I was recently thinking about buying an elecrtic scooter/bike to get from point A to point B, with everything so close in a city, and traffic being bad. What are your thoughts on cycle-lanes, and cycling/scooting in general?
I was recently thinking about buying an elecrtic scooter/bike to get from point A to point B, with everything so close in a city, and traffic being bad. What are your thoughts on cycle-lanes, and cycling/scooting in general?
It’s complicated. Often adding a cycle lane is disastrous for local cyclists. It’s a poorly understood issue, even IMO among road planners, because it’s not something you can explain in a 10 second soundbite.
We could start a proper discussion. Maybe you could start a dedicated “community” for those really interested in the technicalities of this.
And many people are really interested, it’s literally life or death stuff for them.
How can a cycling lane possibly be “disastrous”? Whenever I’m biking I highly prefer roads with cycling lanes and have had much fewer “close calls” when in a dedicated lane. And why in the world would we need to create a community specifically to discuss bike lanes?
It’s not so surprising that two different people have different experiences of the same thing.
There are many problems, but the major one in my area: The cycle lanes are always the rightmost lane. So cars turning right, they stay in the middle lane, then pull across the bike lane as they turn. Then you have cyclists in the right lane, going straight. The only near-accidents I commonly have are all because of this situation.
Before the bike lane were installed, cycling was much easier, with much fewer near-accidents.
It’s just an example. There are many ways that something that seems obvious and easy, it turns out to be complicated, or even counter-productive.
What did you do before cycle lanes? I bike on the right with or without a lane.
That being said, there is one major road in my area that has bidirectional bike lanes in the center (left of the cars), and I agree that’s ideal.