This discussion about the value and use of bike lanes keeps amazing me. It seems many people hold a negative view without having good arguments, almost religiously.
Living in the Netherlands, the benefits of separate bike lanes (to point of a separate transit system) are so incredibly obvious. It's not some cultural particularity, it's because cycling has been made easy, nice (most of the time) and safe here. (see http://hembrow.blogspot.com/)
People who don't accept the rationality of the whole thing, probably have difficulty imagining a city with a cycling network. And when you show them the Dutch system, they have problems imagining the change it requires to get there.
That is why Copenhaganize is a good campaign, because it shows the change is possible
Also, besides infrastructure, making a city of country bike-friendly also requires changes in legislation. E.g. in The Netherlands a lot legislation has been introduced in the past to protect cyclists, making drivers of motorized vehicles more cautious.
The effect on society is profound. Most of my colleagues go to work by bike, public transit, or both. A bike is often many times more economic than a car, reduces oil-dependence, and wide use results in cleaner air.
> It seems many people hold a negative view without having good arguments, almost religiously.
I tried discussing the benefits of cycling with a friend. "Bikes actually use as much energy to produce as cars, since they're made of high-tech materials which use a lot of energy in manufacture."
"Whenever I'm stuck in traffic, it's usually down to a cyclist somewhere."
"Having several cars is very environmentally friendly, since you can select the one most suited to your requirements at the time."
And he gets very pissy if I mention I've just completed a 20 mile ride or whatever, seems to think I'm bragging (which I am, sometimes ;) and it makes him a bit insecure. So yes, emotion trumps reason for some people.
Those objections have one thing in common: they are all flimsy after-the-fact rationalizations constructed to protect an irrational conclusion that your friend has already decided to believe, i.e. that cars are better than bikes in every way, and to hell with bikes. They're not his real objection to bikes.
A good conversational tactic for that kind of situation is to try to get him to agree in advance to what evidence would sway him. If you prove to him that cars are less energy-intensive to produce than cars, or that having several cars is less environmentally friendly than having one decent all-purpose car, will he agree to accept that, and actually change his mind? The purpose of getting pre-commitment here is to avoid the inevitable back-pedaling (no pun intended) and shifting of the goal-posts that would otherwise happen once you rebut his claims.
This guy has always been one to pull facts out of his arse. As a mutual friend put it, "He seems to have found a way of skipping the evidence-gathering stage of enquiry and leaping straight to the conclusions." It's total BS but the chances of changing his mind are zero.
Incidentally, he's not a complete idiot and I've known him for a long time; we've been friends since school. But he does have a massive blind-spot about this kind of thing because, basically, he's in love with his car.
I know that for a lot of people in the US, their experience with bike commuting involves being stuck behind a bicycle on a road that doesn't have bike lanes, causing a certain amount of free-floating antipathy towards bikers.
The unlimited point-to-point mobility provided by a car allows people to optimize their routines almost down to the second, so losing 30 seconds behind a cyclist can make the difference between being on time and being late. Though this can be disputed, I would argue that aggressively minimizing time spent in transportation (and thus maximizing time spent at work or leisure) is beneficial to the economy and society.
... except I know way too many people who voluntarily subscribe to 50-60 minute commutes in a car instead of simply living closer to work.
Optimizing for less time spent in transportation is nice, but there's a balance - both for yourself and society. A bunch of gas-guzzling one-ton hunks of steel squeezing their way down a packed freeway, with only a single passenger inside each... hardly seems beneficial to the economy, society, or the environment.
The commute isn't necessarily voluntary -- living closer to work may not be viable (especially for non-programmer types who work in the city but don't make enough to afford living there with their family), or may lack certain features (like a private yard or swimming pool) that make the commute worth it.
I'm not advocating for the status quo of one giant inefficient beast of steel per person, just explaining why some drivers get upset about small delays. It is my opinion that any transportation system that completely replaces the current road system will need to allow for the type of minimal-latency point-to-point mobility we now enjoy with cars (during off-peak hours, at least). The reason I believe this is that people are easy to move, but businesses, houses, and other resources are not. Extra mobility allows us to match the right people with the right resources in less time.
They have a similar viewpoint here in Italy, where they don't stop for pedestrians at crosswalks. I once helped a "little old lady" cross the street, not by taking her arm, but by striding out to stop the flow of cars, who were very aggressively minimizing the time spent stopping for other users of the road.
Except for when they're stuck in traffic, which is pretty much the norm in any city on any weekday.
I used to live in NYC, and taking the subway, walking or biking was far more time efficient than taking a cab, much less driving your own car. LA wasn't really any better for driving, but the distances were usually to far for bikes, and mass transit was miserable.
Yup, by opposing bike lanes they avoid associating themselves with the bikers that annoy them, even though bike lanes would remove the cause of the annoyance. That's primate political dynamics for you.
I'm a daily bike commuter and I would love to see a Netherlands-like biking network in the US, but it's hard for me to imagine anywhere that's not as flat as most of the Netherlands. I could see it here in Portland or maybe Philly, but I don't think it would really increase the numbers of cyclists that much in, say, Seattle, where I used to live (and bike).
Those cities are the exception, not the rule. Just off the top of my head, Manhattan, Chicago, Denver, Miami, Boston, Dallas, LA, San Diego, Atlanta, D.C., Phoenix are all flat enough for a person in decent shape to get around by bike. I think the winter is a bigger issue than the terrain, but overall I think most Americans could be biking most of the time (given a lot of changes in infrastructure, policy and public health).
When the countryside is flat and good infrastructure exists at the same time, the winter is not that big issue. It's not ideal, but it's not stopping most of the people either. For example people in Sweden have no problem with it: http://www.copenhagenize.com/2010/12/winter-cycling-in-umea-...
The issues of winter cycling are quite small compared to issues accociated with changing the cycling culture and building the infrastructure. So I suppose if Americans made their "flat enough cities" bike friendly, they would cycle even during winter, as other nations with good cycling conditions do.
Living in the Netherlands, the benefits of separate bike lanes (to point of a separate transit system) are so incredibly obvious. It's not some cultural particularity, it's because cycling has been made easy, nice (most of the time) and safe here. (see http://hembrow.blogspot.com/)
People who don't accept the rationality of the whole thing, probably have difficulty imagining a city with a cycling network. And when you show them the Dutch system, they have problems imagining the change it requires to get there. That is why Copenhaganize is a good campaign, because it shows the change is possible