So, sure, there is a threshold effect in whether you get value from bike lanes on your complex journey from point A to point G. But other people throughout the city have different threshold effects:
Other people are starting and ending their trips from other points; some people are even starting and ending their trip entirely on Naito Parkway.
People have a variety of different tolerances for how much they are willing to bike in streets, as you mention.
Even people who don’t like biking in streets often have some flexibility. You say that you personally are flexible, “but for the sake of argument, let’s just assume that there is no flexibility”. But in real life, even many people who absolutely refuse to bike in traffic might be happy to walk their bike on the sidewalk (or whatever) for a single block, in order to connect two long stretches of beautiful bike path.
When you add together a million different possible journeys across thousands of different people, each with their own threshold effects, the sum of the utility provided by each new bike lane probably ends up looking much more like a smooth continuum of incremental benefits per each new bike lane that is added to a city’s network, with no killer threshold effects. This is very different from a bridge, where indeed half a bridge is not useful to any portion of the city’s residents.
Therefore, I don’t think “if you’re going to start building [a bike lane network], you better m ake sure you have plans to finish it”. Rather, I think adding random pieces of the network piecemeal (as random roads undergo construction work for other reasons, perhaps) is a totally reasonable thing for cities to do.
Another example of individual threshold effects adding up to continuous benefit from the provider’s perspective: suppose I only like listening to thrash-metal songs on Spotify. Whenever Spotify adds a song from a genre I don’t care for—pop, classical, doom-metal, whatever—it provides literally ZERO value to me! There’s a huge threshold effect, where I only care when spotify adds thrash-metal songs! But of course, since everyone has different preferences, the overall effect of adding songs from Spotify’s perspective is to provide an incremental benefit to the quality of their product each time they add a song. (Disclaimer: I am not actually a thrash-metal fanatic.)
So, sure, there is a threshold effect in whether you get value from bike lanes on your complex journey from point A to point G. But other people throughout the city have different threshold effects:
Other people are starting and ending their trips from other points; some people are even starting and ending their trip entirely on Naito Parkway.
People have a variety of different tolerances for how much they are willing to bike in streets, as you mention.
Even people who don’t like biking in streets often have some flexibility. You say that you personally are flexible, “but for the sake of argument, let’s just assume that there is no flexibility”. But in real life, even many people who absolutely refuse to bike in traffic might be happy to walk their bike on the sidewalk (or whatever) for a single block, in order to connect two long stretches of beautiful bike path.
When you add together a million different possible journeys across thousands of different people, each with their own threshold effects, the sum of the utility provided by each new bike lane probably ends up looking much more like a smooth continuum of incremental benefits per each new bike lane that is added to a city’s network, with no killer threshold effects. This is very different from a bridge, where indeed half a bridge is not useful to any portion of the city’s residents.
Therefore, I don’t think “if you’re going to start building [a bike lane network], you better m ake sure you have plans to finish it”. Rather, I think adding random pieces of the network piecemeal (as random roads undergo construction work for other reasons, perhaps) is a totally reasonable thing for cities to do.
Another example of individual threshold effects adding up to continuous benefit from the provider’s perspective: suppose I only like listening to thrash-metal songs on Spotify. Whenever Spotify adds a song from a genre I don’t care for—pop, classical, doom-metal, whatever—it provides literally ZERO value to me! There’s a huge threshold effect, where I only care when spotify adds thrash-metal songs! But of course, since everyone has different preferences, the overall effect of adding songs from Spotify’s perspective is to provide an incremental benefit to the quality of their product each time they add a song. (Disclaimer: I am not actually a thrash-metal fanatic.)