>>1919075>You need to disincentivise car useBut you don't. And more than few cities have shown that you don't have to.
Philadelphia converted disused elevated train tracks into cycle paths to help unify a previously discontinuous network.
Atlanta merged a bunch of easements and discontinued rail lines into a really impressive cycling network.
The Northern Virginia area has the W&OD trail that's so direct that you can bike on it from end-to-end faster than you can drive the same route during rush hour. The only I had with using it was that you can't use it after dark because it park land. And cops WILL waste time pulling you over for it.
More than a few municipalities in the southwest are changing how cyclists interact with traffic signals so that they aren't crossing paths with or having to share traffic patterns with cars. Which makes cycling faster, convenient, and safer.
But what bothers me the most is how the traffic laws expect you to share roads with cars, without providing you any legal protections from harm should they behave badly around you or injure you. The penalties for hitting a cyclist are the same as hitting a pedestrian despite the risks for cyclist being more frequent. And current implementations of bike lanes are often so poorly done that they don't provide any benefits or reduce any risks for any of the transportation modes that interact with them. You still get cut off by merging and exiting traffic the same way you would if it were just a normal shoulder. Cars aren't aggressively towed or cited for parking in or otherwise obstructing them like they would if they were on a sidewalk. And they rarely get installed with exclusionary devices that isolate them from cars. They're almost always done in such a half-ass way that nobody is ever satisfied with them. There are pilot programs in New Mexico, Arizona, Nevada, and Utah on better integration of cycling into the road network.
