User:JMyles/Why Car Lanes Divide Us

The auto industry - and its puppets in various governments - seem to be coming for bike lanes. I saw good riddance - we never wanted them anyway.

Whatever else the recent hullabaloo regarding "bike lanes" is, it's certainly mystifying.

One of the loudest examples - the government of Toronto removing several km of bike lanes, including in commercial areas - has been met with seething rage on reddit (in particular /r/fuckcars). The underlying impetus of /r/fuckcars - namely, fuck cars - is a principle with which I find myself in enthusiastic agreement. But I have to ask: is defending "bike lanes" of all things really a meaningful strategy?

I ask that you permit me an observation to inform the rest of this essay, and I think that it's sufficiently obvious to any urban cyclist as to be taken as read: the chief function of "bike lanes" is to present an urban plan where cars are the default, and bikes are relegated to a subsection of the roadway. In this sense, bike lanes are really just car lanes seen from the other side of a line of paint. Although no reliable measurements are available at present, I think it's reasonable to conclude that something like 99% of the 'bike lane' mileage in the USA consists solely of paint and no infrastructure, and a significant portion is also commingled with a door zone. Even protected bike lanes, while safer for individual cyclists, are an antipattern for safer cities.

File:Painted bike lane door zone geometry.png

A standard 5-foot painted bike lane, drawn to scale. An opening car door reaches 2 feet into it, for the whole length of the parking row. What remains is 3 feet, which has to hold a 2½-foot rider and the 3 feet of passing clearance the law requires.

So let me stick my ahead above the parapet and say: bike lanes suck. They fail to fulfill the most important role of urban infrastructure: to calm traffic. Not only are bike lanes not a step toward urban joy, they are a step away from it - they serve to entrench the auto industry subsidy that is the contortionist dance needed to accommodate cars near and even in the centers of our cities.

File:Street treatments separation versus traffic calming.png

Separation and calming are two different questions, and most of what gets built answers only the first. Paint, buffered paint and parking-protected lanes rearrange the bicycle; the car keeps its speed, its width and its priority.

Moreover - and especially evident in the hostile dialogue on reddit and elsewhere, where the focus seems entirely on castigation of 'carbrains' and not at all on the comparative efficacy of various, this style of dialogue allows us to politely say what must by now be the obvious and unstoppable conclusion of the e-bike age: **cars do not belong in cities anymore**.

Perhaps the history of the growth of urban joy will view car roads in cities as an important part of the economic development in the 20th century - and of course this benefits the states that actually monopolized opportunities for economic development in that time period via foreign and trade polices - but certainly not for the next century.

So I offer a simple, actionable approach for the bold and strong among us: take the lane and ride at speeds and in formations which encourage the meek, young, and elderly among us.

File:Lane position and overtaking behaviour.png

The same street three times. Riding the paint costs the driver nothing. Taking the lane makes overtaking a decision. Riding in formation turns that decision into shelter for somebody slower.

Notes on the figures

The three figures are drawn to scale from standard US dimensions: an 8-foot parking lane, a 5-foot bike lane (the AASHTO minimum), and an 11-foot travel lane. A parked car is taken as 6 feet wide, sitting 6 inches off the curb; a driver's door is taken to reach 3½ feet from the body; a rider with handlebars and ordinary wobble is taken as 2½ feet wide. These are typical figures rather than worst cases — narrower lanes, wider vehicles and larger doors are all common, and every one of them makes the arithmetic worse.

Figures drawn by Magent.