Bike Lanes

From HubandSpokes

A friend introduced me yesterday to rambunctious bicycling advocate Fred Oswald via a recent article out of Cleveland’s press. Much debate swirls around his not-so-uncommon opinions. Mr. Oswald’s argument can be boiled down to two points: supporting a critical need for much more bicycling education on sharing public roadways with other vehicles, and fighting an industry-borne fallacy that breaking up streets with allocated spaces, such as bike lanes, is good for the biking community. The former is, of course, not contestable. We all agree that safety and training are absolutely critical to developing a strong and healthy bicycling community. The latter, however, is a serious point of contention in the transportation profession, and deserves discussion. Categorically declaring bike lanes counter-productive is lacking nuance and myopically idealistic; it simply does not reflect where we are as a nation of people on the move. When it comes to the idea of bicycles and automobiles co-existing, that is, equally sharing a common public space, we Americans are but toddlers learning to get our balance; therefore, we still need training wheels. And training wheels in this metaphor take the form of two parallel stripes called bike lanes. read more here