@rcannon100 143096 wrote:
Just remember that it is a balancing act. We are none of us only cyclists. We have kids who play in parks. We like trees. We even drive cars (not me, but I hear some of you bums do). Maybe schools. Maybe we like ducks and birds and snakes and creepy crawly things.
There is a religion that supporting cycling infrastructure is sacrosanct and opposition is heresy. Rubbish. Sometimes bike stuff gets irrationally supported like a religion, without questioning. Bikes = good. Opponents = bad. That is simplistic and tribalistic.
There are still good decisions and bad decisions. All decisions are cost benefit. All decisions mean some win and some lose.
If you look at the Wash Blvd trail decision – that seems to be a relatively good process. Steve O I think wrote a good piece on the decision making about how many trees would have to be cut down and did that justify the trail. In the end, with a lot of push back from the neighborhood and the community – the trail was redesigned and the environmental impact was mitigated. Environmental concerns mattered. Neighborhood concerns mattered. The trail mattered.
That was a good thing.
And by the same token, the benefit side of bike infra is not only to cyclists, and that sometimes impacts what can get built. See our discussion of the advisory bike lanes in Potomac Greens. There are many places where localities use bike infra as traffic calming. Sometimes that infra appears useless to all but the slowest and/or least confident cyclists – and some of the discussion of the cost benefits among cyclists forgets that pedestrians and others with an interest in traffic calming also benefit.
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