Now they are
placing the rails back in to make traffic more manageble (Manchester
beeing but one example), of course at huge expense. That's what happens
if myopic fools disregard the question of sustainability.

Sustainability my ass. That's what happens when NIMBYs stop the process
of expanding the road system (which of course needs to go on permanently
as long as population is growing) and then blame drivers for the resulting
congestion.