Five More Bad Arguments Against Bike Lanes

if you've ever encountered an argument against building bike infrastructure that you knew wasn't strong but you didn't have the exact counter argument in your pocket this video is for you it's the second in our series refuting bad arguments against spike infrastructure but don't worry this one doesn't contain any spoilers for the other one before we get started some people disagreed with the last video because we sometimes use the term bike lane which gave them the impression that we're advocating for nothing more than painted lanes on the street that's the most basic form of a bike lane and it's all that some cities have but the ideal is for a bike lane to be separated from car traffic by concrete or trees or parked cars and bollards you could also call these cycle tracks but in everyday speech most people just say bike lanes at least in canada in the u.s the first bad argument in our new list is that canada is a massive country the second biggest in the world how can bikes be practical if we're talking about traveling vast distances across canada or the us or australia then bikes are irrelevant but cars don't fare so well either the real winner is the plane which can get you from coast to coast in about 8 hours that compares to 60 hours driving in a car which realistically needs to be spread out over a week or two this fact doesn't really matter for transportation in people's daily lives though because most people in these countries don't travel anywhere near those vast distances on a regular basis they travel mostly around their neighborhood city and maybe their province or state there are exceptions like truckers but traveling across big countries on a regular basis is not actually that common we don't need to speculate or rely on intuition for this we can look at studies on people's trip patterns and see exactly how far they travel one study from greater toronto found that one-third of all trips currently being made are within reasonable cycling distance between one and five kilometers and could potentially be made on bike if the infrastructure was there 28 of teenagers are within biking distance to work or school but only one percent actually do so 22 percent of trips to a go transit station for a regional train or bus could be done by bike if the infrastructure including safe bike parking at the station was adequate we need to stop talking about how not every trip can be done by bike and look at how many trips could be done by bike but aren't the second bad argument is that you should stop the social engineering of forcing bikes onto cities people just want to drive the reason this debate is even happening and why so many cities are building bike infrastructure is that an increasingly large part of the population supports it this isn't some small activist group or bike lobby although it started like that decades ago with campaigners like robert silverman and claire morrissette in montreal for example today according to an angus reed survey 46 of canadians in larger cities want more separated bike infrastructure which easily beats out the people who want less infrastructure and almost equals the combined group of people who want less or the same amount this doesn't mean that all bike projects will be popular some cities are more supportive than others and maybe more importantly there's usually a big urban versus suburban divide within each city but support for cycling is real one survey of ontarians found that 41 percent wish they biked more than they do another poll found that 78 think more people overall would bike if there was better infrastructure for it another problem with this argument is that by their definition of social engineering it already took place when we forced cars onto cities north american car focused suburbia is the result of government designs and policies like density restrictions that spread people out and minimum parking requirements that frequently require stores to dedicate more space to free parking outside than to the actual store inside we can't implement these policies that shape our communities and personal habits and then treat the result as the natural state of the world that cannot or must not be tampered with the third bad argument is that cyclists don't have the right to road space because they don't get a license or registration arguments like this show that a lot of people have lost perspective on the fact that cars are dangerous machines on the same scale as weapons cars can kill and maim people really easily while non-motorized bikes just can't motor vehicles are the leading cause of death for young canadians we're not making an emotional argument to say that cars are inherently evil so for example we're not on board with the practice we sometimes see of referring to all car crashes as traffic violence because violence has strong connotations of being intentional however we are making a practical argument that it's completely normal to apply more restrictions and precautions to more dangerous things bikes don't require the exact same treatment as cars any more than bread knives need the exact same treatment as guns if you propose that everyone moving around in public be treated the same we'd have to say that pedestrians need a license to walk and people need to register and attach a license plate to their skateboard toronto actually introduced the bike licensing system in 1935 which they got rid of in 1957 because it resulted in bad relations between the police and children toronto considered bringing back licensing three more times in 1984 1992 and 1996 but each time rejected the idea because it would be too costly to set up a database and processing system it would be too difficult to set up a standardized test that can be applied to children and adults it would waste limited police resources on enforcement and it wasn't even clear that licensing would help fix any actual problems like illegally riding on a sidewalk the fourth bad argument is that cyclists don't need dedicated infrastructure they should learn to share the road with cars and trucks we actually hear this sometimes from cyclists themselves and it's perplexing because it's a vision of cycling that we can't relate to at all for us it's not a matter of experience or ability we've spent lots of time biking in traffic we can do it it's just really unpleasant cycling for us isn't an adventure sport and it's not a way to prove our toughness and bravery we have deadlifting for that we just want to comfortably get around our city and with the exception of strongly trafficked calm streets like vancouver's local bikeways cycling in the same lane as cars doesn't do that for us if cycling always meant riding with cars we definitely wouldn't bike as much and that's coming from people who are interested enough in cycling to make these youtube videos so we're used to putting ourselves out there in the name of active transportation regular people who are less inherently interested in cycling or aren't as young or physically able are much easier to discourage it should come as no surprise that the road environment matters a lot for how likely people are to bike telling people to toughen up or get educated can only go so far one system that urban planners use for thinking about the road environment is called the level of traffic stress or lts a four level classification of how discouraging streets are to cycling based on the speed and volume of car traffic how close the traffic is to you and other features like how often the lane is blocked lts 2 the second lowest level of stress might be seen as the benchmark for a serious spike network because it's accessible to most adults but lts 1 is a gold standard because it makes cycling accessible to all ages and abilities including children if you can't bring road stress down to one of these levels you're essentially limiting cycling in your city to only an activity for people who are fit risk taking adventurous and in a hurry one concern we sometimes hear about dedicated bike infrastructure is that it will be used as justification for not allowing cyclists to use the roads if they want to at least in places where there is a bike lane we wouldn't go out of our way to advocate for banning cyclists from car lanes but retaining the right to ride in traffic is low on our list of priorities far more people benefit from dedicated bike infrastructure than the right to ride in traffic when we look at dedicated separated bike infrastructure like laurier avenue in ottawa or laurier street in gatineau or even painted bike lanes which can be fine on low traffic streets like laurier avenue in montreal what draws cyclists here isn't the right to intermingle with cars it's the dedicated accommodations for bikes either that our cyclists just really like streets named laurier the fifth bad argument is that cyclists don't need dedicated infrastructure because they should just bike on the sidewalk we understand why someone might choose to bike on the sidewalk when good bike infrastructure isn't there but the city just telling cyclists to use the sidewalk is not a good solution biking on the sidewalk is actually illegal for adults in most cities in canada including toronto montreal vancouver calgary and ottawa and in many cases these are provincial laws that cities don't control the u.s seems more varied on policy here los angeles and boston allow sidewalk riding while new york chicago and houston don't setting aside the legal obstacles there are practical problems too sidewalks usually don't have enough room for bikes to comfortably pass each other let alone room for cyclists and pedestrians all interacting and sidewalks are often a bumpy ride because they're made with slabs meant to be walked on not rolled over you could fix these issues by widening the sidewalk making sure the cycling portion is smooth and clearly separating the two uses but then you've just created a bike lane the idea that cyclists should just bike on a sidewalk was among the most common responses to our last video on bad arguments against bike lanes and it's pretty frustrating sidewalks are already much smaller than the road sometimes comically so it's really an indication of who matters when you give motorists 80 to 90 of the road space to drive and store their vehicles and you give the scraps to everyone else cyclists pedestrians wheelchair users people in mobility scooters skateboarders and expect them to figure it out among themselves some people might reply to this by saying that they live in a suburban area that doesn't have much pedestrian traffic we have to point out that the amount of pedestrian traffic you get is based partly on whether your city chooses to make it comfortable and practical to walk but setting that aside it's fair that different contacts can warrant different solutions one interesting idea might be to turn more sidewalks into comfortably wide multi-use pathways so that at least cyclists can have a smooth surface and room to pass each other and pedestrians we saw something like this in bucherville a suburb of montreal which had a regular sidewalk on one side of the road and a smooth multi-use pathway on the other side this setup worked pretty well from what we experienced although integrating multi-use pathways into intersections can be a challenge this route mostly avoids that issue because it follows a river the sixth bad argument against bike lanes is that biking is no fun oh wait i'm just hearing now that nobody has ever said that thanks for watching and as always don't forget to like and subscribe big thanks to our supporters on patreon your support means as much as a protected bike lane on an arterial road you

Channel: Oh The Urbanity!

Views: 111,006

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Id: U3725wx1IgM

Length: 10min 9sec (609 seconds)

Published: Sun Oct 31 2021