Chris Zacho The Wheelman said:From: [email hidden] (The Wogster)
Quoted message said:I actually like the idea of bike lanes,
when gasoline hits $20 a gallon, you
may find many streets with a motor
vehicle lane, and a bunch of bike lanes.
Quoted message said:W
Nice thought. Unfortunatly we'll probably see a bunch of alternative
fuel vehicles with drivers yelling at us instead.
The real issue is that major cities are being paved over at an
astonishing rate, 27.4% of the area of my city has been paved over into
roads. This includes, city streets, major streets, parkways,
expressways, major highways. It doesn't include parking spaces, private
and unassumed roads. If you exclude parkland, most of which is simply
land that was too expensive to prepare to build on, so it became park
land and include private and unassumed roads, and parking lots, it's
probably close to 60% of the usable land. This makes the remaining
land, that much more expensive. At some point, the automobile will have
consumed so much land, that cities will be abandoned as too expensive to
live in. With a tiny post war house, on a tiny lot going for $250,000
and a condo small enough that the cat needs to go outside to change his
mind, going for over $100,000, and a "cheap" one bedroom apartment at
over $1,000 a month, we are getting there, and very quickly.
The real issue is that the automobile doesn't pay it's own way, sure
governments take in millions in gasoline taxes, but that doesn't go
anywhere near the cost of building and maintaining roads. It's also
well hidden, with one level of government getting the tax, and another
doing the road maintenance, and all the fuzzy bookkeeping being done to
hide the fact that road maintenance is the number 2 expense for most
governments. If a city could see that they do $1 Billion in road
maintenance, and 200 million litres of gasoline are sold, then it would
be easy, but would people really want to pay $5.40 a litre for gasoline.
No it's much easier for governments to bury the cost in their budgets,
so nobody knows the real cost, and the car gets a mostly free ride.
Okay, now some math, a typical 2 lane street is at least 10m wide, and
that gives you two lanes, 5m wide. Now a bike lane need only be 2m
wide, meaning the same 10m space allows 2 lanes each way, and a centre
turn lane. Narrow the lanes a little, and you can add both a left and
right turn lane, plus 2 straight through lanes, to every street. Wider
streets could easily add sidewalks and boulevards with trees.
Considering that most cars contain at most 1 person, your actually
gaining road capacity at no cost. However you still have trucks and
buses to deal with, so wider streets, say 15m, could contain, 1 motor
vehicle lane at 3.5m, and 2 bike lanes going each direction.
Of course the biggest issue is that North America has a car culture, and
was mostly built with the car in mind, so how do you change peoples
minds about how to function? Europe on the other hand, was mostly built
pre-car, so much less traffic looks like much more.....
W
W
