Drivers want to blame bike lanes for causing congestion, but they really should look in the mirror to see the problem.
One of the first actions Rob Ford did when elected mayor of Toronto was to rip out a new bike lane, because the people just north of the street were supposedly going to be five minutes late for dinner. No matter that the accident rate had dropped because the confusion was gone, or that bike usage tripled; you can’t mess with people rushing home for dinner. There is no evidence that they are getting home more quickly now that the lane is gone.
Now in San Francisco, they are having a similar debate, where a new bike lane is, according to the Chronicle, “making life misery for teachers just trying to get to work.” Peter Flax of writes in Bicycling that “this controversy over one bike lane shows everything that’s wrong with American car culture.”
In Toronto it was the hard-working moms in Leaside stores struggling to get home to feed their kids. In San Francisco, Flax writes, “I presume teachers were picked as the focal point because they seem like sympathetic, unimpeachable victims.”
And really, the drivers didn’t even lose a car lane; it was a conversion of an empty shoulder. The real problem is that there is just too much traffic, up 28 percent in the last decade.
Peter Flax ends with the classic line:
You’re not in traffic, you are traffic.
Also being frank, this is the problem almost everywhere, and it has been shown that the bike lanes can, in fact, fix congestion, as Peter Walker writes in the Guardian:
Lloyd Alter/ Maisoneuve bike lane/CC BY 2.0
They also help reduce pollution. In Montreal, a study found a 2 percent reduction in greenhouse gases because more people rode bikes after the bike lanes were put in. In New York, putting in the 14th street bus lane didn’t increase traffic on other streets; it kind of disappeared. This is a phenomenon that Andrew Gilligan, cycling commissioner under then-mayor Boris Johnson, has described:
Peter Flax really summarizes the issue: “There are decades of research on this topic, and the only way to effectively reduce traffic is to reduce the number of cars on the road.” We do that by providing safe, secure and dependable alternatives like frequent transit and good bike infrastructure. With the coming micromobility boom, the latter will be even more critical.
