And the year is only six days old.
.
It’s going to be a challenge to beat this one:
The project … would see over 220km of car-free routes installed above London’s suburban rail network, suspended on pylons above the tracks and accessed at over 200 entrance points. At up to 15 metres wide, each of the ten routes would accommodate 12,000 cyclists per hour and improve journey times by up to 29 minutes, according to the designers.
Developed by landscape practice Exterior Architecture, with Foster and Partners and Space Syntax, the SkyCycle would separate bicycles from the city itself in the name of speed and distance – and in doing so recreate the fundamental flaw of the freeway.
Transportation in the city is not about separation; it’s about integration – for which the bike is ideally suited. If getting somewhere fast within a built-up city over distances longer than three to five km, then that’s better suited to rapid transit. The bike is ideal for multiple destinations, decided by the cyclist, integrated intimately into the fabric of the city. SkyCycle does just the reverse.
And while proponents argue that they “certainly don’t want to take money away from making cycling safe on the roads. … our ambition is to redirect some of the money spent by central government on rail and road expenditure,’ that’s not what happens in the real world.
SkyCycle would spend millions to achieve something better done by other modes, reducing accessibility for cycling, in the name of a megaproject that would ultimately fail and be used as a reason to deny funding where it’s needed for better biking.
This is pretty dumb, but I don’t know about the dumbest….
How about our government literally burning books?
http://thetyee.ca/News/2013/12/23/Canadian-Science-Libraries/
Exactly! How do these bad ideas get so far?
That happens when some bike lobbyists, confounding, the goal and the means, measure the success of their cause by the amount of $ poured in cycle tracks disregarding their relevance or not.
They end up to advocate for segregation over integration everywhere. It is a bad trend, and Vancouver is not immune to it as has more esepcially shown the KIts park bike lane debacle:
http://voony.wordpress.com/2013/10/22/the-disturbing-bike-lane-trend-in-vancouver/
The hell is paved of good intention.
PS: I think it is old new, since I have since that idea a year of so
I forwarded the post to my son, who lives in London and is a regular user of Boris bikes, including using them to commute to work. Here’s what he had to say:
Interesting. I think he might be right about integration at street level being a better idea on the outskirts of London, but the problem in the center is that there really is no space at street level. Integration in central London tends to look like that “Drunken Spider” route description I showed you in a different blog post. Commuters like myself (and I’m sure [name omitted] and thousands of others) would be very happy if they could travel 10-15km uninterrupted – in Central London there is no such thing as a “rapid transit” alternative, particularly during commuting times.