Whilst I live in London, I live in a borough of 300k people
My kids go to school within a mile
Most of the traffic through the borough early morning and late afternoon are non resident using residential streets as cut throughs to avoid traffic
The result is they bring pollution and traffic to residential streets that are not their destination
My kids can’t ride to school due to the traffic on specific streets
They speed, pollute and residents bear the costs of activity that doesn’t benefit them
You can say a city of 300k is not like London or Paris or Barcelona but it really is, because where the other 7.7m live in London I rarely travel to
Bus lanes and cycle lanes improve the flow and volume of people moving across the city.
A cycle lanes can look empty and still be moving far more people in half the space of a traffic lanes improving the air quality and reducing congestion.
It’s not even arguable. I mean it’s not as if the Dutch don’t need things delivered and haven’t figured out a way to have amazing traffic free infrastructure (traffic free doesn’t mean no traffic it means getting people out of cars that don’t need to be in them)
The issue is interconnected with density. If we are talking about a typical US suburb, those were designed for low-density housing and it is very difficult to substantially reduce car traffic. My city of 100k has invested a lot of money into bike paths, but a large percentage of their users are recreationists, not commuters, school attendees, shoppers, etc. Getting people out of their cars seems to require either a high degree of density (which both increases the likelihood that your destination is closer and also makes good bus/subway systems economically viable) or a vast increase in gas prices.
Consider most places in the western world aren’t that dense. I have a kid in daycare and a kid in school, in opposite directions. Don’t even get me started on kids activities.
The plan that we are implementing is eliminating main roads. When you do that and create more congestion, people are going to look for alternate routes.
I’m not opposed to bike lanes, or bike highways, quite the opposite. But you still need to allow for smooth flowing vehicular traffic. It is stupid to take main thoroughfares and try to turn them in to quiet residental streets, when quiet residental streets that would be perfect for large scale bike infrastructure already exist a block parallel to said main roads.
I don’t know how people do it. Nothing frustrates me more than being held up by traffic. Where I live now it essentially never happens, only if there is an accident or particularly disruptive road construction.
I drove through Boston on the highway last Saturday at 7:30 in the morning and it was bumper to bumper, slow moving traffice for a few miles. I just kept thinking, how bad is this at other times.
I drive in and around Boston frequently, usually at last a couple times per week. It’s almost always bad, but one of the worst aspects is the unpredictability. Some days at a particular time its fine, other days at the same time you can be sitting in traffic forever.
The frustrating part for me is having property taxes raised 10% a year to pay for the luxury of having our road’s vehicular capacity halved.
In our small city getting around was pretty easy. Now it’s a nightmare, and with Canada hellbent on increasing our population at very fast levels, it’s laughable to think all these new people will ride a bike or take our non existent transit.
It just seems so unnecessary. We could have built an amazing and extensive bike network separated from main roads and we chose not to.
I commute from the suburbs into an industrial area between Minneapolis and St Paul, about 16 miles. I could bike into work, on residential streets and bike lanes, distance would go out to about 18 miles. Overall, wouldn’t be a terrible route.
My wife commutes 4 miles, effectively only in our small suburb. There is no feasibly way for her to ride to work without spending half the ride on roads with no shoulders or reasonable “safe” space on the road to ride.
Traffic in the burbs keeps getting worse and worse. Cities keep pushing for more housing without improving the infrastructure. With the RTO mandates these days the traffic into the city is getting pretty horrible.
houston has bad traffic though it is uniquely bad.
Chicago and LA highways just plain suck. All the time. Houston is like New York, but without the mass transit alternative: you can find yourself stuck for 20 minutes just getting to the highway. I think the traffic in Cypress Texas is the worst in the world. 45 minutes to drive 3 miles on local roads every single day.
Well, it’s not your street, unless it’s private. Public roads are by definition open to all.
Residents may drive them more frequently but that doesn’t make those streets theirs. Until you get to your destination, every street enroute is through someone else’s area.
Oftentimes some neighbor will have a party and guests park along the street in front of several houses. I’m not about to go out there and block of my front with cones.
The solution is a tax for every empty seat for every km driven. Lets say $1. So if you drive one km with 3 empty seats, you pay $3. Congestion pricing. In sao paulo brazil, they have a limit of driving only 3 days a week
Sao Paolo has a population of 13 million people. That’s a third of the population of our entire country in one city.
I can see in massive metropolitan areas needing make alternatives to driving. I can also imagine in large dense cities like that your access to amenities is much different than in less dense, smaller cities of under a million people.
That depends. In a sub-division with space between houses I can see an argument if someone is continually parking in front of your house when theirs is wide open. Not sure I am convinced of ownership, it would just be kind of weird for someone to do that. In a more crowded area, no, you do not.
We rented a house very near downtown Columbus, area that was built around 1900. Many houses did not have off street parking and they are close together so space was always at a premium. The woman who owned the house complained about people taking “her spot”. We laughed. After we moved out she moved back in. She somehow got the city to make her spot a handicap space reserved for her. She was not handicapped. Just bitchy.
Yes, but there’s things we can do. School streets shut Streets for 90 mins around school starting and finishing. Bus gates with restricted hours stop cut through traffic.
It’s not my street but I can advocate to put in place as many obstacles as possible to discourage drivers from using it.
The problem is not that I’m not amenable to sharing the road, it’s that parents in SUV’s too lazy to walk 15 minutes to a school will make riding for other kids dangerous with our segregated bike lanes
So I’m happy to instal bike lanes that will hinder drivers using it as a cut through to avoid traffic elsewhere.
