Commuting trends: transit vs driving vs ...

[MidTowner]

I mentioned those streets because they are the types of major arterials that most commuters take, and they’re where employers are often located. And people commuting by car now are driving down those streets every day, and thinking very sensibly “no way would I bike here.”

To get to those streets, if you live on a residential street, you have to bike on a residential street. I think most people with even just a passing interest in bicycle commuting would generally be comfortable with that.

Insufficient data…I can’t claim to know what a typical person is comfortable with. We’d need to ask people. If it’s a residential street with an average speed pushing sixty kilometres per hour, maybe that’s not going to be comfortable. If it’s a residential street almost only used by its residents, with an average of a hundred cars a day, on which motorists drive slower, I would guess it would be.

We should be able to have a formula of volume and speed and other factors that determine whether a street needs bicycling infrastructure. I would hypothesize that it would be politically more achievable, in the cases where streets are not comfortable, to calm a street generally, than to install that infrastructure. And then we’d get all of the ancillary benefits danbrotherston mentions.