I wrote to advocate for a temporary solution for the Brattle Street bike lanes after the project was pushed back to spring next year. This is the response I received this morning. Hopefully this will make the upcoming winter safer for all users of this road.

I'm so happy to see the city push this through without making excuses. Safety over everything.

Terrific news! Thanks for sharing this update.

Can't wait to see all the bitching on Nextdoor

Brattle is a major bike route. Thank you for writing in.

How safe is safe enough?

Now can we re-zone west Cambridge from Residence A-1 (single family residences with a minimum 6000 sqft of lot per dwelling)? ResA is outdated in this day and age. Even ResB is honestly a little too restrictive.

I think the general movement suffers from some flaws:

• Risk / safety are often assessed based on perception rather than evidence. Groups complain that they don't feel safe biking, and so push for action.
• Many bike advocates seem to believe zero risk / perfect safety is achievable, but it's not. Because they don't understand zero risk is an aspiration goal that isn't possible to actually achieve, I think there is no point at which they will be satisfied.
• There is a diminishing return on safety and increasing costs for each improvement. Bike advocates seem to not acknowledge the various types of inconveniences and other costs any (perceived) increase in safety they push for requires.

Don't get me wrong: There are good ideas that should be implemented. But there are also some really shit ideas that shouldn't be implemented under any conditions, as well as a point where biking is "safe enough".

Ever heard of project zero?

Is that China's covid policy?

A reasonable question; I can think of a few different ways to answer it.

We could look at other places with safe cycling infrastructure, and compare to their statistics (the Netherlands has around 1.4 killed per 100 million kilometers cycled, for example).

We could also answer it with surveys on the perception of safety. This has some downsides, because it is subjective. But the subjective feeling of safety is also important, because facilities that do not feel safe will not be used.

We could also look at the deaths and injuries that do occur, and consider if they are really bizarre black swan events (person on bicycle eaten by escaped zoo lion), or things we actually do know how to prevent/greatly reduce, like doorings, right hooks, etc.

Right now, we often see people die from events we know could be mitigated by better infrastructure, and that such things could be practically deployed.

As a regular Brattle St. rider this is great news. Thanks for the update !

Wow - a surprisingly rational comment. Did not expect that today.

Perceived safety is crucial for actual use of the infrastructure though.

The city of Cambridge has done actual research on this — and it is clear that the majority of people who want to bike won’t until bike lanes are physically separated from cars.

Without perceived safety — you end up with empty bike lanes, leading to the never ending tit for tat that no one bikes, which just isn’t true

How good are they at snow removal for bike lanes in Cambridge in general?

This is really good news

They are plowed, as is the linear park and other designated bike commuter ways.

Inexcusable then and now. All about racial segregation without saying it out loud, and there is a lot of historical records available that prove this. Cambridge should be 2-3 family zoned by right.

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Why am I not surprised that they're wiping out every last one of the unrestricted parking spaces, and keeping 100% of the permit spaces?

The city is going to great lengths to make sure people who live within biking distance can keep commuting by car to Harvard Square, while everyone else can get lost.

Which street will you fuck up next? Streets are for cars, bikes are toys.

Why is perception of safety not a good metric? If a system is perceived to be unsafe, people won’t use it.

Streets are for transportation, bikes are transportation

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That new bike lane is a mess. If you are biking in bound you now have to contend with all the cars turning off of Mason Street. It's like they wanted the bike lane but wanted it to be more dangerous. Here is a picture.

The blue way was the previous method. the bike lane in green basically drives you into the red car zone of death if you want to get to Harvard square.

https://preview.redd.it/bcfypsmcsyz91.png?width=640&format=png&auto=webp&v=enabled&s=27b832025917d0cb55076e2cdaec5fd2664fee3b