Road design, transportation and walkability

[danbrotherston]

MUTs work well in low density areas - the ones along Homer Watson, for example, will probably never be used to capacity as that road does not pass any dense developments.

However, in more dense areas they are trying to fill the role of both sidewalk and bike lane when those should probably be separate - navigating around pedestrians at bicycle speeds becomes a point of conflict soon enough. I think our planners are too quick to jump on them as a solution when a more thorough implementation would be safer.

MUTs work well enough in low density areas, and I have certainly argued that they are often sufficient, but they are also a piece of infra that really can't succeed, if we had a meaningful transition to cycling as a mode of transportation, they'd all be crowded pretty quickly (remember, there are far far fewer bike routes, than car routes, so the few bike routes would be overwhelmed with even 1/10 of the car traffic we have.

But there are other limitations, they are often poorly designed, and the intersections are generally...well, garbage...utter garbage...somewhere between negligently dangerous and intentionally bad (and I do mean intentional here, our engineers have occasionally stated they refuse to design an intersection safely because they believe that will encourage *gasp* use of it).

So generally, they're useful for small numbers of recreational cyclists, sometimes for small numbers of utility cyclists (if they actually connect) but are not useful for sport cyclists, and encourage bad cyclist behaviour by being generally poorly designed.

And certainly a MUT does not really negate the unpleasantness of riding next to a massive four lane highway during rush hour. Again, it might be perfectly pleasant on a Sunday recreational ride, but most people need to commute to work during rush hour (those limtiations we talked about). Certainly they lack the sheer terror of of riding on the four lane highway, but they certainly lack the enjoyment of riding a well designed cycleway in a region that hasn't decided that 100% of people must drive a car.

That's what I mean by compromised.  Certainly they exist and meet the needs of some users, a different set of users from on street bike lanes...but they could be vastly better.