Bike lanes are typically seen as being environmentally friendly. But some Bay Area leaders say the one on the Richmond-San Rafael Bridge is causing an increase in pollution.
Honestly unsure what they were thinking with a 5 mile bike lane where the major population centers are a few miles from each end of the bridge and with no safe bike infrastructure between the bridge and those pop centers. Sure you can ride across the bridge but…to where? This project almost feels designed to fail and make bikes look bad.
I’ll bet the lane is there purely to satisfy some requirement for including non-car infrastructure, regardless of whether it makes sense in this particular location. It’s the same way we get fun bike lanes like these:
that photo feels like the bike lanes in my city that literally merge the right lane of car traffic into the bike lane at traffic lights. it’s like they are trying to kill bicycle riders on purpose
Talking with cyclists it’s actually the opposite. It works in the sense that if someone is turning right they will get into the right lane and essentially self block a bicycle from pulling past them on the right side (if a cyclist did that they have a high likelyhood of getting hit as they are pulling into the cars blind spot… Then traffic starts moving and the right turning car just goes and suddenly there could be a bike there).
so I saw this comment like a week late after I bought my first adult bike yesterday, and this makes a ton of sense. I’m super worried about getting fucked while crossing an intersection while on a bike because of people turning right especially now. Good to know, thank you!
Do you live here? There are major population centers on both sides of the bridge (Richmond on one end, San Rafael on the other) and the Ohlone trail + Richmond Greenway means you can ride a bike from Emeryville all the way to the bridge quite easily.
That said it’s a beast of a commute to ride. I’d say 90% of the bikers I see on there aren’t using it to commute but are using it for exercise/pleasure cycling. I do see about 10% of bikers on ebikes that could make this a viable commute.
I lived there a while ago. Emeryville is what, several miles from the end of the bridge? Pleasure riding sure, but as the article said, no one is actually using these to get to work.
Some years ago now, a bunch of bike lanes got added to the streets in my city. The city did a big project of adding them and afterwards proudly declared that X number of kilometers of bike lanes had been made.
When an investigation was done into how the decision process had gone for where to add them it turned out that the only consideration had been “how cheap is it to add bike lanes in these locations?” Not “would bike lanes actually be used in these locations?” They were solely trying to maximize the kilometers-of-lane-per-dollar-spent so that they could put out that headline with as big a number as possible.
Subsequent studies showed that a lot of those lanes weren’t being used by bikes in any significant number. Bike lanes had been added on streets that ran alongside sidewalks that were already designated bike paths. I’m a bike rider myself, some lanes were added in my neighborhood but they somehow managed to put them everywhere except the routes I usually took. The city wound up spending a bunch more money to remove a bunch of the bike lanes that were doing nothing but increasing congestion.
It may be that this was a similar situation, where someone wanted to proudly show off headlines of how they’d pushed for bike access and got X numbers of kilometers installed and those were the only real metrics that mattered.
Honestly unsure what they were thinking with a 5 mile bike lane where the major population centers are a few miles from each end of the bridge and with no safe bike infrastructure between the bridge and those pop centers. Sure you can ride across the bridge but…to where? This project almost feels designed to fail and make bikes look bad.
I’ll bet the lane is there purely to satisfy some requirement for including non-car infrastructure, regardless of whether it makes sense in this particular location. It’s the same way we get fun bike lanes like these:
Sometimes it’s to artificially narrow the lane to slow traffic. That’s what they did here.
that photo feels like the bike lanes in my city that literally merge the right lane of car traffic into the bike lane at traffic lights. it’s like they are trying to kill bicycle riders on purpose
Talking with cyclists it’s actually the opposite. It works in the sense that if someone is turning right they will get into the right lane and essentially self block a bicycle from pulling past them on the right side (if a cyclist did that they have a high likelyhood of getting hit as they are pulling into the cars blind spot… Then traffic starts moving and the right turning car just goes and suddenly there could be a bike there).
so I saw this comment like a week late after I bought my first adult bike yesterday, and this makes a ton of sense. I’m super worried about getting fucked while crossing an intersection while on a bike because of people turning right especially now. Good to know, thank you!
Do you live here? There are major population centers on both sides of the bridge (Richmond on one end, San Rafael on the other) and the Ohlone trail + Richmond Greenway means you can ride a bike from Emeryville all the way to the bridge quite easily.
That said it’s a beast of a commute to ride. I’d say 90% of the bikers I see on there aren’t using it to commute but are using it for exercise/pleasure cycling. I do see about 10% of bikers on ebikes that could make this a viable commute.
I lived there a while ago. Emeryville is what, several miles from the end of the bridge? Pleasure riding sure, but as the article said, no one is actually using these to get to work.
Some years ago now, a bunch of bike lanes got added to the streets in my city. The city did a big project of adding them and afterwards proudly declared that X number of kilometers of bike lanes had been made.
When an investigation was done into how the decision process had gone for where to add them it turned out that the only consideration had been “how cheap is it to add bike lanes in these locations?” Not “would bike lanes actually be used in these locations?” They were solely trying to maximize the kilometers-of-lane-per-dollar-spent so that they could put out that headline with as big a number as possible.
Subsequent studies showed that a lot of those lanes weren’t being used by bikes in any significant number. Bike lanes had been added on streets that ran alongside sidewalks that were already designated bike paths. I’m a bike rider myself, some lanes were added in my neighborhood but they somehow managed to put them everywhere except the routes I usually took. The city wound up spending a bunch more money to remove a bunch of the bike lanes that were doing nothing but increasing congestion.
It may be that this was a similar situation, where someone wanted to proudly show off headlines of how they’d pushed for bike access and got X numbers of kilometers installed and those were the only real metrics that mattered.
i noticed this in sf too.
Your argument seems to be that nobody should ever start anything unless it’s a complete, end-to-end solution at the end of Phase 1.
When the period of evaluation is only 4 years and nothing is done to integrate the solution, then yeah, you probably shouldn’t waste time/money on it.