What I see a lot in this thread is people's either/or opinions. Love cars / hate bycicles or vice versa.
No. It is a balancing act, where cars, bycicles and public transport co-exist, and infrastructure is developed strategically in smart ways and in a prolonged effort.
When I was young in The Netherlands for the most part the cars still dominated the streets. Over time I've seen cities and road networks gradually being transformed to what I now consider a Walhalla for cyclists. Public transport plays a big role in that too, and the Dutch still love their cars.
I highly recommend reading this article: "No helmets, no problem: how the Dutch created a casual biking culture" [0] which interviews the American Bruntlett family that wrote the book "Building the Cycling City: The Dutch Blueprint for Urban Vitality" [1]
See also the great discussion on HN at the time [2].
As a Dutchman who's lived in a few places abroad, the cycling 'problem' is quite simple: it needs to be the norm. No helmet, because neither do you require them for pedestrians. You can cycle in all weather, just as you would walking (a hard mental one, my non-Dutch partner can't get over the idea cycling is for sunshine). Public space design must start with safe (no sharp turns, looking at you France!) and separate cycling lanes. Perhaps the fact that urban cycling infra is a much cheaper/efficient use of public land could be more emphasized. In urban areas, cycling is faster, and electric biking is expanding your reach a few times over. There are people who bike a 30km commute without breaking a sweat (see bike highways).
Sure, there will always be situations where it will be difficult, such as steep areas (electric bikes can do a lot here, as well as accepting a little sweating which is normal in NL) or heat that exceeds body temperatures which in turn makes expiration impossible (no easy solutions for this one). But that leaves most of the urban areas on this globe perfectly suitable for cycling, which would be in everybody's favor, and their own first and foremost.
While I don't think they should be required, I do think they should be worn. I've had a low-speed spill where the helmet saved my head considerably - I hit the pavement so hard my glasses were flattened out. You fall much faster, even at low speeds, and you fall much farther from a bike, than a pedestrian would fall.
It's a matter of risk assessment. The chance of a healthy adult cycling in the Netherlands getting a head injury that would have been prevent by a helmet are so incredibly low, that making it a requirement would have a detrimental effect on the collective health of Dutch society due to slightly lower uptake in cycling.
For elderly and young children a helmet may make sense, due to the significantly higher risk of such injuries (due to reduced physical responses and inexperience). And for racing bicycles wearing a helmet is the norm.
A helmet can significantly reduce the impact of a fall, but the risk of that fall is so low that the measure becomes statistically meaningless. It is akin to always wearing a hard hat when you leave your home, because it would save you from serious brain injury if a brick fell on your head. Of course, bricks don't generally fall out of the sky, but you can never be too sure…
This doesn't mean that all safety measures are nonsense — having working lights and functioning brakes do reduce the chances of accidents. It is also tempting to compare the helmet to seatbelts in a car, but there the chance of needing them is simply much higher.
A lot of people get really dogmatic about safety gear in very specific ways.
I'm willing to bet that a lot of the same people who think that not wearing a bike helmet (and especially allowing a child not to wear one) should be a criminal offense would think the idea of having to wear a helmet driving is just silly.
The attitudes around helmets for downhill skiing have gone through a similar shift. It used to be that essentially no one except racers (and then snowboarders) wore helmets. Now, at least some people will chastise you if you don't.
And it's not just a US thing. Copenhagen and Amsterdam are both big bicycling cities but a fair number of people in Copenhagen do wear helmets and you don't see nearly as many of the bare headed young kids perched on top of the handlebars that you see in Amsterdam.
> I'm willing to bet that a lot of the same people who think that not wearing a bike helmet (and especially allowing a child not to wear one) should be a criminal offense would think the idea of having to wear a helmet driving is just silly.
Although I don't think biking without a helmet should be a criminal offense for adults, I think the comparison with cars isn't quite right. We do require people to use safety equipment like seatbelts and airbags when riding in a car. A helmet probably won't do much for you in a car crash but can if you wreck your bicycle just like a seatbelt would be silly on a bike.
I was talking about the kind of helmets bicyclists wear. The only thing a bicycle helmet would save you from in a car wreck is hitting your head against the windshield/dash which is what we have airbags and seatbelts for.
Also, race cars aren't really comparable to normal driving situations since they go much faster and have a different set of constraints than normal cars. The racing helmets, rollcages, and 5 point harnesses aren't really as necessary at 70mph as they are at 200mph
> In 2013, 50,000 people suffered fatal brain injuries; 19 percent of those were due to car crashes. Among persons aged 5 to 24, motor vehicle crashes were the leading cause of death from fatal TBI (Traumatic brain injury). It’s likely that a good proportion of the 9,500 people might have been saved had they been wearing a helmet in the car.
Your first link has zero information to support that wearing a bicycle helmet would do any good, it only suggests it. Personally I doubt a bicycle helmet would do much good because they aren't designed to protect your head in such an energetic collusion. Your second link only says that motor vehicle wrecks are the cause of 20% of TBI related hospitalization. The word helmet doesn't appear in it at all.
So no, based off of your links I wouldn't say the data disagrees with me.
I think the terrain may play a part in it. As far as I know, the Netherlands is generally flat, where I live it's nothing but hills, people tend to wear helmets here, it's also the law, though I've never heard of it really being enforced. I've personally had a couple good falls going down hill where my helmet saved my head.
It's a combination of terrain and high quality bicycle infrastructure. There are plenty of countries were even I as a Dutchman wouldn't cycle without a helmet.
> The chance of a healthy adult cycling in the Netherlands getting a head injury that would have been prevent by a helmet are so incredibly low, that making it a requirement would have a detrimental effect on the collective health of Dutch society due to slightly lower uptake in cycling.
That's an easy thing to assert and a difficult thing to prove. I just assume the rules are the way they are because the Netherlands is a democracy and they want things that way, not because they're especially great at risk assessment (what population of people really is?).
I gather this is still a rather active topic of discussion and research in the Netherlands?
Combining your two sources suggests that making helmets mandatory would have a large negative effect on public health. (the downtick in injuries would be overshadowed by the reduction in biking)
I only offered one source, and the research it quotes suggests no such thing, so your comment seems a bit odd. The closest it comes to saying what you suggest, is not very close at all:
But a spokesman for the SWOV acknowledged that the protective head wear might be a hard sell in the Netherlands. ‘Helmets aren’t often worn in the Netherlands and we are aware of the arguments [that cycling could decrease if they were obligatory],’ he said.
I'm not invested in what happens in the Netherlands at all, but I wonder if a lot of people are just taking "the downtick in injuries would be overshadowed by the reduction in biking" for granted.
In almost every other context in which risk of physical harm comes up the overwhelmingly dominant opinion is that forgoing any means of reducing that risk is a non-starter more or less regardless of cost. Anyone suggesting that risk and cost/benefit need to be assessed is received about as well as someone proclaiming god doesn't exist in the middle of a church circa 1500.
As a safety heretic I fully agree with you that people can make their own decisions on helmet use but why should cycling get special treatment here? On every other issue of physical safety the HN gods have ruled the other way.
And yet, drivers and passengers of automobiles are not required to wear racing helmets, or five-point safety belts - nor are all cars factory-equipped with breathalyzer ignition interlocks - or speed governors which limit a vehicle's sustained maximum speed to 63 mph.
This single thing, breathalyzer interlocks, probably would save a huge portion of the lives that would be saved by fully autonomous driving, but for a fraction of the cost, and basically right now. It could even be installed on existing cars, and probably insurance companies would help you cover the cost.
There are no US states that require adults to wear bike helmets, though there are a dozen or so local laws that do[1]. So 'casual' cycling without a helmet should be an option for nearly anyone in the US.
I live in a very mild clime, but still don't bike when it's rainy. What do you suggest gear-wise for bicycling in say 5-10C but wet? I have a 30 minute bicycle commute that I'd like to do more often. A typical waist-length jacket leaves most of my body wet, but a longer jacket is awkward to bike in. If it's over 10C, I can just wear shorts that don't absorb water, but under 10, it gets quite uncomfortable.
5-10C but wet is easy mode. Use a rain jacket, rain pants, and rain spats (optional). It's harder when it's warm and wet, as you can choose between getting wet from the rain, or sweating under your waterproof gear.
Personally I use acceptance ;) Which I think is an important ingredient that most Dutch citizens learn as they start cycling to high school regardless of weather: it won't always be pleasant. In the rain I'll get wet, no biggy. At work I won't be the only one putting a coat and shoes on the heater to dry. Some discomfort is present in all modes of transport, this is the one I chose to put up with.
I also use a raincoat with cap and rain pants, which should fall over your shoes. However, I only use this in heavy rain, because with light rain I get wet anyway from my own sweat (wet rain gear usually does not breathe enough for me).
Then there is the rain radar [1], but is probably not available for your locale ;)
Right, it was 19 miles to bike from my house to my HS, which is a bit far, and long enough that a bus was faster (though at least most of it was separated from automobile traffic).
Rain pants. I was a mormon missionary in northern Japan, and we rode mountain bikes everywhere, regardless of weather. Typhoons, blizzards, compacted ice and snow on the ground, all of it is actually quite easy to bike in. Assuming you already have a water proof jacket, about $30 is all you need to get some waterproof pants that can quickly be pulled over your actual pants and keeps you perfectly dry, and then removed at your destination.
Weather should really be one of the least concerns on anyone's list for cycling.
I find that it's not actual rain that's the problem, but the risk of rain. I hardly every get wet on my commute, but if it says 60-70% chance of precipitation, then that may prevent some people.
I find it handy to simply have a pannier with my rain gear:
It's not heavy, though a bit bulky, and if it does actually start coming down, one can just pull over and put it over one's regular clothes. If you can, try to ensure that whatever over-gear you get says "breathable": wearing the equivalent of a garbage bag reduces comfort.
I personally wear the funny-looking cycle attire as well, but that's because I like to pedal hard to get some cardio (instead of going to the gym). If you pedal at a slower pace then you may not work up a sweat--at least not after ~2 weeks once you're in better shape.
Cycling pants. You shouldn't have too much trouble finding waterproof pants to go with your jacket. There are some that fit over other clothes (which also provide a lot of insulation if it's cold) and some you wear as if they were regular pants. You can also get shoe covers.
The German military has some literal pullover pant+jacket rain combo. It is quite robust woven nylon on the outside with PTFE membrane below (shielded from the inner garments with thin woven PET).
You need gloves to prevent moisture wicking up, and might have to get creative around the face/hood/chin border, but otherwise this (I'd suggest a civil clone; the original seems to only exist in Flecktarn) should do the trick. And it's highly breathable.
>In urban areas, cycling is faster, and electric biking is expanding your reach a few times over.
In Cambridge, UK, where I used to live it once took me quicker to ride to the same destination than a taxi. In fact it’s well known that cycling in Cambridge’s city centre is much faster than taking a car.
Are you suggesting that helmet not be the norm when riding bikes? Biking is more dangerous than walking, even if you did it on an isolated trail. Is looking cooler worth the increased risk of a traumatic brain injury? I’m okay with society thinking it isn’t.
The point is to make cycling the norm. Adding items you need to wear or have (you could mandate a cycling license for instance) increases the barrier to entry and thus use. Moreover, helmets protect only for certain accidents, accidents which are some of the most uncommon.
The danger comes mostly from bad infra design and other heavier traffic (cars). Those can be addressed separately, and it turns out pretty well. Leading causes of bike-accidents are now cyclists being distracted by their phones and skipping red lights (common especially in large cities). Public awareness campaigns are addressing the former, law enforcement the latter.
You're right, strictly speaking wearing helmets is safer, and you are free to do so. But then again, 4 point safety belts in cars too (but we don't), driving slower (but we don't), not calling while driving/cycling (but we do) and so on. There's a balance between safety, practicality and getting people to their destinations, it seems helmets are simply far less impactful than other measures.
Calling while cycling or driving are not equivalents. A vehicle is much more massive than a bike and to use a phone while accelerating is far more negligent. The chances of a cyclist accident harming someone other than themselves while on a phone are far lower than distracted driving accident.
Sure, but 'phone-use' while cycling (thanks ;)) is the number two reason bikes cause lethal accidents for themselves or other bicycles, i.e. it's a big deal.
Thankfully, using a smartphone while riding a bicycle is now illegal in the Netherlands (since this summer), but it will take a long time for people to stop regarding using their smartphone whatever they are doing as normal.
I don't think it's about looking cooler, it's about barrier to entry.
It's like adding a 15 character requirement to passwords on your application and rotating them weekly. Most people will give up on your application before they even give it a try.
OPs point is that cities should make it a goal for biking to be safe regardless of if you have a helmet. I daresay biking without a helmet in Copenhagen is vastly safer than biking with a helmet in any city in the states.
Biking isn’t safe enough to not wear a helmet just because there have been changes to make biking less likely to have an accident. If putting on a helmet is too much work then physically moving yourself to your destination is wayyy too much work. That is to say, it isn’t too much work and it isn’t a barrier to entry. At the very least citizens should appreciate the danger of biking without a helmet even if they choose to do it. Willing the problem away because biking is good on paper isn’t good enough.
Biking isn't completely safe. Do helmets really help all that much? Very questionable[0]. Wearing a helmet, for example, promotes less safe behaviour by both cyclists and by drivers around them.
The sense of safety a helmet gives you when you cycle is mostly a false one. Lack of cycling infrastructure is a far greater danger anyway. In countries with the best cyclist safety records, no one wears or owns bike helmets, like not figuratively 'no one', but literally, no one. Can't be a very significant standalone determinant of bike safety then, can it?
From the re-analysis cited in the wikipedia article:
"Do bicycle helmets reduce the risk of injury to the head, face or neck? With respect to head injury, the answer is clearly yes, and the re-analysis of the meta-analysis reported by Attewell et al.(2001) in this paper has not changed this answer."
It doesn't make cycling safer for the individual, it makes society safer and people healthier. Individually riding with a helmet is safer than riding while not wearing a helmet, but if everyone rides a bike without a helmet, fewer people die and people live longer because there are far fewer cars on the road.
Fewer people are driving cars which are much more lethal to non-drivers, so fewer people get killed. People are more active and live longer because of increased physical activity.
Making bikes more appealing/ easier to access by not requiring helmets makes people collectively safer and healthier.
Could you explain why you think that? That’s a pretty general statement. Are you imagining city biking here, or something more like racing in the country-side?
No, I don’t have the data on hand or the time to hunt down studies that may well not exist. That shouldn’t keep people from knowing what they know. City biking regularly gets up to 15 mph. No I don’t have a citation. Falling over the handlebars is likely when coming to a sudden stop. Brain injuries are not going to be rare occurrences in such cases. No I don’t have a citation.
Note the handlebars and upright rider position that basically prevent going over the handlebars during an emergency stop. That kind of accident just doesn't happen here.
I still prefer reverse-pedal brakes (terugtraprem).
Of course, even then, as a teenager I still managed to get myself into some interesting situations a couple of times. But never went over the handlebars :-P
Yes I am. It’s nice for all the reasons people beat the drum about, but the biggest one for me is convenience. Driving and parking in a city is a nightmare. Biking is marginally slower than taking the bus and by comparison biking grants much more freedom. Frankly, I think it’s insane that anyone who regularly bikes would not wear a helmet. I push back so hard against this notion of not wearing a helmet because of how catastrophic a tiny incident can be.
Thanks. I also bike for my day-to-day transport, and love it.
I go back and forth about the helmet issue personally. Though I've almost never not worn one.
My general feeling is that it's not much of a burden to me. And while the cases where it's actually going to help are narrower than most people think (especially people looking from the perspective of a car impact), it does improve the outcome in those cases quite a bit. So it's worthwhile.
If nothing else helmets are good places to mount lights, which are definitely an important safety measure! :)
I guess I can't disagree with you on that, because ultimately I agree bikers should wear helmets and if I biked I would wear a helmet. It's just that the infrastructure to protect from cars is vastly more important.
As a pedestrian who walks about 30m each way on my morning commute, it terrifies me that if a car strikes me at 31MPH I have a 50% chance of severe injury. At 42 MPH, it's a 50% chance of death ( https://aaafoundation.org/impact-speed-pedestrians-risk-seve... ). Atleast I have a separated sidewalk most of my commute, minus street crossings. I would never consider biking in my city because I have to be there on the street next to a bunch of cars.
Cars are not the only reason to wear helmets. Simply falls are enough of a reason: you're not a pedestrian when you're on a bike, and you're susceptible to injuries that pedestrians simply are not, even if the bike is not moving. Standing/sitting on a mechanical contraption simply is not normal for the human body, and it's very easy to get your leg trapped in a way that you break it, or your ankle, or hit your head on a curb or the pavement. Don't forget, the roads that we cycle on are also not natural in any way, and our bodies were not evolved for them. Concrete and asphalt are hard, not like dirt, and hitting your head on it can cause severe injury or death, again even if the bike is not moving. Do people fall over on bikes? Not that often, but probably a lot more often than pedestrians do, and because of the bike getting in the way, you're more likely to hit your head on something.
You are not debating the same thing. Nobody is suggesting that riding without a helmet is as safe as riding without.
The lack of helmet laws makes me safer on my bike regardless of whether I wear a helmet or not because it means fewer people are driving cars. Cars are far more likely to injure/ kill me than a solo crash, adding barriers to getting people to adopt bikes makes cycling more dangerous. The more people on bikes, the more cars expect people on bikes, better bike infrastructure, and it makes people in cars more alert to the presence of cyclists.
We have a fairly popular bike-share program here. People can poke a few buttons on their phone and get access to a bike instantly. With a helmet law, that's not the case, they have to be prepared in advance. The presence and popularity of that bike share makes me safer. Removing several hundred motorists from the road every day in our city has a far bigger impact on cyclist safety than the presence/ absence of a helmet.
I'm not advocating for mandatory helmet laws in that post, I'm just pointing out why you should wear a helmet on a bike, regardless of any laws. You, personally, will be safer with a helmet; it's a simple fact of physics. Sure, fewer cars means it's safer for cyclists, but you keep focusing on cars and ignoring other dangers with cycling: other cyclists, pedestrians, slippery/uneven roads, or just plain mistakes by the rider, all of which can result in a fall where your head contacts the ground.
Do you also wear boots, an armored jacket and pants? Gloves? I bike to work every day, and spent a good part of my childhood on a bike- mountain biking on trails in the woods.
I have had countless banged up knees, elbows, ankles and hands, but never had a head injury. I used to ride a motorcycle, and wore the full getup aside from pants, and I feel cyclists would be far more protected wearing a jacket and gloves.
Anecdotes aside- figures from the UK (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1119262/) show that it takes 8000 years of cycling to produce a clinically severe head injury and 22000 years for one death. From that same source, roughly 1% of all head injuries admitted into hospitals are from cycling, and 60% are alcohol related. Yet people would find it ridiculous if you suggested they wear a drinking helmet.
The fixation on helmets really confuses me. Its not helped that a lot of it seems to be pushed by people who seem to use it as some kind of virtue-signaling issue. There is just such a focus on a fairly burdensome piece of equipment that in a small percentage of rides in which an incident occurs, and in a small percentage of those incidents, this piece of equipment may help reduce the severity of your injuries, while all other equipment is left out of the conversation.
>From that same source, roughly 1% of all head injuries admitted into hospitals are from cycling, and 60% are alcohol related.
This stat means absolutely nothing. It's coming from a place where not that many people cycle, the summary even says that cycling experienced a decline, so of course there's not going to be that many injuries from cycling when very few people are doing it. By contrast, British people drink a LOT, so of course they're going to have a lot of alcohol-related injuries. It's just like America: there's very little cycling, and a LOT of drinking and drunkenness, so it doesn't take any great intelligence to predict that there will be far more alcohol-related injuries than cycling-related ones.
And yes, maybe people there should wear drinking helmets, with the way people in those two countries love to get drunk so much.
>There is just such a focus on a fairly burdensome piece of equipment
"Burdensome"? Are you kidding me? Something that weighs a few ounces? I guess you think seatbelts are "burdensome" too.
And yes, I do wear gloves when cycling; they have pads to absorb vibration, and can be helpful if I fall and scrape my hands. They're far more "burdensome" than a helmet, since they take more time to put on (which still isn't very much).
I have to carry around a helmet- yes I find this burdensome. Real estate is hard to come by in NYC- and my commute requires a partial subway commute. When I rode a motorcycle to my job and had a cube I was annoyed by the MC helmet, but felt the risk tradeoff was worth it and could at least tuck it away. Now I am subject to the hideous open office trend, it would be a PITA. Its not the weight, its the volume, and the fact that I would have to redo my hair once I went anywhere, all to prevent an event that seems about as likely to me as winning the jackpot on a scratch off ticket. Seatbelts don't bother me at all, they are built in to the car.
Still my point about a drinking helmet stands- drinking is a dangerous activity- 60% of all hospital admissions for head injuries involve alcohol. Clearly we could reduce the severity and incidence of these injuries with helmets. It would be interesting to see how many "drinking years" it would take on average to get a head injury worthy of a hospital admission.
Driving is dangerous too- and in virtually any accident it seems likely your head is going to come into contact with something- even if it is an airbag, and the mv^2 is much higher- we could reduce the severity and incidence of head injuries if everyone wore a helmet, especially an NFL style helmet with a faceguard...
And you accept that wearing gloves is ok, but you don't wear a jacket- so you know you may fall, and possibly scrape along the ground a bit, but you don't wear a jacket that most motorcyclists consider to be basic standard gear.
Do you understand where I am going here? You assess risk a certain way and make tradeoffs in what you are willing to do to protect yourself, as do I. However, what your risk assessment has determined wearing a helmet as necessary and foolish not to, I see as just another unnecessary burden, choosing instead to wear armored gloves in winter, and accepting other risks. You may feel not wearing a helmet is something a fool does, but my years of riding have given me intuition (in other words, my developed common sense) that the head is highly unlikely to be injured, and statistics back me up on this.
If I did a lot of high speed road cycling, it would probably change things, but my rides around town where I top out cruising around 15mph and if I go down a hill hit 30 for a brief minute or two, its just not necessary or reasonably useful.
So wear your helmet, but I feel denigrating those that don't because your "common sense" tells you its necessary is misguided and somewhat ignorant.
>I have to carry around a helmet- yes I find this burdensome.
Unfortunately, I don't have the luxury of biking to work yet, but if I did, I'd be using a backpack for what I hope are obvious reasons. Any good backpack these days designed for cycling has a clip on it that attaches to your helmet so you don't have to carry it around. I even did this years ago in college when I biked to class; it wasn't a burden at all.
>And you accept that wearing gloves is ok, but you don't wear a jacket- so you know you may fall, and possibly scrape along the ground a bit, but you don't wear a jacket that most motorcyclists consider to be basic standard gear.
Jackets are incredibly hot. Bicycles don't go fast enough to mitigate this. Some skin scrapes are preferable to getting heatstroke.
>but my years of riding have given me intuition (in other words, my developed common sense) that the head is highly unlikely to be injured
The problem is, if your head is injured, it's either game-over or you suffer mental problems for the rest of your life. Other bodily injuries you can usually heal from. A broken leg? It sucks, but it heals. Skin scrapes? Not a big deal usually (not at bicycling speeds). Worst case you get a skin graft but that's not normal for cycling. But a concussion can leave permanent damage; the brain doesn't heal the way the rest of your body does. To make a computer analogy, I feel like you're talking about the relative risks to various computer parts, and equating potential damage to your laptop's screen to its hard drive. The screen isn't important, nor is the rest of the laptop: you can replace them at any time. But the hard drive is unreplaceable (going back to the last backup, which unfortunately we don't have for brains yet): if anything happens to the hard drive at all, you lose all your data and all your work, and you can't replace that.
> From that same source, roughly 1% of all head injuries admitted into hospitals are from cycling, and 60% are alcohol related. Yet people would find it ridiculous if you suggested they wear a drinking helmet.
That is a hilarious and wonderful comparison. I'm gonna save that one for future discussion of helmets and safety.
> but you keep focusing on cars and ignoring other dangers with cycling: <
I ride bikes a lot, I rode 7 miles this morning on those "slippery/ uneven roads". Most of my friends ride bikes and we all know someone who has been seriously injured or killed by a car. If you eliminate cars bikes are extremely safe (for riders with reasonable hand/ eye coordination). The only injury type that comes remotely close to cars is mountain bike crashes or crashes while racing road bikes and those injuries are far less common and far less lethal than cars.
So yeah... I focus on cars, because they are by far the single biggest danger to cyclists.
I agree that cities should make motions to make biking more mainstream. My city has very prevalent biking and there are many dedicated paths and roads were bikers are given equal right of way. It’s great. Helmets are mandatory and no one complains. Are there some that don’t bike because of this? Probably a few, but if that is the barrier, then I don’t think they’re treating biking the right way.
> David Roberts: The Dutch don’t wear bike helmets. How safe is it to ride a bike in the Netherlands?
> Chris Bruntlett: We — like you — live in a place where helmets have been mandated by law, because they’ve been accepted as a commonsense safety device, normal as a seatbelt. But the Dutch show that [for them], safety in infrastructure, safety in slowing cars, and safety in numbers are all far more important than safety in body armor.
> David Roberts: Yeah, the US approach seems to be to up-armor the cyclist so that cars don’t have to change.
I've biked for most of my life in the US, and while I agree cars are a bigger problem for cyclists than anything else, describing helmet use as "armor" against cars is ridiculous. I wear a helmet when on a bike because I've had my skull fractured falling off of a bike, with no cars in sight. A decent helmet costs what, $30?
Downhill mountain biking or something similar maybe, casually cycling along a trail isn't really anymore likely to course traumatic brain injuries than jogging. Cars are the only reason cycling in a city is dangerous. Once you introduce helmets as a requirement you put cycling firmly into the category of some kind of risky sport, making it difficult for it to become a casual, normal thing that people do in everyday clothes, like driving a car. (I wear a helmet fwiw).
I disagree. Kinetic energy increases with the square of speed. Jogging at 6 mph is simply an order of magnitude less dangerous than biking at 20 mph. This isn’t a simple footnote. You make a mistake while jogging and you scrape a knee. You make a mistake while biking and you may have your mental faculties permanently reduced and lifelong personality issues that drive loved ones away. Barrier to entry isn’t worth arguing about. It’s simply the safety precautions that need to be taken.
20 mph is far, far faster than "casual biking". Most people can't maintain 20mph much less 12mph. You need to change your frame of mind to be more inclusive as it seems you're thinking of people decked out in biking shorts/jerseys with water bottles and all geared up. The context we are talking about here is not that kind of biking.
Also keep in mind, jogging can cause traumatic injuries. But I agree, biking does pose more risk as you have less control than being on your feet.
You are perhaps confusing the sport of cycling with cycling-the-mode-of-transport. When I lived abroad, it seemed very difficult for people to understand the nuance, and difficult to see how missing the nuance was holding back bike-usage in commuting.
In NL, the average is ~20kph for muscle-powered bikes on bikes like [1]. Sports bikes like [2] are not usually used in commutes and considered as dangerous as scooters if used at speeds of 20mph. E-bikes legislation takes 25kph as the limit above which the cyclist is required to follow certain extra rules, and of course muscle-powered cyclist reaching that speed should perhaps also be legislated accordingly. The reason it isn't is difficulty of enforcement, but there are people advocating a maximum speed for bike infrastructure [3], at 25pkh.
We're talking about a barrier to entry to casual cycling here, people commuting in work clothes are not going to be able to reach speeds of 20mph in a busy city, if they do it's up to them to decide whether or a not they should wear a helmet.
Then there should be an enforced speed limit for cyclers not wearing helmets. There is a delicate balance between personal freedom and the greater good. Seatbelts do not protect anyone other than the person wearing it but societies have deemed making them mandatory is a good idea. Helmets have moved into the same category and I think they should stay there. The benefits of lower barrier to entry aren’t worth the increased, unnecessary risks.
> The benefits of lower barrier to entry aren’t worth the increased, unnecessary risks.
Every study I've ever seen contradicts your statement here.
You are all over this thread making strong, sweeping claims about bike safety and your only supporting data point seems to be "KE = 1/2mv^2". But there are entire cities in Europe where biking with no helmet is the norm, lots of people do it every day, and serious accidents are all but unheard of - there are other comments on this post with citations to back that up. There is also evidence that getting more people out biking increases bike safety more than anything else [1], and requiring helmets for everyone at all times makes this very difficult to achieve.
Please stop passing off your gut feeling as fact, it is spreading misinformation and - though I know it seems counterintuitive - actually making biking less safe. To be clear, kinetic energy being proportional to the square of velocity is a fact, that fact's impact on real world bike safety is a much more complicated question.
Disclaimer for what it's worth - I've been biking to and from either work, school or social events about once a day for the past 11 years, and I almost always wear a helmet :)
Firstly, I am not making sweeping claims. I am making a very narrow, specific common sense claim. I have not seen a single paper that refutes the safety benefits of a rider wearing a helmet. Helmets reduce brain injuries. Does this need a citation?
Secondly, there are a lot more than two factors at play to make the "cyclists killed per billion of km of bicycle travel" number. Culturally bikes need to be accepted. I don't see how helmets preclude cultural adoption.
I don't have a lot of faith in common sense, no matter whose it is. Especially when dealing with large numbers, large populations, diverse human behavior, common sense is rarely common and frequently wrong. So yes, a citation is needed.
> I don't see how helmets preclude cultural adoption.
Case in point. It seems completely common sense to me that helmets are a massive barrier to widespread adoption! Leaving aside the issues it introduces with bikeshare logistics, having an additional thing to keep track of and carry around and periodically replace (helmets can go bad!), here's something that I suspect you may not have considered: women! Whether it seems reasonable to you and me or not (and I'll be honest, it doesn't seem reasonable to me), the 2 reasons every woman I've ever asked gives for why they wouldn't want to use a bicycle to get around more are
1) sitting on the seat is awkward/uncomfortable when wearing a skirt or dress
2) helmets would ruin their hair
Requiring helmet wear makes cycling a nonstarter for a large chunk of 50% of the population (how I wish I had a citation for this! as far as I've been able to find, nobody has done any kind of survey that attempts to figure out if this is as widespread as I've observed personally). This alone makes me opposed to it, never mind the exaggerated claims of helmet efficacy
>1) sitting on the seat is awkward/uncomfortable when wearing a skirt or dress
Try watching a video of people in Copenhagen riding bikes. Women wear dresses and skirts there all the time while cycling. Same goes in Japan; women commonly wear dresses/skirts there and ride bikes.
You're also making the claim that bicyclists should be forced to wear helmets. That is what people are primarily disagreeing with.
And, yes, people are sometimes forced to take other steps that are primarily about their individual safety, such as wearing seat belts. I mostly disagree with those laws as well.
Bicycles are not motorcycles, the risk for injury is not so much with speed but instead with collisions between other (primarily motor) vehicles and the types of surfaces cycled on i.e., pavement. There's also a significant socio-economic influence on injury rates, cycling in a city like Delphi with poor road infrastructure and worse general road safety is significantly more dangerous than cycling in any Dutch city with world class cycling infrastructure.
Helmets are obviously essential for reducing serious head injuries (although they're less effective than generally advertised[0]) and parents/individuals should strongly consider using them, but legislation should be focused on improving road safety through education, community outreach, and infrastructure design long before it starts to seriously restrict personal liberty and hampering adoption of better modes of transport. The Netherlands, Denmark, Sweden, France, Germany, etc, have all showed that you can have world class cycling cities without requiring helmet use.
>Seatbelts do not protect anyone other than the person wearing it but societies have deemed making them mandatory is a that good idea.
This is a dangerous misconception, unbelted rear passengers seriously increase the risk of fatal injuries for the driver and front passengers[1] and in general increase the overall amount of injuries, which should be obvious when you consider that unrestrained passengers essentially become ragdoll missiles in the event of a crash.
> Barrier to entry isn’t worth arguing about. It’s simply the safety precautions that need to be taken.
It's both. Safety doesn't necessarily require helmets, as Netherlands and Danmark demonstrate. I imagine barrier to entry by requiring helmets would be a huge blow to bicycle culture here.
> electric biking is expanding your reach a few times over.
Electric bikes are motorcycles, and I don't want vehicles with the speed and acceleration characteristics of a motorcycle in my bike lane, if you please.
postscript:
my very concerns for my safety seem to be getting voted down a lot considering that our friend the Dutchman here has given a rather nice reply recognizing the substantive nature of this conflict
So in NL, this is tackled with a tiered classification, in which the lowest tier (<25kph) is a bike, middle tier (25-45kph) is classified scooter (under certain circumstances and in certain cities such as Amsterdam you must use the car lanes) and 45kph and up is indeed a motorcycle, which means helmet+suitable clothing and car-lane only (but not highways).
This is not ideal, as the (fast) electric bike is new, also in NL, and people will misanticipate them (which I've experienced first hand). You're right, mixing speeds is a bad idea. This will improve with better infra (wider cycling paths, bike highways) and getting used to this new vehicle. On the other hand, the problem is similar to the scooter, which also doesn't fit the car or bike class, so perhaps with time a new type of lane must be invented. Some cities/political parties in NL are thinking of lowering the car speed limit from 50 to 30 (in urban area), which will facilitate mixing in scooters and electric bikes with car traffic.
Another important fact is liability: heavier vehicles are more liable (weight makes responsible). So in any accident between, say, car and electric bike, the car will be at fault by default, unless there is proof to the contrary. This leads to more cautious driving.
It should be classified by acceleration not velocity.
Weight and velocity are also important (potential energy which could cause harm) but acceleration is the right way to sort things into lanes, there can also be an energy constraint for the lane but acceleration is about being able to anticipate the behavior of something so that you can avoid the accident in the first place.
Electric bikes can accelerate fast and the user will also not care as much about stopping (and losing hard won inertia) this could invalidate some expectation and cause an accident.
Well, acceleration may be non-linear (bikes accelerate 0-10 faster than anything else, which is why sometimes in NL bikes may wait in front of cars before stoplights[1]). Top-speed and weight are also important factors in whether or not it would be smart to mix. However, this results in a matrix of separated lanes that is impractical ;)
Finding a good compromise (such as [1]) I think is a better idea. Lowering car speeds such that we can mix is a good one, as well as the introduction of speed limits on cycling paths [2], which would force certain bikes to slow down.
As a cyclist, I don't believe this claim for a second.
When a car starts moving at the same time as me, it's faster than me from the start. Which makes sense, it has more horse power per unit mass.
Often I do start moving first, because I think I'm less likely to get right hooked if I do so. But that's a result of paying attention and having my for on the "accelerator" waiting to go. (Also maybe a tiny bit of lag for a car to get into gear, but that's not substantial).
I cycled through Rotterdam recently, bikepacking to the UK. I found the scooters in the bikelanes to be massively unsettling. I've cycled all over the place and honestly found riding with the cars to be preferable, at least I'm used to being amongst them.
I agree, as do many cyclists. Recently the city of Amsterdam enacted a law that forces them out of cycling lanes [1]. Like I wrote in another post, scooters and electric bikes don't really fit the usual modes of cycling or motorized (car) traffic, and are something in between. Adding a mode to all infra is however a large undertaking, would add a fourth mode, which is why some want to lower car speed limits in order to facilitate mixing in higher speed bicycles/scooters into car traffic.
Electric bikes are not motorcycles. However, you're right that they're different from non-motorized bikes. And I agree with you that they can cause issues.
I got a eBike (Bionix brand, it's been great!) when I was commuting across town and got sick of riding the bus (these days there's always somebody watching TV on their phone without headphones. It was just a matter of time until I lost it and slapped one out of someone's hand, and I really don't want to be that guy on the bus, y'know? So I bought an eBike.)
I'm a very defensive cyclist and one of the first rules I made up for myself is, "Do NOT use the acceleration boost to catch changing traffic signals." I saw that people (drivers, pedestrians, and other cyclists) around me mis-estimated my trajectory due to the artificial acceleration.
If you Google image search for "early motorcycle" most things will look a lot like an ordinary bicycles. Some versions of the 1903 Peugeot, for instance, had pedals on a crank, and even those that didn't were pretty slender:
This is a silly argument. Do a Google image search for "cars in the 1800s" or something like that, and you're going to see "cars" that have tillers instead of steering wheels, and resemble horse carriages much more than modern cars. This doesn't mean horse carriages or motorized carts or golf carts qualify as "cars" in 2019.
There is a huge range of electric bike products. When I'm old and have difficulty tackling the big hills in my area, I fully intend to get an e-bike just to give me a boost in those spots.
It really helps that in neither Denmark nor the Netherlands, helmets are mandatory. Unlike in say Sweden, where casual biking is having a hard time taking off.
But it kind of bothers me that Danes and Dutchmen seem to be rather disinterested in one another's achievements on this front. There is a lot of lessons from both sides, that never seems to be discussed in one another's media, to the point (anecdote alert!) where I've seen people in either country be surprised that there is a similar biking culture in the other country.
And people still love their cars in either country, even though I believe it's even more expensive to own a car in the Netherlands (and I thought Denmark was pricey!).
I think cycling is inherently more a local thing than cars. Nobody needs interstate or international bicycle paths, because nobody cycles that far. So it makes sense that the interest is more local, and maybe that's also why smaller countries like Denmark and Netherland are more successful at it.
Bicycle infrastructure is primarily about towns and cities. So if you want this big push, you have to do it at the city level, but not just a bike path here or there, but redesign the entire city for bicycles. Have bike thoroughfares, make sure bikes are the best way to get around the center, and for any kind of traffic that stays within a town or borough. Cars are only for getting out of the city.
Many Dutch towns are increasingly redesigned with that idea in mind, most thoroughly perhaps the town of Houten[0], where the only way to get anywhere by car is to take the ring road, whereas bikes get quick shortcuts through the center. That makes bicycles attractive and keeps the pollution from cars out of the center. Travel within the town will favour the bike because it's easier and quicker than a car, which reduces the amount of car traffic, and reduces congestion and pollution.
That's the level at which you need to address this. Well, that and revoking any national helmet laws for bikes, because that's been shown to keep people in cars.
> Nobody needs interstate or international bicycle paths, because nobody cycles that far.
IMHO, this is 120% just a chicken and egg problem. Sure, nobody bikes that far to work, but if you build it people can and will travel large distances to visit just to go on bike tours. In my state, we have an annual event which attracts thousands in which people bike hundreds of miles from one side to the other. Rural highways are closed down/protected for bikes, but just for that one week.
True. In fact, the previous owner of our house went on a bicycle vacation in the US where he'd cycle down route 66.
In Europe bicycle vacations are pretty common, but it's very different from a regular commute. I did have one coworker once who biked about 50 km to work, but he was very much an exception. For most people, 10 km is a reasonable maximum.
Sure there are bike vacations, and perhaps we can make them a little more popular. I'm not going to take my family on such a vacation: most of our vacations are visiting grandparents. With a car and modern freeways we can make the trip in 21 hours of driving (split over a few days - we try to visit some other uncle along the way), few people get enough continuous vacation to bike that far. If flying wasn't such a hassle I'd probably do that instead (driving is cheaper)
I've done some 50 to 90 km (one way) intercity trips on bike. I'd love to do more with the help of extended range and speed with electric assist but they have a silly 25 kph speed limit. If you get a faster electric, it'll be treated like a moped -- you need license, insurance, registration. Largely defeats the point of cycling for me.
You aren’t wrong from a recreational perspective. But from a practical one meant to alleviate traffic and pollution, long distance intercity biking is less viable in addressing those compared to public transit.
Ya, but it should be classed in that bucket rather than to alleviate other problems. E.g. there are some nice new recreational bike trails here in Washington and Idaho along old rail road routes. They won’t do much for rush hour traffic, but they are nice to have.
True, though I do think it's worth looking for connections between the two. A rail trail running through an area could form a good route for many different short commutes all along its length. If it's all rural, then sure - there's unlikely to be any overlap. If it connects populated areas, then subsections are likely to be multi-purpose.
That's the case for a lot of the trails in my state - there are big, rural, rail trail loops, but the suburban/urban connections to the routes are excellent commuting corridors.
> Nobody needs interstate or international bicycle paths, because nobody cycles that far.
Yes, they do. There is a whole series of trans-Europe routes, the Eurovelo network, and some of them are downright crowded with whole families in the summer.
I do some cycling every summer in Serbia and Bulgaria and my route sometimes intersects the Eurovelo 6. It is often a crap shoot if I am going to find accommodation in the smallest towns, because the rooms might all be booked by French and Germans on a cycling holiday along the length of the Danube.
I haven't been to Denmark so I can't compare, but I agree there is much to be learned by looking at how other countries fare.
In the densely populated Netherlands we are facing very serious gridlock problems now with cars clogging the highways and railways at full capacity.
We can't keep building new infrastructure (highways) at the pace we did before, because - besides being very expensive - we lack the space for it. New solutions may lie in promoting remote work, carpooling and shortening home/work commute distances.
I also suspect that bicycle infra will be developed even further (e.g. with bike highways) as they take less space and are less disruptive to the landscape.
> We can't keep building new infrastructure (highways) at the pace we did before, because - besides being very expensive - we lack the space for it. New solutions may lie in promoting remote work, carpooling and shortening home/work commute distances.
You can build highways and rails in 3 dimensions. The bicycle simply cannot replace cars and trains in any meaningful way, despite the rise in numbers of single, childless urbanites.
I love bike commuting. My life is better when I ride my bike to work, but I can't always do it. It's critical that as we think about the future we think about how to improve personal mobility. That's the key.
I'm skeptical that the future is automobiles with single occupants or bikes or scooters. People will gravitate toward toward personalized transportation that gets to where they want to be comfortably, quickly, and within their budgets.
I think declining transit ridership and bike commuting can both be partly attributed to heavily subsidized rideshare services. Once those things hit prices commensurate to their actual cost of operation you might see that trend reverse.
I guess it's a multi-criteria decision problem. On one hand we want people to get where they want to as quickly as possible, on the other we want the city to be "liveable" and safe.
Only "livability" isn't measurable here. IIRC the Dutch maximised mostly for safety.
Cycling was also a 'right tool for the job' where I lived in Italy.
But the US is so far behind from that point of view that it's going to take a massive effort to stop subsidizing and requiring (via zoning) driving and facilitating other means of getting around.
I think that most of the anti-car mentality comes from how difficult this fight has been.
It may seem tangential, but I think that biking culture can’t really take off in the US without universal, good quality healthcare. I’ve had a couple of friends suffer some serious and very expensive accidents and it has certainly made me hesitant to ride as much. When combined with the fact that US car culture has created circumstances in many states where you can kill bicyclists and more or less get away it, seems like a losing bet.
Yes, these may be very inhibiting factors. It's a bit of a chicken/egg problem too, because once bycicle culture grows, road safety also increases significantly:
> Despite the relative safety compared to automobiles, the number of fatalities and hospitalizations from cycling is significantly greater in the United States compared to other western states such as Germany, Canada, and the Netherlands. In a 2014 analysis, incidence of cycling death took place at a mean rate of 4.7 deaths per 100 million kilometers cycled in the U.S., compared to 1.3 deaths per 100 million kilometers in Germany, 1.0 in the Netherlands, and 1.1 in Denmark.
Eventually that isn't practical though. You cannot take a pallet of anything on any sort of transit and never will, it will always be delivered on non-public systems. Your new couch has the same problem. Train tracks to your front door are easy to imagine, but the flexibility of roads (with cars and trucks on it) is a lot more cost effective.
When I was moving a year and a half ago, without a car something like that would have come in handy. Every one or 2 weeks I would see a piece of second-hand furniture I could have used, but had no way of getting it to my new home. I could have payed for the furniture, but didn't have the money for movers or to rent a truck every time I found something.
Drone delivery for all last-mile problems. In fact, I want to buckle on a harness, and have an Amazon quadcopter carry me from the train station to the front door of my house.
This is a silly thing to jump towards in the discussion, since it's not like we are anywhere close to the situation in which we have next to no private transport. In fact, we are almost at the other extreme.
But if I was to indulge you, I would say that public transport doesn't mean rails. In the case of buses it also uses roads. And of course, if we were to abolish all motorized private person transport (again, no where even close to that) of course there would need to be a system to allow for the transport of items that are too big to be transported by individuals in public transport. I assumed that goes without saying.
I'm not denying that this was a quote from me. I'm denying that this is what brought it into this weird theoretical extreme area.
You also haven't responded to my response yet. You just ignored it and are trying to derail the discussion with a meta argument. Unless you are going to address the actual content of the arguments, I'm done with this conversation.
We should organize society however we the people want. That means a bottom-up rather than top-down approach that will vary greatly depending on local demographics, climate, etc... All of us think we know what is needed, but the reality is different ideas need to be floated and we vote for the solution we want to see for our area.
What kind of non-argument is that? Of course we should organize society however we want. That is why I'm trying to persuade people into agreeing with me on what the right way to organize society is.
My point is that it's a little pointless to argue on global forum like HN because it's such a local issue. You don't need to convince anybody here, it's the people in your local community that are going to make the change.
Not really. From where I'm sitting in Austin I don't really care if Madrid has good public transportation or not. If the people of that city decide to fund that or something else doesn't affect me nor should they care what I think.
See? That's the precise problem with car advocates. How many times in your _life_ are you having a baby? How many times in your _life_ is your mother dying?
Just take the car in these situations, that's not the problem. The problem is people justifying 90% of the car usages (which could be replaced by bicycle or public transportation) by being snarky about the remaining 10% (and I'm being generous with 10%).
How does any of this justify the amount of people taking the car to work every day driving for upwards of 45min-1h to and back? Of course transport of goods and emergency situations need to be accounted for. Your pretending that any of what I said dismisses this is incredibly dishonest.
That should be solved. Cities have noone else to blame but themselves for poor public transportation (see California's train).
It really is a waste to have people commuting like that, it's a city problem though, not a car problem.
Yes, cars should be limited in your cities, and yes you need better public transportation, but that doesn't mean getting rid of cars everywhere.
You need to structure around roads because you need to connect goods and services to the last mile, but you also don't need to have every citizen in your congested city driving to work. I don't see why you're conflating those two.
I live in Christchurch, NZ. After a massive earthquake in 2011, I had high hopes that we might redesign the city for the next 100 years instead of the previous 50 (i.e. for people, not cars).
Instead the city council built a few bike lanes and even then people lost their goddamn minds.
"You're taking away parking space!"
"All these bike lanes are slowing traffic"
"No one wants to bike into the city"
Meanwhile, cyclists are steadily increasing in numbers and the centre of town is actually seeing some signs of life for the first time in decades.
But heaven forfend we actually do something radical and pedestrianise the city.
I live in a 750 year old European city. The medieval center is 1 kilometer in diameter. They wanted to make the center accessible only for cars of residents and suppliers of stores (up to 11am for suppliers). There are four underground parking garages directly surrounding the center and the walking distance from a garage to any location is never more than 450 meter. Free wheelchairs are provided from the garages. This change would make the center much more liveable for residents, guests and visitors.
I have never seen a collective group of people lose their shit during the town hall meeting that much. It was like the end of the world. Apparently during the 750 years history it has become mandatory to have visitors parking right on the monumental cobblestones. Walking 450 meter, even with the free provided wheelchairs, became impossible. I wonder how people survived back in 1438 without the ability to park their car right in front of the shops.
In 1438 there was no supermarkets with huge parking lots that will lure away all your customers. It's not just that people will have to walk to you (so competition located closer will win), they will also have to carry the stuff they buy back to the car, so they'll probably not be willing to buy a lot, or anything heavier. If you're selling souvenirs or t-shirts it's not a big deal, but for people selling say wines or craft beer or olive oil, you probably want people to be able to buy a few bottles, so distance is a problem.
Why would you drive into the medieval centre of a city to do a large supermarket shop if you can drive to an out-of-town one already?
Studies show that - particularly in Europe - most people are already walking to these shops everywhere. The 'weekly shop' is not really a thing that inner-city dwellers tend to do that often - they either rely on deliveries (cheap and efficient due to density) or smaller shops throughout the week (which often means less perishables waste.)
> The 'weekly shop' is not really a thing that inner-city dwellers tend to do that often
Something I wish the holier than though types thought of when they banned plastic bags here. No I can't just keep my reusable bags in the back of my SUV so I have them when I go shopping.
Do you not usually carry a rucksack or shoulder bag? If you're having to use a new plastic bag every time it seems like it might benefit you to get one - they're much more comfortable to use too.
Where have plastic bags been banned? Everywhere I've seen these policies in place, there has just been a mandatory charge added for receiving a bag. This seems reasonable enough to me even without waste or environmental considerations.
Well not banned, but they added a 15c charge for thicker ones, so now I spend more and waste more plastic than I was previously. The thicker bigger ones and the smaller thinner ones that used to be free got reused as garbage bags nearly 1 to 1.
I thought the point was to allow people to drive less? Driving to a suburb and back to get to your local mega mart doesn't seem to fit that goal; rather, it seems to push it off to somewhere else.
People in European city centers shop differently. They more likely don’t even have cars, the stores are smaller, they shop daily or bi-daily rather than weekly like suburbanites do. They aren’t carrying a few bottles of wine and olive oil, they have one bag, and everything is pretty fresh.
You can have the same lifestyle almost in the states, just live in a downtown area. Watch out for all the cars though, and wading through huge parking lots can still be a problem (I currently live in downtown Bellevue WA, which is only halfway pedestrian friendly, especially compared to Lausanne CH where I lived as a post doc).
Well, it's still not like in States, but mega-markets are taking over in Europe too, at least in my corner. Cities are pedestrian friendly, but pedestrian-only zones are rare. If you can't get to the restaurant/shop by car and it's not really close to you, it's quite likely that you'll go somewhere else. People get the wrong idea because in summer when they visit it looks different, partially because of the nicer weather, and partially because of all the traffic jams caused by tourists, so bikes become the main transportation to locals. Out of season 90% of the small shops is closed, and there'a lot more rain, so we just use cars to go to weekly shopping like everyone else.
After in 1973 the first such hypermarket opened up in NL, laws were quickly enacted to prevent it from ever happening again. Precisely because it was feared cars would become necessities and city centres would be out-competed.
That single location remains to this day the only hypermarket in the Netherlands [1].
I don't understand why city centers would be outcompeted, and this sort of legislation seems rather heavy-handed not just from an American perspective. In the country I live in, the same grocery chains have mostly smaller (with some larger) stores in urban centers and mostly larger (but less frequent) stores outside these areas. I can get most common items at any of the stores near me, and if looking for a less common item I can go to a larger store in my city which will almost always have it. This means that I'm connected by public transit to both small and large stores, neither of which need cars or massive parking lots.
Well, it largely succeeded in preventing shops moving out from city centres in NL, and can be presumed to have encouraged bike usage over car usage, as inner city shops are more likely to be reachable by bike.
Mega markets are limited to the suburbs from my experience living in Lausanne. Yes, people drive to get there, but if you live in a city core it’s not your concern.
Lausanne has nice cobble Stone pedestrian only zones, and it is considered more car friendly by European standards (there are lots of car commuters, and lots of people living in suburbs).
Most downtowns in the states do not have a grocery store anymore. If you only eat at restaurants (there are many fine ones around) you are fine, but forget about a home cooked meal unless you drive to the suburbs, at which point you may as well get a weeks worth of food just like everybody in the suburbs does.
Note that there are exceptions where there are stores. However before you point them out, remember that in a generalization there is specifics that are wrong. Even if there are stores, are there enough stores to cover each tiny neighborhood or do a lucky few get stores and the rest have to drive because the stores are not close enough to be useful.
Uhm, which downtowns? Seattle has a few grocery stores downtown, they even have a target. Downtown Bellevue has a Safeway, QFC, and an H-mart. LA, SF....have thriving downtowns with grocery stores. They aren’t huge, but they aren’t invisible either.
Even red-state St. Louis had a grocery store downtown, though it took a bit to find one near the hotel I was staying at.
There's more than one similar city which had plans to drastically changed what cars are allowed to do, and when, and the story is similar: people go insane, usually shouting out claims like 'city is going to die' and 'commerce will suffer greatly' and so on (which if I'm not mistaken they do not have any proof for, also not from previous cities where the same happend), and the effect then gets axaggerated on social media.
From what I've seen what follows next is usually the same: the plans are executed, as long as you don't insist on driving your car to the store front in the middle of a medieval city, you're happy because the city became more pleasant and after all there's a ton of parkings, studies one year after execution show less severe accidents involving cyclists and pedestrians, no measurable effect on commerce and less pollution. (again: this is only what I recall from having heard and read here and there, I did not research this in depth so reality might be different)
1438 is pretty far back, before the Renaissance. I seriously doubt carts or coaches were "common", as in every commoner owning one. I'm sure they were around, for carrying goods, doing construction, etc., but this is more like how, today, we have dump trucks and utility vehicles, but the number of dump trucks per citizen is very small. It's just not like today's car-based societies (esp. the US) where every person expects to own a car and use it for getting around.
Ugh. We get the same thing here in suburban DC (not the earthquakes but the outright hostility towards any changes in road infrastructure that don't involve adding lanes).
The main street in front of my neighborhood was recently repaved end-to-end (3 miles or so). Prior to that, it was 2 lanes in each direction, with a few left turn lanes. As part of the repave, they wanted to add a semi-protected bike lane (by removing one car lane in each direction). The outcry was ridiculous. This isn't a major thoroughfare, it's a moderately travelled neighborhood road. There's a small shopping center at one end and a school complex in the middle.
Long-story-short, the government add the bike lanes. EXCEPT for in front of the schools and shopping center. So, it's half mile of 4-lane cars, then 1 mile 2 cars/2 bike, then at the school it's back to 4-car for half mile, then back to 2 car/2 bike for the remainder.
And now all the non-cyclists cry "Look! Nobody uses the bike lanes!" Well, of course not. They're completely fucking useless because they come and go almost at random and don't lead anywhere.
I live in suburban DC too; this place is terrible for cycling. I pretty much only ride on the trails (usually W&OD, also Custis and Mt. Vernon) because they're safe.
Luckily, I'm far enough out (Reston) that I can hop on the W&OD to Leesburg and then bail onto slightly more rural roads. Reston itself is ok, despite the silliness with inconsistent bike lanes and sidewalks. Just have to avoid the major roads.
I'm not convinced there's not more to that story. There was a massive organized bike ride that day, so hundreds of people passing along that stretch of trail when the mugging occurred.
Crime happens on the trail, no question. But it also happens in parking lots and at the local 7-11 and many other places.
Really? This was the first I had heard of it since moving to the area last year, and it has me a little worried. I thought NoVA was supposed to be one of the wealthiest places in the US.
Of course, I think it's pertinent to note that people in other countries don't have to worry much about armed robbery while cycling, since people in those countries don't have so many guns like Americans do.
Fairfax County (and DC metro in general) is wealthy. But, it's also very mixed, just like most large suburban or urban areas. Look at the federally subsidized lunch numbers - despite an average household income well into 6-figures, it's not uncommon for a school to have 20-30% of the students receiving free lunches.
Very little of the crime on the W&OD is "bike specific" - it's just "normal" stuff that happens all over. I'm more concerned about getting run over by a road-raging douchebag in an SUV on my way to the trail than mugged while I'm on the trail. Honestly, I'd be more concerned walking back to my car at the mall than riding down the W&OD.
I've lived in the area most of my life. I can't think of any areas I'd actively avoid during the day. Well, except Tysons Corner, but that's not because of the crime, I just hate the place.
> "You're taking away parking space!" "All these bike lanes are slowing traffic"
The part that always makes me laugh is when they inevitably call cyclists entitled. It's always "I demand massive amounts of probably subsidized infrastructure, to be able to drive at maximum speed all the way and to have a personal space reserved to store my car for the next 8 hours, but those entitled cyclists get in the way".
Not to mention the reliance on the government to provide the infrastructure to drive on, to build the ports to import fuel, huge multi-national companies to extract and transport the fuel, multiple foreign governments and the military interventions necessary to keep them in line, all so you can get that feeling of freedom when you drive.
You forgot the rather significant social cost of health issues caused by car traffic exhaust [1] and the longer term social cost of exhaust having an effect on climate [2].
Coming from the US West Coast, I was unpleasantly surprised by how anti-pedestrian certain parts felt. The biggest issue for me was the difference in right of way in New Zealand. It was unsettling walking around with a reduced right of way versus cars. Reversing that would be a major nation-wide undertaking, but I think it would benefit the pedestrian and biking atmosphere.
Of course no one wants to bike into the city when it's full of speeding cars. In France they've adopted a different attitude. Montpellier for instance has built many parking buildings at the city limits, an integrated urban transportation network while shrinking vehicle lanes and transforming them into dedicated tram lanes, bicycle lanes or pedestrian areas. They've also introduced obstacels and lots of wavy turns to make speeding through the city very hard or impossible. If you want to go anywhere by car you're virtually stuck in a never ending traffic jam. I just wonder what infrastructure ambulances, police and the fire brigade use to go from one place to another when there's an emergency. Maybe they use the dedicated tram lanes.
>They've also introduced obstacels and lots of wavy turns to make speeding through the city very hard or impossible. If you want to go anywhere by car you're virtually stuck in a never ending traffic jam.
Now they just need to add a "congestion tax" like London has to penalize drivers for spewing fumes into the air in the city center.
The irony here is that the bikes aren't slowing traffic, the endless road works are. Also Chch is basically one giant Wilsons parking lot now.
I love the place and I intend to settle there in a few years time but it is very disheartening to see a once in the life time opportunity to solve these issues get squandered in the space of a few years.
The entire debacle with the city council wanting to spend years "reimagining what the city could be" instead of getting back to work building new infrastructure immediately is why Christchurch has taken so long to come back to life.
Don't know how that works out in Finland, but there are a few of those in Paris, and while they are just as good as those on the street at certain hours, at other hours they become overrun with inattentive pedestrians that confuse them for a sidewalk.
This makes those lanes dangerous for both cyclists and pedestrians as a result, and very slow for cyclists compared to a regular bike lane. A third to a half of the cyclists opt for the bus lane instead (despite it being forbidden to cyclists). And they are not slowing the traffic. In fact, cyclists move faster than cars at the particular location I have in mind.
They work ok in areas that aren't particularly congested. Even then, many of these shared bike/pedestrian ways are just packed full of little things that slow cyclists down in a way a cycle lane wouldn't. They're also poorly maintained as compared to the street that gets re-paved every so often while they just fill the worst holes & cracks on the sidewalk.
That's why some enthusiasts in .fi choose to cycle in traffic (even though that's not really legal if there's a bike path on the right).
The biggest counterpoint here is what about families? A mom with three young kids in tow pretty much needs a car to get around. Or elderly people? I can't really take my 90-year old grandma out to dinner if it requires her to bike her way to the restaurant.
Thinking about non-car based transportation methods is great. But the reality is that large segments of society are always going to need some sort of car-based option. You can't just ban cars from a city center without totally excluding a lot of young people.
Ask the Dutch. How do they do it? Or do you assume they do not have young kids or grandmas?
Why is it that whenever people talk about designing cities for pedestrians and bikes, someone on hackernews thinks it means eliminating all cars entirely forever. For a forum ostensibly designed for entrepreneurs, it shows a tremendous lack of imagination.
Answer:
* Public transportation inside cities such as buses and trams
* Trains to rural areas
* Park-and-ride garages for people to drive in, and park next to transportation hubs
* Underground parking garages at the edges of pedestrian zones, or even underneath them, coming up directly above them
* Ubiquitous bike storage and bike attachments such that yes, in fact, a mom with 3 young kids can tow them from a single bike - moms in Amsterdam and Berlin do it all the time.
The difference is that Holland is entirely flat, has an average high of 71 in the summer, and rarely if ever gets icy.
The Dutch experience simply doesn't translate to most of America because of the terrain and climate. Elderly people people will die if you make them walk in the Florida summer. 7 year old children lack the leg-strength to bike up California hills. Both groups are likely to slip and crack their heads open in the icy Boston winter.
And Tokyo and Oulu, Finland have the same weather as Holland, surely?
Lots of places bike. People who don't like bike infra make all kinds of excuses, but the truth is that bikes work almost everywhere short of the Himalayas. It's just our lack of investment that holds them back.
High winds can be a bigger problem than hills, and the Netherlands, as you'd expect from a place famous for windmills, has high average wind speeds. People still manage to cycle. Studded tires are available for icy conditions, although in most of the world occasional de-icing salt on the paths will be enough. Electric motor assisted bicycles are available for people with health problems. Complaints about terrain and climate are just excuses.
I actually appreciate you pointing this out. I get rather tired of smug assertions that America can just do everything like it's done in Europe or something when the landscape and population density are so very different.
But I don't think that means we can't borrow any lessons at all from them. The biggest lesson we can borrow from the Dutch seems to be that they set out to intentionally make their cities more pedestrian friendly and bicycle friendly starting in the 1970s when people became extremely fed up with children dying due to being hit by cars.
> I actually appreciate you pointing this out. I get rather tired of smug assertions that America can just do everything like it's done in Europe or something when the landscape and population density are so very different.
Ahem. The Alps, the fjords, the Netherlands, the Mediterranean coast of Spain, are all very different landscapes.
The population density of the combined regions is probably a red herring, too: nobody sane will cycle from California across Nevada to Salt Lake City, except as a fitness holiday. Even my 1080-km cycle along the Rhine (flat from Hoek van Holland to Switzerland) isn’t something anyone sensible would do to get from A-to-B, and I flew home instead of cycling back to the UK.
Instead, what will matter is the average journey time from where people live to where they want to go, and how much effort it is to get there. Electric bikes will help on both counts.
From the reverse argument: it's really very tiring that the ultimate defense from any American on any topic ultimately boils down to American Exceptionalism.
Yes you have a wide variety of population densities and climates. So does Europe. So does everywhere else in the world.
It's the most boring and lazy argument to make, and it never actually answers anything. Exactly what is so different about LA compared to Paris that it can't have good cheap internet and cyclists must die at 5 times the rate?
What's far more tiresome to me is someone picking a completely pointless fight with some detail of some comment as if the rest of the comment did not exist.
I've lived without a car in the US for over a decade. I no longer have a driver's license. I would like to see America become more pedestrian friendly and bicycle friendly.
I don't think you accomplish that by arguing that "Well, you just do everything exactly like the Dutch!" I think that's a lazy, unhelpful and disrespectful answer that actively ignores real and meaningful differences between the literal and figurative landscapes of the two countries.
It's not good communication to say "Just do everything exactly like the Dutch." If you want real solutions in the US, you need to think in a more nuanced way about what pieces of the Dutch experience you can reasonably use in the US, taking into account real differences between the two places.
Ignoring the differences between Europe and America very often comes across as open contempt for Americans and their presumed stupidity and laziness. It's not an effective means to promote actionable ideas.
No one is likely to take advice that they are just wrong and stupid and lazy and should wholesale copy a system that works well elsewhere without bothering to examine differences between the two places and trying to make some alterations that will hopefully result in a better fit.
Based on the comment I replied to, I feel like San Diego, California could try to borrow ideas from the Netherlands without a lot of critique beforehand. But LA has vastly different weather from Paris and a very different landscape and history of development. So, no, you aren't realistically going to replicate Paris in LA.
I will also note that they have been rioting in Paris. Paris is not some perfect paradise that has figured everything out and never has any problems.
Claims of European superiority are frequently overblown.
Above all, the problems you cite are due to kids and elders needing to move long distances. This is not needed in cities not built for cars. Kids can walk to schools, and the elderly don't need to live away from the lively zone.
Lausanne is a very 3D city with a lot of elevation gains (with elevators to travel between different parts of the city!), and biking worked there just fine, even in its Boston-like Swiss winters. I saw kids biking up hills all the time.
You are right that it would suck in the humid south. There are good reasons the obesity rate spikes in those areas.
I agree with this and I have done this for years. However, having to take a shower is an extra source of friction that makes biking a bit more challenging in hot climates.
tl;dr are you sure those showers are necessary? If you stink when you sweat it could be because your skin is reacting to periodic exposure to soap and/or hot water.
---
It only breaks 100 occasionally here in Colorado, but it's plenty hilly and I ditched my car for a bike 8 years back. I arrive at the office sweaty pretty frequently, and I neither shower nor bring a change of clothes. Luckily the air is so dry that the sweat evaporates quickly.
At first I did a lot of showering, but then my skin suffered. The doctor recommended using less soap without going into how much less, so I asked a few close friends to be brutally honest about whether I was stinky while I reduced my soap exposure and started to look for correlations.
I pretty quickly ended up reducing by soap exposure to practically none (I still use hand soap though).
About two weeks after I quit using soap while bathing my skin has started behaving differently. I can no longer correlate sweating a few hours ago with being stinky now. (Admittedly, is hard to get real data on stuff like this).
Somebody always tells me I'm gross when I confess that now I only shower once every four days or so, but 90% of the time somebody mentions a case where I was stinky, they're taking about day two after the shower, not day five.
My theory is that even exposure to just hot running water depletes the skin of some resource, and about 24 hours after the shower I'm at my stinkiest because whatever process replenishes that resource is at a peak. By 48 hours this has subsided and my scent is steady-state. (i.e. body odor correlates with the derivative--not the absolute value, of this resource. It might be bacteria, or oils, or pheramones, I'm not sure).
I've also found that by avoiding cotton or synthetics in my shirts, I can get get a week's worth of wears out of them (I just cycle them so that the color changes and nobody asks).
I think that people in general are frequently wrong about the causes and effects around bathing, but the social conventions are too strong to help them, so occasionally I go on a rant like this, just in case I can help save somebody else from soap. Thanks for listening.
> Ask the Dutch. How do they do it? Or do you assume they do not have young kids or grandmas?
They do it the dutch way.
Things you wouldn't do anywhere else, like leaving babies in their strollers in the streets outside shops when they go shopping.
Denmark is really a big village.
Source: my girlfriend family is Danish and I had saw them last time 4 days ago.
> * Trains to rural areas
It's more easily said than done.
Rural areas are also resistant to things that would make the area less rural, like high speed train.
Look at the fights happening in northern Italy against the TAV (the Italian version of the TGV)
> * Park-and-ride garages for people to drive in, and park next to transportation hubs
Many cities in old Europe cannot do that. Think about the central areas of Paris, Rome, Milan, Madrid.
And those that could are reluctant to do it, because it would immediately lower the value of the buildings around.
Imagine you bought a house for 100 and its value drops to 70 because they made a giant parking lot just below your window.
> * Underground parking garages at the edges of pedestrian zones, or even underneath them, coming up directly above them
In most cities in old Europe digging is very costly and sometimes impossible (most Italian cities for example)
> * Ubiquitous bike storage and bike attachments such that yes,
That would steal space to pedestrian transit
> a mom with 3 young kids can tow them from a single bike - moms in Amsterdam and Berlin do it all the time.
Compare the average street in Berlin[1] or Amsterdam[2] with those of Milan[3]
You will immediately notice a few things: in Milan trams railways are in the middle of the street, they are very slippery and dangerous for bikers; Berlin sidewalks are much larger on average; much of the transport in Amsterdam happens along canals, where cars are usually not allowed.
Things are in a certain way not because people are simply stupid or ignorant, but because the surrounding environment poses a lot of limits.
Families is not a counterpoint. I have had three kids in my bike. Now my kids ride their own bikes but we meet parents with all their kids in their bikes every day. There are homes for the elderly around here that put two elders in a bike to get them out for a ride. You didn't mention shopping, but I did put all my shopping in that same bike I had my kids in.
Guess what the biggest obstacle to my kids getting around on their own is? Cars! You don't have to exclude cars from cities, just make them be there in a way that also allows children to safely get around.
Most families in the developed world are having one to two kids.
I rode a bike with a toddler in a toddler seat on the back until I was 8 months pregnant. You can also get little "cars" to tow behind your bike to hold two kids.
I always hated cars. My kids never felt like a barrier to going far free. My marriage did. After the divorce, my kids and I eventually went car free.
They are adults. They still live with me. We remain car free. We're happier this way.
> I rode a bike with a toddler in a toddler seat on the back until I was 8 months pregnant. You can also get little "cars" to tow behind your bike to hold two kids.
As adults, I can understand the appeal of being car free, but I can't help but be struck by how dangerous it seems to commute on a bike pregnant with a toddler onboard.
I'm imagining biking down Market St, 8 months pregnant, with a toddler seat and two kids in tow. That's a lot of faith that nobody's going to open a car door at the wrong time or pull out into traffic without looking. I know fit dudes in their 20s that have had accidents and been seriously injured. I've never thought of myself as particularly risk adverse, but wow that seems risky.
I was in Germany. This means the landscape was pedestrian friendly, bicycle friendly and I wasn't going terribly far.
When I was six months pregnant, I took my two year old to the ER via bike because his dad had our only vehicle. The kid needed stitches, having done a bit of climbing of the furniture and busted his chin open on the wood floor -- a rather all too common injury for children that age. I was told that the stitches he needed were really rather mild for such an injury. They had absolutely seen far worse.
The most dangerous place my toddler spent time was our home, where he persistently climbed the door frames and yelled for me to come catch him before he fell. He never did learn to climb down. He just counted on his young, energetic and very attentive mother to always safely catch him. (And I always did, so he was never cured of this expectation.)
I desperately wished I could find some way to remove our door frames. It would have brought my stress levels down about a thousand percent.
> I'm imagining biking down Market St, 8 months pregnant, with a toddler seat and two kids in tow. That's a lot of faith that nobody's going to open a car door at the wrong time or pull out into traffic without looking
That's why it's important to ride where one can be easily seen. That means riding in the middle of the general purpose lane and not off to the side in a narrow bike lane within the "door zone".
I ride with my three kids (one in the rear child seat and two in the trailer) in the middle of the lane and never had problems with car doors or vehicles suddenly pulling out without seeing me.
Ha! Go see how they do it in Europe. Bike trailers, extra seats in the front & back, built in cargo decks, longer bikes; there are lots of fancy ways to load a lot of kids & cargo onto your bike. And don't forget that kids can ride their own bikes too! My kid was riding a bike with me to daycare at 3-4 years old. Your thinking is too car-centric!
Europe does not have some magical equation for drastically reducing car use. The number of cars per capita in the EU is only about one third lower than the United States. That's nothing to sneeze at, but it certainly means that the sizable majority of Europeans are still car-centric.
And even then that's mostly a function of lower incomes (vis-a-vis the US). The high-income European states of Luxembourg, Switzerland, Iceland, Monaco and Liechtenstein all have almost identical car ownership as the US.
The difference of car usage between USA and Europe should be much larger than the difference in car ownership. A car is useful for many things other than the daily commute, someone who mostly bikes to work is still rather likely to own a car but contribute much less to the traffic and pollution.
[edit] looking at random stats such as http://internationalcomparisons.org/environment/transportati... seems to confirm that - the vehicle ownership rates are just a bit lower, but annual distance driven per capita in European countries is twice less than USA.
This is probably a function of distances between living space and work. Beyond 10 km the car catches up and starts to get ahead in total travel time.
Public transport is meant to close this gap but there's not enough for people, much less bicycles, especially long distance. So it gets crowded. The car is universal until you run out of parking space.
They do, but not enough to ensure longer distances are inefficient.
And especially the "ingress" roads do not block - from suburbs and further districts.
Now that is Poland, Warsaw, the city is designed to be more car friendly than most capitals in EU, more spread out, while still keeping strong public transport and bike as options.
The parts that block up are near choke points, City center, bridges, some big intersections.
I live and travel around Europe. Seeing parents riding with their very young kids is not too common a sight and every major city I've been to has traffic problems, because a whole lot of people do want to use cars and do value their convenience.
Whether that's a bad thing or not is another discussion but don't try to present Europeans as some sort of superhumans.
I only have experience with Berlin, Hamburg, Munich, and Amsterdam; but if you sit outside of a daycare in those cities in the morning you can see the multitude of people who ride their bikes to drop off their 1, 2, and sometimes 3 kids at daycare. Those cities do cycling right and it shows.
So I would disagree with you. The traffic problems are caused by having cities that are only setup to make cars convenient and everything else inconvenient. Cities that prioritize the lowest bandwidth people mover are going to have major traffic problems, of course.
Like you say, people want convenience. But I don't know why you think they particularly care about driving (or cycling or walking or taking the train). They just want the most convenient & cost effective thing. If that's a car, they will drive a car. If that's cycling, they will cycle. If it's the train, they will take that instead.
On practically every measure, owning a car is far less convenient (unless you live in a city built around driving cars) and more expensive than not owning a car. We owned a car in Germany but only used it for weekend trips. So the point here is to change cities to not be built around cars. Make cars less convenient.
Your last line is the issue that annoys people. It often lands like “rather than focusing on making other means more convenient, we’re going to focus on destroying the existing convenience to make alternatives more competitive.”
A certain amount of that, as an unavoidable byproduct, is okay with most people. What’s not ok is the perceived (or real) gratuitous destruction of convenience.
You can't have it both ways. You can't have a car-friendly city that is also great for cycling and public transit.
Besides, gratuitous destruction of that "convenience" is good for society and the planet. The obesity rate in America should be proof enough that cars are bad for you.
While we love our bycicles in Europe, if you go down to the southern countries you won't see much of them taking kids around either with trailers or kid seats.
Most of the Germany had the "benefit" of being able to rebuilt post WW2 bombing, so they are a bit more spread out and can easily accommodate new road features (if there was a country that is car friendly but not US, it's Germany :)).
And Netherlands is just... Flat, and biking has been a tradition there long before the current ecological push.
However, most European old towns are frequently narrow one-way streets on hills and it gets really hard to get a buy in to reconfigure them altogether.
But I agree with the premise that streets should be given back to people, but pedestrians should first and foremost, with bikes and other micromobility tools "demoted" compared to them as to not cause mayhem (eg. pedestrians do abruptly stop :). Basically, pedestrian streets with traffic rules stating that pedestrians are always in right of way. That should provide plenty of space for both social activity and transit with bikes and such, even in small streets I mention.
Living in a climate that gets significant snow and is hilly means I would also like to streets to be efficiently "heated" to reduce risks for pedestrians and cyclists during winter months.
But why? It takes a long time to get kids helmeted up and they don’t ride very fast. Not everyone has the leisure to ride bikes everywhere. My kids schools are 10 miles from home and 5 miles from each other. Even with a dedicated bike lane, it would still take dramatically more work to drive. Then, if it rains.. I have to worry about it rain gear for everyone. Then if one kid gets sick at school, I’m supposed to ride my bike from Cupertino to Palo Alto, pick him or her up and then ride to the doctor in Mountain View or wherever?
Or little league practice in one part of town while another kid has gymnastics in another part of town?
It’s silly that a country as huge as the United States is being compared with the tiny, flat, Netherlands. Some American neighborhoods are larger than entire Dutch towns. The Netherlands doesn’t have Texas hot and humid summers, or California terrain, or Michigan winters. And a 3-4 year old riding to day care? Just how long does it take a kid to ride a bike 5 miles vs. me driving 5 miles? It’s absurd.
I get it “let’s hate cars,” but cars are freedom. If I have to run to a CVS at 2am, a bike is the last thing I want to ride. In the event of a natural disaster or an evacuation, are people supposed to ride their bikes to escape a wildfire or a hurricane?Or wait on the city bus? People literally die if they can’t evacuate quickly — and anyone expecting public transportation to be working or effective at evacuations is delusional or living in a perfect dream world where nothing bad ever happens.
Regarding quick evacuation - both in urban environments and rural, cars may not be the great option that you'd initially assume they might be.
In rural areas with few roads and sudden population movement, those roads can quickly become congested. This was a big issue for the city of Paradise during evacuation from the Camp Fire last year[0].
In urban environments, large vehicle movements can also become a public safety issue. Try commuting out of a major city at 5pm on a Friday and you'll frequently find delays and congestion at freeway entrances - exactly as you would during a mass exodus.
That's not to mention the rush on gas stations[1] which can occur as a subset of car owners realize they have to fill up before leaving town. This in itself will lead to delays and congestion - and even if you yourself have set aside plenty of fuel, you still suffer as a result of those who are less prepared.
Neither of these urban problems affect cyclists who can continue even in the presence of road traffic. I'd imagine they'd in fact be more at-risk from frantic and desperate vehicle owners who suddenly realize that using a car is failing and that they want a plan B.
Regarding CVS at 2am -- cycling at night can be surprisingly enjoyable since the roads and surroundings are quiet. In some places with cold/wet weather - or with larger distances to travel - it might be less pleasant though.
It looks like infrastructure and population density is your issue. Dutch kids ride to school, sports and social activities on their own from around the age of seven. You are the one wasting time driving dozens of miles to drop the kids off everywhere when they could bike on their own while you drive straight to and from work and not worry about the kids.
But again, the United States is lacking the infrastructure and population density for this. Yes it's a big country but they could've gone for small dense settlements with everything you need in reach and then big distances between those towns. But having everything spread apart was a cheaper solution.
> In the event of a natural disaster or an evacuation, are people supposed to ride their bikes to escape a wildfire or a hurricane?
This article is arguing for cycling/public transport infrastructure in city cores. Of course cars (or high speed trains in developed countries) are more suited for travelling large distances.
Building more bike lanes in the inner city doesn't stop people from evacuating by car.
As another commenter said, density and urban layout problems are one of the major problems relating to your other points.
Also - kids love riding bikes by themselves when it's safe, at least myself and my friends did!
You don't ask a 3-year old to ride their bike 5 miles. You put them in a trailer or child carrier. On an electric bike that ride will take about 25 minutes. Considering rush-hour traffic, that's often faster than driving.
My car gets parked across the street from my apartment building.
Doesn't get stolen and doesn't care about rain.
My bike spent a single winter out on my balcony after we needed the space inside the apartment for baby stuff.
It's now rusty in multiple spots.
My previous bike, I left on the small back yard of my last apartment, locked up. It got stolen a few months after I started doing that.
So again, this is not feasible for a lot of people, myself included, and it's very privileged to think that everyone has access to a garage next to their home.
> My car gets parked across the street from my apartment building.
Offtopic, but this has to end. I do not understand how it is socially acceptable to put huge pieces of your private property on the public streets. You cannot just put your washing machine on the street because you have nowhere else to put it! Why can you do that with a car?
I am complaining about the assignment for that intended usage. Why do we allow this usage? It takes most of the usable surface of the city for the storage of ugly, static objects. I would rather assign those spaces for other uses, like wider walkways, kids playgrounds, flowers, whatever.
I like this argument. The government is effectively subsidizing a huge amount of real estate (to a huge cost, with the taxes collected from everyone), for the usage of free parking. I would prefer if all that money went instead to free housing, or free healthcare.
> You cannot just put your washing machine on the street because you have nowhere else to put it!
You actually can in the US, that's legal in many places as long as it isn't kept there permanently. (I.e, you leave it on a trailer). We even put our trash bins onto the street almost every week. But that's beside the point.
> how it is socially acceptable to put huge pieces of your private property on the public streets.
Because that's what public transporation is, and the value it imparts.
We dedicated public streets to the public, because the value of public transportation is much higher than the small temporary cost of having any one person occupy it. Cars and roads are the most efficient form of public transportation ever invented so far (in terms of travel time, distance traveled, safety, and equability). That's not to imply they are perfect on any/all of these things, just better than the alternatives available today.
Yes, in a perfect world, everyone would have a beautiful light rail train at their front door, that takes them everywhere and anywhere they ever need to go. But that level of infrastructure is insanely expensive, and the cost of that expense is pushed into the housing nearby that infrastructure. Paradoxically, the act of building alternative public transportation like this prices out most of the public you tried to transport, because the value of that infrastructure gets captured in rent, which gets passed onto residents.
If you look at light rail, and say, "how can we get most of the benefits of light rail, but in a package cheap enough that most people could afford" or "what would a light rail train look like, if it could arrive at everyone's door, take them directly where they need to go, have the lowest construction cost to every possible location so as to have the lowest impact on land value and have the lowest possible detriment to housing prices" -- if you follow that line of thinking, you reinvent zero-emission EV cars and public freeways, which is why they are everywhere in the first place.
It's a good point. Parking should be allowed only on privately-owned land. Look at how it's done in Japan: you're actually not allowed to buy a car if you can't prove you have a place to park it.
Because I pay taxes for those spaces — often I even pay for the parking space itself. I pay gasoline taxes to pay for those roads. What gasoline taxes are bikes paying to use the roads? Are bikes paying registration fees? Tolls? Are they getting mandatory inspections each year?
> What gasoline taxes are bikes paying to use the roads?
Bikes can't pay taxes, neither can cars. People that own them can, and most cyclists I know also own a car. So if you're attempting to stipulate that people that ride bikes don't pay taxes on the infrastructure that they use, you're wrong- at least in my experience.
In any case, bicycles cause far, far less damage - maybe even 0 damage - to the roads used by motorists. So, if a side effect of motorists paying taxes to build and maintain roads is that cyclists also get to use them for free, a sensible person would be okay with that.
> Tolls?
I can't think of a single toll road that I have ever been on in the US that was not a highway. Cyclists don't ride on highways unless absolutely necessary. In most cases this probably isn't even legal for the cyclist to ride on the toll road.
> Are they getting mandatory inspections each year?
Can you find even one example of a poorly maintained bicycle causing someone other than the rider's death/injury?
Anyway, I don't even suspect that you read the article. Instead you just came in here to rant about how anti-cycling you are, which is not a great look, but suit yourself.
> bicycles cause far less damage... to the roads used by motorists
This only holds true as long as bicycles are a small amount of traffic added on. It's like the SMS bands with telcos: a small bit of auxiliary slack being used for something else. If bicycles become a large part of the traffic, there will still be an impact. Even if the bikes don't tear the roads up much, elements and natural wear make up a fair part of that. If bikes take half the road rather than the break-down lane, they will need to start paying for it (even if not necessarily the same amount, dollar-for-dollar.)
This argument is also relevant to electric cars. They tear up the roads, but are not taxed like normal cars are. Registration fees are also still relevant; at least some of that goes to administering a road network, which has to be done for cars or bikes.
> Can you find even one example of a poorly-maintained bicycle causing someone other than the rider's death/injury?
This is a silly standard to set, given present conditions. The people who use bicycles today are enthusiasts, fairly well-trained, and very likely to take care of equipment. If, however, it becomes commoditized, this will doubtless change. Cars didn't need much regulation at first, either; that changed at scale.
> Anyway, I don't even suspect that you read the article. Instead you just came in here to rant about how anti-cycling you are, which is not a great look, but suit yourself.
This is a poor attempt to dismiss someone's arguments out-of-hand. The point that he pays for certain amenities (even if they are subsidized more than they ought to be) is still valid.
I did read the article, and it still leaves the biggest issue un-answered. Namely, _"micro-mobility", as it is therein-termed, only works on a micro scale_. Many cities aren't built this way, and it is only practical if you live in a tiny urban bubble. I've lived places where I drove forty-five miles each way for a commute. Why did I put up with this? Because I didn't want to live in the expensive, yuppie parts of town. For all that money, I'd have gotten a small apartment, built no land equity, and had very little space. I don't like it much in cities for this reason: everything is small, little green space, trash, crime, etc. The other option is the hippie neighborhood with seven-dollar-a-cup coffee shops on every corner; when those pop up, people instead complain gentrification is pricing out the poor.
The reason I don't like the whole bike thing is because it's emblematic of a culture and a vision I don't like: everyone living densely-packed into the stereotypical SF or Seattle city. This isn't often argued, but it's part of the larger "culture war." I know on which side most people on HN fall, but most people on the other side like their culture the way it is. Telling them to just import the dutch bike culture isn't a good solution, and will work just about as well as any other time people have told another group to just import their culture.
Road damage is proportional to the 4th power of the weight of the vehicle.[1] The average bike's weight is about 1/100 that of the average car (unscientific method of searching "weight of average bike" and "weight of average car"). So you'd need approximately 100 bikes to cause the same impact as 1 car! And 100 bikes can transport 25x more people than 1 car.
> everyone living densely-packed into the stereotypical SF or Seattle city.
I don't think you need that much density to encourage biking. Even a city with a lot of townhouses, 3-4 story apartment buildings (for the yuppies), and no parking minimums for businesses ought to be dense enough.
> Road damage is proportional to the 4th power of the weight of the vehicle
Right, which is why I also wrote this:
>> Even if the bikes don't tear the roads up much, elements and natural wear make up a fair part of that.
Roads degrade on their own, and the people who use them should still pay for them. I also specified that this need not be dollar-for-dollar, but it is not costless.
> I don't think you need that much density to encourage biking. Even a city with a lot of townhouses, 3-4 story apartment buildings (for the yuppies), and no parking minimums for businesses ought to be dense enough.
Would you please provide a citation for this? I'm guessing your source is only accounting for being able to pack required amenities into a hypothetical biking range. This wouldn't take into account that many people work across town , have to go there to see people and do things, etc. Without a source, however, I can't accurately respond to this.
I saw another commenter raise the point that if you want comparable convenience, you often end up with EVs. What is the objection to those? Assuming carbon-neutral electricity, that is. I'd hazard a guess that producing the energy required to move people via nuclear electricity is more efficient than producing it via consuming food.
I'm also curious if you'd be open to biking in, say, Texas where summer temps are easily above 100 degrees and above 110 in some places. I have trouble seeing how you could convince people to do this; most hesitate to step outside unless necessary in such weather. How would you mitigate this?
> Roads degrade on their own, and the people who use them should still pay for them
How much do roads degrade on their own vs due to usage? In dry places like California or the southwest, I can't imagine it's a lot. In places with harsh winters or heavy rain it's probably more.
But if roads are designed to maximize bike throughput rather than car throughput, they'd probably be built differently too. They wouldn't need to be as wide or support speeds as high. This would reduce maintenance costs by a bit.
> many people work across town
If towns are denser "across town" isn't as far anymore. Not to mention if driving across town is no longer as fast, people will live closer to work. In any case, on an electric bike a distance of 10 miles is trivially bikeable in under an hour, which is also the length of an average car trip.[1] Implying half of all car trips could be done on an electric bike.
> comparable convenience
Cars are convenient when there aren't many other cars around. As the number of car drivers goes up, I don't really see convenience. Traffic, pollution, fatal accidents, needing to find parking.
> What is the objection to [EVs]?
They take up just as much space on the road and cause accidents at similar rates. Particles from tires and braking are still a health hazard. EVs are awesome and we should all move to them because they're lightyears beyond ICE vehicles but I don't think they should play the exact same role.
> I'd hazard a guess that producing the energy required to move people via nuclear electricity is more efficient than producing it via consuming food.
Maybe. But I'd hazard you have to produce less energy overall because a cyclist is moving 100 times less weight than a driver. Also there are second- and third-order effects of less energy spent on road maintenance (less wear and tear) or healthcare (everyone's getting more exercise). And the cyclist has to eat anyway - biking may add maybe 500 kcal/day to their diet at the high end.
> if you'd be open to biking in, say, Texas where summer temps are easily above 100 degrees and above 110 in some places
It depends. If I'm going to work and can change and/or shower at the office sure. If I'm riding an electric bike and have to go less than 10 miles, sure.
> I have trouble seeing how you could convince people to do this; most hesitate to step outside unless necessary in such weather. How would you mitigate this?
These are all fair points. Most people value convenience. Ultimately everyone needs to decide what they want. Endless traffic, noise, pollution, sprawl, risking death (car accidents are the number one killer of children in the US) seem like a pretty high price to pay for convenience to me.
> The reason I don't like the whole bike thing is because it's emblematic of a culture and a vision I don't like: everyone living densely-packed into the stereotypical SF or Seattle city. This isn't often argued, but it's part of the larger "culture war." I know on which side most people on HN fall, but most people on the other side like their culture the way it is. Telling them to just import the dutch bike culture isn't a good solution, and will work just about as well as any other time people have told another group to just import their culture.
Ah, well, there it is. It's hard to argue in good faith with one who assumes that all things related to cycling are a part of a culture war being waged. I'm out.
There was a time before cars. People didn't just entrap their kids and mother at home. We've just made it unworkable due to redesigning things for cars.
Cars only work with kids due to most people having smaller families these days. I actually think the car limitations is a reason family sizes have shrunk. Start imagining moving ten kids around.
Mini vans and Chevy suburbans are a thing, Utahns aren’t very dissuaded by that problem. I think it’s the other way around: Being carless with one kid can be ok, but you might need to start rethinking that at the second or third.
For your grandma you might consider a three-wheeled version of a bicycle.
My cousin's granddad stopped cycling in the city at the age of 94 since he had problems getting off the bike. He got himself a home trainer and is doing 10k/day at home now. He's turning 96 in a few days.
A mom-of-three friend of mine loves her electric Xtracycle. She mostly leaves the minivan at home, and neatly bypasses the morning school-and-office traffic. It zips along at 20mph surprisingly quickly, too.
While not everyone can be that active, a steadily increasing number of people are using these micro-mobility devices. It really does improve the suburban and urban environment over cars. It's not like handicapped-accessibility considerations are going away when we start to cater to these smaller vehicles!
We had a wonderful irony in local elections recently: the newly elected mayor doesn't have a driver's license, he hitchhiked to work previously as a city counselor and plans to continue that as mayor. Many of his opponents had car parking high on their platforms :).
But they need a bike park instead. Granted you can park 5-10 bikes in the space of a car (depending on the size of the bikes and car), but we still need to have this space.
It is a valid point, but I think "most" traffic I see have one single occupant. Perhaps we could find a way to enforce HOV like rules to certain roads and parking spaces. And also include those with handicap stickers. If we eliminated single occupant cars and were left with mothers driving with young kids we would have a huge safety and congestion improvement.
You provide adequate public transport. I’m totally with you though that in many cases this isn’t feasible. I hope in the future we share our cars more often, but I can’t see this happening until they’re mostly autonomous.
IMO autonomous cars are going to massively increase car usage so car issues are going to get worse not better. Maybe we won't need parking lots but if autonomous cars happen people will use them for anything and everything. No more need for couriers just pop the package/document in a car. Want to run a business out of your house? No need to delivery people just pop your product in a car. Cook for sick relative, pop the meal in a car. Need grandma to watch the kids tonight, pop them in car.
Maybe some of that will go to drones but the point is that a device that shows up at your door and goes to any other door in the city for opens a huge number of new opportunities.
We could redesign the cars to be smaller and to drive more densely if they were fully autonomous and electric. Their footprint would then more closely resemble bikes.
Or maybe someone will invent self driving bicycles/scooters for delivery tasks.
We could, but I don't think we will. There are a lot of fixed costs in a car, so if you need a big car for just a few % of the uses it is very hard to justify having both a small car and a big car when the big car can do both.
A lot of car overhead goes into safety: they have to be big and heavy to counteract other cars that are big and heavy. But if the they are given their own routes and are controlled by the same software, a lot of that girth could easily go away.
You need a big car to haul plywood, or all of your equipment for a weekend of camping. (backpackers get by on much less, but if the car is next to the tent you tend to pack a lot of luxuries)
Safety is a factors, but that is more weight than size, 4 full grown adults take up a lot of space.
Exactly. The answer isn't public transport, but adequate public transport.
Of course if we ban cars we can't expect everyone to use a bike instead, or to rely on current public transport network. Train, tramway, metro, bus (, something new?) all need to be vastly reinforced (something between 10x and 100x maybe?) but there's room for that once cars are out of the picture (both from roads and parking space).
Cars are convenient, but not efficient at scale (and too dangerous, for now at least). We need another solution, and I think it has to be radical to really work. But then, banning or greatly reducing car use in cities will be a tough one..
I really think the concept of bike boulevards is one that needs more attention than bike lanes. Take a network of side roads and make them inconvenient for large vehicle through-traffic via bollards and other obstacles. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bicycle_boulevard
The result is a quiet, safe setting for 'micro-mobility' bicycles and scooters with decreased bike-car interaction. You don't even need bike lanes, because almost all of the traffic on those roads is bike traffic.
The article talks about bus + bike roads, sort of like Market St. in San Francisco, but I don't think that's optimal. For one thing, buses should be able to go much faster than bikes, especially Bus Rapid Transit, and as such pose collision danger. Also, BRT should be upgradeable to light rail, and rails are very dangerous for micro-mobility devices with small tires. Buses and cars coexist easily on the road. Buses should have their own lane, next to the cars.
I don't think this would solve much. In the UK at least, side roads are plenty safe enough for bikes. The issue is the big roads that people want to actually cycle on (because they are the fastest route).
Yeah, here in Munich the side roads are generally safe for bikes because they're narrow, much narrower than side roads in the US. But that by itself wouldn't make for a ton of biking if we didn't also have many protected bike lanes on arterial roads, as well as off-street walk/bike paths.
Bike+bus collision danger can be largely mitigated with protected bike lanes and intersections.
Also in practice, the extent to which buses can go faster than bikes is limited. There's a route I take to the local Ubahn Station, and in practice biking is about as fast as the bus, assuming the same starting time. Obviously the bus has a higher top speed, but it also has to stop every couple blocks, which eliminates its advantage.
For BRT, probably a different story, but if it has a completely separate lane infrastructure, you can just have the same for bikes.
It's excellent to see momentum building like this. Cycling:
- Has lower cost-of-entry in terms of purchase/rental
- Keeps you healthier, which can also contribute to remaining active and mobile in older age
- Provides easier self-maintenance for most common faults
- Requires less fuel (particularly combustible/fossil)
- Can be just as fast, or faster, for transit from A to B in urban environments (especially with e-bikes)
- Is more social and human - cyclists can chat to each other while commuting or in transit, rather than being isolated in glass bubbles (which sometimes leads to misunderstanding and road rage when a simple conversation - even if a little confrontational - might resolve things)
- Requires less physical space - which eventually will make it easier to park cars, once we reclaim this inefficient use of our environments
- Pollutes less
- Is more easily portable within other modes of transport (trains, aircraft, or cars)
- Is, in the presence of good bicycle infrastructure, simply a much more pleasant, enjoyable, and self-directed way to travel
One remaining issue perhaps is large load-carrying; and that's certainly somewhere where cargo bikes and cargo e-bikes are innovating. And also a situation where the physical distribution of goods is changing (for example, via on-demand delivery services, some of which themselves use bicycle couriers).
It's really time to get people shifting towards bicycles in a big way. The arguments against it broadly do not stand, especially in the presence of e-bikes. Cars aren't going to go away, but they're way overused currently.
I'm curious as to what planet you'd have to be living on to think that if we have billions of dollars to spare on huge transport infrastructure projects that aren't cars, that it should go to bikes and not public transport + walkability.
I'm guessing it's a special magic planet with startlingly good weather year-round, without disabled people, where everyone gets to age into spry Euro-oldsters.
Not wanting to kick off a unproductive circular firing squad vibe - in an ideal world, we'd do both, and more public transit frees up existing roads for cyclists. But public transport has to come first.
I don't mind the weather in Copenhagen where the amount of people who bikes every day exceeds the amount of people who take public transportation every day by around 50% (1). Weather in Copenhagen is rarely very cold or very warm. But Copenhagen weather is not "startlingly good all year-round". It rains quite often and temperatures are often close to zero or sub zero. And it's windy all the time. It even snows a few days a year.
I don't think it's a question of either or. It's a question of prioritizing both bikes, and public transportation, and electric cars and scooters.
Sadly, even in Copenhagen, where there are dedicated bike highways, elevated bike bridges, and generally very good biking conditions (mostly flat city), the amount of people who use cars every day far exceeds the amount of people who bike.
Copenhagen doesn’t have 40 degrees Celsius heatwaves in the summer nor winter blizzards that make you feel like you’re in Siberia, while places like the US East Coast (and I guess even the Chicago area in the Midwest) have them both.
Melbourne, Australia has heatwaves exceeding that, and shivers through thoroughly miserable wet winters, and yet we have a large, thriving, and ever-growing corps of recreational, competitive, and commuting cyclists, and that's despite the increasing hostility and declining levels of competence exhibited by local drivers.
The suggestion that cycling is a fair-weather activity is hogwash.
Those aiming to debunk me - and all I said is that public transport should take priority over some dramatic increase in spending as envisioned in this article - seem to read rather too much into the fact that some demographic cycles a lot.
There are huge demographic clusters (particularly late-middle-age to old, middle-aged-to-older women) who, statistically speaking, don't. I'm sure that we're off to the Proof By Anecdote races again about all the spry old folks who cycle everywhere. But in practice weekly cycling rates in places like NSW and VIC for the middle-aged are about 10%, tops, and this declines faster as people get older.
I would hazard a guess that on bad weather days, this skew gets even more extreme i.e. fewer people cycle total, and even fewer proportionally out of the demographics that don't ride much.
I don't know about Melbourne, but the idea that we should splash out Serious Cash on cycling infrastructure in Sydney (vs filling out our shithouse transit network) is just laughable. I'm pro bike lanes and better infrastructure (particularly at the expense of cars), but this 'think big' stuff is really on the nose in terms of equity of access.
> The demographic that bikes are young, fit adults. Can't bike much of anywhere without struggling with hills.
If only young/fit people use the infrastructure then the infrastructure is really poor! Note than I'm from the Netherlands and comparing countries is a bit weird. Why not aim for a better infrastructure than the Netherlands?
Anyway, for hilly areas I expect a large share of people to use electric bikes. And way more care for safety. In Netherlands they think about possible safety issues. Meaning, someone on a bicycle going down a huge bridge is probably going fast and doesn't want to stop. You could argue that a bicyclist shouldn't do that, but that's pretty pointless. What's better to engineer the infrastructure in a way that deals with that. Hillier areas would require a lot of thought.
The Netherlands bike culture is very different than in Seattle. In the Netherlands people ride cheap beater bikes in street clothes with no helmets. In Seattle people ride expensive racing bikes with Tour de France outfits on and helmets.
Electric bikes come at a large cost premium over that.
The demographics regarding participation are well known to be self-fulfilling negative prophecies. That is, if you don't build the infrastructure, then participation declines (or stays low), and particularly amongst the groups you mentioned.
Low participation from a particular group != low latent demand.
I've ridden in every Australian state capital bar Darwin, and rate Sydney drivers as the most aggressively incompetent of the lot - which, combined with the spectacular hostility of the state government to cycling, is a clear recipe for low participation.
Notwithstanding which, I agree that mass transit infrastructure should be built up to the level where it is an easy choice for every commuter, and not the unhappy choice for those within reach of a station.
If the argument is that it's unbearable to commute by bike in scorching heat, I would argue you could still bike and ask your employer to install showers at your workplace. That's how it's done in the Netherlands, where most (modern-ish) offices have showers next to enclosed bike parking facilities.
But that does not mean that parts os US that have favorable conditions should not improve bike infrastructure. You are comparing one city (88.25 km²) to a country (9.834 million km²)
Holland is the densest nation in Europe, but still has substantial farmland, so the urban parts are very dense. It is flat with a mild climate, and the entire urban areas combined would fit into an area smaller than New York City. This is somehow a reproducible model in your mind.
Then there are real economic and social trade offs that need to be seriously discussed. Historically the beautiful, walkable, lovely human scaled cities we all love before the automobile had large inequalities in land ownership. A small number of landlords owned most of the living units and everyone else rented from them. This was because the jobs were in the cities, so landlords could effectively tax people for having access to the high paying jobs. Once they got 1/3 of everyone's income, they could roll that over to purchasing more units faster than the renters could both pay rent and save to buy their own house. This creates a situation where a small number of families own most of the beautiful historical buildings that renters occupy in those lovely downtown cities.
It was the introduction of the car that created a real middle class and increased home ownership allowing people to escape the thumb of their landlords and buy cheaper land surrounding the cities while keeping their jobs in the city. This shifted the economic rents captured by urban landlords and transferred it to auto manufacturers and other producers, shifting resources away from rent extraction and towards production, which spurred economic growth, home ownership, and family formation all together. The growth of suburbs was merely a byproduct of this economic geography.
As transportation technology improves, cities become less dense over time. All cities, the world over, are slowly getting less dense. Living units are growing a few percent each year size, so what used to house a family over time becomes a studio apartment, and in this way, even as the buildings remain the same, urban density declines. Even builder taller buildings doesn't overcome the inexorable decline of density, a process uninterrupted since the early 20th century.
Global populations are diffusing, spread out constantly trying to stay one step ahead of the urban landlords and take better advantage of new transportation to buy units farther away where land is cheap enough for them to buy their own small lot.
When you start reversing this, you also start rolling back homeownership rates. Those lovely, dense walkable cities in the US are majority renter populations. They are also demographic sinks -- people don't reproduce at anywhere near replacement levels compared to more rural environments where homeownership rates are higher as are fertility rates.
In other words, there are real inequality and social sustainability problems with dense living. It's not even something that is demographically sustainable. These cities require a constant inflow of people from more rural areas or immigrants from other countries to prevent demographic collapse.
That doesn't mean that there aren't solutions -- perhaps there are! You can adopt public policies that disincentivize renting and subsidize homeownership in cities. You may (or may not) address the demographic collapse of urban areas. Spain (and the Netherlands) have massive problems with demographic collapse but have achieved high home ownership rates, but it addressing transportation promotion with homeownership and family formation all together, because all of these are intimately related.
This is something that the anti-car crowd has never done, nor is it even on their radar.
That people leave the city because they want to buy their own house and have kids, and once they are in the suburbs you really need a car -- that doesn't seem to register. Instead, it's all talk about building more infrastructure and this will suddenly reverse these trends. This isn't a serious engagement of the issues.
As others have pointed out it's definitely a combined approach to increasing both public transport as well as cycle infrastructure. Electric bikes give you quite the range, which may compare with the average car commuting distance in many cities. Taking public transport from the suburbs and then getting on a bike within the city centre is also very common here in Copenhagen. Heck, even driving to a train station, to take the train/bus, to take the bike, can often by faster than driving with bad traffic.
So while I agree that the car gave people the freedom to keep their job and buy a home, I don't think that argument holds given a decent public transport network and cycle infrastructure.
If you imagine an urban core in the center and a disk of suburbs around it, the availability of housing rises with the square of the radius from the core, and the cost of providing a rail/bus line to the core will grow with the square of the radius, but the cost of giving each person an individual vehicle grows with the population. So there is a density in which personal vehicles make sense and a density in which rail lines make sense, and this trade off is determined by the relative cost of providing individual cars versus rail lines. But because of this squaring effect, it's always the case that at some distance from the radius you need personal transportation.
While Holland is notable for its bike usage, it has 440 cars per 1000 people, or more than 80% of households own 1 car even in Holland, and 30% of Dutch households own 2 or more cars (See Figure 15, https://repository.tudelft.nl/islandora/object/uuid:a33eb3a5...)
Now maybe in the future there will be a fleet of self driving cars that you can call up -- who knows? Maybe electric bikes. There are many options, but density remains key in this trade off, and it's important to realize that different households have different circumstances.
I don't own a car, I live in San Francisco, but I realize this is because I am rich enough to live in the more expensive urban core, and that I am wealthy enough to be able to walk to stores staffed by people who are earning less money than I am and have to drive into the city in order to serve me coffee, food, alcohol so that I can just walk to their business. I am also dependent on goods being trucked in from far away so that I can walk up and buy them. So, it would be a bit inconsiderate for me to tell those people who can't afford to live in the dense core that they need to do without their cars and share my lifestyle. They are doing the best they can under the circumstances.
I don't speak danish, but according to that graph your claim is not supported
BTW how many people use a bike is a useless metric, how far they travel and for how much time is more important.
Copenhagen is not a good example, it's very small, very flat and public transport is very expensive and it doesn't have to handle the same number of commuters many other cities have to.
For example in Milan everyday a million people come to work from cities around it, in Rome it grows up to a staggering 1.5 millions.
Bike is not favourite because it's better, but because politics made it preferable (less expensive)
Things are changing, Copenhagen had it's first subway only in 2002, decades later other major cities and people will start using it more and more, because the city has invested a lot of money on it and can't handle people not using it or, as it is now, prices have to be very high, which kinda defeat the purpose of a public transport.
Subway it's a good rival for bikes, because they use different paths.
If you increment surface transport in cities with a large number of bikers, they start to compete for road space and it create tensions that need to be resolved.
Bikes in Copenhagen and many other small/medium northern city are the effect of inertia (historically they usesd bikes because it's what they always used), much as the ridiculous number of cars in cities like Rome.
As reference, the Copenhagen subway is run by ATM, the public transport company of Milan (Italy), where prices are an half even though the city is much bigger city, but there are public bikes as well, bike lanes everywhere and lots of car sharing companies.
But the best feature of Milan is still walkability + public transport (subway it's much better than buses and very good on average) because much of the population cannot ride a bike for more than a few kms at a time.
> BTW how many people use a bike is a useless metric, how far they travel and for how much time is more important.
As a Dutch person: what you're forgetting is that often the entire design of a city accommodates using bikes. Meaning: everything you might need is close by.
Further, the more people use a bike, the more people are aware of people on a bike. The same people who use a car also use a bike (at least in Netherlands and Denmark).
For Rome, the city is designed in a weird way. Cycling there is awful. Further, the traffic lights are utterly terrible. You're waiting way too long (though this is the case in pretty much most countries in the world).
When infrastructure is designed in The Netherlands the impact is assessed on public transports, roads, cycling infrastructure, etc. That determines where office space is put, etc.
Now for Netherlands there's millions using public transportation, also e.g. using a train. The bike storage areas around the big train stations are massive.
Notice how I mentioned that Dutch people are using bikes, cars, public transport? There's not 1 solution or something that's bad/good as you make it out to be.
This "good weather" argument against biking is so bizarre and disconnected from reality... Have you ever noticed that the most biking friendly places in the world are in middle-to-northern europe? Copenhagen isn't a particularly sunny place. Many people don't care, if you give them good infrastructure they'll cycle with every weather.
The reality is that many people in North American live far from their workplaces and some of us live in areas of extreme cold. This is where 15m of exposed skin can result in frostbite. We bundle up, but by cycling we’ve turned the commute into an unnecessarily dangerous adventure.
The same applies to cities further south: a non trivial amount of days are extremely hot and you’re risking heat strokes.
Edit: don’t get me wrong. Bike infrastructure is awesome and I wish there were less cars on the roads, etc. We just have very different variables to play with so we need to come up with different distributions of mass transit vs personal transportation. Comfort is important!
I live in Edmonton, North America's northernmost major city. I've been cycling year round for about 15 years. It went down to -42 in February, and I was out riding.
I've never had frostbite. I've still got all my fingers and toes. Although it isn't enough fingers and toes to count all the people I've known personally who've been killed or crippled in car accidents.
My point is that we default to easy and comfortable when given a choice, and cycling in -42 is neither. We won’t see mass adoption of cycling in these areas, regardless of infrastructure, unless we forced people to do it... and I don’t think pushing the majority of people towards enduring that kind of weather is something we should do, when there are alternatives.
Learning to read isn't easy or comfortable, so we force everyone to do it, because most would default to illiteracy if we didn't. Not destroying the planet is even more important than literacy.
Sure, no disagreement there. I’m not arguing against bikes but we should also be heavily investing in other forms of mass transit.
You bike in during the dead of winter, and that’s amazing. But how long is your bike ride in? How far out of the city do you live? Would you still do it if your commute was double?
Additionally, in Ottawa, many people live far out of the city and commute in via the highway for 30-40 minutes by car because it’s more affordable than living in the city. The bike ride is well over two hours. They will need other solutions as well.
My commute for a long time was 16 km each way, now it's 1/3rd of that. I've been hearing about climate change since I was a kid, so I've had my whole life to set my life up accordingly. I didn't make decisions that made commuting by bike unfeasible.
I don't think I've met a bicycle commuting advocate who doesn't also advocate for improved mass transit and walkable development. We stopped building neighbourhoods that way and razed many of the ones we had in the second half of the 20th century, so there's a huge supply and demand imbalance for walkable neighbourhoods in North America.
Copenhagen has much milder summers than both of the cities I've lived long-term (Sydney and Pittsburgh, PA) and considerably milder winters than Pittsburgh (and is far flatter).
The thought of hopping on a bike in the Pittsburgh winter, with hilly, iced-over roads sounds at best something for the young and extremely able, or possibly the suicidal.
Indeed, there is much evidence that even when the weather is shit, getting some exercise is really much better for you than sitting in a static seat, parked in traffic.
> billions of dollars to spare on huge transport infrastructure projects that aren't cars
Cycling infrastructure is almost ludicrously cheap. You can build pretty good bike infrastructure for a decent-sized city with O(€100m). A single metro line normally costs O(€1bn). The reason that bike infrastructure doesn't get built isn't cost - it's political. Car users don't like having lanes and parking spaces taken away from them.
> startlingly good weather year-round
Not _everywhere_ has weather suitable for cycling. However, a lot of places do have suitable weather and yet no infrastructure. That leaves plenty of room for improvement. Many cities could be suitable for cycling with some effort - e.g. clearing snow from bike lanes (see Copenhagen) or adding shade.
> disabled people
Cycling infrastructure is actually great for many disabled people. It makes safe space available for specially-adapted bicycles and mobility scooters.[1]
> spry Euro-oldsters
As far as I know, there's not much of an inherent genetic difference between the Dutch and the rest of the world. Perhaps having an active lifestyle is what _causes_ you to age into a 'spry Euro-oldster' - and is something everyone should aspire to.
I appear to have kicked off a frenzy of folks eurosplaining to me that they personally ride in deep snow, howling gales, and see no reason that people in hot climates (including hot humid climates with near 100% humidity, or extreme heat events) can't cycle everywhere at all times. Also they will all be happily cycling when they are 80 just like Grandpa Josef and Great-grandma Helga, etc. Congrats, but the statistics are not going to be with you world-wide.
As I said, I'm pro-cycling. Good for you, all you hardy souls. But it is a seriously boneheaded point of view to imagine that cycling is going to be more important as a mode of transport than public transport in most of the world under the conditions that exist now.
There's a large plurality - even in the totally cycle-happy countries - of people that don't ride, and that's a majority past a certain age. These people will get a small benefit (aside from cleaner air and fewer cars on the road, which is nice) from cycling infrastructure. Conversely, a drastic improvement in public transit infrastructure benefits almost everyone - cyclists are pedestrians and transit users some of the time, and they will also benefit from getting cars off the road.
Frankly a lot of folks are confusing their hobby with good public policy.
> I appear to have kicked off a frenzy of folks eurosplaining
Ah, come on. You asked for it, didn't you? You wrote "I'm guessing it's a special magic planet with startlingly good weather year-round, without disabled people, where everyone gets to age into spry Euro-oldsters". Of course, such an extreme statement will trigger a reaction from people who actually experience every day what you claim to be impossible. It's not possible in every city and it's not possible for everybody, but it's possible in more places than we think once we accept the idea. One quarter of the Dutch population cycles every day and the number of cycling people (obviously lower than the average) over 65 is actually increasing thanks to better a infrastructure and, of course, e-bikes.
And talking about hot climates: You remember the pictures from South China in the 1970s or 1980s where everybody was cycling because cars were too expensive and public transport was bad? Now everybody has a car and nobody with a sane mind would cycle in China.
There's various reasons not to use a bike, e.g. the mentioned way too humid/hot weather. However, the high usage is not due to "flat". Netherlands used to have a very high car usage and pretty much no bike usage.
Not below sea level but close to it and mostly flat: Kuala Lumpur, Dhaka, New Delhi, Kyoto, Ho Chi Minh City, Bangkok, Beijing, Seoul, Mumbai, Lagos
together they represent almost a billion people and the world's biggest cities. Should we ignore them because they're not snowy North American/European cities?
> As I said, I'm pro-cycling. Good for you, all you hardy souls. But it is a seriously boneheaded point of view to imagine that cycling is going to be more important as a mode of transport than public transport in most of the world under the conditions that exist now.
Here in Toronto, Canada, we are building out bike lanes, they are heavily used and it's pretty cheap to dedicate some lanes to bike traffic. They are used ALL year long, even in the snow. Yes, more people use them in the spring, summer, and fall, than in Dec-Feb, but they are used all year long.
Your complaints are not based in reality, either in cost or in usage patterns.
As a European myself this made me laugh hard. Yes, people here have a tendency to see everything in black and white and be really religious about their way of life.
While I also grinned at this inventive term my gut reaction is one of please not another one of those discussion-stopper epithets, free discussion is threatened enough as it is.
Yep. There is a small demographic that would even attempt to cycle. And hell no, I'm not riding my bike 20 miles when it's 98 degrees in south Texas. I can't think of anyone I know who'd do that. My typical day: drop my kid off at school (he goes early so can't take the bus), drive to work, pick up groceries on the way home, and then take a bunch of kids to soccer practice. No way a bike works for any of that. I love bikes (and no cars) for downtown areas. But if you live in the suburbs they are just for exercise/hobby for most people.
> that it should go to bikes and not public transport + walkability.
The article specifically talks about switching our mindset away from a strictly bike lane oriented world view to one that emphasizes diversity in micromobility solutions. That's why it wants the reader to "Dream Bigger Than Bike Lanes". Public transport and especially walkability do not contrast with this viewpoint.
Improving bicycling also improves public transit and walkability usually because bicycles take up so much less room than cars so buses have more space, and it's extremely rare for a bicycle to injure a pedestrian, but it happens hundreds of times a day just in the US alone with cars.
Also bicycle infrastructure is way cheaper to build and maintain than car infrastructure. And even when bicycle infrastructure is totally busted for awhile, people find a way around, where as with cars if there is any blockage it becomes an incredibly high priority emergency.
In my 44 years on this planet, having traveled a lot in many biking friendly cities and living in one, the opposite is true.
Cars respect pedestrian much more than bikers do
As a walker I hate walking in Belgium or Berlin, where you have to share the sidewalks with bikes that usually go high speed, faster than the average car, don't look too much around them and treat pedestrian as obstacles (try to walk on a bike lane in Bruxelles or Berlin and wait for the biker to start a fight with you, it's not gonna take long)
If you optimize you infrastructures for basically unregulated means of transport, you're just moving assholes from cars to bikes.
At least when they are on a car they can be policed and fined.
Bikes should share roads with cars, they have wheels, they are not pedestrian friends.
> As a walker I hate walking in Belgium or Berlin, where you have to share the sidewalks with bikes that usually go high speed
> Bikes should share roads with cars, they have wheels, they are not pedestrian friends.
Biking is its own thing. You have walking speed, cycling speed, moped speed (or quick electric bikes), car speed. There are different speeds between them. They should NOT share the same space!
Further, the bike lane should NOT be some crappy paint on the pedestrian path. It should be an obvious difference to any other form of transport.
Having bikes which go 10-15 km/h share the same infrastructure as 45-55km/h just makes the accidents and the severity of the accidents go up like crazy.
I once made a mistake on my bike, I didn't watch properly and overlooked a car. Fortunately the car watched out and stopped.
What's entirely strange is to blame one person and blame all the fault on the other. Accidents happen. What's great is to find ways to minimize them. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swiss_cheese_model
Wether is mostly a clothes and a comfort problem. I grew up on the countryside in the Alps and used the bicycle the majority of my life to commute, and that includes rain and snow. The days where cycling are impossible or dangerous depend on where you are living, but in my case it was around 4 days a year.
However I think when citylab is writing about the balance between cars and bicycles, they are refering to cities, where you (A) wouldn’t ban cars completely because of delivery and people with mobility problems and (B) the usage of cars by everybody has very tangible problems attached to it (space, noise, pollution, air quality).
And when we are talking about balance we are usually talking about one that is extremely on the side of the car anyways. Even in european cities there is are often two 1 meter bicycle lanes for six 3 meter car lanes and as a cyclist who often rides on crowded bicycle lanes while the streets next to me are empty, I can just dream of the things that could be done with the space of one car lane.
I have also lived for some time in Denmark and the Netherlands, where cycling is extremely widespread and I know what difference the infrastructure makes. When you cycle in a big german city you have to be constantly on the watch to not get overlooked by motorists, in the Netherlands nearly everbody cycles and the infrastructure is so much better, that cycling feels (and probably is) much less dangerous. This is also why it is more popular there.
That beeing said, I don’t believe that cycling alone will be the solution of the cities of the future. Cheap and good public transport systems and a clever network of delivery routes will also be needed.
And those who really need a car will certainly be granted permissions to use them (as they are now when it comes to all european historical city centers/pedestrian areas). The spry Euro-oldsters you mentioned seem to swear on E-bikes, because they can use electricity when they have to go up steep hills or just feel like it. Gives them the security they will make it even if their powers are running out. They would probably say sth. like: “There’s no such thing as bad weather, only bad clothes”
I'm faster with my bike no matter the weather. Especially when it's snowing outside. Gosh, snow slows cars down massively. I love this time of the year: no one tends to speed any more since drivers are afraid of crashing their cars.
The UV issue is a red herring. There are many reasons why people need to be outside and cycling is only one of them. UV is a manageable problem for walkers and outdoor workers, cyclists are not a special case.
I guess that you've never been on a bike on a very hot day. It's much, much more pleasant to be ventilated by your self-created airflow on a bike than it is to to have sweat pouring down your back as you walk around.
I guess you've never experienced a 40-45c day. You sound like one of the regular tourist types we get who dismiss how seriously we take summer conditions and then end up with heatstroke and skin peeling off from sunburn.
The 'self-created airflow' INCREASES the rate at which you gain temperature. Windchill is only 'chill' when the ambient air temperature is lower than your core temp.
To cycle on a summer day, you need to slather yourself in SPF-40 sunscreen including underneath clothing, wear SPF clothing, and make sure to be constantly drinking water. And when you get to your destination you're definitely going to need a shower. I'll take public transport over that, thanks. So does the majority of people.
To counter that: windchill also works at air temperature above body temperature due to evaporative cooling [0], as long as relative humidity does not reach extreme levels. Proper sports clothing (allowing good moisture transport) and sufficient drinking help with that.
> I guess you've never experienced a 40-45c day. You sound like one of the regular tourist types we get who dismiss how seriously we take summer conditions
Funnily enough I was thinking that about you, because on 40+ days we've got people out riding, overcrowding beaches, walking and some even sunbaking, many will be doing that without shirts on in the open sun and they're not going up in flames. Some poor buggers even have to work outside doing physical labor on such glorious beach days. Personally on days like that I like to go for a quick swim and spend the afternoon with a beer on a bowling green if I can. We've been doing this for generations, my great grandma was doing it before cars, sunscreen and aircon were invented and kids had to walk to school, indigenous people were doing it much longer. We aren't scared of the sun as our skin cancer rates will testify.
Of course these days there's people that take the doona off in the morning and enjoy their air conditioned house, run to their air conditioned car to work in their air conditioned office for 8 hours then do it all in reverse and never see the sun. Of course they don't climatise because they're living in a different climate.
The point is at air temps >39c, increasing airflow around you increases apparent temperature.
The more wind you experience (or the faster you ride your bike) in those conditions, the more work your body needs to do for maintaining homeostasis via sweating. You will certainly not perceive a >39c wind as a 'cooling' wind in any conditions, and the faster that wind is the hotter it will feel.
The efficiency of sweating depends on rel. humidity. Not what's being discussed here.
The fact that increasing airflow will increase the rate at which you heat up (and how much heat your body must shed) if that airflow is hotter than your core body temperature is just physics 101. Why do you think fan-forced ovens have lower cooking times or temperatures in recipes?
The minimum temperature to which you can evaporatively cool something also depends on humidity. If evaporation is still doing anything (i.e. wet-bulb temperature does not exceed body temperature, in this context), increased airflow will absolutely still have a cooling effect.
Been in Sydney for a bit. When it’s 40+ the most I can do outside is 5 minutes walking in the shade. It’s not fun. I wouldn’t cycle unless it was electric assisted.
Aussie Sydneysider cyclist here that commutes every day and in summer on a $70 bike - as long as I have a shower/beach at the end of my commute and a water bottle I'm pretty fine!
Look up skin cancer rate maps. It’s no joke in Australia. People die and often.
And then you have most populated regions in Asia with 40 degree summers with air so humid that taking a deep breath makes you cough. People still ride bikes, but there are days where it’s deadly to do so for long distance commuting. That’s not including typhoon periods where you’re liable to be whacked with debris and die (because work isn’t canceled for any reason).
> Cars kill 65% as many people as skin cancer in Australia.
Which would become closer to 18% if the number of individuals exposed to prolonged sun time doubled (e.g. by promoting Cycling). We literally run public awareness TV campaigns telling people to stay out of direct sunlight as much as possible regardless of what protection they're wearing.
I don't think you realise it but you're proving the point.
Bikes are fine when the weather is favourable, but a lot of the people commenting here just don't grasp the fact that in some parts of the world, unfavourable weather doesn't mean you might sweat a bit, it means that the weather will make you sick and kill you in short order. The same people that dismiss warnings when visiting countries like AU and then leave with their skin peeling off.
Honestly, that's impressively high. Imagine how much worse it'd be if everyone spent their days walking around in the sun. There'd be more than enough skin cancer to offset the lost road deaths.
Would shading all (/the majority) of the bike lanes be prohibitively expensive or doable? Encountering a problem should not make us come to a full stop and give up.
edit: Or bicycles with roofs, similar to the car solution?
As someone with very fair skin I check the UV index meticulously: there is no day in the year that I would be riding to or back from work with a UV index higher than 3 in Sydney.
Now if I was cycling at 2pm on a summer's day I would use SPF50 sun cream or wear a UV shirt, just like I do when I walk outside at 2pm.
I am sure that highly fit 20-30 year olds who train for marathons can manage.
I am not sure how that translates to everyday commute for tens of millions of people of all fitness levels and ages.
This 'if I can do it then surely everyone can do it' attitude is incredibly myopic given the scale of the issue. You represent less than 1% of the population (A total of 1% of Aussies report cycling to work once a month or more). Your views don't matter or don't apply for the other 99%.
Unfortunately, trying to make a solution bend to 100% of the population is equally myopic. Right now, car-based transportation networks have one set of tradeoffs that disadvantages one group of people. As silly as it would be, switching to a bicycle-only network would disadvantage another group of people. Rethinking of transportation mode-share is an exercise in decreasing and shifting the disadvantages and allocating different advantages, climate change being one concern.
I hope you see your point of argument regarding weather conditions: just because you aren't able to deal with the circumstances doesn't mean that everyone else needs to be forced into car/climatized shadowy areas.
The article is about giving space to -all- participants. Currently we highly prioritize cars due to arguments like the weather. As pointed out, weather is not an issue for many folks out there.
That's because Australia is populated by Northern Europeans who follow a Northern European lifestyle. This is completely as odds with the climate in most of the country.
In turn this partly explains Australia's high emissions.
Done in plenty of times, Queensland and Victoria, unless you're pasty white and have never stepped outside you aren't going to get burnt in 5 minutes, let alone seriously. I've done it with my normal cycling attire of a wife beater and shorts, still no burning. That's without any protection, but some sun screen, a hat and some long sleeves will prevent burning and save you from the long term skin cancer risks.
You could visit Amsterdam or Copenhagen, they aren't exactly tropical cities. And the situation isn't binary. Because switching to something else than individual cars as the default mode of transportation doesn't mean there's no way for disabled people to get around.
I've been living in Amsterdam for a few years now, and with the bike lanes it feels like disabled people are SUPER included.
You can see a lot of people in the bike lanes with mobility problems, in their electric wheelchairs, scooters, etc.
Completely impossible in my car oriented city, specially because these people often cannot afford a car in their situation.
It's so nice to see an old lady going in her electric vehicle in the bike line.
The point is not to ban cars completely, but to also accomodate other means of transportation as well. Also in city centers only limit cars to a strict minimum (delivery, disabled people, etc).
Honestly, I feel like a broken record bringing again countries and cities where it's working, they're not magical countries but real countries where different choices have been made.
German interest rates are below zero right now. There actually are hundreds of billions of dollars flying around the world chasing the slightest hint of return. So yes, we do have the money.
OK that public transportation is essential. But your climate argument is a bit shaky. Denmark and the Netherlands have comically bad weather all year round, yet bike transportation thrives on their cities. I'd say that an important factor of the viability of bikes is whether the city is flat. For example, biking in sunny and hilly Lisbon can be very tiring.
Denmark and Netherlands does not have "comically bad weather" for cycling. Rather they have temperate coastal climates without extreme heat or extreme cold or heavy snowfall - ideal for cycling year round. Yeah they have rain, but you can easily protect against that. Wind is not a big deal inside cities.
It also helps that Copenhagen and Amsterdam are really flat cities.
Public transport and bikes can both be important, the key is cars have been first everywhere for 100 years and both public transport and bikes are massively harmed by the huge incentives given to cars.
If people biked more then there would be less disabled people. No one who spends a couple hours a day on a bike is losing a leg to diabetes. Or getting hurt in a car accident, if they aren’t near cars.
In some parts of Sweden they do. I live there and tend to cycle through wind and weather. Come springtime I'm joined by a host of cyclists but when autumn calls they quickly disappear into their cars, not to be seen until next spring. Sweden is big, Stockholm and Uppsala are not representative for the rest of the country.
While it sounds preposterous right now this problem will soon solve itself with already built "bike lanes". And bicycles are not the solution.
The solution, as this article touches on, is light weight electric transport using the existing road structure. There's a strong indication of this future in the fact that last year the Dutch bought more electric bikes than normal bikes in total. And they paid twice as much for their electric bikes ($2000) than they did for their pedal bikes. Let that sink in: The Dutch are already starting to abandon their pedal bikes. This is the future of urban transport: lightweight electrics.
One underappreciated, but critical aspect of electrics is their lack of exhaust fumes. This will allow much more of city roads to be covered or even inside. With electrics you could park inside almost everywhere.
Electrics will soon start to invade the "slow lane" of cities with bikes and mopeds. Even a cheap electric bike already feels much safer in urban car traffic than a pedal bike because it has super fast acceleration from a dead stop and therefore can ride in regular traffic without being an impediment or needing its own lane.
If you want to lead this revolution forget about city council; buy yourself an electric bike and ride it in regular traffic with a hi-viz vest. The more people that do this the sooner the transition will happen. The current urban roads are the 'bike' lanes of tomorrow.
(One thing city councils could usefully do right away is to immediately ban any fossil fuel motors under 125 cc from their roads.)
> Let that sink in: The Dutch are already starting to abandon their pedal bikes.
Within Netherlands the number of accidents with bikes also has skyrocketed. That's due to often older people buying these bikes. They're more mobile, however they're slow to respond, plus not used to the speed of these bikes. As a result, more accidents plus the accidents are more severe.
The electric bikes are often restricted to 25 km/h (15.5 miles/h). That's actually too quick for most electric bike users.
It's great that older people aren't reliant on others to get around. Still, electric bikes do have a huge impact on the safety of their users, plus other people on the road.
Note that wearing a hi-viz vest can actually make you more accident prone. There's been various studies that a helmet or a hi-viz vest means other cars will pass you closer than before.
> Note that wearing a hi-viz vest can actually make you more accident prone. There's been various studies that a helmet or a hi-viz vest means other cars will pass you closer than before.
Even worse, when I used to ride a motorcycle I got complaints and agression when wearing a hi-viz vest. Either people though I was a traffic controller and sometimes approach me more aggresively (aggression toward police/traffic controllers is getting more common these days in the Netherlands), or they where angry and comment that I should not pose as a traffic controller. Because if every motorcyclist whore a hi-viz vest, how can the distinct them from traffic controllers?
bicycles are not the solution ... The solution, as this article touches on, is light weight electric transport using the existing road structure.
To me this sounds pretty funny: you make it sound like an electric bicycle is not a bicycle, whereas to me it's still a bicycle, just with the addition of a motor. Even a speedpedelec is normally still considered a bicycle here: after all it doesn't move unless you pedal, unlike a moped for instance.
Electrics will soon start to invade
Small city in Belgium here with historically a lot of cyclists: this has happened already despite infrastructire not being sufficient :)
Even a cheap electric bike already feels much safer in urban car traffic than a pedal bike because it has super fast acceleration from a dead stop
Hmm, having used more than one cheap and not-so cheap and expensive electric ones, that is not my experience at all and for more than one reason: it only works really well (i.e. better than a non-electric bicycle) if your bicycle is in the highest power mode and in a low enough gear. Even then, it takes some experience to be able to use that fast acceleration safely. Seriously, I see people struggle everyday with starting from dead stop just because they're still in the wrong gear or fail to put their foot on the pedal in time etc. Or they succeed and then they get suprised by the acceleration and can't keep the bike straight. Just ask people in the hospitals: amount of injuries is up since electric bicycles happened.
To me there's a big difference, in terms of urban transport, between a pedal bike and an e-bike, mostly because of the acceleration capability of the e-bike, which is even better than fossil fuel engines.
My feeling is that initially the 'e' revolution will start with e-bikes but ultimately will end up with electric mopeds (no fiddly gears) and electric tricycles (two wheels at the front) with seat belts and modest roll cages.
To me there's a big difference, in terms of urban transport, between a pedal bike and an e-bike
Sure, the difference can be substantial depending on model, but my point here was that I interpreted your comment as the latter not being a bicycle anymore.
So...electric motorbikes means you don't need bike lanes? Why don't we put children on motorbikes again?
NHTSA: "For every mile traveled, motorcyclists have a risk of a fatal accident that is 35 times higher than a car driver." [1]
In my experience, light weight electric transport mingles great with bikes, as long as they're limited to something reasonable. I can clock up pretty high speeds on a normal bike!
So no - we do need bike lanes because cars are too dangerous, whether your bike is electric or not.
> we do need bike lanes because cars are too dangerous
Cars only are a danger when the driver can't easily see you. A bike lane tells a cyclist to ride close to the edge of the road. That's not where most drivers focus their attention on. Bike lanes also encourage cyclists to pass traffic making a right turn on the right, make cyclists harder to see for traffic making a left turn, and can catch drivers pulling out from side streets and driveways off guard.
If cyclists rode in the middle of the rightmost general traffic lane, then they are much more easily seen by others, get more clearance when passed by faster traffic, and don't have issues with right it left turning traffic or traffic pulling out from side streets.
Sorry when I say bike lane I mean separated bike lane or cycleway, with a physical curb between traffic and the bikes. This is much safer than biking on the road or on the edge.
In Sydney we have dedicated bike signals at intersections (with dedicated infrastructure) so turning is no issue.
I agree with your point that it is safer to ride with traffic in the middle of the lane rather than an unseparated bike lane - that's not infrastructure, that's paint on a road.
A good friend of mine was cycling in a painted on bike lane and got car doored by a policeman. There is no hope of the general population checking their mirrors when opening car doors if policeman can't!
I agree many more people will feel more comfortable with an ebike in traffic but there are plenty of places without a plethora of ebikes and also plenty of bike commuters, but this change doesn't happen. The "feels much safer" argument is mostly about drivers respecting cyclists...which hi-viz and ebikes won't do. Hi-viz and helmet admonishments only lead to victim blaming. Hi-viz won't make me show up on a driver's phone, sadly.
In cities with reasonable 25mph speed limits and traffic calming then riding around with a regular bike works fine. EBikes are only icing on the cake for some people but I disagree that this is a simple single technical fix (i.e. more ebikes).
> And they paid twice as much for their electric bikes ($2000) than they did for their pedal bikes. Let that sink in: The Dutch are already starting to abandon their pedal bikes.
This is nonsense. Those ebikes are pedal bikes, they're just electrically assisted up to 25 km/h. You still have to pedal to move forward. And you have to ride them on bike paths/lanes just like normal bikes. So they certainly don't enable getting rid of bike paths: mixing those 25 km/h (often elderly) ebikers with car traffic would be a disaster.
Many issues with this approach - for example back home roads are frozen with snow +- 4 months per year. Often heavy rains outside this period. There are no 2 lanes - only one, so your approach would be blocking rest of the traffic heavily (even e-bikes are much slower than most cars FWIW, maybe people are just lazy and don't use the potential, don't know). People simply don't have 2000$ for an electric bike, thats super luxury back there (hard to explain to HN crowd used to buy their latest iphones, almost nobody back home has apple products).
And back home is still above global average in terms of income. It might work for western hipster places like SF, but globally this is harder to achieve.
The Dutch are finding that e-bikes are more of a substitute for a car than they are for a pedal bike. That should play even better in lower income countries. Time will tell.
Even electric bikes are not the solution, at least not in many parts of the world. What happens when it rains / snows? I don't know what the solution is though, maybe small electric cars, self driven, as part of public transportation service?
> Even electric bikes are not the solution, at least not in many parts of the world. What happens when it rains / snows?
What happens when it rains?
As someone who lives in the developing world, I'm always a bit taken aback when people seem to be so unaware of the lived experience of the billions of people outside of America & Europe. This isn't some hypothetical scenario that we don't know how it plays out. It is the lived experience of hundreds of millions of people who get by just fine.
I live in a city in Southeast Asia where every day over 6 million people commute on two wheeled vehicles. We have monsoons, so 6 months of the year are the rainy season.
What happens when it rains? We don't need to make theories. We just look at the real world in places where people can't afford cars and have to deal with rain. They get by just fine.
Go to almost anywhere in Asia, from India to Taiwan and everywhere in between, and you'll find hundreds of millions of people that get to work, school, hospital, and everywhere else they need to be on two wheels despite torrential rain and sweltering heat.
I regularly ride my "normal" bicycle (including 2 little kids in a trailer) in the rain in Berlin (where it rains for 167 days per year on average, which is ~45% of the year).
where it rains for 167 days per year on average, which is ~45% of the year
Well, neighbouring country in which it rained on 199 days on average in the past 20 years or so, but since it doesn't rain all 24hrs of those days, a more interesting figure would be that it apparently only rains about 10% of the time here. Meaning about 90% of the whole time there is no rain.
There's proper clothing which keeps you dry. Personally I find fresh snow awesome to ride in. Not so fresh snow is less fun, but I still do it. But indeed if you cannot / do not want to take the risk then in most places infastructure is not quite ready yet and we do need solutions. Shared electric vehicles combined with decent public transportation services would be my bet.
And when there's a lot of snow, a bicycle is "wrong gear".
(N.b. I ride in the snow for hundreds of kilometers every winter. I know you can take a fatbike to powder snow but that's just too strenuous for most people.)
idk, people seem to commute by bike even in the winter in Anchorage, AK... It isn't like there is a fresh dump of 6" powder every day. Most places, you get a dump of snow, it's sloppy for a day or two, then back to packed down snow and ice.
When faced with something like that, I usually just switch to the bus for a day
But clearing snow takes time and equipment and main routes have the priority.
For example my commute of about 20km has about 10km that gets cleared early in the morning if humanly possible; maybe 9km that usually gets cleared during the evening; and maybe 1km that may take 3-5 days after a big snowstorm.
If this is predicting electric bikes that can keep up with the current speed of the roads, I don't think it sounds meaningfully different from light motorcycles in terms of infrastructure. The vulnerability of the traveller sounds the same. But perhaps the lighter vehicle and environmental benefit will help it reach a critical mass where change will happen..
I think we're generally headed for slower roads in built up areas. It's the cheapest option. 15mph roads will probably be safe enough for cyclists and I personally believe stopping distances have got to come down a lot if we're ever going to let the robots drive cars in towns.
I've been saying for a few years now that self-driving cars are a fetish. (And can we please please call them "auto-autos"?) The thing to make is a self-driving golf cart. You could build that today, make it small, light, soft so it can't kill or maim people, sell a million of them.
(Old people! They still need to get around, they tend to be not so great drivers, and they don't mind the mellow, easy route.)
I'm not sure this is true. I average faster than the maximum speed of electric bikes cycling my commute, and I do not feel remotely safe in city traffic. Drivers don't have a problem with slow cyclists, just cyclists in general.
At different times I've been in all these roles, motorcyclist, cyclist, car driver and e-biker. As a driver I find e-bikes much less frustrating than pedal bikes because they keep up with traffic when the light turns green. As an e-biker I also feel safer because I stay fully in the traffic lane (at intersections), I don't have to always have one eye out for passing cars while I'm also changing gears and watching out for getting doored by parked cars. That's my experience.
Ebikes are restricted to 25km/h, at least in my region. You sometimes see them going faster so you know they've been modded or aren't compliant.
A lot of ebike riders are going faster than their skills would suggest, i.e. no time to build up experience of safe riding.
I accelerate faster than many ebikes, on my CX bike (which is vastly better than your typical Amsterdam upright bike), and will peak around 30-35 for bursts when in traffic as needed. Having said that I ride hard even though unfit, and have to avoid the typical bike lanes as they're just too slow for my liking - taking the longer way home is less stressful.
I like your points about getting rid of exhaust fumes, but why stop at sub 125cc..
Smaller engines are often less efficient, rarely have emissions control devices, and are more often two-stroke engines (which are much more visibly polluting and almost surely much more polluting in reality).
As deployed, they’re also often on vehicles that don’t get inspected and often don’t get maintained until they flat out don’t work.
I want talking down hill... More the 30-35 kmh nonchalantly with zero effort kind.
The extra weight of the ebike system becomes a significant factor when trying to push past the cut off point manually. Speaking from experience with a Bionic system.
I lived in Palo Alto, CA, (heart of Silicon Valley) and commuted by bike to work. (I even took my bike on the train for a few weeks.) Once I met my wife, we were able to bike to each other's homes and also bike to work.
It was great!
Then we moved in together, and because she had a dog, Palo Alto became prohibitively expensive, and we had to move a few miles away. I only used my bike three times after that. Even worse, my job then moved in the opposite direction, so I ended up with a commute that was only possible by car.
This is why I laugh at these kinds of articles. There's a lot we can do to encourage many forms of transportation, but the nature of a large world is that a car lets you drive 20 miles from point A to point B in a manner that's prohibitive by foot, bike, or train.
IMO, I think extremely large, subsidized, easy-in, easy-out parking lots on the edge of population centers makes sense. Within the population center, vehicles should only be for public transportation, deliveries, and people with physical disabilities. It's a great compromise that works for people who just can't bike 60 miles a day, or for people who live in areas where trains don't make sense.
If more people used them trains and buses would be able to run much larger networks thus making the 20 mile commute via train reasonable. However until people use them the network cannot be that large.
If the transit network was that large the freeway network in cities would not be worth it, thus further biasing trips to the train. However there is no easy way to get there from here.
Build it and they will come - you can't expect everyone to get out of their cars and start using public transport, then somehow use the slight increase in ridership revenue to sponsor huge infrastructure projects. Simply put: the government needs to throw down SERIOUS capital and political will to build out 20 miles of trains all around a metropolitan area.
We need to get away from the myth of single people and their small steps changing the world...we need our governments to actually invest in their own society's well-being and structure.
Right now transit construction costs are out of control in the US. (Road is only slightly better). Spain is able to build subways for about 1/5th the cost of New York city. Nobody knows why - we can find people doing nothing, high wages, and more harder rock, but all these together are just a fraction of the cost difference. Until this problem is solved we are better off building roads because we can afford them.
Thus if you want to advocate for build more, you should first advocate for figuring out how to build cheaper. (whatever this means - though if you sacrifice safety I'll oppose you)
A substantial part of the problem in the US regarding transit projects is also lack of practice and atrophy of experience and capability.
In the past 50 years, we didn't build those sorts of projects frequently. When we did, they were often one off projects in one city not repeated until another 10 or 20 years passed, and there have rarely been these sorts of projects going on in many places around the country at once.
As such, you've got:
- A very small number of suppliers for anything, especially with any track record of succeeding at contracts in North America, because the market has been unable to sustain more. Competitive bidding isn't when you get 3 bids and only 1 or maybe 2 of them fully meet your needs/requirements.
- Very few people with any real depth of expertise on building these projects on your management side, so running them effectively is unlikely at best. International hires may have more experience building a subway in the abstract, but that doesn't help them navigate very different regulatory/permitting/planning/contracting environments.
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I'm not necessarily saying "just throw money at it and eventually they'll figure out how to do it better", but to some extent we're never going to get to faster/cheaper construction until we're actually doing it consistently.
> but the nature of a large world is that a car lets you drive 20 miles from point A to point B in a manner that's prohibitive by foot, bike, or train.
Totally agree. Where I live I can't go anywhere in a timely manner via bike. Most places are just too spread out. But I love the idea of making downtown areas totally car free (or with the exceptions you mentioned).
This article paints the interstate highway system as some sort of evil incarnation without even giving so much as a breath to the idea that the Interstate highway system is one of the largest and most successful civil works projects of all time. The Romans had their aquaducts. The Americans have their highways. Prior to the Interstate system, it would take as much as two months to travel coast to coast. Eisenhower was part of an Army convoy in 1919 that did just that. It took them 62 days. With the interstate system, it can be traversed in just a few days. You have no idea how blessed you are to live in an age where transportation is so freely available. While our passenger train network may suck in the U.S. and rush hour traffic is awful, we have a phenomenal road and air travel network.
Meanwhile, I support bike/scooter lanes in dense urban core areas. They're not a solution for most people though, unless you can afford to live in the densest and usually most expensive parts of a city.
Autonomous buses should be within reach this decade. I can't think of a better mass transit solution more easily fitted into the existing systems than autonomous buses or micro buses that could fill more niches and provide reliable service 24/7.
But Eisenhower wanted the interstate system to go between cities, not through cities. And it's the latter that's the real problem.
That we have freeways between cities is no real issue for bikes, in Germany they have the Autobahn system and they still have reasonably bike friendly cities like Munich. Similar situation for Dutch cities IIRC.
But the autobahn system doesn't cut through the middle of cities in Germany nearly to the same extent as it does in the US. Actual high speed parts of the Autobahn basically stop a certain part of the way into Munich, and you have to get off onto surface streets.
But anyway, that's just one problem among many for car dominance in the US.
Germany has a fraction of our population. In 1950 the U.S. had 150 million people. Today it has 320 million. The interstates were largely built outside of urban cores but sprawl often took them over. Most European cities were built before the car. Their grid and design is totally different than U.S. cities.
Autonomous buses are an ambitious but realistic solution to people's transportation needs based on the reality of American real estate, roads, and commuter needs.
It's a fixable problem, long term. Bikes aren't super dependent on high density like a subway, even the relatively low density of many US suburbs can work okay if the infrastructure is good, and you allow POI (like shops/restaurants) within a reasonable distance. That would necessitate zoning changes, but it's easier to achieve than overall density changes.
If you look at cities that DO have good infrastructure, they have relatively high bike rates even without being particularly high density, like Davis, CA, or Portland. The idea that it just can't happen in US cities is not borne out by the facts.
“They’re not a solution for most people” — I encourage you to come visit the Netherlands. You’ll see a society where bikes are regularly used by “most people.” Wealthy, middle class, poor — nearly everybody rides the same cheap black bike. And not just in the cities, but throughout the entire country.
Sit in a cafe near a busy street in Utrecht, Amsterdam, Groningen, The Hague or Leiden, and you’ll see all walks of life riding a bike. It’s a lovely, human thing.
The United States is over 200 times larger than the Netherlands in area. Suggesting that the U.S. follow the Dutch model for transportation is completely missing the mark.
It's not workable at U.S. scale. Many workers live 10, 20, even 30 miles from their jobs.
I'm not understanding why you'd not design infrastructure better? So not entirely made for one means (e.g. car). It'll always be a combination. Some parts will be able to be like the Netherlands. You're saying the US is huge, but still you want one solution for all?!?
Further, it's pretty common in Netherlands to live in one big city and work in another. The Netherlands is small, so it'll usually be 10-20 miles away.
I've already said dense urban cores should have bike lanes. But let's not pretend bike travel is a practical solution for most Americans. Just look at an aerial satellite photo of Houston, TX, for example and you tell me how that's going to work out.
> Autonomous buses should be within reach this decade.
Or we could just deploy more buses, more bicycle lanes and reduce car reliance right now?
"A gadgetbahn is a speculative transportation concept that proposes to solve planning and financial issues via some sort of magical techno-fix, likely some technology that doesn’t even exist yet.
Classic examples of gadgetbahns are: monorails, “personal rapid transit”, maglevs, or the newest addition to the family, the “hyperloop”." [1]
Most cities are deploying buses. However, there are big problems with buses. The hours are variable. If you're lucky enough to live in an urban core (which most Americans don't), you can find reliable transportation via bus. If you find yourself in the suburbs like most people, bus routes are spotty and there's limited to no post peak hour support.
Labor is one of the most significant costs of running a bus. We've got semi-autonomous cars on the road today. This isn't some far off tech. This is imminent. And it would be theoretically easier for a bus to run a predictable route autonomously than what they're doing with Teslas and Waymos already.
I’ve thought about this a lot having lived in Chicago and now London and seen two very different types of infrastructure.
Chicago arguably has a true “cycle superhighway” with its 23 miles of continuous bike lane on the lakefront I was able to commute 10 miles to work very fast and with little exposure to cars.
London is a work in progress, with lots of infrastructure slotted in.
What I’ve come away with being a pretty committed bike commuter is that a good bike network should incorporate routes that are disassociated with the road network where possible. Like the lake path in Chicago, these routes are much safer, accessible to new cyclists, And fast (with few intersections). Also see Chicago’s elevated bike path the 606 for another example.
London could develop something similar along the river Thames (it does exist in parts, but it needs to be continuous, wider, and better developed), and improve routes along its canals. London could also develop and allow more routes through its parks. This in particular is low hanging fruit as routes through many parks are limited and have just been added to roads that cut through parks in many cases (another issue worth debating is whether roads should be cutting through parks to begin with).
I cycle 24km to work across the city each way on an ebike. It’s the fastest mode of transport available to me, even limited to 25km/h.
The bike takes an hour, the bus 90 minutes because of its indirect route, and the car about the same with morning gridlock. You could do it in 35 minutes with no traffic.
When I take the bus I arrive to work tired and groggy. When I cycle I arrive energised. I don’t drive because parking on campus is usually impossible.
The problem is that there are limited shower facilities and the ones in my building are extremely grotty, so much so that some colleagues have stopped cycling. Appeals to facilities has only resulted in them locking one of the showers permanently. If more people cycle that’s great but it’ll have knock on effects on other infrastructure and organisations need to pull their finger out and make changes to encourage cycling.
So I don't own an ebike but I've rented an MTB ebike a short while ago and was able to comfortably do 70km while still having over 1/4 battery left. That being said, I did not have it set to the max the whole way. Mostly spent in eco mode which is more than enough
Some are pretty good, I think the last one I rented had 80 to 160km range depending on the power setting/terrain. I used it to visit around my home town, climbed hills (paved and in the woods), visited small towns 35km away, climbed the steepest road (7km, 600m height difference) in the area on full power, &c. and never worried about the battery. If I ever move back to the country side I'll get one for sure. You can even remove the 25kph limit and make it go up to 50kph if you get a license plate / insurance.
Ebikes have improved a lot in recent years. Bosch makes a large amount of the batteries used in ebikes and they have a handy website indicating what kind of range you can expect:
> Cars are the slowest, lowest-bandwidth forms of urban transportation.
This is the kind of thing I read a lot in micromobility advocacy articles, but it seems like it can't be true. How can a bike, scooter, or moped be either faster or higher-bandwidth than a car?
Also, serious question: if electric SDCs became widespread, would it still make sense to advocate things like bikes?
You can't transport a family of three or a baby as safely in a vehicle smaller than a car (as they lack things like walls and air bags), and the many obese, elderly, and disabled people in the US can't use micromobility easily.
The key word here is "urban". I ride my bike around the city core sometimes just for fun and I can easily keep up with cars because they are going so slow. Now imagine how many bikes you could fit on a two lane road vs how many cars. Obviously if the car is coming from the suburbs its going to be faster.
> Also, serious question: if electric SDCs became widespread, would it still make sense to advocate things like bikes?
Yes, absolutely yes. The cars would still have to go somewhere after they have dropped off their occupants. Hopefully we will get on-demand carpool services that allow us to have vastly fewer vehicles on the road, which would free up space for bikes and other public transit.
> You can't transport a family of three or a baby as safely in a vehicle smaller than a car
Not everyone can use a bike of course. Some will have to use public transit, and yes some will have to use a car for various reasons. The streets don't have to be car-less, we just need to get enough cars off the road to ease congestion and be able to turn existing lanes into bike lanes or public transit lanes. Once good reliable and quick public transit exists, there won't be such a strong incentive to own a car.
I feel the picture is misleading. First, the angle for cars results in a closer, more zoomed in picture than for the bus and bike. Second, it assumes 1 occupant per car, but a full bus. More likely, each car will probably average more than 1 occupant, and buses will probably be less than half full, if not 25%.
> First, the angle for cars results in a closer, more zoomed in picture than for the bus and bike.
That's true, but I don't think it makes much of a difference. I couldn't fix the angle, but here's the same picture with second and third images also zoomed in similarily: https://imgur.com/a/2GMcSlE
> Second, it assumes 1 occupant per car, but a full bus. More likely, each car will probably average more than 1 occupant, and buses will probably be less than half full, if not 25%.
Actually, below is an example for a few countries. Average number of persons in a car seem to be decreasing with 1.8 in the 80s, down to around 1.4 in 2005. At the same time average seat occupancy for buses seem to be around 70%. This matches what I observe everyday - vast majority of cars has only the driver inside.
> Plus car drivers are advised to give a bike the same room as a car, so on mixed use roads a bike effectively takes up the same space as a car.
Yes, that is one case. On the other hand:
1. The fact that such advices are given doesn't mean they are followed. I also heard that car drivers are supposed to leave at least 1 meter of space between themselves and a bike when overtaking said bike. In my experience that happens only on an empty wide road; otherwise car drivers won't hesitate to overtake as close as possible.
2. In case of bike lanes, bikes obviously do take much less space, both when driving and when queuing.
3. Even in case of mixed road, there may be multiple bikes which do not need to stay so far away from each other.
4. Also on mixed road, when queuing together with cars, bikes will usually position themselves alongside cars, therefore effectively taking zero space in the queue.
5. Finally consider also requirements for parking. A single car parking space could probably fit 10 bikes.
I’d be interested in seeing an equivalent side-by-side image based on occupancy data. For instance, cars in the US average only 1.7 people per vehicle:
These articles are indeed often hyperbolic, and many of your points are fine and neglected by proponents. However, "higher bandwidth" probably refers to the number of people per second that can be transported through a certain lane width. At most speeds cars require roughly 2 seconds minimum between them, and they mostly are single occupancy, so they can't do more than 0.5 persons per second per ~12 foot lane.
Bicycles can do more on account of less spacing front/back and side to side. (This is sort of surprising given that bikes have a slower top speed, but it's really the time-spacing between vehicles, not their top speed, that matters when you're operating at capacity.) Bus can do more on account of being more passengers per vehicle. Trains are denser yet. All these have drawbacks on other metrics, of course.
Cars transport around ~1500 people per hour per lane, while 2 bike lanes taking up the same amount of space of a car lane is ~5200 people per hour. A proper train line does 32'000 people per hour.
This may be because I don't live in a "real city" (population 100k, US), but I see people biking with kids all the time (typically in some sort of cargo bike that has had seats added to it). The big threat while biking with kids (or without kids, for that matter) is from cars clipping you as they pass or pulling out in front of you. It's the cars that are the problem, not the bikes. Creating the infrastructure to allow people to bike safely will allow people to do what they're already doing more safely, and it will encourage more people to try it themselves.
IMO the problem is not the car, nor the bike. The problem is that they're sharing the same infrastructure. For new infrastructure I'd suggest also thinking about mopeds and quick electric bikes.
Cars are not space efficient. One person takes up the room of many scooters, bikes or mopeds. The infrastructure that supports cars also takes up incredible amounts of room. They are often slower simply because they are stuck. It is quicker for me to ride my bike 20km than to drive it in my city.
So for space spent on one car to move it and park it in the city you could be moving far more people. If you move to a less car centric CBD, you can still keep some car infrastructure there for people who need a car to get around. But public transport can also be improved, I am willing to bet more mobility challenged people would benefit from that than assuming they all use cars to get around. Not everyone has a carer, or a car that they can utilize.
In cities, bikes are often faster than cars because they just don't get held up by traffic.
In Manhattan or Brooklyn on normal streets my bike goes the same speed as cars when everyone's moving... but I don't suffer any of the bottlenecks. A delivery or moving van or garbage truck might be blocking traffic for two minutes but I go right by. At each red light there might be ten cars stopped but I go straight to the front and cross first when the light turns green. It's significantly faster, in congested Manhattan streets I'd estimate often twice the speed of taking a car/taxi, certainly during rush hour.
And higher-bandwidth if you've ever been to, say, China. When you see 50 cyclists crossing an intersection taking up the space that would fit 5 cars, well it's pretty obvious.
Yup, between being able to move past traffic, occasionally being able to bypass rules of the road (e.g., even if you don't actually bike the wrong way down a one-way, you can still legally walk your bike to the end of the block in less time than it'd take a car to circle), being able to take the subway, and parking, I'm often as fast and occasionally much faster on my bike than a car would be. (My experience is also Manhattan/Brooklyn, though this was often true in SFBA too for short trips.)
When I moved apartments recently, I easily beat my movers' truck via bike-subway-bike from my old place to the nee one because there was some temporary congestion on one of the main roads but the subways were fine.
Most trips are very short. West LA where I live, biking is my fastest commute option (4 miles) because I don't get stuck in traffic.
Pushing people out of cars would probably speed up the cars that are used by reducing the traffic around them. Families can handle more than you'd expect, and I regularly ride the bus with elderly and disabled people, but even if you have someone that needs a car, they don't necessarily need a parking space at each end.
LA is one of the best cities to push cycling - it hardly rains. If the city subsidized electric bicycle uptake it could be a beautiful thing. Of course, you'd had to also make car lobbying illegal so good luck with that.
A lot of micromobility advocates also seem to really hate public transit for whatever reasons, even though it's often superior to cycling in time, safety, and throughput.
To your second question, though, I think the answer is it depends on your intended location and use case. Most micromobility and cycling advocates want changes made to dense urban centers, which are less likely to cater to families with children. SDCs might actually make traffic worse in these places the same way ridesharing has since they will be spending some time driving around empty and also causing congestion when they pick up or drop off passengers. In more suburban settings, though, SDCs make a lot more sense.
I had no problems transporting my children, even when still a baby, in a cargobike (bakfiets).
It's a pretty convenient way of transporting your children in and out of the city, as it actually gets you to where you need to go. Compare this to a car: you cant really get to the store you need to be, instead you have to park in a parking garage and then carry your baby in the maxi-cosi to the store. I prefer a bike.
> You can't transport a family of three or a baby as safely in a vehicle smaller than a car (as they lack things like walls and air bags)
Most families of three can drive their own vehicles, though. And air bags are really only necessary because of... you guess what.
The "not everyone can ride a bike" argument is vastly overplayed. Not only can almost everyone ride a bike -- but even the ones that can't get a better road environment if fewer people go for the single-occupancy personal automobile as the default. It just occupies so much space that is 99% completely unused.
You don't need air-bags if you don't have cars. You'd also have less obese people if they would ride bicycles. Car is not a solution - it's a cause of problems.
Yep, if we can get self driving cars and people are actually willing to share that space with strangers it will be a big win for transportation efficiency.
However at the same time we should be investing in density and figuring out ways to make that work. Urban sprawl is massively innefficient by it's nature.
A bike needs maybe five to ten square meters of road space at a speed of 20-30km/h. A car needs around fifteen square meters standing still. Buses and trains are better still.
Honestly didn't think I said anything weird. I imagine throughput is high because lots of us can do this. I'm not a hater, I actually have an SUV. I just also ride electric downtown.
Assuming you’re talking about two adults and one kid, two bikes? You can easily transport two kids and an adult with a bike+trailer. Alternatively, in the Netherlands, you see bikes being used as school busses, with 4-6 kids in a big bucket in front, and an adult pedaling it around. You can buy them from various importers elsewhere.
Rarely I take bike lanes, they are less fast and irregular
The road should be used by bikes in my opinion (lower infrastructure/maintenance cost, and the separation between road and bike lanes is actually how I broke my right clavicle), and bikes should have priority against individual cars (not urgency and shared transports of course)
This will never work except for the tiny percentage of people who are extremely confident riding with cars. You're never going to get grandmas and grandpas and 8-year-olds comfortably riding in car traffic on regular roads.
I don't understand why people keep suggesting this when bikes generally already can use the road, and this is clearly a failure as far as getting more people biking.
Meanwhile, basically everywhere that implements protected bike lanes and off-street bike paths aplenty gets tons of people biking. But we shouldn't do the thing that's proven successful, because...?
A "simple" change could affect the way cars and bikes interact on the roads.
It's always the cars fault.
If the law were to change to favour the smallest, lest protected vehicle at all times then those driving cars would take much greater care when driving around them.
That would be a good, but insufficient change. People will drive fast on the wide, straight roads common in the states, for example, the road geography itself encourages it. Enforcement changes alone are not enough.
Parents are never gonna feel safe letting their kids bike just because hey, if they get hit by a car it'll be the driver's fault!
That depends entirely on the bike lanes.
In the Netherlands you don't see any bicycles on the road when there is a nice, wide bike lane present instead.
In Germany you see them quite often because the bike lanes there are often too narrow and their surface is in bad shape.
Wr tried. People threw them in the ocean and got cities to ban them.
It’s going to take me a long time to get over how broken hearted I am about people’s reactions to various bike and scooter share programs. I understand not using the services, but people were openly hostile to them.
the problem here with these services were that there have been just too many and around popular spots/bars/etc these share bikes just piled up to a point where it was nearly impossible to use the sidewalk especially for people with impaired vision
Might as well ask here, but why do bicyclists always seem to blow past stop signs and red lights? Whenever I am on a motorcycle, I always feel more endangered by a bicyclist coming out of nowhere than a car. Can anyone give me insight into this behavior?
It's a similar (but better) reason that motorists pull into crosswalks and don't come to a complete stop at stop signs or red lights or go 5mph over the speed limit. In their mind there's very little risk to doing so.
So many people like to equate this to a motorist doing the same thing but they're so clearly wildly different.
Dreaming bigger than bicycles would be helpful as well. Electrification, and having more than two wheels is a big step up in terms of practicality.
There’s a real sweet spot somewhere around where electrified pedal tricycles, electric three wheel mopeds, and small electric cars like the Renault Twizy, that has huge potential.
I cycle everywhere but I’m realistic about the issues with mass adoption. Bicycles are fundamentally unstable and they are too narrow to expect road discipline by cyclists to be an emergent property. There is also a very narrow band of weather conditions, especially as a function of how hilly it is, where most people can cycle without overheating.
Electrification is a game changer but there’s no two ways about it: these are now literally motorbikes, with all the same potential for antisocial behavior (pavement riding, traffic weaving, shortcuts through pedestrian only areas.) Not being quite so efficient with the amount of road space used might benefit cyclist behavior and force the authorities hand into providing first class infrastructure for non-car travel.
My personal solution is a bit of a hack: ride a cargo bike with a large front bucket. Keeps me slow and riding safely :)
We need to build bike lanes as their own adjacent network of lanes on our streets, with stop light integration within the city- meaning separation of cyclist and motorist, but adjacent -and bike lanes that run parallel to but removed from major thoroughfares.
Aka the copenhagen model.
Nobody is gonna ride a bike if it’s unsafe or difficult or if the bike paths are disconnected.
So yes, we should be dreaming beyond bike lanes, because we ought to be building proper ones right now!
I love micromobility. I think it's the future of human transportation, in combination with better, more efficient, more convenient, mass-transit.
But this "let's dream big about bikes" is like saying "we should feed the planet". Well that's a great notion, and we can totally do that. But who the fuck is going to pay for it?
The car lobby had lots of money, and was able to seize on an abundance of necessity and want: the military needed to be able to move things, cities needed to be able to expand housing out to suburbs, the country needed work, and politicians needed an answer to these problems and a big win. Interstates were a godsend to all these various issues, and the car lobby's funding made that an easy argument to make.
What the hell does the bike lobby have? Chump change. A lack of necessity. Hopes and dreams. Nobody's going to build a Futurama world based on that. You need more than dreams; you need a cause. And you need to be able to provide real value for everyone, not just people who like to bike. That means businesses, politicians, etc
I'm always wondering why it is the environment that has to change. I'm also living in a city and I neither own a car, nor a bike nor am I using public transport. I just walk everywhere I have to go.
Think about why you can't just walk everywhere and if the answer is that you don't have the time, maybe you should consider just taking that time or reconsider life choices. Why can't you live near the things you need to regularly visit? There's nothing really preventing you. You just don't want to, right?
So maybe everyone should think hard about themselves first, before dreaming about remodelling the environment.
There are a lot of different types of cities. European cities tend to be more dense and walk-able for historical reasons. Not everyone has the luxury of living in such nice environment or even moving places.
Even as a walker, cities would be so much nicer to walk into without the threat of cars and the pollution that they generate. Imagine walking in the middle of the road, fresh air, you have the space to cross people, some space could be reclaimed for plants and benches. Why not create the ideal environment if we can?
Personally, I wouldn't want to live in a city without cars. And that comes from someone not even owning a car. Simply because I enjoy walking while not meeting many people. So if as many people as possible can just drive to where they want to go that leaves me with more leisure while walking.
Make several separate but interconnected transportation networks.
Peds; Bikes; Light EVs (scooters, kick and seated, small cargo movers, narrow (1 seater) cars); Buses & Cargo Trucks; Trains;
Take advantage of grade (slope). Roads should have short ups followed by long downs (in both directions, it's possible) to let people take advantage of gravity. I once saw a fascinating pamphlet advocating for graded runways: planes taking off head downhill, landing, uphill. The idea was that you would save a ton of fuel.
>I once saw a fascinating pamphlet advocating for graded runways: planes taking off head downhill, landing, uphill. The idea was that you would save a ton of fuel.
It doesn't work, unless you build double the number of runways, at huge expense, because you'd have to have runways going both uphill and downhill in the same direction.
Runways in real airports go both directions, not just one. They change direction depending on the prevailing wind direction. You never land with a tailwind, or take off with one. So a graded runway wouldn't be usable part of the time, unless you built two of them like I said, or made the runway much longer.
Honestly, this idea sounds like something dreamt up by someone who's never piloted an airplane. I've seen other proposals for airport/runway design like this which also were dreamt up by people who had never flown an airplane, and the reasons their ideas made no sense were easily pointed out by actual pilots.
Ok, but now you have an airport that takes 2-4 times as much space as normal ones. Airports already consume an incredible amount of space; most places don't have that much space to spare.
This reminds me of someone's crazy proposal not too long ago (I think it showed up on this site) to make an airport with a big circular runway around it, with the idea that planes could be continuously taking off and landing. It didn't take long for some pilots to chime and and call the whole idea utterly insane and stupid because it's incredibly dangerous to take off or land while turning.
And for good reason: safe travel means separating speeds. Here in NL, the average cycling speed is about 20kph. Walking is about 5kph, 3 for the elderly. It's not a very good idea to share spaces. If space is the problem, it would be better to merge car and bike traffic [1][2].
I think there is a bit of a catch-22 in regard to ridership and using already limited city roadway resources. I am privileged to have a protected bike lane for a about 50% of my commute to work, but can't deny the argument that it is vastly underutilized in comparison to roadways. Unfortunately this seems to further polarize cyclists and non-cyclists when I do need to share the roadway. It is a difficult problem that large scale public works cannot solve alone.
Not nearly enough. What we need are breathing cities. Cities that are more friendly to humans and that function well.
The problem with cars is that they are dangerous. On top of that they also create air and noise pollution and take a lot of space. Is it really worth living in a hostile environment when we have better alternatives available?
The article is too focused on bikes. There are a lot of different aspects to a breathing city and bike lanes are an implementation detail.
Interesting how the author seems to think that cycling advocates have only a marginal impact on our built environment because they "ask for twigs".
I would have assumed that the lack of cycling infrastructure in cities is more influenced by the people who have power over our town councils and planners -- wealthy developers and transport lobbyists. How likely are these people to use bicycles over cars themselves?
It seems like we need a cultural shift here in America, but I just don't see it happening. People here expect to be able to drive their car anywhere and get there in a reasonable amount of time and be able to find parking nearby. That's been our reality since post-WWII, but I think people need to come to grips with the fact that the gravy train is over for personal cars.
Part of the picture of why bike lanes lose is because those same cyclists frequently turn to cars/public transport during inclement weather, rendering those bike lines useless and the system inflexible to repurpose the space for the additional automotive load.
Cities should build elevated bike "superhighway" loops. The weight and material requirements must be a miniscule fraction of an elevated road, and they can probably be mounted to multistory buildings or other tall infrastructure, or even suspended.
> Now, almost anybody can go for miles fairly quickly without breaking a sweat.
Yeah. Cars do that. Congratulations, you understand why people prefer motorized, individual over public or non-motorized, individual transportation. And btw, elevated freeways were one of the solutions for car traffic in the past...
In a dense city, if you want to "reclaim" your space, you have to invest massively. And I'd say the inhabitants need to pay. So tax everyone close to a city center by 50% of their current rent/mortgage and you can build the infrastructure of your dreams. It's not the commuters that profit from that investment, so they should not pay. If you merely want to protect the air quality, just forbid ICEs inside the city limits after, say, ten years. But please be consequent and apply that to your buses, taxis, delivery vans etc. as well.
I happen to live in an area where roads have been slightly overbuilt and there’s plenty of roads and hardly any traffic on them.
I’d say the existing infrastructure is perfect for bicycles we just need to get rid of the cars.
I love bikes. Obsessed bike commuter for many years. Anyway...
Maybe the big engineering project he's looking for is parking garages to get the parked cars off the street. Maybe also block side streets to reduce intersections.
Renegotiating the basics so that bicycles (and other light vehicles) get similar status to cars and buses was always going to be an uphill battle.
It's possible that a shift to driverless cars is an opportunity to do it. If driverless cars do succeed, there could be a shift away from private ownership.
At that point, there's an opportunity to be encourage much narrower, slower, lighter vehicles in cities. You don't a 2 ton car to transport one person 9km @ 25kmph. The cars we have are so big because they occasionally need to transport a whole family long distance on a highway. With self driving taxis this could (plausibly) be handled by a different car.
The conflicting road needs of bikes and lightweight vehicles (say <25kmph & <200kg) are much more manageable than bikes and pickup trucks (or buses).
A bit off topic: but what I’ve asked myself since I’m biking through town daily. Is there an increased lung cancer risk for city bikers with all the car traffic out there?
Yes there is, but it is statistically countered by the benefits of physical exercise that cycling provides. Car drivers are also exposed to pollution, although they don't breathe as heavily.
You joke, but I’ve kicked around the idea of bike tunnels with collimated air blowing down them at 20mph to make riding at that speed more comfortable, and make loitering uncomfortable. Microautonomy might make that feasible.
US Federal highways were built for homeland defense first, then commercial traffic, then individual automobiles. The infrastructure is built on government credit and maintained via gasoline taxes. A 50 mile segment of freeway might move more than $50 million worth of cargo and labor each hour. The same is true for city streets, on a smaller scale.
Bikes, by their nature, are rather terrible at moving things around like cows, refrigerated goods, building supplies and such. They are excellent at moving around people, and providing them healthy exercise in the process.
From an economic standpoint, the value that bike transportation facilitates is the aggregate value of the wages, production, and consumption of its riders. They represent 0.6% of urban commuters, with 86% in automobiles and 5% in mass transit. Even in Portland, OR only 3.5% of the workforce commutes via bicycle, and certainly less on the rare snow day.
Many would argue that our transportation infrastructure is the cause of this disparity. I think that they are in fact a reflection of economic reality. In places where bicycles carry lots of economic value, such as a highly compensated workforce, they have more infrastructure. In places where they convey relatively little economic value, they receive virtually no accommodation. In agricultural areas, roads have special accommodations for tractors, and rail is extremely valuable.
I could imagine, as many have and the article suggests, a vision for urbanism that is centered around human-first transportation networks. In a place where knowledge work dominates, this is entirely possible. Its happening now, in NYC where roads are being closed off to cars block by block. The roads themselves still exist because people still need things that are most efficiently moved by trucks, such as refrigerated goods, construction equipment, and so on.
A pedal-powered utopia would need to have a robust solution for moving kilotons of things like food if people want to eat, building materials if people want shelter, stuff if people want stuff to put in their shelters, and raw materials if people want to make things instead of just consuming stuff.
Bicycling provides plenty of recreational value, which is in itself economic value, and that should not be discounted.
If we're envisioning things, I'd like to see integrated networks of airborne, ground-level, and subterranean conveyance, each with macro, micro, and intermodal transit solutions that have maximal economic bandwidth and minimal environmental impact. Better yet, technology that eliminates the need for transit, like localized manufacturing and recycling... ie, instead of a garage sheltering a car, it could hold waste materials, shredders, extruders, 3d printers/fabbers, etc for anything from plastics to proteins. If everything we needed to transport could be transported via bike or drone at the last mile(s), if everything we needed came in small packages, if labor happened in place, if everything we made came from commodity components and openly shared designs... roads would vanish rather quickly.
Until then, bikes will get the infrastructure budget commensurate with the value they transport, and the same goes for each other mode. At least cyclists don't have to pay gas tax.
Nobody's suggesting getting rid of roads for cars entirely. Munich is radically more bike friendly than any big US city, but they still have trucks and stuff. Even in the city center portion that's off limits to regular cars, businesses can get deliveries.
And you can do some deliveries with bikes, I do see people doing it for DHL here on electric cargo bikes for that last mile. Doesn't work for everything of course, but I don't think the goal is literally zero cars ever, it's reducing the unnecessary usage.
You know what? Fine. I think the increased trend in cycling in day, San Francisco is neat. I have questioned the sanity of those who thought plastic pylons were adequate “protection” wherever I’ve seen them.
Streets are typically city-owned and managed though, and if you’re in a place with a tax regime like California’s, then you’re in a place that relies heavily on things like sales taxes and capital gains taxes which tend to go down the gutter, because good old fashioned property taxes, while extant, are not nearly adequate enough when 1. the assessed value of a property is completely disconnected from the market value which 2. leads to an illiquid property market which artificially inflates prices and 3. the actual property tax rate is largely outside the hands of the people who need to draw up a budget(supervisors, councilors, legislators).
So you want more and better bike infrastructure? I want more and better bike infrastructure. I know! Let’s pay for it! But how are we going to? We could tax and spend, but now you need to see if voters would like more and better bike infrastructure. Oh I know! We can tax the future taxpayers! Sell bonds. Kick the can down the road. I’m sure there is nothing wrong with that.
So now we know how we’re going to pay for it, how much are we going to pay? Well, how much do you like unions. If you’re a union guy, you have no incentive to get the job done any faster than on time, and plenty of incentives to not get it done on time. Well what about contractors? Small business owners have every incentive to get the job done on time because after this, they’ve got their next job to move onto. The more projects they can work in a calendar year, the more money they can make.
Ah, but you don’t want them to just go in wily nilly, make a mess of things and disrupt the flow of traffic and business, wake up the neighborhood and just make things generally unpleasant! You’ve gotta have rules! Sure, you’ve gotta have rules. In fact, you’ve gotta have an environmental impact report, confine portions of the project to certain days, confine actual work to certain hours, have adequate signage posted everywhere, and marketing fluff posted all over about how all this “stuff” is going to make life worth living (here) even better! All of which costs time and costs money. And quite a lot of this really just extends the time it takes a project to complete.
Like Irving Street, San Francisco. An extensive project to kick two or three bus stops down the road and extend the sidewalk a few feet on a couple of street corners which has taken, I don’t have a number on this, but well over a calendar year and has either just wrapped up or is about to wrap up. Actually I take that back, I just remembered part of the project is to move a couple of stops to 5th or 6th Avenue, the ones at 4th and 7th precisely are to be consolidated in the middle, and last I checked that ain’t finished. To say nothing of the numerous public meetings that must have gone into this project.
It was even a good plan, it just took too damn long. But hopefully we can repeat this process block by block, and create dedicated bike infrastructure of the kind that would make a Dutchman feel right at home, and if it takes 30 years and enough money to fund a train between San Francisco and Los Angeles, then who cares because we’re rich and therefore time and money don’t mean anything at all! Even if you only have the same 80 or so years to love and live as everyone else.
So let’s dream big, and maybe tackle the crisis or more like tragedy that is well, every single part of a modern day public project from start to finish so we can maybe build some bike superhighways from here to six blocks down the road within one human lifetime and only a little bit over budget.
None of this extended, anti-American rant has anything to do with bikes in particular. You're just complaining about doing anything at all with the government and with unions.
So, build some private bike infrastructure. If Elon Musk wants to make Hyperbike, sure, let's see if it gets built and forms part of a functioning network.
Also - how come your arguments don't apply to building roads themselves? How did Central Freeway get built? How did the Bay Bridge get built and rebuilt?
I was too young for the Central Freeway, so no comment on that one. Feel free to pull in the relevant data yourself though.
The Bay Bridge was built in a different time under a different regulatory regime and with fewer rules. The Eastern Span, because the Western Span hasn’t been “rebuilt”, much like the Central Subway (Not Freeway, I’m intentionally switching gears here) was built in a more modern regulatory regime, over budget, in more time than planned, and with defects which will limit the effective life of the new span (near as I’m aware the Subway doesn’t suffer this particular deficiency).
Let me be clear, I support building more bike infrastructure, but if we start tomorrow without addressing the regulatory and public budgetary issues of today, it will take more time than necessary and cost more than necessary and not by small amounts. I don’t want to privatize our bloody Streets, I want a sane taxation and budgetary regime that doesn’t depend on the will of finicky voters, worse: a supermajority of them in the case of California under certain conditions.
Oh and my friend, not all criticisms are inherently Anti-American. This is just that regular kind, the kind or a dissatisfied taxpayer dissatisfied with the level of service provided by the State and Local government, and the conditions which ensure that ain’t changing anytime soon. It’s the thing that guarantees that if you dream big and imagine every City an Amsterdam, you’re going to be disappointed. The more friction there is to doing stuff, the less stuff that voters have the stomach for to have done.
tl;dr Ballot box budgeting (to say only the least!) is insane, and ballot box budgeting for bikeways will net you more twigs than bridges.
Urban sprawl and planned cities are a pox on humanity. Look at this thread and tell me that these layouts don't look eminently more livable than the modern grid layout city.
Cyclists are already largely subsidizing drivers, because a) it's more than gas taxes and registration fees that go to roads, it's also general income taxes and local/state taxes, and b) bike infrastructure is radically cheaper than car infrastructure.
You're looking at at least an order of magnitude difference in cost, which overwhelms the difference in taxes paid. That cyclists may only be paying 50% or even 25% as much as drivers doesn't matter if the cost of bike lanes and paths is 10% of the cost of roads for cars.
Thus, it's actually drivers who are freeloading compared to cyclists.
Bike infrastructure IS car infrastructure for the most part. Also, auto drivers pay the exact same taxes that bicyclists do and additionally pay greater taxes in gas and licensing. Bicyclists always like to whine “Share the road.” It’s time they share the costs as well. Fortunately, there appears to be a push in my community to make that happen and I think it is great.
Now, if you’re talking bike trails, then yes. Those are cheaper. If you’re advocating that bicyclists should be limited to bike trails, then I’m in full agreement. If they’re on the roads, however, they should be forced to pay all the road fees cars have to pay.
> Bike infrastructure IS car infrastructure for the most part.
It is when it's bad, yes. Good bike infrastructure usually involves things like physically separated bike lanes, or off-street bike paths.
> Also, auto drivers pay the exact same taxes that bicyclists do and additionally pay greater taxes in gas and licensing.
I already addressed this in my comment; it doesn't matter when car infrastructure is VASTLY more expensive. Why would it matter that drivers pay double when they cost 10x?
Cyclists subsidize drivers. Period.
> If they’re on the roads, however, they should be forced to pay all the road fees cars have to pay.
The whole reason roads are super expensive is because of cars, not bikes, so of course drivers pay more. If there were only bikes (and scooters and skateboards) on a given stretch of road, it would be called a multi-use trail, and it could be made for much, much cheaper, since the engineering standards would not have to be nearly as high.
Your argument is exactly like if a city got rid of all its sidewalks, forcing people to walk on the road, and then to add insult to injury forced people to be 'licensed' and pay a registration fee to walk about. No freeloading steppers here, no sir! They need to pay their fair share now that they have no good options of their own!
I get that it doesn't jive with your current worldview that cyclists are subsidizing drivers, but it's true. Those cyclists you deride as 'whiners' are paying your way.
Fuck drivers. They are freeloaders on the health, space and safety of the people who live, walk, bike, socialise, work and have kids in the city.
In my city, there is a push to charge drivers higher toll fees to make it less lucrative to drive, similar to how bikes riders have paid a health and safety fee for years. Once drivers are paying their fair share for the use of highly valuable inner city space, then we can start to dream bigger than bike lanes.
I feel like this person is an optimist, envisioning a future that is never going to happen. I envision a future of rapidly decreasing revenues as the boomers die off and the population size plummets, while simultaneously climate change starts to wreak havoc, resulting in city infrastructure not being maintained at all, much less being improved to the extent the author is recommending.
No. It is a balancing act, where cars, bycicles and public transport co-exist, and infrastructure is developed strategically in smart ways and in a prolonged effort.
When I was young in The Netherlands for the most part the cars still dominated the streets. Over time I've seen cities and road networks gradually being transformed to what I now consider a Walhalla for cyclists. Public transport plays a big role in that too, and the Dutch still love their cars.
I highly recommend reading this article: "No helmets, no problem: how the Dutch created a casual biking culture" [0] which interviews the American Bruntlett family that wrote the book "Building the Cycling City: The Dutch Blueprint for Urban Vitality" [1]
See also the great discussion on HN at the time [2].
[0] https://www.vox.com/science-and-health/2018/8/28/17789510/bi...
[1] https://islandpress.org/books/building-cycling-city
[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17861803