Bob Atkinson
Aug 8, 2017 · 1 min read

Interesting article pulling plenty of info together.

Clearly a balance between libertarian (no public space) and excessive bureaucracy (restrictive planning rules) is needed.

Easy to achieve starting with a blank slate but almost impossible to change a city once it exists without upsetting existing inhabitants — and of course they are often the taxpayers paying for changes to the infrastructure.

The comparison of modes of travel along a 3.5m lane is rather misleading. Assuming a car travels at 10 times the speed of a pedestrian then it delivers slightly more people to where they are going in a given time. I also suspect the cycling is based of competition cyclists on the flat; it works out as almost 4 per second and that is something like a peloton —average cyclists would be two or maybe three abreast but less when going uphill and they would be traveling at different speeds and therefore needing to overtake. You just have to accept that only a small minority of car journeys can be replaced by bikes so it is rather unimportant. Which doesn’t mean a well designed city would be designed to have safe cycle tracks for kids to get to school — certainly not the high risk cycle lanes we have marked on main roads.

    Bob Atkinson

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