This is an intractable problem with normal sidewalk/streets. Bikes don't belong on the road with cars and they dont belong on sidewalks with pedestrians and they don't belong in between. This is why both drivers and pedestrians hate bikers.<p>Ideally we have entirely separate paths for bikes. Of course this is infeasible for most established cities. Doesn't mean they are't inherently a problem in these cases though.
Entirely separate paths for bikes are absolutely feasible in established cities (see New York which has huge protected bike lanes running north and south up and down manhattan) with little cost to car infra
You misread me.<p>>Bikes don't belong on the road with cars and they dont belong on sidewalks with pedestrians and they don't belong in between.<p>The NYC bike lanes are inherently problematic. These are the "in between" that I'm talking about. They are not entirely separate paths in the way that I mean. They are a new lane within the existing path. What I mean by a separate path is something that is above, below, or in an entirely different location than the road/sidewalk.<p>Normally, if you’re turning right you’re in the rightmost lane, so nobody to your right is going straight. And likewise for left. A bike lane puts straight-through traffic to the right of turning cars so they come in from your blind spot. A "yield to bikes" rule doesn’t help much when you can’t see who you’re yielding to. And car traffic presents the same problem for bikes. They have to deal with this by merging all the way across traffic or cross <i>and become a pedestrian</i>. The fact that they may have to become a pedestrian is a major flag that they inherently <i>dont fit.</i><p>Parking and buses have the same problem. The sidewalk and the road were designed to touch. When you put a bike lane between them, every trip from curb to car, bus, etc. has to cross it.<p>It’s essentially splitting 1 road into 2 with separate rules. It's inherently problematic. You can't introduce bikes without increasing the rule complexity and worsening the experience for everyone else.<p>There is plenty of basic intuition here.<p>- Pairs. Each pair of modes (car,bike,pedestrian) needs its own set of rules. Two modes is one pair. Three modes is three pairs, so adding one mode triples the relationships.<p>- Introducing a "middle": Every segment of one street crosses every segment of the other. Adding a middle lane on both sides takes an intersection from 9 overlap zones to 25, and from 4 where different modes meet to 16.<p>- Fixed width: The street doesn’t get wider. Any space dedicated to bikes costs car lanes, parking, or sidewalk.
When you turn off a road, you need to look for pedestrians and motorbikes. Why is a bicycle so different?<p>For busy cycle routes, specific infrastructure to deal with this is installed like separate lights and banned turns to de-conflict the road.
I think this reasoning is like “you can be right and dead”. If you’re cycling at 20km/hr, some bike lanes are arranged so that it’s very hard for a driver to see you whether you have the right of way or not. You can’t legally mandate someone to see what they physically cannot see.
Since bikes/scooters are much faster than pedestrians, it causes problems like this when they use pedestrian infra. For an example, I was driving up to a yield-to-peds xwalk a while ago, and on the sidewalk there was a scooter going at full clip. I slowed down because I had a hunch he would do this, but he took a hard 90 deg turn at the xwalk and went straight through at speed. If I hadn't done that, I might have run him over. A pedestrian could never have done that.<p>Something similar to this dynamic happens anywhere you would "look both ways" as a driver but don't have far enough visibility to extrapolate a safe window of passage relative to the speed of oncoming traffic. It can happen when parked cars block your view of oncoming traffic, or when parked cars block view of the bike lane, or when parked cars, trees, hedges, fences etc block view of the sidewalk that a non-pedestrian is using.
> A bike lane puts straight-through traffic to the right of turning cars, coming up from behind in your blind spot.<p>Bike lanes making riders less safe has been known for decades. John Forrester’s book “Effective Cycling” [1] catalogues a lot of these dangers and warns cyclists to not assume that bike lanes are safer.<p>[1] <a href="https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262516945/effective-cycling/" rel="nofollow">https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262516945/effective-cycling/</a>
John Forester is globally recognized as a clown who's conclusions have never been supported by real world evidence. He was employed by DOTs to tell them what they wanted to hear ("don't build infrastructure for bikes") and in doing so set US infrastructure back decades.<p>Vehicular cycling techniques can help in situations where there is no bicycle infrastructure, but they are not safer than good bicycle infrastructure.
So here's the thing. Seattle drank all the urbanistic Kool-Aid and started doing all the road sabotage with bike lanes, bulbouts, road diets, and so on with the goal to eliminate pedestrian and bike deaths.<p>What was the result?<p>A stunning INCREASE in pedestrian deaths and no significant effect on bike deaths: <a href="https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/transportation/as-seattle-pedestrian-deaths-rise-traffic-safety-program-to-get-audit/" rel="nofollow">https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/transportation/as-...</a><p>Edit: my personal theory is that these "improvements" on average do nothing whatsoever. They "worked" in some places in Europe because they made traffic so shitty that more people were forced to use bikes. In turn, this provided driver education, by showing them how badly average drivers behave.
Why would cycling infrastructure reduce pedestrian incidents? They'd presumably decrease <i>cyclist</i> collisions. And since cycling has increased ~25% over the same time frame, steady rates of traffic incidents involving cyclists amounts to an increase in safety: <a href="https://www.kuow.org/health/2026-09-21/seattle-had-record-breaking-bike-traffic-this-summer-whats-behind-the-numbers" rel="nofollow">https://www.kuow.org/health/2026-09-21/seattle-had-record-br...</a>
The infrastructure sabotage was done as a part of the Zero Vision program, that included both pedestrian and bike safety. It achieved neither.<p>> And since cycling has increased ~25% over the same time frame<p>The percentage of bike commutes in Seattle is in the noise, around 2-3% of the non-remote-work commutes. So the data is too noisy for any reasonable statistical significance.<p>For example, this year was deadly with 4 cyclist deaths (to date). In 2024 there were no cyclist deaths.
Did they observe more crashes on roads that received upgrades? Doesn't sound like it, these are overall numbers. Maybe more people are walking/biking now, maybe just noise (10 and 18 ped deaths is really good for a major city already, in LA it's 160+).<p>Your personal theory is refuted by studies in the US, here's the classic lit review on this subject if you're interested: <a href="https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC2776010/" rel="nofollow">https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC2776010/</a>
> Did they observe more crashes on roads that received upgrades?<p>No statistically significant correlation.<p>From my personal observations, sabotage of arterials resulted in a lot of traffic shifting onto the side streets that are much less safe. But our local DoT doesn't have enough traffic data to confirm or disprove this, I tried to FOIA it.<p>> Your personal theory is refuted by studies in the US, here's the classic lit review on this subject if you're interested: <a href="https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC2776010/" rel="nofollow">https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC2776010/</a><p>Look at the dates on these studies. Nearly all of them come from the period of the global crime drop, a result of the leaded gasoline phaseout.<p>I recently tried to replicate some of the studies of bike lane effects and quite often found the _opposite_ of the original studies. For example, in Seattle the business tax receipts declined more steeply on streets within 1 block of a protected bike lane compared to controls.
I tried giving you the benefit of the doubt, but your word choices make it clear you're not approaching this topic in good faith. This means your anecdotes are even more worthless than normal.<p>Get your attempted study published and reviewed, then I'll take your observations seriously.
Do an experiment: try to find papers in pro-urbanist publications that look past 2016 in the US cities like SF or Seattle. 2016 is a good starting point, as it's the year when a lot of Vision Zero construction kicked off.<p>Go on, I'll wait.<p>Still waiting.<p>Oh, there are almost no publications? Wonder why. And the ones that do appear tend to be relegated to rarely cited journals. E.g.: <a href="https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/19427867.2022.2116673#d1e125" rel="nofollow">https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/19427867.2022.2...</a><p>> We examined changes in counts and per capita rates of all, pedestrian, and bicyclist fatal motor vehicle collisions between 2007 and 2019 for 18 U.S. cities that took early Vision Zero pledges. Only 2 of the 18 cities have experienced statistically significant decreases in total fatalities since taking a Vision Zero pledge and only one city experienced a statistically significant decrease in pedestrian fatalities.
John Forrester spewed completely disproven garbage and harmed cycling for decades by this influence on policy.
the beltline on Atlanta comes to mind
Have you been to NYC recently? 2 years ago it was utter chaos with delivery folks and crazies in rental bikes gunning at full throttle. It was quite scary compared to something like Paris or Munich.<p>I’ll take a full lane here in Miami. Screw these thin bike lanes next to the curb with F-150s and Cybertrucks. I’ve seen too many bike falls. Pass me safely and that’s that.
> This is why both drivers and pedestrians hate bikers<p>Drivers and pedestrians hate each other too. Everyone gripes about any minor impediment to their own travel, particularly other modalities, but also their own. I mean, drivers universally complain about being "stuck in traffic", but they <i>are</i> traffic.
Sorry I'm late, I was being traffic. Toot toot.
Cars turn people into psychopaths. They're the only mode of transport that essentially wishes other people simply didn't exist.
In Seattle, local residential streets are often designated as "stay healthy" streets, where bikes and pedestrians have right-of-way. You can drive a car there, but it will be slow (intersections are narrowed to discourage fast driving). Cars take parallel streets if they're going more than a block or two.<p>I haven't checked the statistics but it seems to work. There's one near me that's packed with bikes during coomute hours, and I think the cost to the city was negligible.
I wouldn't paint Seattle as a picture of success when it comes to bikes. We've spent untold millions on bike lanes, reduced vehicle capacity with road diets, reduced parking and access to small businesses and made life more difficult for delivery drivers and ADA access.<p>After all that, the mode share of biking has actually gone down in Seattle over the last decade, to under 3%. It turns out if your city has hills, rain and darkness much of the year, there is no amount of money that will convince people to ride a bike. We've effectively subsidized a recreational interest for a very small population, a group so small that the top profession of the ~12k who do cycle is "college professor". And as a pedestrian who has to share with cyclists almost every day, it's been a net negative. In my own neighborhood they've made sidewalks unusable for pedestrians in the quest to encourage more cyclists.<p><a href="https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/data/seattle-bike-commuting-hits-10-year-low-census-data-show/" rel="nofollow">https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/data/seattle-bike-...</a>
Stockholm is colder, further north, (though admittedly less hilly).<p>I can't argue that the bike infra improvements in Seattle haven't made a huge difference, but I'm not at all convinced this is because it is intrinsically unlikeable.<p>For what it's worth, the environmentally incredibly bikeable SD/LA has such bad infra that they have both fewer bikers and far more deaths.
Your stats are nearly a decade old. Cycling popularity has increased, not decreased, even surpassing the pre-pandemoc levels: <a href="https://www.seattlebikeblog.com/2026/08/17/july-bike-counts-obliterated-seattles-all-time-monthly-record/" rel="nofollow">https://www.seattlebikeblog.com/2026/08/17/july-bike-counts-...</a>
"After all that, the mode share of biking has actually gone down in Seattle over the last decade, to under 3%" <-- your article is from 2018 and that is like 8 years old, an eternity ago.<p>There is significantly more bike infrastructure now then in 2018. Plus the lime scooters and bikes have radically shifted the balance of bikes vs cars to the point where I'd say that bikes now rule the street in most of the dense parts of Seattle.<p>I would imagine there are at least 10x more people using those lanes than there was before affordable e-bikes and "bike shares" showed up. You've got people who would never, ever ride in a million years be caught dead on a bike using those bike lanes to run errands, go to visit people, commute to work, etc. Just sit down anywhere in the dense parts of the city and you'l see them go by constantly!<p>I doubt the people who put those bike lanes in back in 2018 and before ever could have imagined how popular they are now thanks to lime bikes, electric scooters and such. Its honestly pretty remarkable and thank god somebody had the thought to build up that stuff back then!
This is more in the direction of what I'm talking about. I think it's a pretty good model and affirms not contradticts what I'm saying because you do have to sacrifice drivability (unless you can just add streets like this - but I assume not).
It's pretty easy to do in most cities, you just have to eliminate a lane of traffic and/or parking spots. It's quite rare for a modern city to have streets too narrow to do that.
Bike lanes don't just compete against car lanes. They also compete against sidewalks and bus/tram lanes.<p>There is also the question of what you are going to do with your bike once you are at your destination, where are you going to park it?<p>For those who went to Amsterdam as a pedestrian, I don't know how it felt, but to me, it was not great. Lots of narrow sidewalks littered with stuff, the stuff in question is often bikes, so you have to step onto the adjacent bike lane, where you are usually greeted by an angry cyclist, because for some reason, parking your bike on the sidewalk is fine but stepping on the bike lane is not.<p>So, as a pedestrian, I wished Amsterdam converted its car lanes into trams and sidewalks rather than bike lanes. And yes, I hated bikes for as long as I stayed in Amsterdam, and so did everyone in my group.<p>The cars vs bikes debate tend to get a lot of attention, but the bikes vs pedestrians and public transit aspect matters too.<p>Note that bikes + buses can be a particularly dangerous combination. Buses are long and can block off the path of a careless cyclist as they turn, who may fall right under the wheels of the bus.
To provide a different anecdote, Amsterdam is the best city I've ever had the pleasure of exploring as a pedestrian.<p>There were well-maintained sidewalks everywhere I needed to go. The reduced amount of automobile traffic made it easier to cross smaller roads and intersections without risking my life. At larger intersections, I often received a crossing signal almost immediately upon requesting one, instead of waiting multiple minutes.<p>Negotiating interactions with cyclists was trivial, because I could always make eye contact with them. Unlike drivers, who barely pay attention to those outside of cars, have their heads buried in their phone, or are obscured behind tinted glass.<p>It was also the quietest major city I've ever visited, which I largely attribute to the prevalence of bikes instead of automobiles. Some of the semi-tractors / HGVs I saw making deliveries were even electric, which is a great reduction in noise and other forms of pollution.<p>If I ever have the pleasure of visiting Amsterdam again, I intend to rent a bike. I hope to explore more of the city via the obviously superior mode of transportation, as demonstrated by so many locals.
> Bike lanes don't just compete against car lanes. They also compete against sidewalks and bus/tram lanes.<p>Tram lanes are a travesty, but bus lanes make pretty decent bike lanes. I biked through Seattle to work for a year or so in 2018/2019 where bikes are allowed in bus lanes, and it's a good compromise. There's a couple of streets where the bus lanes are always full of busses, but most of the bus lanes are a nice place to ride; unless they've got rails, of course.<p>Seattle has put in a lot more separated bike lanes since I've been there, but on routes I wouldn't have used anyway, so I dunno. There was one on my route that was <i>terrible</i>, but I don't think they used that pattern very often; they put a separated bike lane between parking and the side walk, and parking ended close to an intersection where many cars wanted to turn right; limited visibility and limited space made it hard to get to the center or left of the lane to avoid conflicts with vehicles turning right.<p>IMHO, there's a conflict between bike infrastructure appropriate for beginner / slow bicyclists and infrastructure appropriate for experienced / faster bicyclists. Separated lanes can be nice, but they make it harder to mix with motor vehicles when that's appropriate and desirable. If separated bike infrastructure makes me take a longer path or wait for a signal change to turn left, but lack of infrastructure (and the traffic situation) would have let me mix with motor vehicles and take a permissive left without waiting for a signal change, that's a negative for me --- but the extra wait isn't an issue for someone who wouldn't have mixed with traffic for that left turn anyway.
> eliminate a lane of traffic and/or parking spots<p>It's out of the question in most places, it slows car traffic down and makes it harder for people to park in places where parking is already scarce. Then residents and customers of local businesses have nowhere to park.
>It's out of the question in most places, it slows car traffic down<p>If you actually make a sufficiently high-quality bike network to convince people to bike that would otherwise drive, I would expect this to speed car traffic up by taking a lot of cars off the road.
Not everywhere is San Francisco. Where I live, it's below freezing almost half the year. No one wants to add bike lanes that will only get lightly used 3 months a year.
I bike 9 to 10 months out of the year in southern Wisconsin. It would do people well to get outside and spend less time on their screens in the Winter.
Denmark has excellent bike infrastructure and terrible weather.
This is very geography/climate dependent though. There are conditions where most people would <i>not</i> bike regardless of how high quality the bike network is.
The effect is a lot less pronounced that you might expect. See, for example, this video talking about Oulu, Finland: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uhx-26GfCBU" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uhx-26GfCBU</a>
Are these conditions that typically can't be found in the Netherlands?<p>I guess heavy snow isn't too common there, maybe if we plowed the bike paths? Ok, now I'm getting distracted imagining a bike-path-plow, it would presumably be mounted on a powered bike of some sort, or maybe on those little parking enforcement trikes.
It's a self-fulfilling situation. It's that way only because those places have designed their infrastructure to be car dependent.<p>The opposite is also true: If you take a place where people primarily walk and bike, and take out the sidewalks and bike lanes to widen the road, people will also be pissed.<p>All you're pointing out is that humans are resistant to change. We already know that is true. The question is not whether people don't like change, the question is: which is better urban planning? What is a better environment to live in?
There should be more friction added to car travel. More walkable neighborhoods with local business around the corner would pop up right where people are if the norm wasn't "everyone make endless individual trips to Walmart."<p>So stupid all the suburbanites blocking my driveway to come eat at nice restaurants because all they have out there is fast food; such a huge waste of resources
It's absolutely impossible everywhere except where it has been tried and works great. Car centric design is a poor match for dense urban development and reverting the city to be more transit and pedestrian focused almost always improves the situation, bringing more people to shops and restaurants and revitalizing previously moribund downtown districts.
Eliminating parking on a single street is hardly a death sentence for nearby businesses.<p>And the whole idea is to encourage biking, ergo less parking is a good thing.
Vancouver in Canada did a really good job with bike routes. Instead of putting bikes in a lane on a main road, they turned side roads into a kind of bicycle highway. It’s the best cycling infrastructure I’ve ever seen.
Insulating bicycles from other vehicles is not the only path to road safety. When forced to interact with bikes more often, car drivers drive more safely and conservatively. Not sure that works everywhere or depends on better driver education and general empathy.<p><a href="https://time.com/archive/6683576/signal-failure/" rel="nofollow">https://time.com/archive/6683576/signal-failure/</a><p><a href="https://bikecity.amsterdam.nl/en/experiment-traffic-lights-disabled-and-gone/" rel="nofollow">https://bikecity.amsterdam.nl/en/experiment-traffic-lights-d...</a><p><a href="http://dutchcycling.nl/get-inspired/sarphatistraat-amsterdam/" rel="nofollow">http://dutchcycling.nl/get-inspired/sarphatistraat-amsterdam...</a>
Motorbikes in the US are the same problem, 30 years behind.<p>We have decades of bicyclists clamoring for infrastructure, and they've been starting to get it.<p>Meanwhile, e-bikes and delivery apps have caused a recent explosion in the number of motorbikes on the road. Cars think they're too slow. Cyclists think they're too fast. They're nimble and vulnerable like bicycles, but can be regulated like cars. Like taxis, they're often piloted by people who come from places with chaotic road cultures, and who have a financial incentive to bend the rules to get there faster.<p>Ideally, we'd be like the Dutch and have different outlets for different classes of transportation (mass + speed + amount of protection). Instead, everyone just gets pissed at everyone who moves differently than they do, and the road network fails to keep up with anyone's needs.
In the Piers Anthony novel "On a Pale Horse", the protagonist is taught a lesson about empathy and perspective by being forced to experience the same scenario as a pedestrian, a bicyclist, and a driver.<p>Reading your comment and many others makes me think that the most "intractable" problem with shared transportation infrastructure isn't making it physically safe, it's getting people to treat other road users as human. Even a car-only road still has this problem.
Can't recall which European city it was (not AMS) where it was impossible to ride bikes on footpath but easy for padestrians. Very interesting hurdles were added. I wish I was more enthusiastic about taking photos. I had seen it on a very small stretch though. Somehwere in Belgium? I can't recall. In fact some of those hurdles/obstacles looked very artsy :)<p>And also there were dedicated bike lanes which should be a must in any self-respecting place.
Natives might have a different take, but I was recently in Berlin (which you might consider an 'established city'), and this seemed like a solved problem there. Bike lanes are at sidewalk grade, above the curb, with rumble strip or other tactile indicator for the boundary. You do NOT walk in the bike lane, it's just like walking in the car lane.<p>Considering the rise of additional micromobility vehicles, this is such an obvious solution when you see it in practice.
> Of course this is infeasible for most established cities.<p>It simply is not. The problem is sacrificing an unreasonable amount of space to drivers. There is a ton of space for human-scale vehicles.
Copenhagen does this quite well: <a href="https://ramblershighway.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/10/dsc06020.jpg" rel="nofollow">https://ramblershighway.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/201...</a>
Have you heard of "The Copenhagen left"?<p>It's a method for a cyclist turning left at an intersection. Turning left from the bike lane on the right is of course impossible, because the land is on the right, despite being a basic function of biking somewhere.<p>So the cyclist wants to turn left. They go through the intersection and move off to the side, near any pedestrians waiting to cross. When the light turns they and the pedestrians can cross.<p>Otherwise the biker must leave the bike lane and merge across traffic.<p>In either case the bike lane is inherently problematic.
They do have good urban cycling design, but I think a big part of it is merely the expectancy of both drivers and pedestrians that bikes are everywhere.
Minneapolis is very successfully demonstrating that this is not infeasible.
It's not really infeasible, we have this in Holland everywhere and our cities are a lot narrower than the US ones.
>It's not really infeasible, we have this in Holland everywhere and our cities are a lot narrower than the US ones.<p>I said it is inherently problematic, not exactly that it's infeasible.<p>The Netherlands is excellent support for my claim because of what you just said. The cities support less car traffic and slower driving speeds. Something has to give and in that case its drivability. In fact there are a lot more streets where cars can't go at all, or are just mostly bikes correct?<p>And the 3 modes/lanes in one place is still not even solved while minimizing cars. Cyclist are more than 1/3rd of Dutch road deaths and the Fietsersbond has even argued that the middle lane. <a href="https://swov.nl/sites/default/files/bestanden/downloads/FS%20Cyclists.pdf" rel="nofollow">https://swov.nl/sites/default/files/bestanden/downloads/FS%2...</a>
Tho Onion should have also had “'Infeasible,' Says Only Nation Where This Does Not Happen” to link to.
The same person is a driver, biker or pedestrial at different times of the same day.<p>Toxic entitled drivers hate bikers. Some bikers are toxic on sidewalks. Most sane people are actually able to exist with all three.<p>> Bikes don't belong on the road with cars and they dont belong on sidewalks with pedestrians and they don't belong in between.<p>Bikes belong both on road and in between. Childrens bikes belong on side walk. Bikes moving in small speed can be on sidewalks too.
Chicago is putting these in everywhere to varying degrees of robustness based on traffic flows and it's fabulous.
It is not at all infeasible. Many cities do this successfully.
usually at the expense of one or the other, usually cars.<p>FWIW I think that is a fine trade-off. I think people don’t truly realise how poorly cars scale until they take a really large step back and take a holistic view on infrastructure- which is inherently difficult for most people as they are so close and bought-in that they can’t even conceive of life being different than what they’re used to.<p>And they reach for exceptions to prove the requirement, when less cars in cities frees up the roads for those that truly need it (LGV and disabled access, but slow thus disincentivised unless actually required and thus less likely to cause accidents).
It's not necessarily at the expense of cars; the people riding bicycles on the bike lane are no longer driving cars blocking the way ahead of you, and parking their car in your favourite spot. Since bicycles use space more efficiently than cars, this can actually be a win for both the cyclists and the remaining drivers (who now have one less lane, but even less traffic). However this only happens if cycling adoption is high enough, which is why the bike routes have to be well connected.<p>Sometimes it doesn't even require sacrificing a lane, because many North American cities have lanes that are wildly larger than necessary or even appropriate given the posted speed limits. The lanes can simply be narrowed, and then this also causes the drivers to naturally drive at safer speeds, reducing traffic accidents, speeding tickets, and the unplanned delays that those both cause.
In Chicago, more people ride the Ashland bus than drive down Ashland every day. We still couldn’t take a lane for bus rapid transit.<p>People are already stupid, put them in a car and their brains start leaking out of their ears.
The bike lane space has to come from somewhere, parking space for bikes has to come from somewhere, intersections have to be set up to disadvantage one for the other.<p>Street space really is zero-sum, though more people in bikes and out of cars free’s up so much infrastructure that it can make less space work even better for cars- I’m sure urban designers are aware of this.<p>The major issue I presume that is faced in urban design is how to handle people coming from far away, the regional hub/spoke design (with train stations around a radial that have good parking allowing train access into the city) is not something actively pursued by advanced economies for some (presumably good) reason.
The bit you are missing is the space efficiency. Cars take up the most space by a large margin and getting people into more dense forms of transit (anything else) frees up space to be more efficiently used. Space is the most precious commodity in a city as many people are competing for every square meter.<p>This is also why suburbs and rural areas are a better fit for cars. Space is much more available and you can afford to be wasteful with it.
> The bike lane space has to come from somewhere<p>> though more people in bikes and out of cars free’s up so much infrastructure that it can make less space work even better for cars<p>Yes, you've reiterated my point...
And how many do it thoroughly, not just in small parts?
I’m a driver and a pedestrian and I don’t hate cyclists because I’m not a psychopath.
Bikes do pretty well on roads, especially in cities or quiet roads outside. We will all live in peace once we have self-driving cars instead of careless and violent human drivers. This already works pretty well in many cities in for example Spain.
The cars are the problem, not the bikes or pedestrians.