Not sure how many people bike there, but if they make driving even worse, and people notice an empty bike lane, maybe it will encourage them to try hoping on a bike instead, whenever possible?
Pretty much with bike lanes it's a "build it and they'll come" situation. If you don't have protected bike lanes and biking is unsafe, you don't get a lot of cyclists. The bike lanes may look empty now, but you have to build some degree of a complete network for the whole thing to work and for bicycling to become an appealing alternative to driving a car.
Looking at it another way, how many people would drive from A to B if the road narrowed to a single lane and became a pothole filled dirt road? It probably wouldn't be an appealing commute.
>Pretty much with bike lanes it's a "build it and they'll come" situation
not just with bike lanes - this works for most transportation infrastructure, and in both directions. If you take away a car lane, less people choose to drive. If you add a car lane, you don't get less congestion, you get more people driving. People choose the optimal route, and there's a lot more people going places than the current road network can accommodate. you can keep widening roads for a long time without having much impact on congestion. If you want to actually fix the roads, you need to improve the more efficient means of transportation, like bicycle lanes and mass transit.
I would say the main deterrent to riding a bike in LA is the fact the city is not dense, not the lack of bike lanes. Very few folks can afford to live anywhere close to where they work in LA. I don't know how one would solve that fairly, but, I don't think making bike lanes where they have little use (e.g. where it is a bedroom community) helps.
I wonder how many people are actually in the situation that they commute some unpleasant distance to work, wishing they could live nearer, while meanwhile someone occupying a pleasant apartment near there work is doing the reverse every morning?
Actually, yeah. They added them on Foothill Blvd in Tujunga a while back. I seriously have never seen anyone ride a bike in one, and I drive around there at least weekly. Vineland between Lankershim and the 101 is also a good example, but that's a bit denser. The lane is just huge though.
Quite a few people bike here in my anecdotal experience. However, LA suffers from the same problems as SF. Certain areas are becoming impossible to afford, so if you work in or near those areas you have to live very far out and commute a distance that's not realistically bikeable. (And also some people have disabilities that make biking unrealistic.) People in my office are commuting from over 30 miles away. In fact, some are commuting from Orange County up to LA's west side.
