Have you been in a place where lots of people ride bikes?
A small car world would be 100% -> 60% resource reduction. At reasonable scale, bikes are at least a 100% -> 10% reduction in all mentioned 'externalities' or should we say resource use, or 10x capacity for same resources, except for road size at maybe 3x, but still more than 10x on cost.
Public transit would grow (no need to fit all cyclists), but that should actually be a net benefit.
To comprehend the difference in scale, view images here [1]. Half as many cars wouldn't fit, even if they covered every cm of the image.
> A small car world would be 100% -> 60% resource reduction.
You're missing the part I replied to which was about bikes being usable 11 months of the year. If you need all the car infrastructure for 1 month, plus the bike infrastructure, that makes it overall worse, not better.
But discard that, if biking is a 60% reduction, then a walking+train world would be way more.
Your link talks of a train station building a 12,500 bike-parking garage. For comparison the busiest train station in the UK (Waterloo) has 250,000 people using it every day. Note that the pictured bike parking in Amsterdam takes up the space of two of the large multistorey hotels next to it, just to store metal, but pushes actual walking humans two hotel distances further away from their destination just to walk past unused metal storage.
Bike parking, like car parking, is a non-place in the sense of https://newworldeconomics.com//place-and-non-place/ it's not somewhere anyone wants to go, or a place where anything happens. Scale that bike parking up to 100,000 people and it would be an enormous amount of physical city-center non-place. Now count that you have to park those bikes at both ends of every journey - bike parking at the supermarket, at the clothes shops, at the pubs, at the apartment buildings - and instead of a small, dense, walkable city center, you're now measuring the total area devoted to non-place metal storage in square kilometers, and inconveniencing everyone with kilometers more walking every week just to cross the distances taken up by mega bike park bloat.
This picture is Shinjuku in Tokyo, the world's most populated city, near the world's busiest train station: https://newworldeconomics.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/shi... - can you imagine that street being as pleasant with 2,000 bikes barelling down it at 2x walking speed and every one of those eateries having 5-20 bike parking outside?
And there's no chance those 12,500 bikes would fit on the trains, how many bikes fit on a passenger train, maybe 15 or so? Bike+train means most people can only bike on one side of any train journey.
> Public transit would grow (no need to fit all cyclists), but that should actually be a net benefit.
If public transit is growing, more people will be able to not-need bikes.
> To comprehend the difference in scale, view images here [1].
e.g. [1] "The typical U.S. solution is to surround the train station with acres and acres of free parking.[...] There are 157 acres of land in this photo. When you step off the train, you have immediate walking access to 157 acres of /nothing/"
and [2] "The better solution is to surround the station with all the highest-value property. All the best offices, stores and restaurants are as close to the train station as possible, so we can walk there from the station, and where there is the most pedestrian traffic. Plus, you also try to put as many apartment buildings there as you can, so you can easily walk to the station in less than ten minutes."
"if you want people to be able to live without automobiles, you have to make it easy to get from the train station to wherever you want to go on foot. This means you put all the good stuff right up against the train station — even build it into the train station itself if possible. When you step out of the train station, you want to land right in a wonderful pedestrian Traditional City environment, not a parking lot wasteland."
When you switch a "large" surround of car parking for a "large" surround of bike parking, that doesn't fix anything. I put "large" in quotes because the measure is not abstract meters, dollars, or kilos of concrete, the measure is human size and human footsteps - walking past 12,000 bikes is 90% of people walking further for no benefit, while the bike owners also walk further for a small benefit of part of a journey, and puts desirable city space to use by metal instead of humans.
To be clear, I don't want to displace public transit -> bicycles. I was talking about cars -> bicycles. Densest cities are best served on foot - the places nobody would dare convert to car transit.
As I emphasized, cars -> bikes is not 100 -> 60, but 100 -> 10. Meaning not 1.5x nor 2.5x but 10x density. A moderately priced double-decker staggered height bicycle parking comfortably fits 20+ bikes in the place of a single car.
The only places that require comparatively large bicycle parking areas are large transport hubs, and in the example, the added distance for pedestrians is less than going between platforms, if any at all.
In a typical not-overly-dense places, bike travel is technically faster than foot if you're going more than about 50m + about 120% of distance to parking (if not along the way).
> U.S. solution .. 157 acres of free parking
That is truly foolish, and would fit over a million bicycles even without racks.
> The only places that require comparatively large bicycle parking areas are large transport hubs, and in the example, the added distance for pedestrians is less than going between platforms, if any at all.
> I was talking about cars -> bicycles. Densest cities are best served on foot
Right, so if you're redesigning smaller and denser, why on earth would you build so everyone needs bikes, instead of building so everyone doesn't?
And if you're not redesigning smaller, and distances are still car-suburb distances, they're still too far for bikes for most people and most journeys. You might have to do a 20 mile round trip to get into Houston center and back, for example, that's 1.5-2hrs biking. Way outside what you could expect most people to want to do regularly compared to say a 15 minute walk.
> The only places that require comparatively large bicycle parking areas
All bicycle parking areas are comparatively large for the people who don't have bikes. "The space of a single car" is ~3 meters. You only need 30 of those to push your walking commute, trip to the shops, visit to your friends, out by +1km and +2km after a round trip. Building for the 10% of bikers compared to the 90% of non-bikers is insanity.
> That is truly foolish, and would fit over a million bicycles even without racks.
If it did, it would still be 157 acres of non-place nobody wants to go to, spend time in, and resent having to get to the other side of. The foolishness is having that much inhuman space dedicated to metal storage, not that it's dedicated to fossil fuelled vehicles instead of pedal powered vehicles.
That is, the desire for and apparent need for bicycles comes from having a city built large enough for cars, too large to walk, and then having the cars removed. Where you are miles from your destination and between you and your destination are acres of no-place, nothing nice to travel through, nothing interesting to do.
In a city built small enough to walk, bicycles are unwanted and unneeded extra hassle, and when you occasionally do have to walk a couple of extra miles it's through a vibrant, busy, maybe even beautiful, human space not concrete void.
"It should be obvious that it is better to not need a bike than to need one. [...] we should not think about bikes-instead-of-cars, but rather getting over this unhealthy fixation on My Personal Transportation Device"
A small car world would be 100% -> 60% resource reduction. At reasonable scale, bikes are at least a 100% -> 10% reduction in all mentioned 'externalities' or should we say resource use, or 10x capacity for same resources, except for road size at maybe 3x, but still more than 10x on cost.
Public transit would grow (no need to fit all cyclists), but that should actually be a net benefit.
To comprehend the difference in scale, view images here [1]. Half as many cars wouldn't fit, even if they covered every cm of the image.
[1] https://biketoeverything.com/2018/12/18/bicycle-infrastructu...