“You know what else I saw on my half-hour commute to the Slate offices? At least 30 cars idling in the bike lane for unspecified reasons—hazard lights on—forcing me to maintain forward momentum by jackknifing into the busy thoroughfare.”
“You know what else I saw on my half-hour commute to the Slate offices? At least 30 cars idling in the bike lane for unspecified reasons—hazard lights on—forcing me to maintain forward momentum by jackknifing into the busy thoroughfare.”
Don’t blame the lack of police enforcement alone for people blocking cycling lanes. It’d be nice to see these people ticketed, but that is NOT the fundamental problem.
It shouldn’t be possible for cars to block cycle lanes. They should be physically separated by at MINIMUM a curb. A car should not generally be able to enter the space.
Road engineering affects behavior. The idea that we can engineer to cause bad behavior and then rely on the police to fix the bad behavior is dumb.
I can and will blame both. I can also, and will also, blame motorists who do it.
Yeah, no one LIKEs mixing bikes and cars on roads, but little is given towards making them separate. There are 4 things on a street being balanced though, pedestrians, bikes, greenery, buses, and cars. The first 3 IMHO should be the priority for a street (the area people travel short distances between close destinations). Roads on the other hand should be limited to buses, cars, and greenery OR a bike highway limited to bikes and greenery.
Like you said, though, using police as the primary method to enforce these separations is a failure of design. It would be like if Lemmy required you edit the webpages code to comment instead of having comment boxes, and having some dedicated to just going around and checking the code to make sure you were only putting in good formatted text and hoping they could punish people enough to do encourage it.
You would either shut down the site from excessive enforcement or shut it down from unusable design.
@fruitywelsh @admiralteal
I’m thinking that planting trees randomly in the road is the best answer?!
Slow cars down and force drivers to concentrate 🤔😉
There is actually something to this. Even if you don’t decrease the size of the road, adding things to the sides of roads makes them feel less spacious, encouraging people to slow down.
@fruitywelsh
I actually noticed myself the other week driving down a busy crowded road with trams, really slowing down and concentrating.
We could also follow India and allow cows to roam our streets freely 😉
Whether or not you are being sarcastic, look into traffic calming. Chicanes are an effective way to make roads safer and perform better.
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Ironically, the real reason why NYCDOT repeatedly refuses to install physical separation in bike lanes, like curbs and bollards, is for emergency vehicles access. They do not say it publicly but they treat bike lanes as “traffic relief valves”, ostensibly for ambulances, but in practice mostly for police cars to zip up and down. The only bollards they have ever installed was on the Hudson River Greenway, and that was only after a literal terrorist drove a van all the way down it. Every single other “protected” bike lane ever built has been made wide and unobstructed enough to fit a truck through.