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 3 weeks 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 3 weeks 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 3 weeks 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 3 weeks 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.
ilinamorato@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
America-good, not Europe-good.
knexcar@lemmy.world 3 weeks 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.
ilinamorato@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
That is incredibly frustrating.
pbjelly@sh.itjust.works 3 weeks 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 weeks 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 weeks 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 weeks ago
Yeah sadly not the case here. Marin is quite suburban and hourly bus service is standard, with the only people taking it being those with no other option. They seem to be slowly moving toward half hourly at least