Submitted by sloowhand t3_zdrxkv in washingtondc
The improvements for cyclists and scooters are obvious, but the people that use those regularly don’t need convincing. The resistance is coming from drivers and that’s the position I’m coming from in this post.
I’ve driven New Jersey Ave NW from Rhode Island to the 395 Tunnel to work, and the reverse home, for ten years. I know this street well to say the least. For that ten years it’s been the standard two lanes each direction with curbside parking that was (supposed to be) no parking during rush hour. Then a few months ago that stretch was converted to one lane each way with protected bike lanes and turn lanes at the intersections. When they were redoing it, I was really concerned that this was going to turn into a mile-long parking lot with traffic getting bottlenecked down to two lanes.
There’s been no difference. Seriously. My experience over the last month or so is that there is no difference in my drive time along this section of my commute. I’ve hit it at different times of the morning and afternoon, weekday vs weekend, you name it. It doesn’t take any longer to drive.
I know a ton of you are reading this saying “Yeah, obviously.” but again, you’re not the person this is addressing. This is to the skeptical driver who is worried it’s going to make traffic worse. In this instance, not the case at all. And as a driver, perhaps counterintuitively, this will ultimately reduce traffic if it encourages more people to bike or scooter. That’s one less car you’re stuck behind in traffic. The city needs more of this.
madmoneymcgee t1_iz32uk4 wrote
I'm being completely serious when I say that I can't think of an example across the DMV where bike lanes went in and made the car traffic worse. Like, actually worse measured by real quantitative counts. Lots of people like to complain but rarely even bother to have the data to back it up.
There have been a couple examples where political pressure reversed a change but the numbers never actually backed it up.
Some of it is survivorship bias. DDOT simply isn't going to advance any sort of project where their numbers suggest car traffic would get really bad.
Some of it is that traffic is way more resilient than we realize. Trips start and end far from any one corridor so people who know that a route is no longer no good (not that NJ was ever any good in the first place) will make changes way earlier than right there.
And better yet this cascades as we get more and more people on bikes.