Bus lanes have higher throughput of commuters than car lanes.

To play devil’s advocate…

Bus lanes having higher throughput doesn’t imply that it’s always the right choice to replace car lanes with bus lanes.

If the road was a major bottleneck for cars and this change made it even narrower, it could hurt throughput for both cars and buses!

I think you’re in the wrong sub

Ah yes cuz adding more lanes totally gets rid of traffic Just one more lane man I gotta get just one more lane and ill be ok I swear

This is a common optical illusion with bike lanes. Bicycles are a lot smaller than cars and are 100x less likely to encounter traffic congestion, so bicycle traffic always looks much lighter than a similar number of cars.

The only way to be certain about traffic numbers is to do a traffic survey, where you actually go and count the traffic amount during rush hour.

Heres an example of a traffic counter where bicycle traffic looks a lot lighter than it actually is.

https://youtu.be/3F_B0HtewDU

Also, even if a bike lane is underutilized, it is often a first step towards a proper bike network. Once a bike network reaches a critical mass, the traffic grows exponentially as people feel safe biking and new kinds of business is enabled by bicycle transport.

In countries like the Netherlands it is very rare to build a road WITHOUT a bike path, and I think that should be the standard. We should be asking why it didn’t have a bike lane when the road was first built.

A single bike lane doesn’t do much to make an area more accessible to bicycles. Over time, with enough bike lanes and other bicycle friendly infrastructure, it makes a huge impact.

Our citys are designed very poorly. Our roads are designed very poorly. Our laws are designed very poorly. This all takes time to fix, especially when the people trying to fix things are fighting against the lawyers and lap dogs of multibillion dollar corporations.

I understand your frustration. You want better traffic flow and feel like this change made it worse. You are probably right in the short term, but on a macro scale, the only way to fix the problem is to rebuild from the ground up to make your area less car reliant. Less car use is better in pretty much every way.

• She likely could afford a car since she has a mayor’s salary, but wisely chooses to ride the bus because of its many benefits to society

To give more history about this route, there is a annual "race the 8! event scheduled by seattle urbanists where people start off on the worst part of its route and do increasingly outlandish activities on foot while still beating it to its designations. Folks have beat it juggling, walking backwards, dancing, etc. Katie and her kids participated before she was the mayor, and you guessed it, beat it.

This route serves an intensely dense part of the city and has been failing people for years. The city/county have been making piddly, empty changes for nearly a decade that fixed nothing, like adding a 1 block bus lane. Yup, one block only.

The bus is regularly 30-40 minutes late, which makes using it miserable and unreliable. The reason its route is terrible is that there is a highway onramp thats right there near Amazon HQ. So for years and years people commuting in and out of the city have been prioritized over people who live in it, and no previous mayor had the stones to push back and fix it for actual residents.

Cause they had an extra lane for their private vehicle and they feel like a service their taxes paid for has been robbed from them to serve people “that haven’t worked hard enough for it.” They worked hard to buy and pay for their car and they feel upset if their ability to use their private vehicle on public infrastructure has been diminished. Despite the fact that cars have been given the vast majority of space and funding for decades. There is also nothing stopping them from using the improved bus service except their preconception that “its for the poors.”

With all the stops, cycling is usually faster unless the route is uphill or you really don’t have a lot of stops and probably need more.

Maybe I’m just a dumbass, but I think your rule of thumb is busted?

X should be slower than A, but should not be faster than A + B.

Isn’t slower the same as “not faster”? I think it should be slower than A, but faster than A + B. So between A and A + B.

Or “the bus should be faster if it’s already here, but cycling should be faster if you’d have to wait for the bus”. I think that’s what you were going for.

My rule of thumb is that within a city, a bus (other than BRT) is likely roughly the same speed as a bike, assuming good bike routes.

If the bikes are stopping regularly because of red lights, that will obviously change.

Its a good rule of thumb. I ride an hour in to work (on an e-scooter) because it is faster than that bus during rush hour. Outside of rush hour though, the bus beats me every time. It’d be cool if I could become mayor to add a bus lane for that route. And all the other routes that need it tbh.

if a bicycle is slower than a bus, then it is definitely slower than waiting+taking a bus

Bike with parking can and often should be faster start to destination than walking+bus+walking at least compared to city buses, it’s different with buses who are allowed to go faster than 50 km/h

I have done something similar on Oxford Street.

I suspect this is not the same.

As someone commuting to the city from the Eastside (now taking the train every day), I was unfamiliar with the sad state of the 8 line before this post.

There’s a dedicated website: https://fixthel8.com/

I learned from that site that all-girl punk band Tacocat wrote a song called F. U. #8: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aRFlROqgFwo

Well, Seattle has a more temperate climate than New York City

And I don’t know if it’s possible to add more bus lanes to NYC

Wait, she’s a jazz musician?

Pedantry warning

Mamdani is mayor (city level), not governor (state level).

Viscount Rothermere

Had to look up if that’s someone’s name or what. It’s Harold Hamsworth, owner and founder of the Daily Mail and unapologetic racist, elitist, nazi piece of shit.

It’s crazy to me that people like this were still allowed to own newspapers after the war. You don’t have to put them against the wall, but you can at least take away their power.