BICYCLE LANES 🤦‍♂️

[Camer the Dragon]

🚩1) Most bicycle lanes do a poor job of offering protection against drunk drivers and speeders.

🚩2) Bicyclists don't always use the bicycle lanes. They find the roads more appealing.

🚩3) Bicycle lanes limits parking areas, especially if you're looking for parking spots downtown.

🚩4) Someone is going to get sued because eventually a drunk driver is going to swerve and collide with a bicyclist.

🚩5) Drivers don't always pay attention to the road, thus potentially increasing the risk of bicyclists getting killed from biking in the streets.

1, 4, and 5 are basically the same issue which could apply to pedestrians too but in more detail for each:
1) As opposed to what, having them in the same stretch of road? I don't see how picking out a particular problem that exists and then saying "well this one isn't fixed" invalidates everything else (i.e. benefits) about it. It's not even "it's worse like this".
4) Surely this would be more likely without bicycle lanes? Once again like in point 1, I don't get the point of this argument.
5) Drivers not paying attention to the road isn't a danger just for cyclists, but for pedestrians too (e.g. if someone is crossing the road) or if you get people just mindlessly wandering in the road just off the side of the pavement (which does happen). Once again, surely without a designated bicycle lane this would be more likely too?

2) This would be the cyclist's fault but at the end of the day they're mainly putting themself at risk by doing so. Many cyclists would use the cycle lane though (and especially if a car is coming I feel a lot of people would at least dip into it).
3) You really shouldn't be parking on the side of the road if it's a busy road anyway. If you mean designated spots you have to pay for, then you may as well make a multistorey car park (Google tells me these are called parking garages in America).

Whatever happened to bicyclists riding on the sidewalk?

Because it's illegal, at least here it is. Looking it up tells me in America it's very much a "depends on local laws" situation. Also it'd just cause another issue with cyclists and pedestrians.

[Master Raiden]

@Uptight 534 Woah, that was a good response.

Also cyclists travel way faster than pedestrians in relative speed (i.e., "bike vs pedestrian speed" is greater than "car vs bike" speed. Using the high end of the average walking speed of 4 MPH (6 KMH) and the low end of the average cycling speed of 12 MPH (19 KMH), we see that cycling is 3 times faster than walking. Let's take an average speed limit in a residential area of 35 mph (56 KMH) (chose this because from the table and personal experience, this seems to be the "average") and compare it to 12 MPH (19 KMH). The motorist is only 2.9 times faster than the cyclist, which is less than "Cyclist vs Pedestrian."

I don't really agree with the relative speed argument. I think the absolute speed difference is more important here.
A madman going 150 mph on a highway with a 60 mph speed limit is only 2.5x faster, but it is probably way more dangerous and any accident would likely result in a fatality.

FWIW, a 45 MPH (72 KMH) and 15 MPH (24 KMH) difference is 3 times and 15 MPH (24 KMH) vs 3 MPH (5 KMH) is 5 times. Bringing that walking speed down by one value really shows cycling on the sidewalk is more dangerous due to the "relative speed" difference (i.e., less time for people to react).

Also about the reaction time, that also depends on absolute speed difference. Your vision is not limited by how slow you or the other person is going, so cyclists actually have more time to react to pedestrians than a car does to a cyclist.
In your example, the cyclist would be gaining on the pedestrian at 15-3=12 mph while a car would be gaining on a cyclist at 45-15=30 mph. So the cyclist has 2.5x longer to react to a pedestrian from the same distance.

I find it weird you want more safety, but also advocating for removing painted bike lanes and making roads wider in downtowns for vehicles. Shouldn't we be keeping roads narrow to deter speeding, which will increase reaction time and decrease the severity of incidents?

I don't agree with narrowing roads. That just makes everything more dangerous. The penalties associated with breaking laws should deter people from speeding. Wider roads are much safer than narrow ones because they offer greater visibility and more room for error if an evasive maneuver is required.

I think, ultimately, everyone here agrees that things going at very different speeds should be separated. Pedestrians should ideally be separated from cyclists, and cyclists should ideally be separated from cars/trucks/buses.

[Different]

@Uptight 534 @Master Raiden @Mia @Camer the Dragon @Magniloquent @LCPD Gentlemen, I'd like to thank you for taking the time out of your day to challenge me on my viewpoints. Keep a lookout for a new blog post that I'm about to drop. It'll thoroughly explain why I've been inactive for a week.

[Uptight 534]

@Master Raiden Apologies, took me awhile to sit down and write a response. Yeah, I totally get you on the absolute speed argument. Relative speed does not matter when a much heavier object is going fast. We can thank Sir Isaac Newton for that one (Force = mass x acceleration). I am not a physicist, so I am not going to act like I know anything advanced about speed, reaction times, relativity, etc. because I would just be talking out of my rear-end, lol. I think you perfectly summed it up in this quote.

I think, ultimately, everyone here agrees that things going at very different speeds should be separated. Pedestrians should ideally be separated from cyclists, and cyclists should ideally be separated from cars/trucks/buses.

I am still going to disagree on "wider lanes being safer." In theory, what you said is what wide lanes are designed for, but in practice, they trick the driver into thinking they can take more risks (e.g., speeding; I am totally guilty of this). Combine this with a dense urban area, and you have a fatal concoction This Johns Hopkins study found wide and faster lanes have caused more deaths than narrower ones. Here is an article that talks a little bit about the study and also quotes the chair of the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB, U.S. agency for investigating civil transportation accidents). I see it as a false-sense of security just like people that have All-Wheel Drive or Four-Wheel Drive and think they are immune to a skid in slick conditions.

Regarding enforcing traffic laws, that does not really matter when the police in my city do not care until someone is already dead.