{"id":41140,"date":"2017-12-07T03:00:50","date_gmt":"2017-12-07T08:00:50","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=41140"},"modified":"2017-12-07T10:32:36","modified_gmt":"2017-12-07T15:32:36","slug":"lawrence-solomon-makes-his-pitch-for-most-hated-by-the-bike-mafia","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2017\/12\/07\/lawrence-solomon-makes-his-pitch-for-most-hated-by-the-bike-mafia\/","title":{"rendered":"Lawrence Solomon makes his pitch for “most hated by the bike mafia”"},"content":{"rendered":"

This was published last week<\/a>, but I didn’t see it until it was linked from Instapundit<\/em><\/a>:<\/p>\n

Today the bicycle is a mixed bag, usually with more negatives than positives. In many cities, bike lanes now consume more road space than they free up, they add to pollution as well as reducing it, they hurt neighbourhoods and business districts alike, and they have become a drain on the public purse. The bicycle today \u2014 or rather the infrastructure that now supports it \u2014 exemplifies \u201cinappropriate technology,\u201d a good idea gone wrong through unsustainable, willy-nilly top-down planning.<\/p>\n

London, where former mayor Boris Johnston began a \u201ccycling revolution,\u201d shows where the road to ruin can lead. Although criticism of biking remains largely taboo among the city\u2019s elite, a bike backlash is underway, with many blaming the city\u2019s worsening congestion on the proliferation of bike lanes. While bikes have the luxury of zipping through traffic using dedicated lanes that are vastly underused most of the day \u2014 these include what Transport for London (TfL) calls \u201ccycle superhighways\u201d \u2014 cars have been squeezed into narrowed spaces that slow traffic to a crawl.<\/p>\n

As a City of London report acknowledged last year, \u201cThe most significant impact on the City\u2019s road network in the last 12 months has been the construction and subsequent operation of TfL\u2019s cycle super highway \u2026 areas of traffic congestion can frequently be found on those roads.\u201d As Lord Nigel Lawson put it in a parliamentary debate on bicycles, cycle lanes have done more damage to London than \u201calmost anything since the Blitz.\u201d<\/p>\n

As a consequence of the idling traffic, pollution levels have risen, contributing to what is now deemed a toxic stew. Ironically, cyclists are especially harmed, and not just because the bike lanes they speed upon are adjacent to tailpipes. According to a study by the London School of Medicine, cyclists have 2.3 times more inhaled soot than walkers because \u201ccyclists breathe more deeply and at a quicker rate than pedestrians while in closer proximity to exhaust fumes \u2026 Our data strongly suggest that personal exposure to black carbon should be considered when planning cycling routes.\u201d Cyclists have begun wearing facemasks as a consequence. A recent headline in The Independent helpfully featured \u201c5 best anti-pollution masks for cycling.\u201d Neighbourhoods endure extra pollution, too, with frustrated autos cutting through residential districts to avoid bike-bred congestion.<\/p>\n

Health and safety costs aside \u2014 per kilometre travelled, cyclist fatalities are eight times that of motorists \u2014 the direct economic burden associated with cycling megaprojects is staggering. Paris, which boasts of its plan to become the \u201ccycling capital of the world,\u201d is in the midst of a 150-million-euro cycling scheme. Melbourne has a $100-million plan. Amsterdam \u2014 a flat, compact city well suited to cycling \u2014 is spending 120 million euros on 9,000 new bicycle parking spots alone. Where cold weather reigns for much of the year, as is the case in many of Canada\u2019s cities, the cost-benefit case for cycling infrastructure is eviscerated further.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

An answer might be dedicated bicycle-only routes, but the usual problem arises: the cost of the land necessary to build and maintain the routes will almost always be far higher than municipalities can afford to pay, and the benefits accrue more to upper-income users while the costs fall on the whole population. That’s just what we need: another way to transfer wealth from the poor to the rich.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This was published last week, but I didn’t see it until it was linked from Instapundit: Today the bicycle is a mixed bag, usually with more negatives than positives. In many cities, bike lanes now consume more road space than they free up, they add to pollution as well as reducing it, they hurt neighbourhoods […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":35193,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[25,84],"tags":[1175,712,350,443,527],"class_list":["post-41140","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-economics","category-government","tag-bicycles","tag-centralplanning","tag-london","tag-pollution","tag-publictransit"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/06\/favicon.png","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-aHy","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/41140","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=41140"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/41140\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":41141,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/41140\/revisions\/41141"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/35193"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=41140"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=41140"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=41140"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}