Everyone recounting their incidents in the comments has made me realize this should be brought up when discussing bike lane width, separation, and close pass distance; cyclists need to have enough space that a mechanical failure doesn't result in instantly going under a vehicle.
Was yelling at a driver who passed within 15cm of my cycling 7 year old daughter about this a few weeks ago. They apparently thought kids never fall down.
Cars break too, but roads for cars are typically constructed such that you won't go off a cliff or under a heavier vehicle like a train even if it happens. I believe GP's point is that cyclists' safety in failure scenarios is often not similarly accounted for.
In my wealthy European "cycle friendly" city, they put one of the main cycling lanes that goes downhill to the city center, between trams, cars and cubes of rusted steel with 90 edges. Every time I have to cycle through there I get Final Destination flashbacks.
Vienna? I remember when it was considered suicidal to even go on the road with your bicycle there, atleast from what the locals told me haha.
As a Dutch person though, I see no safety issues in this picture :P
On my morning commute people would be side by side on that lane, with two more people on the outside trying to overtake each other, relying on the cars to avoid them haha
Which is why I, on the board of the bicycle association here, spend most of my energy on the infrastructure. The main blocker for people biking is safety, and perceived safety. Lots of other stuff we can do as well, but this is the main point to make it possible for more people to bike. And since it takes long from planning a road to it being built, and it will remain that way for a long time, getting it correctly planned now is the biggest contribution I can do I feel. So spend my time pushing city planners and politicians.
Ouch, I wouldn’t want to bike down that on a busy afternoon.
My US city has been buying abandoned rail lines and creating biking/walking path instead. I like being away from the streets. Some streets have a barrier that protects the bike lanes and I prefer those with my kids in tow.
While those are nice places to ride I still oppose such things because those paths are lost to useful transit forever and cities need long cooridores for transit
Not forever. Keeping them as public paths retains the option. Selling them off and building over them would definitely make it impossible to reinstate.
The option is not retained - you will never convince bicycles to give up a path they like once they have it. Thus it becomes politically impossible to reinstate it.
Everybody should just copy the Dutch and be done with it. It helps that their country has a max elevation of 4m but apart from that we can just transpose their lessons to our cities, and/or hire their designers.
