From USA.Streetsblog.org
By Nicole Gelinas
People stuck in a car in a lane next to a bus or bike lane shouldn’t be mad at the bus or the bike lane. If they had access to the bus or bike lane, it, too, would quickly clog with cars and trucks.
One measure of the pernicious dominance of cars on urban streets – even on Manhattan streets – is how often you don’t even notice them.
Because I write frequently about urban transportation and transit, I often hear complaints – from all sides – about people’s day-to-day movement through the city. One of the most common complaints: that the bus lane or the bike lane is a waste of space because it is “empty.” People stewing in traffic on Fifth or Madison Avenue look out from the back of a car, whether their own or an Uber or taxi, and see the vast red blankness of the avenue’s twin bus lanes – room they could be using to whiz by. Or, drivers idling in traffic on Ninth Avenue look to the bike lane and think: that empty lane is causing traffic.
But the fact that the bus and bike lanes are “empty” is a feature, not a bug. The bike lane looks empty because cyclists move efficiently: they don’t get stuck behind other cyclists making turns and they don’t double-park at the curb to drop off passengers or stuff. The bike lane looks empty because the cyclists have already glided by, so efficiently as to be invisible. Likewise, the bus lane looks empty, but it is really full of buses – up to 130 an hour, with bus passengers outnumbering passenger and for-hire car occupants two to one. It’s just that the buses have already efficiently gone by the cars, because, even with frequent stops, they don’t get stuck behind each other in an unpredictable fashion.
Photo by Markus Spiske on Unsplash