Title is misleading... the source Le Monde article states that use of certain bicycle paths has doubled (or tripled) in certain places, as investment has gone into improving these paths.
That's great, but kind of obvious that if you build out dedicated bike lanes, cyclists are more likely to prefer them to alternate routes.
> kind of obvious that if you build out dedicated bike lanes, cyclists are more likely to prefer them to alternate routes.
That's not obvious at all; it's not even true. It's not uncommon in US cities to install long, wide bike lanes on major roads which see close to 0 daily users. Significant problems include:
- complete lack of physical barriers between cars and bikes
- bike lanes terminating at dangerous roads
- density is still low and there are dangerous parking lots at every destination
- bike lanes are exposed to direct sunlight in 100F+
- a non-trivial number of American drivers need extremely little push to intentionally hurt or kill bibcyclists
While those are "dedicated bike lanes", it wasn't infrastructure built for bikes. Typically those are existing road safety shoulders converted to a bike lane.
I dont count that as dedicated bike infrastructure.
If your definition of bicycle infrastructure excludes anything insufficient to facilitate increased usage, then yes we can agree it is obvious that building such will facilitate increased usage, but that's a useless statement.
But if we talk about all bicycle infrastructure, which is a conversation useful to have, it is clear from the multiple issues I pointed out (not limited to lack of physical separation) that simply building bike infrastructure ad-hoc and without holistic change is not useful.
Almost all of your points are because what you are describing isn't bike infrastructure, it's a line of paint on a highway's shoulder that use to be a pull-over safety shoulder - that's why they terminate randomly, don't have any barriers, there's random/low density, and direct sunlight). It's literally a political line in the road to get federal money from the DOT, which is why it shouldn't be counted as bike infrastructure. It's a literal line on a state highway.
Any real conversation about bike infrastructure would need to start with recognize a political line in the road is not real bike infrastructure any more than Amtrak using freight lines is a real passenger rail route.
One of those points relates directly to paint-only bike lanes. None of the others do.
Any conversation about expanding bike infrastructure needs to acknowledge existing bad bike infrastructure and common bad techniques in order to explain why we can't expect results if we use them again. Otherwise, they'll just get used again and waste more money. If all you say is "You literally have no bike infrastructure" to a city that literally has spent money and effort creating (bad) bike infrastructure, I don't see how that's helpful.
Even though it seems obvious you will find the majority of Americans fighting against bike lanes because they think nobody will use it. Having data to show causation like this is genuinely helpful for other countries and cities to follow their lead.
I think a lot of the push back in the US against bike lanes comes from bad bike lanes and a lack of a wholistic solution.
In most places I’ve been, the city will paint a line on a road where cars are going 50mph and call it a bike lane. There is no chance that will get me to start riding a bike. All it does it make the road worse for cars, by making it more narrow, or more likely, losing a lane.
One place I lived did get a protected bike lane going right in front of the building. I still didn’t use it, as it wasn’t really connected to anything else. Everywhere along the route I’d go, I’d simply walk. It wasn’t that far. Everything has to start somewhere, and I hope they build more, but so far drivers see problems without any payoff.
The worst of it was during the pandemic. There were construction barrels all over the city. It was hell to get around by car. I figured they were preparing for construction and ripping up the road. I found out a year later that the barrels were meant to create temporary protected bike lanes so people could get out and ride around to places during the pandemic. Cool… if there has been a single sign to tell people that’s what it was. Instead, it just made drivers mad, and the lanes weren’t used, because people didn’t know what they were for. More space taken from cars with no payoff in terms of reducing traffic through increased biking.
I want good bike infrastructure, but the plans and efforts I keep seeing still don’t seem that good. The useful paths are dangerous and the safe paths aren’t that useful.
> That's great, but kind of obvious that if you build out dedicated bike lanes, cyclists are more likely to prefer them to alternate routes.
Not really, here in Poland there are new bike lanes, but they go far from the city, so if you need to commute you end up going around the city to finish in a bottleneck when you are approaching the center. So, want it or not, you end up using the alternate routes.
That's great, but kind of obvious that if you build out dedicated bike lanes, cyclists are more likely to prefer them to alternate routes.