I live outside of the city of Raleigh. The roads of Wake County are two things:
- Beautiful
- Narrow
Really, driving through the county on those little county roads is a good way to spend a couple hours. When the kids were very young I’d get them to nap by driving through the roads near my home. However, those roads offer little to nothing in the way of a shoulder. Even the picture above has very little shoulder support, and the roads near my house offer even less.
Which is why I advocate that bikes should not be on these roads. Fifty or seventy years ago these roads were lazy country affairs. Today, with the population growth, these roads are legit thoroughfares that move 1000’s of people to and from work every day. Complete with the hustle and bustle of such. Drivers are hitting speeds of 50-60 MPH and that just doesn’t work when you have a cyclist, or 5, moving at 20 with no way to get out of the way.
While I don’t think that bikes have a place on these roads, I DO like this idea:
Every day, one-third of the people of Copenhagen ride their bikes to work or school. Collectively, they cycle more than 750,000 miles daily, enough to make it to the moon and back. And city officials want even more people to commute, and over longer distances.
So a network of 26 new bike routes, dubbed “the cycling superhighway,” is being built to link the surrounding suburbs to Copenhagen.
Lars Gaardhoj, an official with the Copenhagen capital region, says the routes will be straight and direct.
“It will be very fast for people who use their bike,” he says. “This is new because traditionally cycle paths have been placed where there is space for them and the cars didn’t run. So now the bike is going to challenge the car.”
The first highway, to the busy suburb of Albertslund some 10 miles outside the city, was completed in April.
…
Each mile of bike highway will cost about $1 million. The project is to be financed by the city of Copenhagen and 21 local governments. And in a country where both right- and left-leaning politicians regularly ride bikes to work, it has bilateral support.
Even as I object to cyclists on our roads I preach that we should build a “bike-way” through the county. Start with a small map and add 5 feet to one side or the other of our roads; a place where only bikes can go. But creating a highway might even be better.
Certainly government has a role in transportation. And we can pay for it by implementing a use tax. You can tax bicycles, something I had to pay every year growing up in Minnesota, or pay a toll as you ride the highway.
Ride on!
