When I lived in the suburbs, wy home was a few blocks away from the nearest highway, and the only cars on my street were driven by people who lived on my quiet street. This makes for good study conditions for suburban students. (Many suburban school districts have graduation rates of 95% or greater).

I have lived a major city for the last five years, and find it hard to read and/or concentrate during hours of the day when lots of cars are either whizzing past my apartment, or are gunning the engine to accelerate when the red light turns green. This makes for poor study conditions for urban students. (Many urban school districts have dismal graduation rates). Noise level in cities is one of the major reasons why urban students struggle, and automobiles are the #1 source of noise. If, let’s say 25% of trips by car were to be replecad by more trips by bike, then students in these urban areas would have less backgreound noise, and thus better study conditions. Why not study car noise vs studemt performance?

I think policies are being written and authorized that include these facilities based on only on speculative hypothesises and studies performed by certain professionals who are too professionally invested in seeing these facilities become standard vs. other solutions.

From the standpoint of my current “second job” on the Transportation Board, I wonder if we need to spend some money to synthesize and critically re-evaluate all of the previous work done on facility type vs. safety, “safety in numbers”, public health benefits of cycling, and other ongoing discussions and plot a path forward towards what future work remains to be done to fully understand programs in facility engineering, public education, and public health benefits of cycling. Especially given the attacks on Federally funded programs that are ongoing, having a clear and lucid understanding of the cost-benefits of different efforts would be nice in setting priorities.