reading between the lines I'm guessing local drivers are also aggressive, compounding the other problems?
sounds like what the city centre needs is a radical planning change-of-heart a la Curitiba.... (something like) a grid of "boulevards" rendered one-way by traffic barriers, to expand the road space shareable between mv and bikes; light rail and buses with incentives for ridership and disincentives for driving; and some kind of emissions regs to discourage the dirty engines. breathing stinky filth is very discouraging for cyclists and peds, and though studies tell us that the occupants of the car may be even more heavily exposed to the nasty stuff than those outside it, it's small consolation...
sorry to hear urban form is so maladaptive there. but imho the solution is never to pave over even more open land and build more and more roads, a whole parallel network for bikes -- it is to take space away from the private auto and give it to other transport modes... the problem with trying to accommodate the ever growing private-auto fleet is that it not only takes up an enormous amount of public space, it discourages and displaces more efficient transit modes as you report. The difference between theory and practise in practise ...
imho the solution is never to pave over even more open land and build more and more roads, a whole parallel network for bikes -- it is to take space away from the private auto
Well, that was kind of my point, with our 'maladaptive urban form': there simply is no open land within city limits for bike roads, it has to be taken away from car roads :-) And that's exactly what cities like Stockholm, Amsterdam or Frankfurt started to do from about the eighties, but which was done only in a partial lackluster way here. *Lunatic*, n. One whose delusions are out of fashion.
Second, radical re-thinking in Western Europe was kind of forced by the fixed width of main roads - at the stage the entire width of the streets were used up, traffic just didn't have any more places to grow into, yet car ownership was further increasing - and regrettably we in the East didn't use the fall of communism as a chance to apply their lessons, but are continuing to repeat the learing curve with a delay. *Lunatic*, n. One whose delusions are out of fashion.
