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msteffen • yesterday at 5:53 PM • 3 replies • view on HN

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.


Replies

pnw • yesterday at 7:21 PM

I wouldn't paint Seattle as a picture of success when it comes to bikes. We've spent untold millions on bike lanes, reduced vehicle capacity with road diets, reduced parking and access to small businesses and made life more difficult for delivery drivers and ADA access.

After all that, the mode share of biking has actually gone down in Seattle over the last decade, to under 3%. It turns out if your city has hills, rain and darkness much of the year, there is no amount of money that will convince people to ride a bike. We've effectively subsidized a recreational interest for a very small population, a group so small that the top profession of the ~12k who do cycle is "college professor". And as a pedestrian who has to share with cyclists almost every day, it's been a net negative. In my own neighborhood they've made sidewalks unusable for pedestrians in the quest to encourage more cyclists.

https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/data/seattle-bike-...

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asdff • today at 9:57 AM

Bikes already have right of way. You are allowed to take the lane and bike in the road and pretend you are a car.

nonethewiser • yesterday at 6:06 PM

This is more in the direction of what I'm talking about. I think it's a pretty good model and affirms not contradticts what I'm saying because you do have to sacrifice drivability (unless you can just add streets like this - but I assume not).