Jeff Holmes: belief

Transcript context

…Uh-oh. [laughter] It’s not as bad as you think. “Why is it that you seem to dislike measures to make practical cycling in cities safer and more comfortable? ” You’ve had a number of posts where you say that the idea that people — I think, correct me if I’m wrong, but the way I would summarize you is, you think it’s without evidence, installing bike lanes and these things — that the ROI is not there to you. Is that fair? Correct. As far as I can tell from the numbers I’ve seen, use of DC bike lanes has been declining. I suspect it’s not the future. It’s a relatively slow and late-19th-century mode of transport. If you look at downtown Washington, it’s much harder to drive around in. I get that’s partly by design, but there is a real economic cost to that, and the bike lanes are mostly empty. It does seem to work for much of Manhattan. I think one should be an empiricist. I know Amsterdam and Copenhagen quite well; it works great there. Houston decided not to do it; that was almost certainly the correct decision. One should be an empiricist, and I think bike lanes are, by the people I come into contact with, very much overrated. If you ask the simple question, “Where’s the cost-benefit analysis that adds up all the costs?” I never see it. No one has ever sent me one, ever. I did a long post; there were a large number of comments. People would say things like, “Oh, you dummy, don’t you see Copenhagen is a great city?” Yes, it is. It’s worked well there. But at the margin, how many American cities should make big investments in this direction? I still want to see the cost-benefit analysis, and no one’s coming up with it.…

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