Yeah so frustrating! I've visited so many towns and small cities and neighborhoods in big cities, where the only bike infrastructure was on the main drag. With cars going 45mph and nothing but paint to protect you
We need to bicyclize the small streets first, and the main drag after
In places built during the era of the cul-de-sac, sometimes the main drag is the only route from a to b. That way means we need to create woonerfs, pave the often already existing informal paths that connect one cul-de-sac neighborhood to the next
I think the reason city planners put bike lanes on the main drag is partly that it's visible, so it looks like they're doing something. And partly that it doesn't occur to them that someone might take back streets to get from one place to another
Obviously the solution is to stack the planning committees with bicyclists, and give them a larger budget than the part of the transportation department that deals with car streets
Somehow we need to convince people that the future is micromobility, and any money spent accommodating cars is probably wasted
@NilaJones City planners don't put bike lanes anywhere. City engineers do. I think the main reason they put them on the main drags is that those roads get touched more often than neighborhood streets and so they get the opportunity to restripe them vs neighborhood streets don't really need bike lanes if the speed limit is 20 mph. Better signage, yes. But lanes, no.
Planning commissions also have no dog in this fight. They do not make engineering decisions.
I haven't seen a map oriented feedback system like that for my city. But I do subscribe to their newsletter where they list the surveys, and I fill out the surveys!
And I used to write documents when they were soliciting public input. But eventually I figured out that they really didn't want input from individual people. They want input from groups. So I'm trying to find the energy to start a group
(I was at a city council meeting one time, and they were like, '... and feedback was submitted by This group and That group and.... Nila Jones.' And then everyone looked uncomfortable, at me)
I don't know how it is in different places, but I've been pretty frustrated with the process here. I've been on committees, I've submitted feedback as a person or part of a group
There's a huge emphasis here on getting feedback from the public, but it really doesn't seem like the feedback is incorporated. It seems like the enormous amount of time and effort that is spent on feedback gathering comes after the decisions have already been made
The last official thing I did, I was on a committee to review the zoning code and suggest changes
We met weekly for about 6 months. We went through the whole code, and applied our expertise. We went through bucket loads of suggested changes from citizens, figured out when people were saying the same thing in different words, and which suggestions could be combined. Eventually we came up with a list of 30 or so top priority changes
THEN, after all that, they told us that they were only going to make three changes, and they had to be super minor like correcting typos
People involved in the process were pretty mad, and spoke up about it at the meeting. The folks from the city looked shamefaced, and said that they would do another process in 10 years where we could make slightly larger changes
I don't want to discourage people from getting involved in local government. But it's really important to find people who can tell you how stuff really works. I thought I had done enough of that, but I guess I didn't
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