Is asphalt really that much softer?
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No. It doesn’t. It’s a trade off, likely because they only had a certain amount of space between the buildings to work with. That’s how engineering works.
I didn’t hold up the image as a picture of “optimal”. I said, I preferred the solution of separated bike lanes, and grabbed an image off the web to illustrate. If you want to nitpick the hell out of it, knock yourself out.
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It was a perfectly valid image to post. There are bike lanes just like that where I live.
When discussing the trade-offs in various approaches to creating bike lanes I think it is quite valid to bring up them up in the open and discuss them rationally. That is not nitpicking. You can’t judge trade-offs rationally unless you know what they are and can knowledgeably weigh them relative to one another.
Yes, it is.
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You are both correct, as has my home state. The majority seem to still.
“Maryland joins neighbor Virginia (but not Washington, D.C.), in not assessing parallel-parking skills, as well as these states: Alabama, Arkansas, California, Colorado, Florida, Illinois, Nebraska, North Carolina, Ohio, Oregon, South Dakota and Wyoming.”
https://www.google.com/amp/amp.usatoday.com/story/27671165/?client=ms-android-google
This, so much this.
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Fair point. Enjoy your optimal thoroughfare design meeting. I’m done.
Uhm, yeah, that’s actually the topic of the OP.
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Nah, the Tour de France guys are moving at about twice my pace; 70km/h on the flat and 120km/h on the descents. And they do it for a month, over mountains that normal people would struggle to walk across at any speed. 
I wasn’t on a racing bike; just an urban-focussed hybrid:
Proper clippy shoes do add substantially to your pace, though. As do skinny tyres inflated to 80psi; rolling resistance is the enemy. And a few decades of prior motorcycle experience helped a lot with traffic survival.
For impressive: while on my motorcycle, I once passed a bicyclist who was doing 120km/h up a lengthy steep hill. He’d had a big downhill runup and was drafting a truck, but still…
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Can’t we all just agree that skateboards are the worst? Followed by Segways? (And, while we’re at it, mopeds? Yesterday while I was making a slow right turn across a narrow bike lane, indicators on and having carefully checked for cyclists, a moped that had been behind me on my left cut over to my right and raced past me through the narrow gap. Scared the crap out of me. Another car honked at him, he responded by flashing the finger. My wife’s comment was about the girl on the back of the moped: “if you’re going to have a suicidal ‘bad boy’ boyfriend, at least choose one that rides an actual motorbike.”)
Sorry for the late comment, I’d been ignoring this thread because I thought it was about a roadkill diet.
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Am I doing the conversions wrong? I have 70kph = 42mph and 120kph = 75mph. The one hour record is about 55 km.
The original post was about narrowing roads. I can see where the door opening concern would fit in there. My response initially was to the bicycles on sidewalks issue. Admittedly a tangent.
In any case, The BBS format is poorly suited to a full discussion of all of the attributes that go into traffic flow and accommodating all roadway users. Listing off concerns one at a time and saying “but what about” is not a game I really want to play. If this were a design meeting for a specific project, I’d have probably already sent you off to write up a report with all of your hypotheticals and drop it on my desk so I could read it and not have to go through all the back and forth. That is what I was getting at.
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1 mile = 1.61 km.
The 20/40/60 km/h speeds I was quoting for myself are flat-out sprints; no way in hell can I keep that up for an hour. Fortunately, in urban commuting you don’t have to: there’s a traffic light or something every few minutes that provides a chance to catch your breath.
The Tour averages about 40km/h overall, but that’s including all of the lengthy mountain ascents. They certainly break 100km/h on the steep descents; my 70km/h estimate of their speed on the flat was a bit high (they can hit that speed in a sprint, but the sustained pace tends to be closer to 50km/h).
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That explains it. I was assuming a sustained speed.
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A fair point if this was a design meeting and I was your subordinate. You knew it was as web forum from the start, though. It’s like calling ice out for being cold.
It was a bloody analogy. I’ll put it another way. This conversation is entirely unproductive.
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I’m kinda with you. The last time I went over my handlebars, a stationary object was involved, and that was about 30 years. ago. I would not say, as others have that it’s “pretty easy” to brake so hard you flip.
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I’ve noticed that Californians (at least Angelinos) don’t seem to understand this…
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All of the danger, none of the swag!
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I’ve noticed that, too. To me, it seems to be those who grew up running vs. those who just began an exercise routine. Walkers do that, too. All I know is that there is no way that I’m going to walk or run with the car traffic coming from behind me. 
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Yep. I grew up running on country roads, so I am used to 50-90 mph traffic (and mean teens that might try to door ya).
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