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  #42  
Old February 10th 20, 06:20 PM posted to rec.bicycles.tech
Frank Krygowski[_4_]
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Posts: 10,538
Default How to suck all the joy from cycling

On 2/10/2020 9:42 AM, sms wrote:
On 2/10/2020 5:04 AM, Rolf Mantel wrote:
Am 08.02.2020 um 05:49 schrieb John B.:
If one builds bicycle lanes in a similar manner as foot paths are
being built in Bangkok with no surface road crossings but bridges over
the roadway (seehttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zz0ghLc6lrYÂ* ) than
I'm sure that they would work fine.... except of course for the
complaints about the "hills", but having the beautiful bike path
terminate on a busy road crossing seems to me to be simply inviting
calamity.


They tried doing that in Stevenage and in Milton Keynes.Â* Both cities
are now known to have fewer bicylcles and more bike accidents than
normal cities.


Ah, the old "Milton Keynes Argument."

"One, initial, way of demonstrating the flawed reasoning behind the
Milton Keynes Argument would be to consider whether there would be more,
or less cycling in Milton Keynes if there weren’t any cycle paths at
all. Are those who claim that cycle paths do notÂ* make cycling more
likely really suggesting that if we were to strip out the cycle paths in
Milton Keynes the amount of cycling there would stay the same, or even
increase?


You're stating a terribly weak excuse for the dismal failure of what
should be your dream town.

Let's remember the objective in MK and similar towns. Their
super-extensive bike networks were not intended to generate a tiny bit
more bike riding than Britain's national average. The luxurious,
up-to-highest-standard completely separate bikeways were intended to
generate Amsterdam level bike mode share. They failed. The chief
designer admitted they failed.

And they failed not because they were badly designed. They're still
better in many ways than the stuff being called for in America today.
They failed because the towns did not dissuade car travel.

Like it or not, almost all citizens of almost any country will use a car
instead of a bike _unless_ there are big detriments to car use.
Netherlands makes it inconvenient and expensive to use cars by high
license fees, high taxes, strict licensing requirements, high fuel cost,
high parking cost, street restrictions in many cities, etc. Milton
Keynes did none of that, but instead designed the roads to be modern and
convenient. So people use the roads in their cars.

That seems fantastically unlikely to me, given that the cycle paths, in
the main, run alongside dual carriageways, often those with 70 mph speed
limits. To pretend that people are just as likely to cycle on these
kinds of roads as they would be on the cycle paths that run alongside
them...


The "new towns" were designed from scratch with clean sheets of paper.
There was no real need to build in high speed roads. And in any case,
you're exaggerating the number of those. Look at a map that includes the
bike paths:
https://goo.gl/maps/76an5ub1DNQgWtuW6
Only a small percentage parallel the roads that scare you. The bike
paths go everywhere.

Yet they get barely 3% bike mode share.

We posting here may love bicycling. Many of the people who constantly
lobby for magic separated bike facilities may love bicycling. But the
fact is, most people simply don't love bicycling enough to get out of
their cars. It's foolish to spend fortunes to make them switch to bikes.

--
- Frank Krygowski
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