Bike lanes have sped up car traffic in New York City

I&#x27;m one of those drivers who hates sharing roadways with bikers. It&#x27;s not that I have to share, but between slowing traffic down, pure safety concerns for the biker (who <i>I</i> as the automobile driver am responsible for in the case of an accident) and the generally shitty entitled attitude lots of bike riders seem to have (probably earned from dealing with irritated drivers like me) I get my hackles raised every time I see one on the roads. Bikes aren&#x27;t automobiles no matter how much we debate about it. They shouldn&#x27;t be sharing the road with cars.<p>But you know what? I&#x27;m absolutely in favor of this kind of road engineering. Regardless of making traffic faster or not, it&#x27;s just smart design. Between roads, sidewalks and bike lanes, this provides a designated travel area for everybody regardless of the mode they choose to travel with. Bikes shouldn&#x27;t be sharing the road with cars, they <i>should</i> have their own designated travel areas.<p>It eliminates all three of my issues in one swoop and provides equitable space for sharing the travel conduits in a city. In fact, it would probably get <i>me</i> out on a bike more often.

The &quot;before and after&quot; picture at the bottom of the page shows that both &quot;before&quot; and &quot;after&quot; have bike lanes. The bike lane has grown from 5&#x27; to 6&quot; and is separated by a buffer, but it was there before.<p>What has sped up traffic is the creation of left turn pockets in the parking lane. But these could have been created in the &quot;before&quot; situation, by carving them out of the 8&quot; curb-side parking lane.<p>So, the claim that &quot;bike lanes have sped up traffic&quot; is poorly supported.

Someone already commented on this but it must be re-emphasized in blunter terms: the OP&#x27;s title is sensationalized bullshit, period.<p>What has caused the improvement in speed is the building of dedicated left lanes. The fact that the city also added bike lanes at the same time does not mean that the bike lanes caused the speeding-up of car traffic (correlation != causation, and all that)...<p>Read from the source article that the OP references (and then glosses over):<p><a href="http://www.citylab.com/cityfixer/2014/09/when-adding-bike-lanes-actually-reduces-traffic-delays/379623/" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.citylab.com&#x2F;cityfixer&#x2F;2014&#x2F;09&#x2F;when-adding-bike-la...</a><p>&gt; <i>So what happened here to overcome the traditional idea that bike lanes lead to car delay? No doubt many factors were involved, but a DOT spokesperson tells CityLab that the steady traffic flow was largely the result of adding left-turn pockets. In the old street configurations, cars turned left from a general traffic lane; in the new one, they merged into a left-turn slot beside the protected bike lane (below, an example from 8th and 23rd). This design has two key advantages: first, traffic doesn&#x27;t have to slow down until the left turn is complete, and second, drivers have an easier time seeing bike riders coming up beside them.</i>

Protected Bike lanes are great and hopefully we start getting Protected Intersections to go with them.<p>This site has a great video which describes the protected intersection. Having traversed them quite a bit as a cyclist, motorist, and pedestrian, they are delight to use.<p><a href="http://www.protectedintersection.com/" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.protectedintersection.com&#x2F;</a>

I&#x27;m a fan of biking to work, but my inner skeptic is wondering about correlation vs. causation. You&#x27;d also have to compare the total automobile traffic levels to get a clear picture. It&#x27;s possible that drivers are avoiding the streets because they assume they&#x27;re worse with the bike lanes in place.<p>Edit: Oops, somehow I missed this part:<p>&quot;You might imagine that these bike lanes decreased congestion by cutting down on the number of cars on the road. But if that played a role, it was very slight: on Columbus Ave., the DOT counted cars, and saw only a very slight drop in overall volume during morning rush hour, when travel times declined by 35 percent. Instead, it seems that a pair of design decisions are responsible.&quot;

Having 2 of my coworkers killed this year on their bike( both by drunk drivers), I wont venture out on a bike until all my path is a completely protected from cars.

The results here are impressive, but the particular example they show in the last picture seems pretty dangerous, unless I&#x27;m misunderstanding. It seems like it places left-turning car traffic to the right of cyclist through-traffic, creating an opportunity for &quot;left-hooks.&quot; Many jurisdictions use mixing zones instead: <a href="http://www.streetsblog.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/03/dc_mixing_zone.jpg" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.streetsblog.org&#x2F;wp-content&#x2F;uploads&#x2F;2013&#x2F;03&#x2F;dc_mix...</a><p>(Unless there&#x27;s a separate signal phase for the cyclist through-traffic, which is possible, but not that common in the US.)

They need to put up the concrete barriers on every lane. Biking on an ave A + ave B is still not safe.

I lived in Shanghai for a brief period a few years ago, and there were protected lanes everywhere. It was utilized by both bikers as well as scooters. When it comes to managing loads of people, I&#x27;d imagine the Chinese have quite a bit of insight.

Try to drive in Chinatown. It is a nightmare with the bike lanes, let alone the traffic from along Delancey. It is nice to see the city encourage biking (well, at least for the Bloomberg administration), but the extra bike lane is hurting the safety of drivers in Chinatown, which, brings safety concern to bikers too.

Who drives in New York?

<a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8295712" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=8295712</a> is related.