City Walkability

[lpetrich]

Posts about bike-helmet safety split off into their own thread: Bike Helmets - split off from City Walkability

[TV and credit cards]

Yeah, bike lanes suck.

Sometimes they suck because the planners put them in place not so much to accommodate cyclists but to torment car drivers. At least here in LA anyway. There have been a number of roads where a lane has been sequestered for a bike lane which just causes more congestion. And there are very few cyclists on the road here.

Vehicles suck. They cost a small fortune, depreciate rapidly, insurance, taxes (CA registration fees are brutal),annual cost, traffic, can’t find parking, and now this! Instead of trying to improve traffic flow, they make it worse with these bike lanes! What are they thinking? It’s as if they are trying to... Nah. They’ll never get me out of my SUV. I’d rather die in an I-5 traffic jam.

[rousseau]

The city I live in was built for cars, and the green community here are desperately trying to make it bike-friendly (walkability isn't really an option). I hear person after person here point to European cities and ask 'why can't we be like that?'. Well, it's because those cities were built before cars existed, where North American cities are optimized for cars.

I'm all for increasing walkability and bikeability, but in a lot of places in North America it feels like an impossible problem.

Even if I could bike to work in safety where I live, it would become next to impossible to finish the most basic of errands without a car. Meaning I'm pretty much tied to the auto if I want any semblance of quality of life at all.

[Jolly_Penguin]

Thai towns are surprisingly walkable. While there I have never used a car. You can take a train between cities and walk within the cities (less so the bit cities like Bangkok). The smaller ones even have not just benches bit full on but basic excercise equipment in little parks free for use. Saw this in Taiwan as well.

[Jimmy Higgins]

You can put it another way: The planners get their arm twisted to add bike lanes, and they put it where they think it makes sense, not how it would be best for either bikes or cars.

Or... the federal funding for the roadway paving requires a bike lane. What'd be nice is if cities got funding from the state again, so that they could afford to pave roads without the use of federal funds!

[Sarpedon]

My pie in the sky administration dream would be to reorganize the country with metropolitan areas being the primary legal/economic unit, with counties and states being done away with and replaced with economic regions based on which city they serve. In some cases, the results would be identical: the Providence Metropolitan area would be very similar to the state of Rhode Island. But it would put it back into the way it should be with the cities bossing around the country, not vice versa.

[TSwizzle]

And here's why nobody's walkin' in LA;




Thanks Mayor Garcetti !