London. A Billion for Bike Lanes.
March 13, 2013
The city of London is going big into bicycles. See visualization above.
Here’s a sampling of what you can do with £1 billion ($1.4 billion):
- A new ‘Central London Grid’ of bike routes in the City and West End, using segregation, quiet streets, and two-way cycling on one-way traffic streets, to join all the other routes together
- A new network of ‘Quietways’ – direct, continuous, fully-signposted routes on peaceful side streets, running far into the suburbs, and aimed at people put off by cycling in traffic
- Substantial improvements to both existing and proposed Superhighways, including some reroutings
- Major improvements to the worst junctions, making them safer and less threatening for cyclicsts
Climate Denial Crock of the Week 
March 13, 2013 at 9:02 pm
We have some new ‘bike lanes’ in the San Fernando Valley, Los Angeles. One goes up Resada Blvd. which is a North/South route in the middle of the Valley. It’s on the right of the double and triple wide car lanes (four to six lanes, counting both ways) with nothing delineating the two but a small white line, which bikers must cross to get around parked cars in their ‘lane’, and which cars must cross to make right turns onto no-traffic-light intersections.
If one braves the 4 mile+ run to the mall or university library, they will have ingested the fresh exhaust from several hundred cars that have passed them on the way. Traffic congestion goes from moderate to horrible. As the SFV is home to almost 2 million people, you’d expect lots of bikers, right? I see maybe one biker on that route every once in a while. I ride a bike, but that road is too dangerous and too polluted when one is gasping for air, once their blood is pumping.
One fairly descent route is an East/West route that runs along side the bus lane (a specific lane running across the Valley, just for buses). But going north/south, even if one uses the light traffic roads in the suburbs, they always get stuck at least once per 1/2 mile of travel, negotiating high volume roads that grid-out the Valley.
March 13, 2013 at 10:37 pm
The Economist interviews the architect of an innovative UK science station in Antarctica: