@ai6yr So the thing about putting bike lanes on LTS4 and LTS3 streets is that yes, there IS a better alternative, but that doesn't mean you shouldn't serve the people who are going to cycle on those streets anyway. Invariably, people will cycle on them, so you should do the retrofitting to make them a SAFER space to do it. And last I checked, even shitty bike lanes do increase safety even though they don't ensure it. It should be done, but isn't the ONLY thing that should be done.

@HayiWena @ai6yr if it's an LTS4 after bike lanes are installed, the engineer is bad but also I don't think it's worth installing it for whatever marginal gain you got. You now put a bike lane effectively no one is going to use on what is likely the most significant road, meaning people that don't want real changes can reasonably point to the shitty bike lane and say "why bother".

@HayiWena @ai6yr And since you clearly don't have good political or staff support fighting for something that actually improves the LTS, they will happily wilt under the most minimal push back.

@DemonHusky @HayiWena Yeah, part of this problem is one of the staff is not a fan of bicycling (I believe), and we had an APPROVED, FUNDED Class III bicycle lane being put into place at a critical connector, and he decided to run an (unsolicited) "test" by putting orange cones on that street for two weeks, soliciting what they say is "the most complaints ever to the city", so they s***canned the project. I believe it was a deliberate move. (I was in a bicycle meeting and he said "we don't want to do Class IV lanes or anything because then we can't reclaims the lanes in the future"... he tried to explain this as "it will be easier/cheaper if they have autonomous vehicles / future technology if we don't put in separation and only use paint". So we're fighting that.

@ai6yr @DemonHusky @HayiWena I think everything wrong with transportation is some variant on a theme of car culture, where we have 10x redundant carway networks and you can aimlessly and incompetently wander through any city in a car without fear of death or even really getting honked at much. But we have like at-best 0.3x complete low-stress bikeway network, and if bicycling isn't outright dismissed as a sport, it's something we "don't have the money for" while cars burn billions in road wear.