Eh, I biked a shit ton. I drive to. Majority of bike users I don't think should be allowed on the road. Bike paths can be an answer but it's very dependent on the city.

For reference I'm Canadian. Two cities I've been to enough to make commentary are Victoria BC and Calgary Alberta. There seems to be a weird push to eliminate lanes in main thoroughfares for bikes. These are streets that are already congested at prime hours. So congestion gets worse and to be honest I don't want to be on those roads anyway. This mainly a Victoria thing.

Calgary seems to do it better for the most part (my commute rarely involves the downtown bike lanes so feel free to comment you own experience) lots of rivers and "side" streets. Extremely pleasant. Calgary also just has thin white line to do bike stuff in.

Victoria recently implemented what, imo of course, an over engineered solution with there own lights and rules. For example we should be allowed to turn right on a red light. But with these bike paths your not allowed to if there light is green.

The problem here is so many people have no idea there not allowed to turn right on a red on these streets and it's dangerous. I've been almost clipped quite a few times and I feel this is greatly compounded by the fact that Victoria is a tourist destination.

Both cities suffer from being, tbh, Canadian. Hopping on your bike in summer you will see good utilization of the paths but come winter there's so few people. The decent season is about 4 months leaving 8 months of "why did we build this". Calgary being far colder in winter then Victoria suffers from this more but in both cities the bike lanes are ghost town for the most part. Seems weird to me to increase congestion with so little utilization when used year round.

Let me put it this way. If the avg speed of traffic on a road is 50km an hour and then a car is going 20km an hour I'd say that's at worst dangerous and at best adding a wild amount of congestion.

To be fair if you avg pedestrian walks at 3 km an hour and your ripping 20km that's also dangerous. But I think (correct me if I'm wrong) there's little chance of anyone dieing. Also, hypothetically, if you do not use the road and there's a pedestrian you can always go off the side in someone's yard for a couple of feet to give them room.

Personally, I use both depending on situation. A busy road I can't keep speed on? I'll hit the side walk. Busy side walk? I'll hit the road. If both are busy I'll use the side walk and pop off into grass to go around. If I can't do that I will pop off the curb into traffic till I've past the pedestrian then back onto the side walk. Also in these situations it's just a fact of life that you can't go top speed. It's dangerous to everyone and you need to know how to signal well for your safety and others.