Bike Lanes Are Capitulation

I often post this on bike lane discussions.

Bike lanes are the dominant subject among bicyclists at the moment, though many of the more experienced tacitly acknowledge their imperfect, incomplete and possibly misleading implication of safety.

Regardless, the strategy is to get more bikes on the road by whatever means necessary. Many new cyclists, trained in automobile lane culture, need to feel that there is a space reserved for them.

Not only do I believe the implied safety of a bike lane is greatly, and perhaps dangerously overstated, I don't believe the nascent strategy is taking much hold. I've witnessed that "women with kids" and "older people" simply will not ride bicycles unless they "feel as if they are riding on the sidewalk," which of course many of them do anyhow. Most new cyclists are younger and less in need of such misleading assurances. Bike lanes at intersections are especially dangerous.

There are the gold, (green) standard bike lanes; painted bright green and 4 feet in width along slow speed ROW's. There are also completely parallel segregated facilities in nations such as The Netherlands, all requiring additional and/or specific maintenance and funding, and of course, dedicated bicycle trails. These require even more maintenance and funding, and are often shared with hikers or families and strollers through parkland.

In the U.S., we have the advantage of typically and sufficiently wide public right-of-ways already available. Of course our history in the last 100 years has been to give every inch of that space to automobile culture.

That space isn't being taken away from automobile culture in the application of bike lane philosophy as it should be, the more usual application is to either lessen the width of, (but retain in number) existing automobile lanes AND retain on-street automobile curb parking.
Even more 'safe' in this way of thinking is to add surface to the right of existing automobile space, with or without an added median, necessarily encroaching on what little space there may have been for pedestrian access originally.

Capitulation.

The true solution is a two-part strategy:

Reduce four, (or six) bi-directional lanes for automobiles to two, (or five) including a center left-turn lane. There's your cycling space.

More importantly, slow that automobile traffic the fuck down. 20-25 MPH is the target.

These should be the goals of the cycling movement.