You mean the 3ft wide lane you couldn’t fit a compact car in? Who’s going to drive in that lane? Brodizers? Mall crawlers?
deegeese@sopuli.xyz 4 days ago
That bike lane is such an offensive waste of hundreds of millions of dollars of infrastructure.
A handful of bike activists got a recreational lane that sees almost zero use, while every day people trying to get to work are stuck in traffic next to an empty lane.
Chainweasel@lemmy.world 4 days ago
deegeese@sopuli.xyz 4 days ago
No. The bike lane is full width and the proposal replaces with a full car lane.
Get educated before you try schooling others.
AstralPath@lemmy.ca 4 days ago
If their time is so valuable, maybe they should ride a bike instead of trapping themselves in traffic?
The average American commute is 41 miles round trip. I guarantee you that a large number of people stuck on that bridge every day have a much shorter commute, could ride a bike instead, and would actually spend less of their time commuting by doing so.
Those are the people you should be angry with because they’re the ones that are directly wasting your time with their frivolous driving trips. The more we get people riding bikes, the less problems those that are required to drive will experience.
Also, maybe if the average American car wasn’t a wasteful hulking behemoth there would be more room for more people on the roads. 🤷
deegeese@sopuli.xyz 4 days ago
That bridge is too long for bike commutes.
AstralPath@lemmy.ca 4 days ago
The bridge is 4.3 miles. Average riding speed for a 30-35 year old rider is 20.8 mph according to Strava data. Let’s say its 15mph instead.
That’s a 28 minute ride at below average speed; 20 minutes at average.
That is not too long, as clearly evidenced by the people that use the bike lane.
einlander@lemmy.world 4 days ago
And that’s not factoring e-bikes. Class c e-bikes can go up to an assisted 28mph.
HeyThisIsntTheYMCA@lemmy.world 4 days ago
uh, i’m disabled. and not a little disabled. I could do that bridge on my trike in my sleep. respectfully, where are you coming from?
undefined@lemmy.hogru.ch 4 days ago
I rarely ride a bike or even exercise but 4 miles is still nothing. 🤣
bent@feddit.dk 4 days ago
If you can’t bike for 30 minutes you would really benefitting from getting some exercise. Biking to and from work would probably do wonders both for your physical and mental health.
grue@lemmy.world 4 days ago
I am sick and tired of your blatant fucking lies.
Visstix@lemmy.world 4 days ago
If america had better bike infrastructure everywhere there would be more people riding bikes. Maybe improving bike safety everywhere would increase the number of bikes.
Taldan@lemmy.world 4 days ago
More people commute through the bike lane than a single car lane. Congestion will get worse if you get your way. Are you sure you want that?
HeyThisIsntTheYMCA@lemmy.world 4 days ago
is that you mr commissar
BigBenis@lemmy.world 4 days ago
That car lane is such an offensive waste of hundreds of millions of dollars of infrastructure.
Replace it AND the bike lane with a train that can carry 10x as many passengers at a time as both the car and bike lanes combined! Bonus, it can even fit bikes on it! No such luck for the cars though… too bad.
aln@lemmy.world 4 days ago
You should reconsider everything about your life that led you to typing all that stupid shit you just typed.
pbjelly@sh.itjust.works 4 days ago
It’s almost like for some reason, there’s mysteriously no fast public transit which easily could connect the north bay with the peninsula or the east bay and that’s why the traffic sucks ass.
deegeese@sopuli.xyz 4 days ago
Yes, so the proposal is to replace the unused bike lane with a bus lane.
pbjelly@sh.itjust.works 4 days ago
HikingVet@lemmy.ca 4 days ago
Source?
Onomatopoeia@lemmy.cafe 4 days ago
sukhmel@programming.dev 4 days ago
How is it that 68 cyclists are 5 cars?
fubarx@lemmy.world 4 days ago
If you want to talk bigger picture… they built a pedestrian/bike lane with zero access/amenities at either end (unlike the Bay Bridge). No staging area to load/unload your bike, no parking, no bathrooms, no water fountains. Good luck finding all-day parking on city streets in Pt. Richmond or… San Quentin.
Here are the directions: marinbike.org/…/getting-to-from-the-r-sr-bridge-p…
Once approaching/getting off the bridge, if commuting by bike, there is no direct connection to the Bay Trail. So anyone living in Marin and wanting to commute to, say, Berkeley or El Cerrito so they can get on BART (or even the Richmond Ferry) has to risk going through heavily industrial areas or dicey parts of Richmond. On the Marin side to/from Larkspur Landing, you had to ride unprotected on the shoulder of the freeway!
Only way to use it for commuters on either end would be to park and ride, but again, no parking and ride facilities. And there’s any wonder more people don’t use it? There’s wide open space at either end of the bridge to build staging areas, especially on the Richmond side right near the Toll Plaza, but nobody wants to make it easy. It’s such a gauntlet I’m amazed that many people use it.
The solution to traffic congestion is to make public transit and alternate forms of transportation more cost-effective, functional, and convenient. That includes offering easy transition/transfer points. It isn’t to open more driving lanes. They’ve known this since the days of Robert Moses in NYC, but keep doing it.
ChairmanMeow@programming.dev 4 days ago
MTC data has different numbers: reports.mysidewalk.com/3374a0ca74
Regardless, adding a lane won’t work. The bottleneck is the 101, so you just get extra lanes to stand still in. And the toll gate as well.
The lane was already there btw, but it was an emergency pullover lane. It didn’t cost a lot of carbon to turn it into a bike lane.
HikingVet@lemmy.ca 4 days ago
I am thankful for the article links, but how many edits are you at?
deegeese@sopuli.xyz 4 days ago
I live there.
HikingVet@lemmy.ca 4 days ago
Opinions don’t count.
deegeese@sopuli.xyz 4 days ago
You reject first hand experience because it conflicts with your political biases.
Please tell me o wise traveler, how us Bay Area residents should convert full freeway lanes into unused bike lanes.
scarabic@lemmy.world 4 days ago
You’re SO close to getting it!
The thought drivers are supposed to have when glancing over at that nice clear lane is: “Hm it might even be faster if I biked.”
Instead, you apparently think “we should throw that lane down the throat of car overload rather than allow anyone alternatives.”
ilinamorato@lemmy.world 4 days ago
It’s a well-known fallacy in urbanism that bike lanes “see almost zero use.” Bikes have much less visual weight than a car, so one driver in a lane will look like a lane being used while one bicyclist in a lane will look like the same lane being “half-used.” In addition, bike lanes are much more efficient at keeping travelers moving at a constant rate so that they don’t bunch up, meaning that a busy road with backed-up traffic will look like it’s getting more use when what’s actually happening is that the bike lane is just moving travelers more efficiently.
Furthermore, the “induced demand” phenomenon means that adding capacity actually doesn’t reduce traffic, at least not in the long term. We have decades of data proving it. The amount of cars that the lane can accommodate will invariably be taken up by people taking that route who had previously taken a different route. The only way to reduce traffic for a given route is to either create more routes or remove traffic from the road. Bike lanes do both.
In reality, for most routes, if you compare the number of people being moved on the bike lane, you’ll often find that it equals or even exceeds the number of people being moved on the car lane immediately adjacent to it. More importantly, they also tend to reduce the number of drivers on the same route and nearby routes as they encourage travelers who would ordinarily be afraid of biking to ditch the car.
I can’t speak to that specific bike lane, of course, but in general the argument that “it’s not doing anything!” is a fallacy, and replacing the bike lane with a motor vehicle travel lane would almost certainly result in worse traffic, not better.
sukhmel@programming.dev 4 days ago
I think that is public transport is using that road, the bus will still transport more people/day, but I’m a bit uncertain if much of public transport is available in this case, or pretty much anywhere in the US
pbjelly@sh.itjust.works 4 days ago
There’s a bus service, but historically, there have been some very nimby reasons for why there’s no faster transit in and out of this region of the Bay Area.
TL;DR: having access to a light rail train would have meant less drivers paying tolls and the board owning the Golden Gate Bridge would want that.
For more about this in SFGate. I know this doesn’t make the journey from Richmond to San Rafael shorter, but BART has been known to expand their services and it’d probably still be faster going around than waiting in a car.
ilinamorato@lemmy.world 4 days ago
I believe the Bay Area has pretty good transit, but I don’t know the specifics at this location. The bus is probably more theoretically efficient, but I would wonder about usage in this case. I believe it’s slightly too suburban for light rail.
CookieOfFortune@lemmy.world 4 days ago
I mean… the Bay Area has transit at least, but I don’t think you can call it good compared to places with actual transit.
knexcar@lemmy.world 3 days ago
It’s not. Marin doesn’t get BART or Caltrain. There’s a once-an-hour bus service that gets stuck in traffic. In fact it gets stuck in worse traffic than the cars because it takes a highly congested off-ramp (which shares car flow with an on ramp) to crawl to the Tewksbury Ave & Castro St stop. Then has to take the same on ramp. Sometimes the delay is so much you can not only miss your transfer, but the transfer an hour after that.
pbjelly@sh.itjust.works 4 days ago
There’s tons of people living up there who make the commute up and down. If Bart can go as far as Antioch, I don’t see why it can’t go there and has in the past, proposed going through Marin County.
knexcar@lemmy.world 3 days ago
Sadly I doubt the once-an-hour bus service that’s notably slower than driving and gets stuck in even worse traffic than the cars (because it has to take congested off ramps to reach stops) is getting enough ridership to make a dent. One time the bus was so delayed I missed not only my timed transfer, but the transfer that came an hour later.
sukhmel@programming.dev 3 days ago
I don’t know the local specific, but what I was talking about is more like the bus that comes at least every 15 minutes, and those do get quite a lot of ridership in my experience
knexcar@lemmy.world 3 days ago
On one hand, I wouldn’t be surprised if this bike lane actually doesn’t get as much use, considering it’s across a 5 mile bridge, and neither end has a lot lot of destinations until you get further inland. There aren’t any 3 mile trips being replaced, and most cars are traveling farther (think Berkeley to Novato or Richmond to Santa Rosa).
On the other hand, there is no other cycling alternative to get between those places. The bridge is a freeway so bikes aren’t allowed in the car lanes (and weren’t allowed before the bike lanes). Sure there’s Golden Gate Transit route 580 with bike racks but it’s hourly, gets stuck in the car traffic (but even worse since it takes very congested exits), and you can’t take oddly shaped cargo bikes or trailers on it. So anyone who commuted by bike would be screwed.
ilinamorato@lemmy.world 3 days ago
Five miles. Dang, I hadn’t processed that. Even at highway speeds, that bridge would take more than five minutes to cross; if you’re a strong cyclist, you could do it in, what, 30 minutes?
Still, you’re right. The next closest way for a bike to get around would be something like 20+ miles out of your way in one direction or the other, it looks like. So it would turn any hour-long errands you might be able to run by bicycle into day trips of 4-8 hours.
I dunno. Tough choice.
knexcar@lemmy.world 3 days ago
I personally still firmly believe in keeping the bike lane. Cars have 2 other lanes they can take, but bikes don’t have many other options. I don’t believe they can go via San Francisco or highway 37 so it’s an even bigger detour than I thought. The hourly bus theoretically works if you have a “normal” bike but cargo bikes, fat bikes, recumbents, trikes, and heavier e-bikes are screwed.
The only compromise I could see is closing it off to bikes during rush hour only, but providing a shuttle bus or van, ideally one that’s always waiting at the side of the bridge (not some number you have to call), has room for cargo bikes/trailers, and only covers the actual bridge to minimize headways and traffic delays. And even then it would just result in induced demand as people start commuting yet longer distances.