Originally Posted by
3alarmer
...I think I get it now. You presume that the portion of our roadways used primarily by cars are the safe and practical portion of it.
That's indeed most often the case (after all it is literally how roads are designed to work) - at an intersection, an ordinary travel lane compatible with one's intended movement is overwhelmingly the only remotely safe place to be.
The idea that cars behind you are the primary threat is a instinctual fear inconsistent with informed reality - instead, it's the turning or entering driver who does not see you who is the primary cause of concern.
I cannot even begin to address the fallacious nature of that. Google up the auto injury and fatality statistics when you get a chance.
You're imagining the stats support your view, when in reality if you pay attention to what specifically you are looking at, they contradict it.
Intersections are overwhelmingly where danger is found.
Only if you look at fatalities specifically rather than injuries, and only on the highest speed roads, do crashes from the rear show up statistically relative to intersection crashes.
Roads with highest speed motor traffic can present some unique design challenges - but the most likely conflicts still remain at the intersections, which need to be designed from awareness rather than the all-too-common ignorance.
You're stuck in this fantasy of imagining that we can somehow "graft on" bike friendliness to a system which remains fundamentally reserved for cars.
That's just not going to work.
The only way we actually see car trips replaced with bike and light electric vehicle trips to an impactful degree is
if we welcome such alternative transport as to start to become the primary and defining use of the roads themselves.
Build for bikes on the margins and you marginalize bikes.
Normalize bikes and light EVs as the mainstream, and things start to look like a bike and light EV world, rather than a car world.
In fact you've probably already seen this - bet you know a vacation area or local street where it's bikes and pedestrians which set the character, with car drivers as occasional "guests" well aware they are in others' domain.
A driver "stuck" behind a bike on a narrow road has to come to recognize that it's the fact that they are in a car, and not the fact that the bike is going 12, 16 or 20 mph which is the fundamental problem that will require a patient maneuver on their part.