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Munich Planning Highway System For Cyclists
An anonymous reader writes: The German city of Munich has been looking for solutions to its traffic problem. Rush hour traffic is a parking lot, and public transit is near capacity. They think their best bet is to encourage (and enable) more people to hop on their bikes. Munich is now planning a Radschnellverbindungen — a highway system just for cyclists. Long bike routes will connect the city with universities, employment centers, and other cities. The paths themselves would be as free from disruption as possible — avoiding intersections and traffic lights are key to a swift commute. They'll doubtless take lessons from Copenhagen's bike skyway: "Cykelslangen (pronounced soo-cool-klag-en) adds just 721 feet of length to the city's 220 miles of bicycle paths, but it relieves congestion by taking riders over instead of through a waterfront shopping area."
Why would the need to be licensed? It costs far more than it brings in benefits. Or is this a way to expand the government overreach?
I bet you'd be fucking pissed if taxes went up to cover it, right?
Oh, and they pay (twice) for the roads anyway. 80% of cyclists have cars which are road taxed (but don't use when cycling), PLUS local roads are paid out of local taxes.
Now there will be no excuse not to require cyclists to get a license, registration, and payment of that registration yearly to pay for the roads they want. As a highly-taxed driver (gas and registration), I'm getting rather tired of cyclists requesting more and more road upgrades despite them not paying even a small share of the costs for those upgrades.
Obviously bicycles do far less damage to the roads, and the requirements are much lower. So we can forgo trying to replace the gas taxes, and just stick to registration costs.
Oh, you don't like that? Quit being a leech, TYVM.
As a highly taxed driver, you should be happy at anything that means fewer cyclists on "your" roads (even though much of the road costs are paid out of general taxes), and to have more people switch to cycling, which means fewer cars on the road.
Since road wear scales with the 3rd or 4th power of axle weight, a 200 lb cyclist should pay about 1000'th of the road taxes as a driver with a 2000 lb car (or 1/5360'th as much as a 3500 pound car). So if you pay $1000/year in taxes for your 3500 lb Honda Accord, the cyclist would pay about 20 cents.
Give me your address and I'll pay you the 20 cents directly since no government could collect a 20 cent fee without losing money.
But hang on, how many cyclists out there, who are of age to drive, don't also own a car? Outside of dense inner-metro areas (NYC, London), virtually everyone owns a car.
The administrative costs of imposing and collecting bike registration (not to mention the relative difficulty of policing it, given that plenty of people own bikes but only ride on trails and other things that aren't city streets) would seem to outweigh the extra revenue it would bring in. Not to mention that you generally want to encourage bike riding as much as possible, for public health reasons, and the extra cost and inconvenience of having to register would probably drive away a lot of casual cyclists.
...even then it was pretty bike friendly. It's interesting that in the article about the Copenhagen skyway, they cite pedestrians slowing bike traffic on the ground as an impetus for building the skyway. And the photo accompanying the article shows...a couple pedestrians walking down the center of the skyway *sigh*.
Never let a lack of data get in the way of a good rant.
Munich is growing faster than any time in recent history. Yet, for the first time in 50 years, no subway is being built. Leaving aside the reasons for this (mainly the German obsession with public debt), this is simply wrong, the two parts don't fit. Bulding more subways would help traffic more than bike highways (as much as I like them) -- and it would do so even in bad weather.
What could be done? Well, one of the main problems is that the public transport infrastructure is organized in a way where basically every connection runs via the center. So even if your destination isn't on a straight line from where you're at towards the center, you will still have to go there, change trains and then move out on another radial line. Now, with the ever increasing numbers of passengers this leads to lots of congestion on the stations in the town center (anybody who has e.g. tried changing subway lines at Sendlinger Tor during the morning or evening rush hours can confirm this).
The logical conclusion is of course to build a loop subway. Reduce dependency on the center and increase priority. This should become a priority.
(It is perhaps noting that such a loop exists in the public transportation network, but it is a patchwork of tramways and busses. So the necessity was recognized already, only the implemented solution falls short.)
I know! And what about all those leeching pedestrians? Sidewalks don't just appear! Plus pedestrians slow me down when I'm in a hurry! We should require registration to walk in the city! :-)
a,e,i,o,u and sometimes w and y (at be if of up cwm by)
Screw that. When are those lazy anarchist pedestrians going to start paying sidewalk and crosswalk tax? And when are they going to have registration plates so we can report jaywalkers? I'm getting rather tired of people thinking they're just free to move about anyway they want to. Don't even get me started on adults offering piggy-back rides. Clearly unsafe. Also, peds should have to wear belts and helmets and hi-viz.
It's the same reason we don't require registration for people to walk on sidewalks
love is just extroverted narcissism
Should they also pay for
1. Increased air pollution due to causing cars to driver slower and waste gas while some gay boy in colorful pants ride 20 mph below the speed limit?
With few exceptions, driving slower saves gas, so that gay boy should get a credit for gas saved.
2. Loss of productivity due to delaying drivers?
Again, with few exceptions, cyclists cause less traffic on the roads, speeding up the commute -- my commute is faster by bike than by car because I'm not stuck in traffic behind all of the other cars while cyclists zip by in the bike lane. If you find that there are so many cyclists on your commute that they are slowing you down, then you shoulid be advocating for bike lanes to reduce the cyclists on the road.
3. Extra paint and labor setting up the bike lanes for "special" people?
Given that road taxes (at least in the USA) only cover a fraction of road costs, cyclists are already paying. Most cyclists are also car owners, when I bike to work, my car sits at home, unused, and while that reduces my fuel taxes, I don't get a refund on the expensive VLF that I paid that purportedly goes to road costs.
4. Finally, pay for emotional damage caused by seeing people in spandex who should never ever be in spandex?
Your mental issues are your responsibility, but it's lycra, not spandex, and few commute cyclists around here wear specialty cyclist clothes unless they have a long bike commute.
Actually from the OP and not just a stupid editor: "Cykelslangen (pronounced soo-cool-klag-en) " (fault of Wired.com)
Cykels Langen - there is precisely zero chance that's pronounced soo-cool-klag-en.
More likely, with a usually wierd euro-pronounciation of the "y" it's soocles-langen.
I'm American, and I'm honestly not sure why Americans are SO BAD at pronouncing foreign words. Do we just see an unfamiliar collection of letters and what, just give up?
-Styopa
If there is no road sign that marks a road built especially for high speed motorized vehicles (like a freeway) then the road is built for general use, not just for cars.
"It's such a fine line between stupid and clever" -- David St. Hubbins, Spinal Tap
Pfft! We get that in Portland now...
A huge percentage are frickin' snowflakes demand to be given the same rights and berth as automobiles, then blatantly violate every traffic rule there is. Worst part is when they blow off such things as, oh I dunno, signaling, then get mad when you have to slam on the brakes to avoid turning them into road pizza - then they look at you like *you* did something wrong. Then there's the complete disregard for traffic lights (oh, the light's red? Well I'm a pedestrian now, so screw you and give way as I suddenly pull out of my lane and ride across the crosswalk without warning!)
Mind you, a good share of bicyclists here are perfectly fine with obeying traffic rules, are are easy to share the road with. It's the massive percentage which behave like jackasses and (for instance) demand to use the middle lane (at 10mph) in spite of the really fat bike paths on either side of the road... the urge to turn them into road pizza gets strong, but that only makes them martyrs, and good luck getting a fair trial in this town should you hit one.
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
Since road wear scales with the 3rd or 4th power of axle weight, a 200 lb cyclist should pay about 1000'th of the road taxes as a driver with a 2000 lb car (or 1/5360'th as much as a 3500 pound car). So if you pay $1000/year in taxes for your 3500 lb Honda Accord, the cyclist would pay about 20 cents.
There are other costs to building and maintaining a road besides simple road wear. The biggest cost of a road is usually the land acquisition in order to build one. A bike lane takes up far more than 1/5360th of the land that a car lane uses. Probably closer to 1/3rd.
And there are other causes of road wear than the weight of vehicles traveling on it, such as water damage from rain puddles, freeze/thaw cycle, etc
You forgot to factor in the road shoulders and parking strips that are a part of most roads -- in many cases a bike lane takes 0% of the space a car needs to drive on the roadway. But since drivers rarely pay the acquisition costs of roads (especially roads that were in existence before cars came along), it seems a little unfair to suddenly charge cyclists for roads that were originally easily shared between bikes and horses.
And there are other causes of road wear than the weight of vehicles traveling on it, such as water damage from rain puddles, freeze/thaw cycle, etc
One of the dedicated bike paths I ride to work has been in existence for nearly 30 years without repaving or major maintenance (only tar sealing cracks). The busy road in front of my house has been resurfaced 2 times in the past 15 years and it's still pothole strewn, the city tries to fix them as they occur, but their 5 year plan includes grinding off the top surface and repaving. A cycling path is much cheaper to build, not only is it a lot narrower than even a single lane road, it typically uses only a few inches of fill under the surface compared to a road that requires 12 - 16" of subsurface prep and drainage before paving.
I just can't find any picture of the Cykelslangen with more than a few cyclist on it. For a route that relieves congestion in a busy area, you would expect it is full all the time, and that it looks busy on most pictures. But it doesn't. Strange.
90% of road wear and tear is from trucks, even though they make up less than 1% of the traffic. Do trucks pay 9x the road tax?
Actually...
Here in Portland a lot of roads downtown lost square footage thanks to wide swaths of green-painted areas which are bike-only, forcing cars to concentrate themselves into fewer lanes, wearing those portions of the road out faster, etc.
Sounds like all the more reason to get more of those wear-inducing cars off the roads and replace them with cyclists. The other side effect of narrowing roads is that it increases safety for everyone (cars, cyclists and pedestrians) since drivers naturally go slower on narrow roads. Make a city street as wide and straight as a freeway and drivers will drive as if it's a freeway.
Also, in many locales, bicycles do require a license anyway (mostly to assist in recovering stolen ones). Wouldn't take much to slap a tax on those bad boys, and without much overhead beyond what's already in place.
I'm fine with a bike tax that goes to dedicated cycling infrastructure, but don't tax a cyclist to pay for shared roads that they are already paying through their general taxes. My locality passed a general bond measure to pay for road repairs, so I'm paying for roads through my property taxes whether I drive or not.
I live in Denver, and just moved. My previous commute was about 3.9 miles via bicycle, with about 2.5 miles of it on bike lanes. My new commute is 4.5 miles, with about 3.5 miles of it on a dedicate recreational path (Denver's Cherry Creek Trail), and the other 1 mile almost all on bike lanes.
My new commute, while having a longer distance, takes me less time. In addition, it is a lot less stressful. The recreational path makes all the difference. It is limited access - there are ramps to the trail about every .2 miles - no motorized vehicles, and goes from my neighborhood (an urban residential-heavy area) to downtown.
I have commuted via bicycle in a wide variety of cities on the East Coast and can say that this new commute is about as ideal as it could be. I dread the days I have to drive into work. Even without traffic (which doubles the time needed), it takes me longer to drive.
A lot of US cities I have lived in see separated paths for recreational use only. They never seem to see that a trail going from residential areas to business areas can be a great encouragement for bicycle commuting.
- (c) 2018 Hank Zimmerman
A cyclist highway in the states would start with an on-ramp where no one yields, 6 people fall over due to shoddily constructed wal-mart bikes, some guy on a strider bowls through a lane of recumbent elderly, and 2 kids on mountain bikes wobble aimlessly and perpendicularly across the darn thing. But every morning a quarter million dollars of race-grade peloton disciplined commuters would roar toward their respective office cubicles, leaving a wake of empty gel-protein wrappers in their path.
Good people go to bed earlier.
No it's not. Try it on Google Translate https://translate.google.co/ by selecting Danish and clicking on the speaker symbol. Danish pronunciation is sometimes a bit odd but not as crazy as your example.
"He took a duck in the face at 250 knots." -- William Gibson, Pattern Recognition
Generally, I agree with you. But the bike pathletes can be as rude and obnoxious as any overly aggressive rider.
Here in England, the only roads that were built for cars (motorways) don't allow cycles (or horses or pedestrians) on them. The other roads were built for general pedestrian (we don't have a jay-walking law) and vehicle use. The first "modern" roads were paid for by cyclists groups, so it's ignoring history to claim that the roads are built for cars.
Have a look at http://www.roadswerenotbuiltforcars.com/ for a really good examination of the early history of roads and cars. Most of the car pioneers were also cycle enthusiasts (the earliest cars were pretty much tricycles with a motor fitted).
You're a temporary arrangement of matter sliding towards oblivion in a cold, uncaring universe
Can you imagine someone demanding the same rights as an automobile?
Everyone knows automobiles were endowed by the Creator with inalienable rights to have everyone get out of the fucking way.
You are welcome on my lawn.
Everyone knows automobiles were endowed by the Creator with inalienable rights to have everyone get out of the fucking way.
The creator also endowed automobiles with headlights, seatbelts, turn signals, stoplights, and on the seventh day, traffic laws.
"I like to lick butts!" by MobileTatsu-NJG (#32700246) (Score:5, Informative)
Funny thing is, motorists do the exact same things as cyclists. Yet, when a motorist does it, it is a bad driver. When a cyclist does it, it is a generalization that applies to all cyclists. (I will thank you for moderating your views to a massive percentage of cyclists. Yet your moderation is highly unusual.)
As for cyclist lane usage behavior, I'm not sure what the circumstances are in your city. In mine, the cyclist is to stay as far right as it is safe to be. This means that a cyclist has the right to take the lane for reasons of safety. If you're making a left turn, it is far safer to take the left turning lane to prevent cars from passing you while making the turn. If you're stopped at an intersection, it is far safer to take the right lane to prevent cars from making a right turn across your path. There are all sorts of rules of thumb like that which make life safer for cyclists and have very little impact upon motorists. (Seriously, we are talking about a 5 second delay in most of those cases.)
I have noticed motorists get impatient when I take the lane, presumably because they don't understand why. But if you think about it from the perspective of two motorists, it should make sense. For example, would you want a car passing your car from the left to make a right turn? I'm guessing the answer is no.
Then there's the complete disregard for traffic lights (oh, the light's red? Well I'm a pedestrian now, so screw you and give way as I suddenly pull out of my lane and ride across the crosswalk without warning!)
If a signal has remained red for five minutes despite my bike's front and rear wheels being directly over the crack in the street that indicates an induction loop sensor, what else am I supposed to do?
You may want to read up on safety recommendations by e.g. the cops. In some situations it is recommended to take the lane to keep cars from squeezing past you.
thegodmovie.com - watch it
The motorist in the video committed a crime -- several actually. But the cyclist committed an indiscretion by chasing down the motorist to give him a piece of his mind. That's not illegal, it's just a very bad idea.
Many years ago I heard an interviewer ask the great race driver Jackie Stewart what it takes to be a great driver. He said that a driver ought to be emotionless. I think this is very true for any kind of driving -- or cycling. Never prolong your reaction to anything that anyone does on the road beyond the split second it takes to deal with it. Let your attention move on to the next thing. Never direct it to a driver because of something he *did*. Keep focused on what's happening now.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.