Originally Posted by
base2
I know, I know. Slowing the cars is just a bridge too far for American traffic designers.
When you've claimed that you target is 20 kph (12.4 mph) indeed,
your goal of 12.4 mph is absurd for the scale of american geography. I can pretty much guarantee that even the parents of the victim would not be willing to confine their speed to that for long it just doesn't work for the kinds of distances involved here. Nor would you even find many people who use bikes in their lives who would be willing to agree to such a speed limit
on the bike.
The standards themselves are focused on the wrong priorities. Moving cars & not people. This has to change.
That's nonsense - cars are presently the only realistic way you can "move people" in that environment.
we need systemic change.
Moving away from designs that are so
inherently car requiring would be a good thing, but if you're serious about actually doing anything rather than just screaming at clouds, you focus on the things that are
possible evolutions of the housing already built, and that actually help - rather than what you've been doing, when
you've been demanding things that actually make life even harder and more dangerous for those of us who actually bike.
So first, you recognize that
the residential street itself is not the problem, rather the actual issue is that
you can't get there without a car.
Why can't you get there? Because as I've been explaining all along,
North Park Drive is too narrow - it needs a shoulder so that cyclists can safely be passed. So for the umpteenth time,
you widen North Park Drive.
Then, because indeed not everyone wants to take the direct route beside traffic,
you also turn the disused rail line into a rail trail that manages to almost entirely avoid any interaction with roads at all, and where it has to and you can't build a flyover, you build good intersections with great sight lines that give trail users equal priority with drivers - basically,
you treat the trail at the intersection as a road (just one that happens not to be available to cars).
Of course, only a fraction of your population is going to be willing to bike American distances, especially in Texas heat. So if your goal is actually reducing the use of cars, far more important than cycling, is adding transit.
And much as North Park Drive or building the rail trail are great for getting to the grocery store and movie theater, that's not where most of the people who live in that housing work. Some will be lucky enough to commute virtually (truly the most useful revolution in "transit" planning ever). Many others will unfortunately have to travel to other areas only reachable by car. You can start the process of building transit, and
widening the key regional roads to make them more bikeable for 5-10 mile commutes, but
the reality is that bicycles are not going to solve the problem of sprawl for most of the people who live there, because the places they need to go are just too far away. One of the key problems actually is the suburban office park - instead of just having the housing sprawled and people trying to commute "in" someone ends up with a home that's sprawled in one direction and a job that's sprawled in another, which changes public transit from the borderline untenable time sink it would be with a traditional commute, to an utterly untenable 2+ hours in each direction.
Still, even though you can't make biking work as a major transit mode over the distances of American communities and lives, you can at least recognize the distinction between what actually helps the people who will bike, vs
the outrageously anti-cycling mis-designs you keep ignorantly calling for.
The very least you can do for those of us who actually bike as our primary transportation is to stop trying to making things worse.