While I often have mixed feelings about bike lanes, mostly having to do worry over an end result of only being allowed to ride in them, they can be useful in cities. I’ve ridden on some really good ones (on the mainland) and some really bad ones (both here and elsewhere).
Here’s a good article on the economics of bike lanes which was written by Olaf Storbeck as a rebuttal to another writer’s rant on bike lanes in NYC, “The Economics of Bike Lanes – How can John Cassidy get it so wrong?”
Slower, cheaper, less useful…