You are missing that the cost of bike lanes isn't just in constructing and maintaining them. Adding bike lanes in cities means dropping car lanes because there's not enough space. That ends up creating potentially huge opportunity costs.
Anyone who has done any amount of virtual traffic engineering (aka: Factorio, City Skylines, OpenTTD) knows that intersections are where the bottlenecks are.
Its incredibly difficult to design a max-throughput intersection. Roads have a huge amount of throughput, most "traffic" just gets stuck at offramps and traffic lights.
Narrowing a road to make room for bike lanes is a lower cost than people might think. If you're all going to get stuck at the next intersection anyway, it doesn't matter if you're a 2-lane, 4-lane, or 8-lane road.
It’s not all about throughput. Taking away car lanes in favor of bike lanes usually takes away parking as well.
While that certainly has the desired effect of reducing car traffic to the area, it also increases the difficulty and expense of travel to the area. We’re seeing this in Oakland now, where they’re putting in bike lanes and taking away parking, while simultaneously doing nothing about the limited public transportation system.
If you want to reduce vehicle traffic without seriously impacting the shops and restaurants in the area, you have to use both knobs available to increase people’s use of public transportation: make it harder and more expensive to drive a car, while also making it easier (and, preferably, cheaper as well) to take transit. One without the other is a disaster.
I mean, or you can ride a bike in these new bike lanes in one of the flattest and temperate climates in the US?
Oakland is littered with cars along roads in every neighborhood you go on, and the police barely enforce anything resembling traffic code (due partially to complicated historical reasons). In some neighborhoods, I've seen duplexes with more land area in cars than living space (so is it a wonder that poorer people here live in their cars when it's so easy to own and park a car?)
A bike lane or two makes it cheaper for most folks (yes including the folks living in the pop-up Oakland housing shelters, they own a lot of bikes) to safely move around, and reduces traffic from our generally saturated roads. Given the limited paving budget here (and how tectonically active the hills are), it's a wonder that bike infra has taken so long.
Moreover, the heavy private vehicular traffic in the area makes it very difficult for buses to navigate their routes in a timely manner, and taking parking off the road for bike lanes and BRT is a much cheaper way of enabling transit in the area that laying down rail.
Sure, you can ride a bike. Now, tell me how you would transport groceries for a family of 4, or how you transport the kids to doctor's appointments, for instance. What about people who physically can't ride a bike? What if I'm coming from 15 miles away?
Surely as someone from the area you've seen the countless folks with cargo bikes transporting their kids? I live 1.5 mi. away from my grocery and I take panniers and shop for a family of 2 (though I understand that kids need a lot more things than adults do, so this isn't an apples-to-apples comparison). And if you're coming from 15 mi. away, you're a guest, not a resident, so either take transit and a bike share or circle the block for parking. I don't demand a house in your yard, and neither should you demand a parking spot in mine. Also, what about the folks that physically can't drive a car but can ride a bike, or the folks with poor reflexes or vision that should not be allowed to drive and yet are given a pass in the US because it's so driving centric?
But intersections also suffer if you give them less lanes. Say for each direction you have two lanes in your intersection, one for people going straight or turning right and one for people turning left. To get bike lanes, there’s no choice but to drop the lane for left turns (and my city has done this in a few places). Now you either forbid left turns completely on that intersection or every left turning car will completely stop traffic until it can move. Either way you’re creating a total mess.
One effect that I’ve seen pretty consistently is that adding traffic lanes to a single-lane local road almost always slows down traffic. This is because every intersection needs a stop light.
> it doesn't matter if you're a 2-lane, 4-lane, or 8-lane road
If you halve the capacity of the road, you're just going to spread the same cars (and congestion) among twice as many lights...and make traffic far worse.
Depends. My commute home from my office has a 6km of a three-lane road and then a single traffic light. The road never gets backed up more than a couple km from the traffic light, so even dropping it to a single lane wouldn't make any real difference to the throughput. The speed you drive on the three-lane road also makes no real difference to the throughput as long as you get the same amount of cars through the traffic light at each cycle.
The bit about speed prior to lights was meant to be separate from the bit about # of lanes. To clarify - I mean, e.g. that when there's 5km of free-flowing traffic before the lights, and then 1km of congestion, it doesn't matter how fast you drive for those 5km as long as it doesn't delay your passage through the lights. I could halve my speed from the speed limit for those 5km and still arrive at the congestion at the lights before it's my turn to go through them.
I wasn’t missing that, I just wasn’t addressing it; I was just addressing how to assess maintenance taxes. If there are other costs of having the road there, like its real estate usage, I agree that’s another factor to consider.
Bike lanes can handle more traffic per surface area than car lanes. Utilization is unfortunately low in most areas, but capacity wise it’s a clear net gain for city centers.
Oddly enough, sidewalks are the most efficient use of space, but require good public transportation and extreme density to reach that threshold.
In Oslo, Norway the city builds a lot of bike lines . It narrowed streets for cars or removed parking places. I talked with a few folks with cars in the city and their typical response that it made them to get work faster with a car. Surely they have to walk more to a parking spot, but after that they drive faster through the city. Apparently street parking creates a lot of congestion.
Such a tax would eliminate marginal uses of trucks but not eliminate trucks entirely (since it would be a higher but not ridiculous tax).
It also works as a reductio against any wear-based tax on bikes, since it would imply an absurd tax on trucks.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22519021
(Edited over past hour to fix numerous typos.)