Entirely separate paths for bikes are absolutely feasible in established cities (see New York which has huge protected bike lanes running north and south up and down manhattan) with little cost to car infra

> This is why both drivers and pedestrians hate bikers

Drivers and pedestrians hate each other too. Everyone gripes about any minor impediment to their own travel, particularly other modalities, but also their own. I mean, drivers universally complain about being "stuck in traffic", but they are traffic.

In Seattle, local residential streets are often designated as "stay healthy" streets, where bikes and pedestrians have right-of-way. You can drive a car there, but it will be slow (intersections are narrowed to discourage fast driving). Cars take parallel streets if they're going more than a block or two.

I haven't checked the statistics but it seems to work. There's one near me that's packed with bikes during coomute hours, and I think the cost to the city was negligible.

It's pretty easy to do in most cities, you just have to eliminate a lane of traffic and/or parking spots. It's quite rare for a modern city to have streets too narrow to do that.

Natives might have a different take, but I was recently in Berlin (which you might consider an 'established city'), and this seemed like a solved problem there. Bike lanes are at sidewalk grade, above the curb, with rumble strip or other tactile indicator for the boundary. You do NOT walk in the bike lane, it's just like walking in the car lane.

Considering the rise of additional micromobility vehicles, this is such an obvious solution when you see it in practice.

Insulating bicycles from other vehicles is not the only path to road safety. When forced to interact with bikes more often, car drivers drive more safely and conservatively. Not sure that works everywhere or depends on better driver education and general empathy.

https://time.com/archive/6683576/signal-failure/

https://bikecity.amsterdam.nl/en/experiment-traffic-lights-d...

http://dutchcycling.nl/get-inspired/sarphatistraat-amsterdam...

They definitely belong with pedestrians, it is a pedestrian vehicle.

The roads are always full of cars, the pavements are maybe 0.001% utilised outside of places like central NYC. There is plenty of capacity for bikes.

Motorbikes in the US are the same problem, 30 years behind.

We have decades of bicyclists clamoring for infrastructure, and they've been starting to get it.

Meanwhile, e-bikes and delivery apps have caused a recent explosion in the number of motorbikes on the road. Cars think they're too slow. Cyclists think they're too fast. They're nimble and vulnerable like bicycles, but can be regulated like cars. Like taxis, they're often piloted by people who come from places with chaotic road cultures, and who have a financial incentive to bend the rules to get there faster.

Ideally, we'd be like the Dutch and have different outlets for different classes of transportation (mass + speed + amount of protection). Instead, everyone just gets pissed at everyone who moves differently than they do, and the road network fails to keep up with anyone's needs.

Can't recall which European city it was (not AMS) where it was impossible to ride bikes on footpath but easy for padestrians. Very interesting hurdles were added. I wish I was more enthusiastic about taking photos. I had seen it on a very small stretch though. Somehwere in Belgium? I can't recall. In fact some of those hurdles/obstacles looked very artsy :)

And also there were dedicated bike lanes which should be a must in any self-respecting place.

Copenhagen does this quite well: https://ramblershighway.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/201...

In the Piers Anthony novel "On a Pale Horse", the protagonist is taught a lesson about empathy and perspective by being forced to experience the same scenario as a pedestrian, a bicyclist, and a driver.

Reading your comment and many others makes me think that the most "intractable" problem with shared transportation infrastructure isn't making it physically safe, it's getting people to treat other road users as human. Even a car-only road still has this problem.

> Of course this is infeasible for most established cities.

It simply is not. The problem is sacrificing an unreasonable amount of space to drivers. There is a ton of space for human-scale vehicles.

It's not really infeasible, we have this in Holland everywhere and our cities are a lot narrower than the US ones.

Tho Onion should have also had “'Infeasible,' Says Only Nation Where This Does Not Happen” to link to.

Vancouver in Canada did a really good job with bike routes. Instead of putting bikes in a lane on a main road, they turned side roads into a kind of bicycle highway. It’s the best cycling infrastructure I’ve ever seen.

Bikes can totally belong on the same streets as cars if said cars can't go fast thanks to traffic calming infrastructure.

Minneapolis is very successfully demonstrating that this is not infeasible.

It is not at all infeasible. Many cities do this successfully.

> Bikes don't belong on the road

I beg to differ. And I used a bike daily for commute (okay, when it wasn't raining) and a car otherwise.

The roads are for everybody. Bikes, cars, lorries, farmers. We should (and can) learn to live next to each other.

If you aren't a kid or aren't driving a bike for leisure on the weekend, then "separate from the street" bike ways have several drawbacks. Especially if you want to go speedy from A to B.

- often they aren't cleaned like the normal streets. So expect weeds growing into the lane, dog poop, farmers mud remnants, glass shards. Things a car driver sometimes see, but to a much lesser degree.

- kids play there, making the biker need to speed down

- dog owners walk there dogs there. Especially the long telescope lines are bad as bikers aren't usually not that good with rope jumping

- people walk there and if a bike rings the bell, they usually first turn around "What in gods own world could ring on a way dedicated to bikes?" seems to be an important question to be answered. Way more important than just going to the side.

- if a parking lot separates the bike way from the street, then the passengers in the cars just open the doors, not looking if some bike comes

- every street crossing is usually not level with the bike lane. So as a biker you always go 1-3 cm up/down twice for every crossing street. Some bikes have very narrow tires, that's not fun

- at the street crossings the car drivers are used to check for other cars. But they are less likely to check for bikes. This improves currently in Germany, but it's still not at the same level

So if I want to go fast from A to B by bike, I actually prefer to use the normal street. And if I go by car and see a bike then I can understand this. Except if the bike drives intentionally in the middle of the street. Don't do that, drive on the right side (except in UK or so ...)

"Ideally we have entirely separate paths for bikes. Of course this is infeasible for most established cities."

Not a problem, we just reduce lanes for cars. Bikes use way less space, do not contribute to bad air, keep their riders healthy - well, except when car drivers kill them.

The same person is a driver, biker or pedestrial at different times of the same day.

Toxic entitled drivers hate bikers. Some bikers are toxic on sidewalks. Most sane people are actually able to exist with all three.

> Bikes don't belong on the road with cars and they dont belong on sidewalks with pedestrians and they don't belong in between.

Bikes belong both on road and in between. Childrens bikes belong on side walk. Bikes moving in small speed can be on sidewalks too.

Chicago is putting these in everywhere to varying degrees of robustness based on traffic flows and it's fabulous.

Cars are the least suited to cities of these.

I see the problem more that motorised traffic tends to take all available space (due to their size and congestion concerns) and cyclists and pedestrians get to fight over the scraps left over.

Ultimately, motorised traffic tends to disrupt other forms of transport as people get used to travelling longer distances to get to shops, work etc. This then results in out-of-town hypermarkets which pretty much require people to use cars to get to them. The resultant traffic inevitably results in congestion, so more space is assigned to building roads and facilities get built further apart which of course just exacerbates the whole congestion issue.

> Ideally we have entirely separate paths for bikes. Of course this is infeasible for most established cities

Maybe in the US which has gone all in on providing space for cars and their parking, but it's quite feasible in old European cities that are much older. Often it relies on reducing the space available for cars. There's good examples of how some European cities were able to change drastically.

The Netherlands is a great example as during the 1970s, it was heavily biased towards motorised vehicles. The "Stop de Kindermoord" (approximately "Stop the child killing") campaign was key to changing attitudes and nowadays, cities such as Amsterdam are held up as examples of designing for multi-mode transport.

https://www.dutchreach.org/car-child-murder-protests-safer-n...

Bikes do pretty well on roads, especially in cities or quiet roads outside. We will all live in peace once we have self-driving cars instead of careless and violent human drivers. This already works pretty well in many cities in for example Spain.

I’m a driver and a pedestrian and I don’t hate cyclists because I’m not a psychopath.

The cars are the problem, not the bikes or pedestrians.

Cars don't belong in dense city centers. Bikes are not the problem.

I find drivers mostly hate themselves, but do occasionally take time out to hate other road users as well.