What was the result?
A stunning INCREASE in pedestrian deaths and no significant effect on bike deaths: https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/transportation/as-...
Edit: my personal theory is that these "improvements" on average do nothing whatsoever. They "worked" in some places in Europe because they made traffic so shitty that more people were forced to use bikes. In turn, this provided driver education, by showing them how badly average drivers behave.
[–] hamdingers 3 days ago
Your personal theory is refuted by studies in the US, here's the classic lit review on this subject if you're interested: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC2776010/
[–] cyberax 3 days ago
No statistically significant correlation.
From my personal observations, sabotage of arterials resulted in a lot of traffic shifting onto the side streets that are much less safe. But our local DoT doesn't have enough traffic data to confirm or disprove this, I tried to FOIA it.
> Your personal theory is refuted by studies in the US, here's the classic lit review on this subject if you're interested: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC2776010/
Look at the dates on these studies. Nearly all of them come from the period of the global crime drop, a result of the leaded gasoline phaseout.
I recently tried to replicate some of the studies of bike lane effects and quite often found the _opposite_ of the original studies. For example, in Seattle the business tax receipts declined more steeply on streets within 1 block of a protected bike lane compared to controls.
[–] hamdingers 3 days ago
Get your attempted study published and reviewed, then I'll take your observations seriously.
[–] cyberax 3 days ago
Go on, I'll wait.
Still waiting.
Oh, there are almost no publications? Wonder why. And the ones that do appear tend to be relegated to rarely cited journals. E.g.: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/19427867.2022.2...
> We examined changes in counts and per capita rates of all, pedestrian, and bicyclist fatal motor vehicle collisions between 2007 and 2019 for 18 U.S. cities that took early Vision Zero pledges. Only 2 of the 18 cities have experienced statistically significant decreases in total fatalities since taking a Vision Zero pledge and only one city experienced a statistically significant decrease in pedestrian fatalities.
[–] jrowen 2 days ago
They "worked" in some places in Europe because they made traffic so shitty that more people were forced to use bikes. In turn, this provided driver education, by showing them how badly average drivers behave.
That sounds like a pretty big win to me? Yes these programs are designed to make other modes of transport more attractive. What do you make of all the data that shows that adding lanes to a highway doesn't decrease traffic?
[–] cyberax 2 days ago
It's the root cause of all the current political problems in the US and Europe. It's a kind of pollution that offloads externalities (high living costs) from companies onto the population. Dense cities allow companies to more easily access larger pools of workers, without having to care about their long-term benefits.
> Would you prefer if we just focused on making car traffic as fast as possible and pushed aside other methods of transportation?
Yes. I would go as far as ripping out all the local transit (eventually). Self-driving cars have solved the only real problem with cars: people who can't or shouldn't drive (children, elderly, people with disabilities, etc.)
> Do you interpret these results as evidence that attempting otherwise is folly?
Yes. Quite simply: look at the stated goals of programs like Vision Zero. They are social engineering programs that simply use saving human lives as a justification to push their agenda. I hate that.
Other urbanistic programs are similar, and even urbanists admit that: https://archive.strongtowns.org/journal/2023/4/26/upzoning-m...
> That sounds like a pretty big win to me?
Sure. But at what cost?
> Yes these programs are designed to make other modes of transport more attractive
No. They are designed to make car travel intolerable. It's a zero-sum game, a bike lane almost always means removing a traffic lane.
> What do you make of all the data that shows that adding lanes to a highway doesn't decrease traffic?
It's a real phenomenon - induced demand. And it also applies to housing costs: increases in housing density do NOT result in lower housing prices.
And the fix is actually the same in both cases: eliminate the _need_ for more lanes or denser housing.
[–] jrowen 2 days ago
One other problem with cars is that not everybody can afford one, or really should need to have one in a big city. Even if Waymo were a free or cheap public service, it's still far less efficient and more disruptive than a robust public transit system. When dense cities are walkable and bikable, less people need cars for everything. That's hard to achieve with cars at 40mph everywhere. There's a place for cars but we've only created the problem by having them zoom around every inch of a city at the expense of everything else.
Also, tax the companies, easy. In America we've been manipulated to loathe the ideas of taxes. Taxes are what pays for things that are good for everyone.
[–] Manuel_D 3 days ago
[–] cyberax 3 days ago
> And since cycling has increased ~25% over the same time frame
The percentage of bike commutes in Seattle is in the noise, around 2-3% of the non-remote-work commutes. So the data is too noisy for any reasonable statistical significance.
For example, this year was deadly with 4 cyclist deaths (to date). In 2024 there were no cyclist deaths.