Spending costly millions going nowhere without complete systems.

Cities know they have a problem- high energy users like drivers are enabled by the city with roads, parking, and faster streets. Then they make life impossible for other users like children, elderly, parents with strollers, park goers and downtown shoppers. The air and water become toxic. Drivers and the driven in turn get obese and/or develop diseases of fast mobility: depression, early onset of Parkinsons, memory failure, heart, lung, diabetes, etc; as the organs that are sustained by walking, collapse. Worse drivers behave like cholesterol, clogging their own systems, until congestion brings society to a halt. The policy response of congestion management progressively requires millions and can never solve the problem its staffed to maintain!

The congestion management solution is to provide choices by accommodating other users if the street like cyclists, walkers, etc: people who don't cost the city or state or trash the planet need to be provided with some form of  equal access with high energy users. Cities thus "spend a fortune planning "pedestrian friendly," "multimodal," "alternative transportation" strategies to reduce traffic congestion in the urban core"  to provide alternatives to driving.

But without complete systems, primarily because of costs, the alternative options remain dangerous, unused, hostile, and unpleasant. Quoting from the same opinion article: "But in reality, the downtown remains rather unfriendly to cyclists. For example:

There are no bike lanes on important sections of Ringling Boulevard or Osprey Avenue south of Main Street. On Orange Avenue, the bike lane is intermittent at best.

Bikes are not allowed on crowded sections of Main Street sidewalks. This makes sense, but it forces cyclists to thread their way through rows of cars backing out of angled parking spaces. That's not safe.

Overgrown landscaping, buildings too near the street and other obstacles block cyclists' sight lines. Countless driveways and intersections create additional conflict points and crash opportunities.

City officials say they'd like to fix these problems but don't have the money."

Other problems-
Bike lanes are in the door zones of parked automobiles create an unpleasant interaction with automobile access. In Oakland Eric Fitzpatrick was killed when a door was opened into his path. The cyclist was knocked into traffic and was run over by a bus he had just dismounted from. The news didn't know if the driver was charged! Increasing costs the bus driver was placed on paid administrative leave.

Now planners will tell you that sure the roads are dangerous (for cyclists and pedestrians- hello, anyone there?) and they can't plan for every eventuality. But as Dean Baker at the Center for Economic and Policy Research says "if our regulators cannot understand the potential harm from extremely rare, but extremely costly, disasters, then the country has a very serious problem."

So the key factor is cost. Cities don't have the money to do the job right. And low energy users don't have influence in economic justice to make drivers pay increasing insurance costs; and letting risk be mitigated by circumstances. The solution is not for cities to look for more money to expand or maintain existing infrastructure or provide more alternative infrastructure. The solution is to reuse existing infrastructure for complete systems now.