Riding a bike doesn't need to be the only or primary way that people get around in every city, all the time, for it to drastically improve quality of life for people living in cities the world over. Most people are capable of riding a bike - especially an e-bike - to get to where they're going. It's cheaper than a car, it can be faster than driving a car, and it is obviously better for both the global climate and the local environment.
More than half of all daily trips in the US are less than 3 miles[1]. If cities give people the option to ride a bike for those shorter trips without feeling unsafe, a lot of people will ride bikes to complete those trips. That's shown over and over again. Change is hard, but a future with less cars and more trips by bike and public transportation is better, and possible.
I do think this is a more complex problem than people give credit.
I've seen bike lanes added to roads, and almost no one is happy. There's always idiot drivers and bikers and every now and then someone gets hurt or killed.
Bike paths make infinitely more sense (especially since they dont have to follow roads and can take more direct paths), but cities seem loathe to adopt them vs just painting some lines on a current street.
Finally climate plays a huge part as well. I live where it gets over 100f in the suummer routinely. Even a 3 mile bike ride at that point means you're drenched in sweat, which is just not acceptable in a majority of environments. Showers can be added but water is already a resource we're flippant with when we really shouldn't be.
Finally its not a great solution for the elderly and has some risks. Yes they can ride an e bike, but when you screw up at 20 mph in a sedan you wind up with a very expensive bill and an insurance premium hikes. When you crash on a bike, even with saftey gear, you can wind up pretty seriously injured.
None of this isnt to say we should not build more bike paths/trains/subways/busses, but I dont think its a one solution fits all sort of thing.
> Even a 3 mile bike ride at that point means you're drenched in sweat
I can't say that is my experience. Cycling at a relaxed speed is less effort than walking and you get a nice a breeze. I've cycled in 40C heat and it's lovely - more comfortable than being stationary.
It's hills (no matter the temperature) that make me break a sweat because of the exertion and a hardwired instinct to sprint up them.
> Finally its not a great solution for the elderly
Trikes are a nice solution for those feeling a bit wobbly on two wheels.
You seem to be missing the point that standing stationary with no shade in 100+ weather will make some people sweat, even if in shape. Its a natural response, and thats before you consider your attire.
Again people can bring a change of clothes, but Ive worked places that require a suit year round, or at least no shorts. Biking around in pants in 100f heat is hardly fun.
For those that need to be in a suit, I don't think cycling would work at many times of the year. But if you just need to do some grocery shopping, then a bike with a couple of pannier bags works well.
As I said, cycling is actually more pleasant than staying stationary.
If you want to argue that cycling isn't suitable in an environment in which humans should never be outside and only transfer from one air-conditioned environment to another then fine, sure, but my god, what a dystopia in which no human should live. Time to encourage migration to Siberia rather than cars.
Well, I would argue that 38C and above are hostile temperatures to humans and people probably shouldn't go outside too much those days hahaha, but it also depends on humidity. I do think cycling is suitable even in those places, and I personally cycle under those circumstances, but there should be a temperature controlled public transport option available as well.
Trikes are not a nice solution for people who get hit, lose control, or crash into something.
Again its the consequence of something, even if its your fault. Obviously speeding in a car can kill someone, but fender benders are pretty common and mostly harmless. Also obviously most people can fall off a bike and be fine, but for the elderly a simple fall can be life altering or even lethal, and thats before you get to the physical issues.
For an elderly person, losing control or crashing on a trike is a low speed non-event.
A car driving so dangerously, so recklessly, so without any care for humanity, to hit a slow moving bicycle is homicide. It's an outrage to ever surrender the road to criminals. No-one should ever accept such a mentality.
> Bike paths make infinitely more sense (especially since they dont have to follow roads and can take more direct paths), but cities seem loathe to adopt them vs just painting some lines on a current street.
They can make more sense in certain circumstances for long trips between population centers, but as an alternative to bike lanes within cities… not really. The problem with only having bike paths is that they usually don’t take you all the way to where you need to go! If you’re trying to get to a particular business and they’re not directly on the bike path (which they probably aren’t), you need to leave the bike path at some point. And that’s when it’s helpful to have a protected bike lane!
> None of this isnt to say we should not build more bike paths/trains/subways/busses, but I dont think its a one solution fits all sort of thing.
Correct, there is no one-size-fits-all solution for transportation. Including roads for cars, but they’re currently treated that way in North America.
> Correct, there is no one-size-fits-all solution for transportation. Including roads for cars, but they’re currently treated that way in North America.
I've lived in Chicago for almost a decade, and I initially did all of my transportation by public transit. That said, I'm really surprised at how well driving works in Chicago, the 3rd largest city in the US and one of the most dense major cities, and one which has far fewer highways than even smaller cities: Chicago has only a few major thoroughfares for getting across town quickly by car, and even still traveling by car is almost always 2-3X faster than taking the El which is faster than the bus and so on.
Of course, this isn't an argument for investing more in cars and less in other forms of transit--if the folks who rely on cycling and public transit instead decided to drive, then congestion would be unbearable.
At least in Chicago, I think we could make a lot of progress in making all commuters safer by enforcing basic traffic laws. Chicago has some of the worst drivers I've ever seen--people routinely running solid red lights, weaving through traffic, generally not paying attention, passing on shoulders (on highways), parking in the middle of the street or in a bike lane, and generally just not paying attention to pedestrians and cyclists. Similarly, it seems like most cyclists just fly through stop signs and red lights with no sense of self-preservation--I'm a very careful driver, but a lot of intersections have low visibility and I've had a lot of near-misses with reckless cyclists. Also, public transit could be a lot safer and more comfortable if we would enforce such laws as "no smoking, urinating, panhandling, fighting, stabbing, robbing etc on buses and trains". Unfortunately, we're in the process of driving the police out of the city (we are hemorrhaging police officers) while also making sure offenders are minimally penalized (our district attorney prefers to let violent offenders out on low bail, lenient parole conditions, short sentences, etc if her office is even willing to prosecute in the first place).
I think that's their point. Even if bicycles aren't a solution for all, everyone can still benefit from more trips happening by bicycle. The elderly or those with a commute that would leave them unacceptably sweaty can still drive, and they will enjoy less traffic, cleaner air, and an easier time finding parking thanks to the cyclists.
That’s a chicken and egg problem. If you live in a city without ideal weather thats already built with automobiles in mind, getting even just a whole whopping 1% of trips by bike is nearly impossible and still makes no difference. Possibly even counterproductive as the bikes are consuming the infrastructure yet volume is not contributing enough to the “everyone can benefit” part.
Living in a place that is overly car dependent, I’ve watched as billions are spent on light rails and bike lanes and such but ultimately have very low utilization. People, on average, don’t want to use it here. They won’t want to use it until there’s any economic reason to use it.
> Living in a place that is overly car dependent, I’ve watched as billions are spent on light rails and bike lanes and such but ultimately have very low utilization. People, on average, don’t want to use it here. They won’t want to use it until there’s any economic reason to use it.
Or, alternatively, until it can actually get them to where they need to go?
It’s always frustrating when cities put in a few disconnected bike lanes and then act surprised when nobody uses them. It’s like… yes, I would love to use this bike lane, if it didn’t just end abruptly and throw me into multiple lanes of fast-moving cars! There’s one near me that looks very nice in isolation but ends at a freeway on/off ramp, so I don’t dare use it.
Bikes/trains/buses/pedestrians taking up space that was once allocated for cars is actually a good thing though. By reducing road capacity you are increasing the cost of driving, which encourages people to get out of their cars and bike more. Think of it as the opposite of induced demand.
It doesn’t though. Not here. This statement is purely theoretical in an incentive vacuum. Or maybe just an ideal city repurposing old infrastructure (eg I think in NYC some old rails were converted to trails).
Let’s just consider the work commute/rush hours. The average commute where I live is probably 20 miles. But it has a wide range. I’d guess some double digit percentage commutes more than 50 miles one way. They do this because most of my city and surrounding area has grown in the age of the automobile. It wasn’t optimized for density and short distances. So, the driving commute would have to worsen severely to make someone consider even just the extra time of a bike trip. The weather, danger, physical capabilities, and limitations of a bike are added hurdles.
This is very observably true as when bike lanes are added, nobody uses them.
Your comment sent me on a bit of a rabbit hole, it turns out you can look up commute distance histograms in the census data here https://onthemap.ces.census.gov/
I looked at a few dozen cbsa metro areas, big cities, small cities, east, west, middle and the only 3 i could find with more people traveling 10-24 miles than <10 miles were Houston (34/36), Dallas (34/37), and Atlanta (34/38) so even in the worst case ~⅓ of commuters are doing less than 10 miles.
I couldn't figure out how to query this data via an api, but I did find a paper that looked at the 96 largest metros, which showed that Houston, Dallas, and Atlanta had the highest median between 12.2 and 12.8 miles. So I think that a 20 mile average is likely not true anywhere, though double digit over 50 miles does occur in all three of the above cities. Most cities have plenty of people commuting across the spectrum, though some are significantly denser than others (up to ~45% for <10).
Now looking at the per mode data, 10 miles is still on the long side for a bike commute. There is a steep drop off in people cycling/motorcycling to work (for some reason combined in the dataset) at the 30 minute mark. 20mph is fast even with a e-bike assist, probably somewhere around <2-6 miles would be the ideal probably.
I do agree with you that most people aren't going to start using bike lanes if that means a worse commute. I used to, but I cycle for sport and would do those hours anyways (now my bike commute is faster than train or car). Most Dutch people don't bike commute for fitness or sport or fun, they do it because it's the most efficient way for them to make their daily trips. Part of this is because of the density of that country and part of that is the infrastructure.
Thanks for doing the deep dive this is interesting data that I didn't want to research :)
> There is a steep drop off in people cycling/motorcycling to work (for some reason combined in the dataset) at the 30 minute mark
I live in Dallas which is one of your samples. I think on the above point what you would find is above a certain threshold and commuters are using a highway/high speed road and probably see it as a necessary component to keep drive time down. I just mapped my commute and it's actually 12.2 miles of which 9.3 are on a highway. It takes me a consistent 20 minutes to get to/from work; or about 35 if I avoid the highway for some reason. Average speed is probably a small factor and stop lights/merging traffic being the dominant slow downs.
On a bike, intersections still slow you down and you don't see people bike across a highway's path very often at all here because all of those intersections tend to be high speed, several lanes, and quite dangerous too. Since biking isn't a normal activity for most people here, I'd venture to guess most people would impose an additional danger to themselves until they got familiar with things.
The shear number of roads and infrastructure to be upgraded to make it feasible is daunting.
People generally take the mode that makes the most sense from a time, money, safety, and comfort perspective.
If a city wants more people to switch from driving to walking, biking, or transit the only way to do that is to make the latter options some combination of faster, cheaper, and/or safer than driving. Adding a bike lane here or there only induces those people who were right at the boundary to switch from driving to biking.
Given that most cities have spent the last several generations making automobile transportation as efficient and cheap as possible it would be very hard for a few bike lanes to convince people to get out of their cars.
To really move the needle you'd have to start charging market rates for parking and road use and/or make walking/biking safe and enjoyable. Or you could just wait until population increases inevitably result in auto traffic slowing to biking speed.
> Given that most cities have spent the last several generations making automobile transportation as efficient and cheap as possible it would be very hard for a few bike lanes to convince.
I agree but would phrase it as "externalising all the costs of automobile traffic onto other people (and some of those 'other people' are other car commuters who in turn externalise their costs onto other drivers)"
The kind of nerdy efficiency argument free-market libertarians would make if they weren't owned by fossil fuel interests.
If you're afraid of showing visible signs of sweat on a 100F day, something else is wrong.
I bike commute in Texas year round about 8 miles one way. 4-5 days a week. 104F or 22F.
For a typical day, it takes about 15 minutes of air conditioning for me to stop sweating, and I don't even change my shirt. On a more formal day, I'll arrive an hour early and bring my button down and pants in a bag, and the key is to completely stop sweating before you change. If you shower in the morning at home, a bit of sweat isn't going to make you stink. Office shower is a plus if you do cold showers though
I'm not a jock but being a bike commuter gets you more positive office cred than the anti-sweat pearl clutching gets you negative office cred.
And others work in environments that will get you fired for sweating. Its not about "office cred". Its about doing your job, and theres plenty where having bad BO is going to affect your ability, especially in more formal environments.
And this is before you consider all the extra steps now required such as show up an hour early.
To add to the list of challenges, not only are there places which get very hot, but there are also many places that get very cold or which have lots of precipitation. Obviously we can still increase bike adoption in these places during better weather, or in places that are just more moderate overall.
Other challenges include transporting infants, pets, or just larger commodities, so it seems more likely that most people will need to own a car and a bike. Again, not all trips require transporting one or more of these things, so we can still increase bike adoption.
However, these factors mean that the overwhelming majority would need a bike in addition to a car, and arguments about how much cheaper cars are than bikes only apply to people who satisfy the following:
* Healthy
* Live in an urban environment
* Work/shop/etc within a ~3 mile radius
* Live in a hospitable climate
* Don't have kids
* Don't have pets (at least not that need regular transport)
* Don't travel outside of their ~3 mile radius frequently
There are probably criteria that I'm missing, and yes, I'm sure some of those criteria are optional in theory (I'm sure someone knows some dutch guy who cycles his kids everywhere), but in practice these are deal breakers for mere mortals.
I disagree with the cold part. It is easier to dress to stay warm in a cold place than to dress to stay cool in a hot place. Both adults and kids bike in Scandinavia in the winter.
Cargo e bikes solve at least 3 of those problems. Public transport solves the rest. Being healthy is a result of your environment, not the other way around. The transition sucks but you gotta do it.
Yes and 80% of Dutch households have cars, and those who don't own cars aren't foregoing them voluntarily--rather, they have health or financial problems that prevent them from driving (https://www.researchgate.net/publication/358798695_The_wides...). Of the remainder of the voluntarily carless, I suspect that's biased pretty heavily toward the young, healthy, and childless. Moreover, car ownership in the Netherlands is increasing--in 1992, 42% of Dutch households were car-free.
> Cargo e bikes solve at least 3 of those problems. Public transport solves the rest.
Maybe theoretically, but not in practice. You're probably not hauling furniture by ebike or by public transit, and for most people there are so many individually-rare-but-collectively-common things like this that it's not practical to rent a car twice a week.
> Being healthy is a result of your environment, not the other way around.
No one claimed that your environment is the result of being healthy...
> The transition sucks but you gotta do it.
You don't have to be car-less to be healthy. This is silly. Note also that rejecting the anti-car extreme doesn't imply opposition to more public transportation, cycling infrastructure, or changes to make cities more walkable.
I didn't invoke a straw man, I literally quoted your arguments and cited research. Falsely claiming "straw man" is the cringiest way to concede a debate.
It seems China had a solution, but no more. When I grew up in China, cities had dedicated bike lanes. Each lane was at least 2-car wide, and was separated from car lanes by a green belt, so bicyclists were safe. The bike lanes disappeared or shrank in width as China got more and more cars, and the green belts were removed as well, making it a lot more dangerous for bicyclists.
This is same, as complaints in exUSSR countries, that when where communists, roads where empty, and traffic issues does not exists.
In reality, people where so poor, that there was less than 1/10th automobiles, which normal similar western city has, so those automobiles number was not enough to create traffic issues.
China current officials are essentially same communists as soviet, so they used obvious things for propaganda, and does not do real measures as long as possible.
Western world is not ideal, but at least it is honest- we could talk free about such things; we could critic officials, and we could suggest solutions and take part in implementing them.
> Bike paths make infinitely more sense (especially since they dont have to follow roads and can take more direct paths), but cities seem loathe to adopt them vs just painting some lines on a current street.
They're probably loathe to adopt them because often there are buildings in the way that would have to be demolished to make way. Painting lines on an existing street is infinitely cheaper, because no one has pay to demolish or build anything.
Bicycles turn quickly. We're happy to route around buildings and terrain. No one's talking about demolishing buildings, and with the size of parking lots required by code for cars, there's often plenty of space to go around.
Paint is popular with cities because they literally do not have to care about people's motivations at all. Which they don't. Paint is an easy out.
Bike paths are indeed amazing and could of course work great for small little electric assist bikes, scooters, etc. That bike ride that drenches you in sweat might actually feel pretty nice if the electric motor is doing most of the work and now you are getting a nice breeze over you. Although 100F is pretty miserable regardless of what you are doing without AC - there may not be a solution to that other than highly cooled public transit.
Once vehicles are outputting less toxic fumes, semi-enclosed outside spaces make more sense in both hot and cold climates.
Pedestrian subways is an idea overdue for a revisit as are bike routes that pass through parks and indoor malls.
Do any of these "city of the future" projects explicitly address this kind of thing? Seems kind of obvious.
Though I think its obvious that bicyles would be really handy in a zombie apocalypse (or any kind of apocalypse really) and that seems to be generally ignored by our modern culture too, preferring hot rods, trucks and helicopters.
> Finally climate plays a huge part as well. I live where it gets over 100f in the suummer routinely. Even a 3 mile bike ride at that point means you're drenched in sweat, which is just not acceptable in a majority of environments.
I live in the American south where it routinely hits the upper 90s with very high humidity. I really hate this sort of thinking.
It's completely possible to ride 3 miles in 100 degree heat without actually getting very sweaty. The mind-blowing revelation? Just ride a bit more slowly! The natural breeze from your motion will evaporate perspiration. If you have hills to climb and find yourself struggling to keep your cool, it means you simply need to find lower gearing, so you can climb the hill at a similarly leisurely level of exertion.
There's a notion that cycling has to be a physically exhausting endeavor, but it really need not be. If you simply put in the same energy on the bike that you would put into walking, you'll move a lot faster than you would have walking, and you'll actually be a lot less sweaty due to the breeze.
I live in Kiev, Ukraine, city famous for it's territory on few great hills.
We have so large angles of roads in some places, so cheapest models of cars, with smallest engines, can't drive up on 4th speed of gearbox, sure it is not easy for bikers to drive there.
So, in few districts bikes are impractical. And also, are very rare cars, with small weigh/power ratio.
> Even a 3 mile bike ride at that point means you're drenched in sweat, which is just not acceptable in a majority of environments.
First, how much you sweat depends on (a) how out of shape you are. After a couple of weeks your fitness level will improve and you'll sweat less/not-at-all.
As well as (b) how hard you pedal. I used to pedal hard on my cycling commute to work in the Before Times, and did arrive sweaty, but that was I wanted the cardio. I simply wore the funny-looking clothing and changed at work. No, I didn't stink: I took a shower at home beforehand, which reduced the bacteria on my body, and so it was fine. Sweat does not stink (it's just salt water), but bacteria stinks. But if I pedalled at a leisurely pace, then I hardly sweat at all.
Pedalling effort can also be reduced by pedal-assist e-bikes.
I’m fit but sweat a lot even with moderate physical activity. Same for my father. I guess it depends on your DNA. I’ll sweat in 40C just standing doing nothing.
Re: sweat… At least on a bike I’m moving and wind is hitting me. When I commuted via subway somewhere that required button down shirts and pants (not shorts), I still carried a change of clothes due to the heat and humidity in the subway.
> Finally its not a great solution for the elderly and has some risks.
it's not a great solution either to have elderly people in a car where one of their mistakes couuld kill people; but it is more accepted this as a "fatality".
btw there are lots of solutions of mobility for elders that do not include a car.
> There's always idiot drivers and bikers and every now and then someone gets hurt or killed.
There are idiots everywhere. I just prefer them to be on a bike or walk, because then they are much less likely to cause harm if they don't care about others.
> I've seen bike lanes added to roads, and almost no one is happy. There's always idiot drivers and bikers and every now and then someone gets hurt or killed.
which is why we should allow only bikes and public transport in large cities.
San Francisco is an illustrative example of how they are done right, and done wrong.
TL;DR: physically protected lanes are the viable solution and the one with the least unhappiness.
Almost all the unhappiness I have experienced in the city as pedestrian, driver, and biker of 20+ years,
is the result of improper (frankly half-assed) bike-lane retrofitting by painting some lines on long-established car corridors.
The inevitable and predictable result is they become a convenient parking lane. The advent and popularity of meal-delivery services and ride-share amplified this problem 100-fold.
Valencia Street is a laboratory example of this. The few blocks south of market with mostly-protected lanes are 1000x better for everyone than the nightmare blocks further south. On a typical commute down that street I have had to go into traffic at least a half dozen times to get around people parking. As ride-share traffic returns the corresponding risk of oblivious passengers throwing open doors is returning as is the perpetual stopping "right in front" of the destination regardless of open spaces 10' away.
Even Valencia's protected lanes are poor by the standards of any properly engineered white-page design; the constant interruption by "shared" turn lanes and the need to jog around them, of drive ways, of pedestrian cut throughs, is all just accumulated urban planning cruft there is no will to wipe away.
Me, I'd like Valencia to become a permanent pedestrian/bikeway, with no cars but emergency vehicles. full stop...
> The inevitable and predictable result is they become a convenient parking lane. The advent and popularity of meal-delivery services and ride-share amplified this problem 100-fold.
Has any city ever actually tried ticketing people who block lanes? In Chicago there's no enforcement at all, and I have to think that even a little enforcement would send a clear message. I don't mean to argue against protected bike lanes (although I've heard people say they accumulate trash and street cleaners can't access them, but I don't have strong feelings), but I don't understand why we talk about this as an inevitable problem.
> Has any city ever actually tried ticketing people who block lanes?
There is a large amount of discourse about this on twitter, the issues as I’ve seen:
- Police don’t think to
- When it’s pointed out to them, police don’t want to.
- Police are often frequent bike lane parkers
- Non-police traffic wardens don’t think to
- When it’s pointed out to them, non-police traffic wardens are sometimes unsure how to actually ticket them as their handheld computer doesn’t have a wizard for bike lane parking and requires inputting of a special case
etc etc.
My experience, I think ticketing is of limited use to discourage it as the chances of getting ‘caught’ if you’re only there a short time is pretty low.
These seem like pretty absurd obstacles. Police in various places have historically been pretty notorious for zealously ticketing other offenses--I can't see anything special about these bike lane offenders. Of course, following BLM there has been a lot of pressure on police to avoid any "unnecessary" policing (lots of studies confirm that police have been pulled back all over the country as a direct consequence of BLM-related pressure), so maybe that would affect things as of the last 5ish years?
I am capable of riding a bike, and I even enjoy it. But I seldom use a bike for transportation because I'm scared it will be stolen. Bike theft is rampant, locks are ineffective (especially when it comes to attached accessories like lights and pumps), and the police don't bother to investigate.
In the Bay Area we have some nice bike paths along the creeks, but the local authorities have allowed those to turn into homeless camps. Guadalupe River Park in San Jose is probably the worst. There are literally tents obstructing the paths. I know several people who have been accosted by aggressive homeless camp residents and are now afraid to travel through. And judging by the bike parts I see scattered around, many of the camp residents are prolific bike thieves.
As long as the local authorities refuse to enforce the law, I have to assume they don't take bike transportation seriously and are only paying it lip service for virtue signaling.
One alternative solution to that problem is a folding bike, then you can just take it inside with you. Some even fold into something like wheeled luggage, if you needed to take it inside a grocery store and not just your office.
So now I need to buy yet another bike (good quality folding bikes aren't cheap), fold and unfold it at every stop, and drag it around in the store with me? And how am I supposed to carry a load of groceries on a little folding bike without a big basket or panniers? Come on, that's just not a realistic solution for any but the most dedicated cyclists.
I absolutely want to see more motorists switch to riding bikes. The only way to make that happen is though a combination of infrastructure improvements and effective law enforcement.
> Most people are capable of riding a bike - especially an e-bike - to get to where they're going.
I'm getting an electric moped or motorscooter at that point.
They are more durable, require less maintenance, are safer and handle adverse weather conditions better, can be more easily insured and are harder to steal. Also they usually cost the same or less than a good e-bike.
Problem is the main path to move around a city with a vehicle is still, and will still be in the future, a road.
We will simply switch to more eco-friendly vehicles.
People will still want to move and carry other people and heavy stuff around without exercising, that is a modern obsessions, but not actually so common as one can imagine.
Yes people own bikes, yes they do casually run them once a week or every 2 weeks (especially because kids), but except some notable (small and completely flat) exceptions, like Amsterdam and Copenhagen, in Europe Berlin comes third with 13% usage.
And Berlin is considered a bike friendly city.
Truth is that if numbers were reversed, 13% of the people used a car in Berlin, we would be saying that __only__ 13% of the people are using a car.
In London, a 9 million people city (10x Amsterdam), only 2% of the people use a bike.
It means that anyway there are more people using a bike everyday in London than in Copenhagen.
I think what we really need, especially in oversized-for-no-reason USA, are smaller cars, like the Citroën Ami which I personally love. [1]
It is an ebike but is pretty cheap (less than 2k Canadian Dollars) and has a passenger seat as well. Also has a throttle so you don't have to exercise at all if you don't want to.
Berlin might be considered bike friendly but it's very far from being a good city to bike in, I regularly travel there with my bike and can compare with other European cities:
- You can get around but bike paths on sidewalks are very badly maintained
- Bike paths across major streets (such as the lanes on Skalitzer Straße, Karl-Marx Straße, etc.) suck balls.
- Cars are often stopped on the bike lane as it's not separated from the road like in the Netherlands, and Germany being so car-centric it's allowed to stop over bike lanes.
- There are many cobblestones streets to rattle you around, no separate bike lanes on sidewalks for those.
- Often, bike lanes on sidewalks are very bumpy due to tree roots' undergrowth.
- Bike lanes in general are very poorly separated from other traffic even though the city has quite a lot of space to properly separate pedestrians, bikes and cars.
I do enjoy Berlin to bike as it's extremely flat but the infrastructure is not even close to good. In Stockholm I have some issues with maintenance and some bike lanes in the center but its infrastructure is much more inviting to biking than Berlin. Sharing a 50-60km/h road with cars just separated by a painted line is not great.
> In Stockholm I have some issues with maintenance and some bike lanes in the center but its infrastructure is much more inviting to biking than Berlin.
And yet according to ECF (European Cyclists Federation) Stockholm is stuck at 9% usage.
My point is: there are many other factors that drive bike adoption, bike lanes, infrastructures and "they are good for your health" are not enough to convince a majority of the people, apparently.
Or maybe, except Holland, 15%-20% is kinda of a hard limit, very difficult to surpass, and we should start considering that in general no more than that will use a bike and plan infrastructure accordingly.
Sometimes I have the feeling that wishful thinking takes precedence over harsh reality.
The only other country where bike usage is more than 30% that I know of is China, for the opposite reason though, people are too poor to afford to buy a car.
That also explains the boom of dirty cheap micro electric cars in China.
It's not really a hard limit if there are exceptions, though?
The issue is that The Netherlands has been moving in this direction for 50 years. It takes decades of consistent policy to convert a city from car-only to multi-modal, and adoption will only increase once a critical mass has been attained.
For cycling specifically, it's about the value of the network: what I've seen happen in many places is that they construct a bike path, evaluate it a few years, and then conclude that there's not much bike traffic, so it must be that the people simply aren't interested in cycling. That conclusion conveniently ignores the fact that the bike path terminates on a dangerous multi-lane road at both ends.
You simply won't see cycling adoption rise with half-hearted implementations like that. Only when people can safely make a full trip to their destination does the alternative begin to appeal, and only then might you see a generational shift to cycling. So for a city that's completely car-dependent now, you're looking (roughly) at a 25-year policy window to see the full effects.
Why except Holland? Or parts of Denmark and Germany for that matter? It seems that 30-40% of bike share is definitely already happening in the harsh reality [1]. Add in another 30% walking and public transpor and a majority car-free city is definitely possible. And highly desirable for a myriad of reasons (public health, quality of life, sustainability, energy independence)
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modal_share
Stockholm's weather and geography is very different than Berlin, Amsterdam or Copenhagen. Bike infrastructure is also a second-class citizen for now and the public transportation network doesn't allow bikes (except local trains out of rush hour) which doesn't help usage as it's a sprawling city focused in multiple "centers" located around stations.
The ECF data you mention is from 2012, it's 10 years old...
Not sure what you are basing your hard limits on, care to share if it isn't just guesswork?
> Most people are capable of riding a bike - especially an e-bike - to get to where they're going.
Citation needed? If I think of my own family, the ones without kids in their teens, 20s, 30s, 40s are ok, but the ones older than that, and the ones with young kids, I would not put on an ebike.
[EDIT] Not sure why the downvotes. I'm cycling a lot myself and am a big proponent of cycling. But am no longer able to make this my only means of transportation now that I have kids that are both too old to fit on a baby seat and too young to be going around town on their own. Family members that have respiratory and cardiovascular health problems cannot do sustained even moderate exercise. Populations are aging worldwide. Thus I don't really know that the statement is true and would like to learn more from actual data.
In my city (Boulder), e-bikes are essentially banned on bike-friendly trails. A bunch of 70+ year olds are mounting a campaign to get that overturned, because they want to be out there on ebikes and access the trails like everyone else, even if their physical capabilities are a little bit lower than younger people.
Also, you can put "car seats" on many cargo bikes. You can tote around a kid safely on an ebike starting from about 1 year of age.
How many people do you suspect aren't capable of riding an e-bike? Clearly there will always be some people it doesn't work for, but that is pretty much the case for any kind of accomodation.
You could use a golf-cart sized vehicle, max speed ~20mph, and fit right in with the flow of bike traffic. So much safer for everyone involved than a car.
Would be nice if more cities optimized for golf carts alongside bikes.
There are lots of tandem like addons that work great for medium sized children - I remember using one extensively with my mother when I was around that age. People with cardiovascular issues could probably still ride a low speed ebike or electric scooter.
To be honest it sat in my living room for a week because of the fear of riding it on these most dangerous streets. (Bangkok has bad reputation for accidents worldwide).
But today I took it out.
I rode to work and it was amazing. People here respect two wheels a lot and drivers slow down for you.
Normally I’d walk to work for the exercise 3km. Which is about 45 minutes for me each way.
But today the riding took about 10-15 minutes with a great cardio workout.
I’ll take the bike out most of the week now instead of taking a cab.
Here motorcycles are the mainstay. But I’ll stick with my bike for shorter distances and cabs for longer ones.
> The Thai state has failed at promoting utility cycling as a mode of transport.[33] Officials regard bicycles as toys, and cycling as a leisure activity, not as a means of transport that could help solve traffic and environmental problems. Their attitude was on display at Bangkok's celebration of World Car-Free Day 2018, celebrated on 22 September. Bangkok's Deputy Governor, Sakoltee Phattiyakul, who presided over the event, arrived in his official automobile, as did his entourage. He then mounted a bicycle for a ceremonial ride.[34] Prior to the event, which encouraged the non-use of cars, the BMA announced there would be extensive free automobile parking spaces available for participants who were to ride bicycles in the parade.[35]
> In his first year office, Prime Minister Prayut Chan-o-cha launched a cycling initiative, encouraging members of the public to cycle. But state investment in cycling lanes ended up a being a waste as they quickly devolved into parking lanes for motorists.[36] All Thai rail companies, whether commuter or long distance, make on-board transport of bicycles difficult or impractical.[34] Without state intervention, direction, and education, the public lacks the impetus to adopt a mode of transport that remains ignored by urban development projects.[33]
> Without state intervention, direction, and education, the public lacks the impetus to adopt a mode of transport that remains ignored by urban development projects
Yes, because people here love motorcycles. They're faster than bicycles and no effort needed for pedaling.
Actually, I always (humorously) say that Thai people really don't like to walk. All my Thai friends just to go a hundred meters or so tend to take a motorcycle.
I just came back from bangkok and was impressed by how well people drive compared to other large cities in developing countries I've been to. To be fair Thailand is much more developed than I thought before going.
I don’t understand take that this is not possible due to disabled people, winter, hills. Climate and city planning is an incremental problem. Just 2 new bike lanes significantly change the way I am able to commute, even far into the winter, and when it’s raining or snowing I switch to car or public transport. I live in a reasonably bike friendly city for us standards, and it’s clear that some overhauls have made the road much more efficient for cars themselves, pedestrians don’t stray out nearly as much into the road, as did the consolidation of parking spots into parking lots. Just go see some European cities for how not only public transport, biking and a more modern street layout make life better for almost everyone.
For disabled people, having dedicated parking spots as well as a pedestrian friendly street layout makes life easier than having to navigate a busy street.
Make the city better for bike doesn’t mean making it hell for cars.
There are also lots of options for disabled folks that aren't all the way to a car. My wife and I bike around our city daily, and there are plenty of disabled folks zooming around on all manner of mobility devices, in the bike lane, on sidewalks, at similar speeds to bikes. I'd argue that making a city more bike friendly also makes it more friendly to these types of mobility devices as well. It seems that these two things, bike friendliness and disabled friendliness have the same needs of our infrastructure.
My belief is that the same carbrains pushing the "what about the disabled" argument are the same people parking their huge SUV illegally on the sidewalk, blocking wheelchairs from passing..
> Make the city better for bike doesn’t mean making it hell for cars.
It doesn’t, but it does mean that you can’t dedicate 100% of street space and 75% of space for businesses to cars. And some drivers seem to interpret losing any sliver of their dominance over the streets as “hell for cars,” making this a tough battle.
Its not so simple as “I paid I, so I do what I want”.
Are roads funded exclusively from tax collected from car taxes?
Aren’t bicycle and public transport users also funding roads also? Even if indirectly, by going to a shop that use those roads for supplies.
As far as I heard, roads cost a LOT to maintain (and more to build).
77 billion might be a small bucket in the ocean depending on the country.
This is public space, your freedom to drive a car impacts my commute time by bus.
Cars also cause a lot more road wear than bikes do, and they require a lot more road surface area than bikes. It makes perfect sense that car users pay for the majority of road maintenance.
This is a piece I don't know how to explain coherently - cities function _as poorly_ for passenger vehicles as they do for bicyclists.
Tons of queueing time, low reliability, noise, hassle, expense, lack of perception of progress.
I think a good city engineer would:
1. start gathering benchmarks for travel time by mode across the city, at various times of day.
2. Start counting intersection vehicle through-put
3. Start counting intersection "vehicle dwell time" (an intersection that has 15 cars stopped waiting for a light to change is wasting an incredible amount of time)
And then with this data, start modifying how the intersections are laid out, run experiments. There's 50 things someone could experiment with, some of which would be worth retaining and expanding.
American traffic 'planning' is so boring and so openly ineffective. It's a traumatizing institution to be a part of, if you have a sense of awareness and responsibility and agency.
Chuck Marohn measured his average speed at rush hour, and found it was about 16km/h ...
So despite the roads having a speed limit of 50 km/h or more, his average speed was less than 16,
because of all the traffic lights. And this was in a tiny town of only 14,000 people.
Incidentally, 16 km/h is the average speed of a cyclist in Amsterdam
> So despite the roads having a speed limit of 50 km/h or more, his average speed was less than 16, because of all the traffic lights.
> Incidentally, 16 km/h is the average speed of a cyclist in Amsterdam
Unfortunately this only says that removing traffic lights would drive cars' average speed up and many bikers aren't actually stopping at traffic lights.
Maybe average speed is not that important as a metric and we should not optimize for it.
I would prefer a 15km/h average speed for cars, but to avoid any intersections with other users and flow interruptions: people should not cross streets, they should pass over them on bridges.
Crossroads should not exist, only roundabouts.
Etc.
Anyway, in most of Amsterdam the average speed of cars is between 15 and 30km/h [1], while bikes on average go at 14.9km/h.
> removing traffic lights would drive cars' average speed up
is that knowing that cars are slow because there are a lot of traffic lights to stop at, it's not very helpful.
The only thing that we can logically conclude with that information is that traffic lights take down average speed.
On the other hand, being bikes' top speeds much lower than cars and being subject at the same traffic lights, the only thing that we can conclude is that they don't stop at traffic lights as much or they pass cars stuck in traffic, even if it's probably forbidden.
Which is okay, everybody does that, but, again, not very helpful.
It only says that bikes don't respect every traffic laws in the book.
Not a big deal, but we can't use that information to optimize traffic.
The video is actually comparing cars on a main road in London (Ontario) with bicycles in Amsterdam (North Holland). NJB is humorously pointing out that the traffic design in London is so inefficient, that Amsterdam bikers actually have comparable performance to London cars (qua average speed).
> and many bikers aren't actually stopping at traffic lights.
It is not because of this, but because Amsterdam created entirely separate bicycle routes that have grease separated intersections with main roads for cars. So they simply don't have as many traffic lights for bikes because of that. Also, even if the are traffic lights they're much smarter at adapting to traffic and have much faster phases than in America.
> avoid any intersections with other users and flow interruptions: people should not cross streets, they should pass over them on bridges.
No, the cars should be the ones going over bridges or through tunnels. Doing it the other way around is prioritizing cars and dehumanizing pedestrians and cyclists.
I average 20-25km/h on an electric-assist bike in San Francisco (because my commute happens to have dedicated bike lanes the whole way along the bay). Would be much slower if I had to dodge vehicles.
I understand there are a lot of documents and papers on this in the Netherlands, since they have been measuring and experimenting for over half a century now. They don't just count vehicles, but also persons. If you're in government, maybe also see if you can contact the dutch Ministry of Infrastructure and Water Management (Rijkswaterstaat). https://www.rijkswaterstaat.nl/en
Our city converts street lanes into bike only lanes like crazy. All under the guise of keeping carbon emissions down. With the result that still no one is using the bike lanes and the traffic is now more condensed and way worse on the remaining car lanes.
Bikes sound so good if you live somewhere with an eternal summer (or spring) and where it never rains or snows or gets below 20 C.
I bike all-year around here in Norway. Studdes tires feels even safer than walking. And on mornings after a big snow storm cars are stuck everywhere while I zoom past on my bike.
You make it sound like it’s impossible to bike in less-than-perfect weather. Which is false. Makes me think you haven’t really tried to use all those new shiny bike lanes.
Car-dependent Americans have such myopic vision that they can't see that investment to improve cycling and mass transit infrastructure actually improves the driving experience dramatically.
From my grandparents village to the district capital in a Portuguese countryside region, there is a bus coming twice a day, once in each direction.
If you don't want to lose a whole day just to go to town, either own a car or better be wealthy enough to pay for a 20km taxi ride (X2).
Most people won't cycle in a mountain region where temperatures in August are 40° C on average, nor do they possess the health to do so.
Plenty of European regions are just as deplected of good city with wonderful public transport networks, specially on the southern countries where the people love to spend their vacations and end up renting cars if they actually want to move around in a timely manner.
There are also a lot of disabled people that have a hard time walking or using public transport, because of steps, need to sit down and stand up, etc. But with the right bike it's much easier for them to move through the city. So even there the bike infrastructur is an enabler for disabled people. Don't force them into cars.
Right but the argument is that it’s not worth investing a lot of dedicated space for a mode of transportation that’s only usable for part of the year, by a subset of the population, and actually utilized by a so few people that you could argue that nobody bikes and after rounding be correct.
My city is approaching it differently, instead of bike lanes they are just adding significantly more sidewalk and marking the left side as where bikes should ride. The sidewalk can be fully utilized by everyone all of the time. During big crowded events it’s just sidewalk.
> Your first paragraph sounds like you're talking about cars.
Every single person no matter how old, poor, or disabled can utilize roads meant for vehicles year round. There is no "public transportation" for bike lanes.
Every single person no matter how old, poor, or disabled can utilize sidewalks even if that means assistive devices like wheelchairs.
This is not true of bike lanes at all. My grandmother even with a try-wheel and fully electric would still be unable to use the bike lane. People seem to forget that one of the ways people can become disabled as they age is balance.
Infrastructure that accommodates bikes is a good thing, dedicated infrastructure for them isn't.
Dedicated bike infrastructure is good, because if more people cycle it leaves more room for those disabled that need their car. So being so anxious about providing for them, you surely agree that we should do that and also ban other cars from the roads to make it even easier for them. Right?
That “if more people cycle” is carrying a lot of weight and even accepting the premise it’s still no because more road and more cyclists on them makes more room for cars. Bikes on the road condense but a dedicated lane is a fixed size whether it’s utilized or not.
dae if you really cared about the disabled you would hunt the abled for sport isn’t an argument. Providing for the disabled is making accommodations. Blanketing a city with dedicated infrastructure that in practice is inaccessible to people who aren’t young, somewhat in shape, and abled is silly — that takes away space from the abled. And trust me I’m not weaponizing the disabled, it’s entirely selfish of me because with 100% certainty in my lifetime I will be disabled temporarily from injury and permanently from age.
Ban cars entirely for all I care, I’ll fully support you turning city centers into pedestrian only areas with scooters and small electric golf carts for those limited mobility. Even in a world entirely without cars bikes lanes are still dumb.
> Even in a world entirely without cars bikes lanes are still dumb.
The bicycle hate runs deep. Why?
Dedicated bike infrastructure also reduces conflicts with pedestrians. Often better to have two separate ways, than one big with everyone intermingled. If you are unable to even comprehend that, I question your bias in this.
I just picked up an e-bike, and it's gobsmacking how much it changes the equation for bicycling - it reduces the difficulty to a degree that it just doesn't make sense to take any other mode of transport within 3-5 miles of home, which is basically my entire city. It's unlocked a huge amount of travel that I wouldn't have bothered to do otherwise because it's too far to walk and driving (and parking) is a pain in the ass. If you haven't tried a modern e-bike, give it a shot - it really, really changes the game for transport.
My biggest concern in getting an e-bike is the fear of it getting stolen. I live in an European capital where this kind of crime is quite common. Didn't look too deep into insurance options, but still.
Other than that, the idea sounds super nice. I see more and more people using e-bikes here.
Yeah, that's a concern. I've got a Kryptonite for the frame and a beefy cable for the front wheel, and I'm going to get pinlocks for everything I can. I don't think I'd leave it out overnight or be real comfortable leaving it on the street for a whole day, but for meals, stops into stores, etc I think it's protected well enough.
(I'd note also though that there's enough broken glass on the sides of the roads around here that I'm not sure a car is much of a theft deterrent either.)
I watched the video, and I still think winter (and late fall, and early spring) weather is a problem for biking in the Pacific Northwest. It's just not a pleasant or safe thing to do most of the year.
I see a lot of snow in that video, and not a lot of rain. Best of luck biking in sheeting rain.
For me, most of the reason it's not pleasant or safe to do in the PNW is due to cars. I stop biking around when DST kicks in and causes most of my riding needs to happen after dark, because it's just a little more likely some pickup truck will not see me despite my flashing lights and reflectors. Some journeys I'll still do, because there's good bike infrastructure - but general biking after late october is more risk than I want to take on.
Yeah, evolving the culture of drivers is harder than putting in bike infrastructure.
Painting bike lanes is cheap and effective, but not foolproof. You have to change how people drive, and it seems like the wealthier the suburb, the more careless drivers are (driving fast, blowing lights/signs, not yielding the right of way).
You must separated paths for bikes and cars. We did that in Paris in the past few years and bike usage has exploded. It simply becomes safe (and pleasant) to ride a bike and people tends to follow others when society make a reasonable choice (favor bikes over cars).
And it was/is not easy to make space for bike in such a dense city.
Indeed, and in the US when it comes to making changes to urban areas for bikes, the prevailing attitude is something along the lines of je suis fatigué.
Here in Boston I've had several coworkers who consistently commuted by bike even when it was pouring out. They just wore rain suits, had waterproof panniers, and presumably weren't trying to maintain a 20 mph pace.
I biked daily in the Pacific Northwest for over a decade. You get rained on, but honestly there were only 2-3 days a year where it was a lot of rain. Vast majority of the time it was drizzly and with proper rain gear it was completely unnoticeable.
Rain with leaves on the road is really the biggest problem. With the normal mountain bike tyres snow is giving good grip and not an issue. But if you can't cycle for two full months per year that's fine if you switch back for the rest of the year.
road grime, sweat, and sunscreen can be avoided with good clothing choices, and the ebike doing most of the work. You might not want to ride if you're headed to a black tie formal event, but the point is there are plenty of trips where none of these are an issue.
We just finished a period of something like 100 days over 100F. There's not much you can do to avoid sweat on those days, especially when it's also humid.
I personally won't ride when it's above 102F because even when I sweat and there's a light breeze I struggle to cool down.
Why is an ebike so impractical in Texas when motorcycles are so popular? And what about all the people on bicycles/motorcycles/scooters in even hotter regions like Vietnam and India?
I sold my motorcycle a couple of years ago because it was pretty impractical for much of the year. Riding around with a good jacket, pants, gloves, boots, and helmet isn't much fun in the summer, especially commuting traffic (I couldn't afford riding gear with built-in cooling).
I'm not sure what you are asking about people in Vietnam or India. I've never been to either place however there are a lot of Vietnamese and Indian people who work in the same office park I work in and going by the people I meet around the bicycle rack, I don't think they are any more or less likely to commute via bicycle than any other group.
In general, if you can take a car you can ride an ebike; if there's so much snow that no car except special 4WD can cross, then yes a bike doesn't work either (although it's still better than most cars); and when it's pouring and you'd be completely drenched in the one minute it takes to get to your car, a bike isn't too great either.
But everything else is fine. Weather isn't really a problem on a bike / ebike.
Yes, there are always a few folks who will pull their bikes out in 0°F (-18°C) and go out on icy roads, but they are a vast minority. And a lot of cities in the world experience those kinds of temperatures.
Also, bikes (especially individual bikes) are not very compatible with many types of disabilities. We really should keep accessibility in mind when working on Urban areas.
> Yes, there are always a few folks who will pull their bikes out in 0°F (-18°C) and go out on icy roads, but they are a vast minority. And a lot of cities in the world experience those kinds of temperatures.
The majority of population centers are outside of regions with that kind of low temperatures. Even if the temperatures get that low, its usually not for the majority of the year. And cities with well planned out and maintained cycling infrastructure do demonstrate that cycling even with low temperatures is a feasible mode of transportation.
> Also, bikes (especially individual bikes) are not very compatible with many types of disabilities.
Getting rid of cars that don't _need_ to be in a city makes space for cars that do need to be there. Very few people who are seriously debating this topic are for banning every kind of motorized vehicle outright. Obviously there are many cases where cars/trucks are the only feasible/best option, even in a city. Emergency vehicles, delivery trucks or vehicles for people with limited mobility.
> We really should keep accessibility in mind when working on Urban areas.
Cars are incredibly expensive. They are even more expensive if you have special needs (that is, if your disability even allows you to drive at all). Pedestrianized and bike friendly areas, that often go hand in hand with well designed public transportation infrastructure, are far more accessible than car-centric planning ever could be.
Umm no they’re not. And the ones that are just have the opposite problem half the year. Very few cities are in a climate where all but the most hardcore people will want to bike more than half the time.
Go down the list of American cities by population. NYC, Chicago, Philly, etc. Not biking in the cold months. Megacities in Texas, Cali, Florida, AZ: not biking in hot months.
This might work for Honolulu or San Diego and that’s about it, even if you completely disregard the 50% of the population that couldn’t ride a bike in any weather due to being old, injured, obese, etc.
It’s preposterous to think this is an actual solution.
Getting rid of cars necessitates some other motorized form of transport from which you can’t easily fall and get injured.
I lived for a couple of years in Amsterdam. Cycled fine in the rain, snow or sunshine. Then again, the infra was amazing and supportive. Can’t speak for the cities you mention though but in Phoenix where I live now, cycling in Summer is impossible.
If you get less than an inch of snow a month and it doesn't stay long enough to go through thawing and freezing cycles, then bike infrastructure can handle it reasonably well. If you get a foot of snow at times and the snow you get in November hasn't melted by March, then bike infrastructure and the safety of riding bikes on segments of road that are difficult to plow, biking in the winter may be more problematic.
I'd suggest a trip up to Minneapolis, Madison, or Chicago in January and consider how bikeable those areas are and if it would be reasonable to do a commute.
(And as an aside, I don't consider those areas to be AI drivable in the winter either)
Deeply freezing temperatures, ice, snow, all of those are completely ridable on bicycles, but you have to ride with very fat tires, often called "fatbikes"[0]. You can ride those bicycles in just about anything; I've ridden them across frozen lakes and up chunks of frozen glacier in the dead of the Alaskan winter, so cold roads don't sound particularly scary. If you want to have a single bike that you can ride in any weather very easily, an electric "fatbike"[1] makes for a super versatile single-person car replacement.
It's worth noting that the nearby city of Tucson is a cycling mecca for pros during the offseason and many avid cyclists continue riding throughout summer. If Phoenix were better designed for the climate it's in (e.g. dense, narrow streets between high thermal mass buildings and lots of shade), the summers would be far less intense.
Winter cycling is really not anything like as hardcore as people imagine it to be, especially in the pretty mild winter cities you mention of NYC and Philly. NotJustBikes has a great episode featuring Oulu Finland which has harsh winters but still has a way higher modeshare of cycling in the Winter than cities in North America do in the Summer https://youtu.be/Uhx-26GfCBU
With well maintained/shoveled/prioritized bike infrastructure, cycling in the Winter is actually quite pleasant and no big deal at all. There's an argument if we're talking about Winnipeg or Saskatoon, for the couple of months that it goes down to -30 celsius, a lot of people might call it quits, but those extreme temperatures are only around for 2 months, not the whole Winter.
I wish there were a lot more good biking infra. in the US. But the fact of the matter is that a lot of these "bikes can take over the future" are total pipe dreams if you just try to ignore the fact that they are bad modes of transportation for a lot of people a lot of the time.
Austin TX has made huge strides in the past few years making bikes a better option - a ton more bike lanes, more and more of those are protected, and related options like tons of electric scooters and MetroBike bike share. Still, the city is fundamentally laid out for car transportation, and so far this year it has hit 100F on 68 days.
Bikes may be a good addition, but the idea they can totally replace cars in a lot of American cities is ludicrous.
I think it's a fallacy to just say that bikes are bad modes of transportation for a lot of people a lot of the time, based on experience in one location.
Trains won't work without rails, airplanes don't work without airports, ships won't sail without water, cars don't work quite so well without roads (4WD notwithstanding), and bicycles are a lot less useful without bicycle paths.
Put in the relevant infrastructure, and many kinds of transport become very good modes of transportation for a lot of people a lot of the time.
Literally nobody is saying that bikes can "totally replace cars" in ANY American city. That is such a straw man argument. The mode share for cycling in Austin is something like 1%. We are only saying that a lot more trips could be done by bike. Even if we multiplied the number of people cycling by 10 it would still be a small portion of the number of people driving.
Biking in Austin around the lake is totally fine weather wise. Keep your commutes to the mornings and use an eBike at a leisurely pace when it’s peak summer. Come Fall, the weather is absolute bliss for riding!
Minneapolis famously has a strong year-round cycling culture, despite being one of the coldest and snowiest cities in the US. It's all about the infrastructure (e.g., good paths) that's proactively maintained (e.g., clearing snow quickly).
In the meantime cities in Finland experience multiple inches of snow a day and still manage to have high cycling numbers during Winter.
The number one predictor of cycling participation is decent infrastructure that is maintained. Hills, winter, rain are all a distant third place to having decent infrastructure and then maintaining that infrastructure. Cycle paths regularly plowed? High cycling activity. No cycling infrastructure and a habit of plowing snow onto the sidewalk? No cycling activity.
Lowest temperature in NYC last year was 15F. Its cold, but it's not that cold. Tons of people still bike in winter. And if they don't, we have trains and busses. The nice part about orientating transit around bikes is that people tend to live reasonable distances from the places they need to go.
> Umm no they’re not. And the ones that are just have the opposite problem half the year. Very few cities are in a climate where all but the most hardcore people will want to bike more than half the time.
I am surprised that you city NYC as an example. Especially in cities as dense as New York, pretty much every car owned by a private individual represents a policy failure. With a car ownership in NYC of ~45% [0] these are quite a few failures. Even with temperatures like in Chicago or Los Angeles, riding a bike would be very well possible for large parts of the year, regardless of heat or freeing temps, as long as the infrastructure is there.
People tend to over-estimate the actual need for their car incredibly. Even in the US, probably the most car-dependent place in the world (so I have been told),
60% of vehicle trips are less than 6 miles (9.6km) [1], that is very well within (e)biking distance. In dense urban centers the average trip length is likely even shorter, thus an even better fit for biking. But even in sprawling cities or suburbs, car dependency could likely be dramatically reduced with relatively little investment.
Everybody here keeps talking about bikes (so do I), but there is more to it. People completely ignore that especially in cities, space is at a premium. So usually the most efficient form of transportation should win, but that did not happen in most of the western world. Instead, everybody built rows like crazy. As a matter of fact, bringing people out of their cars and onto bikes or public transit, you free up a whole lot of space in crowded cities. That would be a very good opportunity to invest in improving transit, creating living spaces, public spaces or for businesses to expand.
> Getting rid of cars necessitates some other motorized form of transport from which you can’t easily fall and get injured.
Absolutely true, cities should be accessible regardless of age or disability. Current city designs aren't really doing well in that regard. As I pointed out, removing vehicles that shouldn't be in cities frees a lot of space for vehicles that must be there. Also, good that you mention obesity considering city design and thus car-dependency has been linked to an increased risk of obesity for years now [2].
But a necessary addition to the falling/injury statement: if you have proper infrastructure in place (enough capacity, safe separation from car traffic, continuous pathways) the risk of getting injured while cycling can be significantly lowered compared to the status quo.
> The majority of population centers are outside of regions with that kind of low temperatures.
Do NYC, Boston, and Chicago not count? As well as all the other people who live in similar latitudes? There are also a large number of areas where it's too hot to safely rely on bikes for transportation without risking heatstroke in vulnerable populations. If anything, areas like San Francisco are outliers in terms of being good for cycling.
It gets to 0F in NYC for... maybe 4-5 days a year, tops (most years never). Same with Boston and Chicago. If it gets that cold it's big news (yes, I've lived or spent time in all three). You're talking about like, one week in January that makes it unbearable, which is what busses, subways and the like are for.
> Yes, there are always a few folks who will pull their bikes out in 0°F (-18°C) and go out on icy roads
Luckily this doesn't apply everywhere.
> Also, bikes (especially individual bikes) are not very compatible with many types of disabilities. We really should keep accessibility in mind when working on Urban areas.
Well, sure but neither are the small cars that people often prefer in urban areas. Grade level light rail can be great for accessibility but can be hard to drop in place and expensive. Building out bike infrastructure is pretty cheap and in many circumstances can leave more space for other uses. It's a lot easier to get in and out of a van on a street narrowed for bike lanes, because either traffic will have to wait, or will be slower moving.
I used to care for a man with quadriplegia as a care assistant for about a year. It made me realize a lot of things with disability parking.
Everything took 5x as long, handicap spots were hard to find, and you can forget taking a train if you want to do anything else that day.
The wheelchair van was his lifeline to the rest of the world.
So from that, I'm personally against banning cars in city centers for that reason.
It wouldn't be too difficult to restrict roads to handicap placard drivers and a limited number of commercial vehicles. You'd just need a lot of cops and parking enforcers (not bad for job creation!)
And, while I'm no road engineer, I imagine the results would be a large drop in car traffic, and very little infra to build to make it happen.
You can even just block off certain roads and turn them into pedestrian only spaces.
Parking and lane enforcement can and should be automated. The disabled status is linked to the license plate and driving on the wrong road with that status leads to an automatic fine. In the UK we already have automatic fines for speeding, jumping lights, stopping in a no stop zone, using a bus lane, not paying a toll. This is no different.
Fair, but infrastructure is notoriously hard to build in the US.
The US disabled status works different here too.
You're only given disability privileges while in a car with your own handicap placard in the window (it's assigned to a person)
I actually like this a lot better than a plate because it's trivial to know if someone in the car actually needs a spot or not, and discourages use of the car by friends/family that don't qualify for using the (often limited) access to handicap spots.
Also allows you to drive any car and still get the same privileges.
I'm clearly not opposed to special accommodations for people who need vans and other special transport. I don't think it's a good argument for the status quo though. It's possible to restrict most private vehicles from a city center and still allow things like vans the disabled. Obviously there is tension here around pedestrian only streets, but making sidewalks more accessible to electric wheelchairs seems very doable.
Bro it gets freakin' cold in the winter in Austin, TX and we're further south than Tunis, Tunisia; San Diego, CA; Alexandria, Egypt; Casablanca, Morocco; Tucson, AZ; Basra, Iraq and Osaka, JP. How much further south would you like us to go? Should we conquer Mexico just so we can ride bikes in December?
What risks should my very pregnant-for-the-last-three-years wife take? What if we lose a child or for that matter _her_ because she slipped on the ice? How is she going to get groceries for our family of five-soon-six from the grocery store that is miles away from our house?
You people don't live where the rest of us live. You're callously indifferent to the pain caused by policy designed to inflict economic damage on the middle class. POSIWID. You hope you can condense the economic violence into the other-world you would prefer to live in.
I'm from Ohio where I rode a motorcycle in the dark for my second shifts at the warehouse through the entire winter and I still wouldn't wish bicycling _by necessity_ in the winter here on my worst enemy. Good way to cull the elderly if that's what you're going for. We can't all be healthy 20-something males though.
I wouldn't bike in Austin regardless based on the infrastructure, but a lot of people bike here in NYC in the winter. People do the same in Berlin and many other cold cities.
> What risks should my very pregnant-for-the-last-three-years wife take?
Whatever the two of you are comfortable with? I'm not here to tell you how to live.
> You people don't live where the rest of us live. You're callously indifferent to the pain caused by policy designed to inflict economic damage on the middle class
I disagree. I'm not trying to impose anything, except some bike lanes in urban cores at the expense of a little on street parking. I grew up on a farm and have live in a few different kinds of places in the US and I get it people have different lifestyle preferences. I'm not trying to make anyone bike if they don't want to, I'm in support of making it easier in already dense places.
You do you my guy, I'm not trying to tell you otherwise.
Overall, we're not trying to force you and everyone else to cut over to bikes tomorrow, since for those individuals like yourself, your environment doesn't support biking at all. Hopefully though, we see a greater focus on building environments where biking does make sense, and less on car-centric living. However, to break down some of the specifics you mentioned:
The average low in Austin Texas is 43°F with rare dips below freezing (32°F). Looking at the temperature history for the last winter, Austin saw temperatures drop to freezing on 7 days during December and January[1]. When it's not freezing, at those temperatures, you can absolutely ride a bike safely and comfortably (though you'll need to put on some extra clothing to stay warm). As for your other questions:
> What risks should my very pregnant-for-the-last-three-years wife take?
She should take the risks she feels comfortable taking. In the opinion of me and my wife (we live in Seattle), we'd feel quite comfy biking in your city (as long as the paths are safe) during any of that weather as long as it's not freezing. If it was freezing and we knew we needed to go somewhere, we'd take a fatbike[2] (yes, that's their unfortunate name, and they work great in snow and ice with their huge tires).
> What if we lose a child or for that matter _her_ because she slipped on the ice?
That would be tragic, but ice means we all take that risk every time we travel by bicycle or by car. Driving a car on the ice is dangerous, even if driving feels safe and familiar. Thankfully, traveling on a bicycle means you're traveling at lower speeds, so should an accident or slip occur, the likelyhood of serious injury or death is far lower than at high speed in a car.
> How is she going to get groceries for our family of five-soon-six from the grocery store that is miles away from our house?
Cargo bicycles[3] make getting groceries, even lots and lots of groceries, even transporting small furniture, easy! However, you living many miles from a grocery store does make this all more difficult; I realize that where and what type of housing is available isn't totally up to you.
Baked into your comment is the statement of some real facts: that bicycling infrastructure isn't well developed where you live, the entire environment of where you live is built around making transport by car the easiest and often the only available option, and if you tried to adopt it personally now, it would be unfamiliar, dangerous, slow, inconvenient, etc. I think you're right that all those things are true. Trying to convince folks that they should bike to the giant Walmart that's 10 miles away for their daily groceries in the same way they might via a car, that's probably not going to go well, and I don't think it has gone well. That's why most of the constructive discourse I see, like the original article, is focusing on reshaping urban infrastructure around bicyling since that's where the density is. Hopefully we see that happen, and hopefully in the coming decades we see a reduction in investment into car-centric living (huge car-only suburbs with only homes and nothing to walk to for miles around), and an increase into more modest walkable suburbs with greater support for mixed use land (closer grocery stores) and the higher density housing (smaller lot sizes and smaller homes) which provide enough density to support the businesses in those walkable areas.
Like most difficulties with cycling in the cities, the most dangerous part of it are sharing resources with cars. Cycling in the winter isn't so bad if properly dressed. Even now, the cycle paths get plowed before the roads.
> Also, bikes (especially individual bikes) are not very compatible with many types of disabilities. We really should keep accessibility in mind when working on Urban areas.
Totally agree. Most bike infrastructure works well for those with disabilities. The coming goal with bike friendly cities is livable cities for all, and not one that's built for cars first, and people second. It's the same sharedd evil conspiracy agenda. ;)
I lived in minnesota, five mile commute. Cold is very very doable. Ice does suck, but that's more of a tire issue. Cold and snow? Eh, bundle up and biking in winter is actually kind of fun. The cold really isn't any different than getting into a cold car in winter. The car warms up when you drive it, you warm up when you ride a bike.
Rain really sucks though. I don't have a good solution for rain.
What is the best for bike commuting is the lack of aggravation from driving, and knowing that basically no matter what you'll get from X to Y in a known amount of time. There's no traffic jams in bikes, at least not in the US.
Oh, aside from security risk, the ability to basically ride directly to where you're going and park RIGHT THERE is the #2 best thing about biking places (#1 being the reduced stress).
E-bikes should be even more amazing. I was a triathlete so I was a fit biker and wind/hills didn't bother me, but e-bikes eliminate that for the whole population.
What sucks:
- securing bikes, they are simply far too easy to steal. I guess in europe and big US cities there are real problems with this: tracker chips don't work, U-locks get shattered with liquid nitrogen, etc. What's nice about e-bikes is that you can get a heavier bike with a bit more security, but still, easy to drive up with van, shatter lock, take bike.
- rain, already mentioned
- flats are still far too common
- bikes aren't really that much of a money saver if you already have a car. They help with stress, fun, exercise, but between bike tuneups and flat tires and other stuff, they aren't really that cheap. Especially once you get into panniers and racks and that type of thing.
- drivers and danger in general. Bikes aren't a safe mode of transportation in the US unless you have good dedicated bike paths (Minneapolis is really really amazing for this, I never appreciated it until I moved somewhere else).
Motorised vehicles (both public transit & other private/vocational/individual) are a fantastic utility, and one we should never get rid of. The problem is scale: bikes can absolutely supplant a significant portion of current motorised urban transit.
A system that requires nearly everyone to drive cars is not compatible with disabilities. If fewer people drive, it frees up road space for people who actually need to drive, as opposed to people who drive because it's the easiest way to get around. Also note that cars are often not a good fit for many kinds of disabilities. Public transit works much better with only minor modifications.
Why is driving a 2 ton car safer in icy conditions than riding a 20lb bicycle?
And the disability thing: there are a wide variety of disabilities. 76% of disabled people are able to ride a bicycle [1]. Only 60% of disabled people are able to drive a car [2].
If a car slides a little in a corner, there's a good chance to correct it. If a bike slides a little in a corner (at least the front wheel) you are definitely going down.
Well, yea—the person inside the 2-ton steel cage is probably going to be fine. It's the nearby pedestrians, cyclists, houses, etc. whose safety I was interested in.
I would argue that various forms of cycles (going well beyond the UCI definition of a bicycle, but still using common components powered primarily by a human) are much more compatible with disabilities than cars are. I've seen both double-arm and double-leg amputees cycling, among others.
Cycles (bikes, trikes etc) are sometimes more compatible with disabilities. As they support your weight, they can be better for people with standing/walking issues. Some sight issues can be dangerous for driving, but manageable for cycling (e.g. I'm a bit short sighted which is fine for cycling as if something is too blurry, I can just go closer to it if I need to read something). The ability to come to a stop safely in almost any scenario means that some sufferers of epilepsy can safely cycle whilst being unable or not allowed to drive (here in the UK, I think there's a time limit of something like three years since your last attack).
I live in a place where it is very consistently below -20C in the winter. Sure, I'm not going to bike in that (especially +snow), but you know what? Being able to do most of my intra-city travel by bicycle 75% of the year is still a big win over 0%.
Cycling in the winter is fine, actually. Bikes cope with snow and ice better than cars, and the physical exertion keeps you warmer than you would be on foot.
> and the physical exertion keeps you warmer than you would be on foot.
Only if you are not sweating. Once you sweat its game over. You are probably thinking of very short pre sweating distances.
Only way to bike moderate to long distance is to dress in layers and shed layers as you get warm and let the moisture get out. You also need moisture wicking base layers and moisture expelling mid layer.
Thunderstorms in Florida, also. Or even just the humidity. If you want to go anywhere looking like you just jumped fully clothed into a swimming pool, sure, go for it.
At those very low temperatures, but also at very high hot temperatures, you are basically living like an astronaut. In that case I don't see a way around the car as well.
But for disabilities, the infrastructure for bikes is much better accessibility wise. It allows for electric wheelchairs or wheelchairs with handcycles in front. The car roads are often too dangerous or require the ability to drive, whereas a bike path is low-key and allows all kinds of slower traffic.
> Also, bikes (especially individual bikes) are not very compatible with many types of disabilities. We really should keep accessibility in mind when working on Urban areas.
That’s what accessibility-oriented public transit is for. The goal isn’t to replace all transit with bikes; it’s to reduce the dependence on cars by leveraging bikes more to make safer, healthier urban environments.
Not in summer, they aren't. Arizona, Texas, etc. I don't even ride my motorcycle in the hot months. I just wish we built more European style housing with shops on the bottom floor with housing above it, walk able city blocks, etc.
But for those conditions a car also isn't a good fit. I've seen it in Sweden, where they have snow or ice on the roads for months and they drive Ski-Doos instead. Haven't seen a self driving one yet.
I wish there was greater acceptance in the west of bike-based contraptions like bikes with big cargo baskets / barrows, or trailers, or bikes with sun/rain shelters above. They do exist but are usually considered kinda dorky and weird and most bike infrastructure isn’t designed with these larger vehicles in mind. But they are common in several Asian countries and can be very practical. They help with the “I can’t use a bike because it’s raining or because I need to carry groceries” problem. Of course they are heavier and take more effort to pedal, but c'est la vie.
I don't drive, and get around on my bike or public transport in general. However, while arguing about "how it's possible to bike in winter with proper infrastructure" my friends pointed out the important portion of cars - "comfort when it's -15C outside with wind chill". I didn't actually have any arguments against it, and that seems reasonable.
Personally, I always can fallback to public transport if I don't want to cycle, but it's not possible in most of NA. Unfortunately, retro-fitting most of the cities to have proper subway/bus system that would complement the cycling infrastructure. But hey, I hope that day comes at some point!
The thing people might not realize is that when you're exerting yourself, your body generates plenty of heat to keep you warm - it's really just a matter of keeping that heat contained. It's more akin to doing a winter sport like skiing, snowboarding, etc. than it is to sitting passively in a car.
I totally agree! But personally, I prefer taking the bus/subway over biking when it’s cold. “Why should I wear two layers and a scarf when the bus stop is in front of my apartment building” would be the question I ask myself. I get to listen to my stuff, be comfortable and etc.
And that’s pretty much the line of thought I can see a car-centric person might have. Might be completely wrong though, cars and I live in non-adjacent worlds.
We need "grand theft auto" [1] type law enforcement support for bikes. Theft is a huge problem and the reason why most expensive bikes are mainly for exercise/racing.
Even in low-crime areas, it's inadvisable to ride, say a $1-2k bike without extensive locks.
If you walk around downtown in my city you'll be approached by sketchy dudes selling a set of expensive bike wheels for absurdly cheap. Not hard to guess where they got them from.
An urban reform, not bikes or any sort of transportation, is the gateway to urban progress.
I was about to argue that bikes would never solve the transportation problems in most of the huge latinamerican cities. Not simply because they are huge, but because the way they grew -- "freed" slaves expelled from rural zones and piled up in the periphery of urban cities, unassisted by even the most basic public facilities. In cities developed like that, most people live very far away from jobs and services and, then, traffic jams are the norm and commutes are usually extremely long.
But then I realize: such commutes should be the exception, not the rule. And that will never change while real estate speculation remains allowed and we keep treating the poorer as sub-humans.
I surely can’t be alone in just not picturing myself on a bike…
I walk, take public transit, Uber, etc but will often drive myself places a little too far to walk despite the inconvenience of parking when I get back because of it.
All it might take to adjust to this is starting to do it… anyone go from bike-curious with an aversion to biking in general to a full blown biker?
Also, anyone living in a city with an e-bike: is this very expensive, easily stolen item you have to park outside of a store often stolen?
Edit: just to clarify I know you are supposed to use a bike lock but … bikes and tires and whatnot regularly get stolen regardless. Just curious if e-bikes are more of a target.
Yeah, I wasn't exactly sceptical but didn't really bother because we didn't have anywhere to lock them up. I would say dockless e-bikes were my gateway drug. We lived somewhere the docked (Boris Bikes) scheme didn't go, so suddenly being able to get around with low effort really opened our eyes.
Once we got access to a street lockup here in London, my wife and I both bought e-bikes (these ones https://analogmotion.com/). We have good insurance and a couple of gold rated locks and so far have managed 2 years with them in London, a city notorious for bike thefts.
I don't do everything on the bike, and I don't take it out if I'm going out normally - though the times I have it's been fine/not stolen. It's great. We haven't owned a car in the 7.5 years since we moved here and can't imagine going back to a way of life where we have to.
It's a long game. The right thing to do is to start to shift toward bike-friendliness and bicycle-centric programs and infrastructure projects. Then get the kids on board. Part of this will probably require a rethinking of neighborhood schools vs bussing. Then make it easy for people to live near their jobs, and create incentives for self-propelled & mass transit commuting options. It's a decades-long process.
> All it might take to adjust to this is starting to do it…
Nailed it. For a long time, I was an avid user of public transport and I couldn't imagine myself on a bike (nor in a car.) Then life forced me onto the bike and it became the most natural thing in the world.
I also had a period where I couldn't imagine taking the car anywhere, but life has forced me to take a car more often now than in the past, and I'm starting to get used to it. So now I use the bike for shorter distances and the car for longer ones, generally.
That said, I haven't taken public transport in ages, and I can't picture myself doing it now. (Much to my wife's annoyance.)
If you think a bike lock is not enough just get two. More work for thieves and they'll steal the bike next to yours. For you tires and seat avoid the quick clamp. And have an insurance just in case.
And I do bike, but also walk and take public transport. You don't need to be hardcore. They can even be combined.
While I do enjoy taking my bike out as frequently as I can, I must confess that it can be a challenge for people where I live.
I live in a tropical country. Half the year, it's either super hot or it's raining. It's really uncomfortable riding your bike during summer here (35+ Celsius) and riding your bike in the heavy rain is out of question.
Maybe it makes more sense to focus on public transport over cycling in such cases but I do wonder what the solution for last mile connectivity should be if walking also 'walks' into the same problems.
I don't see how I could use a bicycle reliably in my hilly town that gets significant snow fall every winter. Could I please have some kind of electric tuk-tuk instead?
Ebikes, albeit still very expensive, are a great option. Even my weaker radmission can kind of help get my 250lb body up Cincinnati hills but im a seasoned bike commuter, new riders my size wont go for it in the winter.
Plenty of decent ebikes available in the $1000-$2000 range. I don't think that counts as "very expensive" - for a lot of people that'll be 6 months or less of gas usage
Most reasonably sized cars get > 30 these days. $1500 is 9,000 miles of fuel, or an average of 51 miles per day for 6 months. If you're commuting that far, then a bike probably isn't going to work anyways.
Let's say you can afford to live within some reasonable commute distance of 10 miles from your office, which is 2x the average bike commute distance, and 30 minutes at max legal ebike speed. That $1500 will get you 2 years of commute fuel, if you consider the seasons prevent you from driving for 3 months of the year.
Not your point, but I'd like to mention it since this is the scenario you brought up - if you live 10 miles or less from your work, unless you've got zero traffic and perfect parking on both ends, I'll bet an ebike is faster door to door than a car - and when it's slower it's like 5min slower.
But back to the numbers: I just typed in "average miles driven" to get my numbers, but you're right that's not exactly realistic. So taking your numbers, and settings aside other savings that not driving 5200miles/year will get you, two years of gas still doesn't count as "very expensive" imo.
This is more or less my logic, when I am in the office and the weather is not debilitating, by bike I can get to my desk ten minutes faster despite living only 6 or so miles away. Ive done this for a long time and its probably kept a few thousand miles off of my car.
Okay, some more realistic math then - that's often less than 9 months of insurance.
Cars are extremely expensive, so if we're comparing car replacements we should look at the total cost. Some sources are [1], [2], if you're curious how expensive cars can be on average.
I don't think this math is right either. If I live 30 minutes from work by bike, the additional monthly housing costs will be over 10x what what my car payment + insurance + charging is, over the next 10 years, compared to 30 minutes by car.
And, using average car cost is not useful for something like this. That average includes luxury cars, sports cars, and new cars. You can choose to buy outside all that. I think most people would consider sacrificing their personal transportation, for a car and public transport, as a significant quality of life reduction, so luxuries of the car world would not be included when trying to make a rational comparison to a bicycle. I've never paid close to that average.
Ebike (amortized over 5 year): $2000/(5*12) = $33.33
$150/year maintenance
$20/year electricity (made this number up... it's small whatever it is)
Which works out to about $47/month.
Cost of a car:
Car payment: $300/month
Insurance: $1500/12 = $125/month
Gas: $62/month (your estimate)
Maintenance: $500/year (again just spitballing - this is low from my experience but idk what the average is)
Comes to: $529/month
The difference $529-47 = $482. Now, idk where you live, but the cost of living a 30min bike ride out from downtown vs a 30min drive is definitely not 10x that $500ish monthly cost. For most people in most areas it's going to be in the range of 1x to 5x. You can quibble with my numbers if you like, but I'm definitely somewhere in the ballpark for most people. You might spend a little less on the car and more on maintenance, or more on the car and less on repairs, etc.
And of course none of this takes into account your time. I've always tried my best to live under 20min commute from work, with my best being 5min, and to me saving that time has always been worth the smaller living spaces I've had to accept to get that. When you're talking about dense cities, that last 10-20min of your driving-commute is usually related to traffic and parking - which you can bypass freely by riding. I suspect if you live 20min drive out and 20min cycle out you're talking about the same distance.
No. This assumes you're buying a new car every 5 years, which is ridiculous when comparing to relying on a bike and public transit.
> Most people in most areas it's going to be in the range of 1x to 5x.
The original comment was:
> Cars are extremely expensive
So it seems that you're agreeing that a bike costs 1x to 5x more than a car, if commute times are held constant, and housing is considered, correct? This was my only point, that, if you calculate the math in a wholistic way, a bike is not cheaper.
> So it seems that you're agreeing that a bike costs 1x to 5x more than a car, if commute times are held constant, and housing is considered, correct? This was my only point, that, if you calculate the math in a wholistic way, a bike is not cheaper.
No, I don't agree. Because I believe that the relationship between drive time and cycle time is not usually directly proportional - see my point about 20min commutes.
I'm serious. It's peak drive time and I just put a 30min drive into google maps (4pm right now) and it gets you 12-15km from downtown depending on where you put the pin. That's around 30-35min by ebike. Add a few minutes to walk from the parking lot (we haven't even talked about parking costs) and you're describing the same distance.
All in all we're trying to make an apples to handgrenades comparison here - you can't hold everything else constant and live in two different places. My point is cycling is cheaper for many distances, less time consuming for short distances, and has plenty of fringe benefits. It does require spending more on housing to live closer to where you work, which if that's the city center, may end up either being more expensive overall, or requiring you to live in a smaller home. If you want to live near the city center, that might end up being worth it when you consider all the factors. If you want to live outside the city, it's probably not going to be worth it - in which case I'd urge you to live somewhere suburban but with a good transit system since our planet can't actually sustain this much driving anymore.
They can handle any snow or ice you could drive in. Lots of studded tire options out there. That said, I think this problem is truly minuscule relative to the size of the opportunity as a whole.
Sure, add on a third wheel, some thicker tires, and give me a cabin so I don't need to get too rained on and I can probably get rid of my car and borrow one if I need to pick up like a load of plywood or something.
Seriously though, a cabin probably won't even add too much weight, make it out of corrugated plastic or something. We already have the technology.
It varies from state to state but usually the deciding factor is the motor. No motor? It's a bike, no matter how many wheels it has.
Amusingly enough many of the laws are old enough that they are written with "cc" mentioned, below 60cc is a "moped" above is a "motorcycle". Those rules will have to be updated to account for various traction devices.
The balance requirement of a two-wheel vehicle probably makes them less appealing in icy weather to most folks. I don't live in an area that experiences cold weather, so I'm speculating.
They make electric trikes, and they're a bit more popular around here (Nova Scotia). Electric trikes have their own balance problems though. Also thinner tires and there being no such thing as ABS brakes make it really easy to go into a slide, especially if you don't really know why ABS brakes are a thing.
Cold weather is difficult, you need to protect yourself from the cold but you also need to deal with heat and sweat from biking, so your clothing requirements actually change depending on what point in the bike ride you're on.
Visibility is reduced due to high snowbanks, so you're likely coming to a complete stop more often than you otherwise would. That's a good argument for electrics and regenerative braking obviously.
Road salt and ice are a big problem, since bikes have components exposed. Components like chains, brake lines, the steering yolk, etc. Those are probably not made for the weather here and will more or less dissolve if you use most bikes during the winter. I'm sure there are some that are alright, but it's an additional research task.
I think it's solvable, and a personal vehicle that can solve that will probably do quite well if they can hit the right price-point, but I think that vehicle ends up looking more like a golf cart or a kei-car than a bike.
There's a subset of people who are very anti-car and not actually very pro-bike/transit and you can find them by seeing if they rant and rage against motorcycles as well.
We should construct far more elevated walkways, at least in NY. Similar to the High line. I would be far more likely to walk everywhere if I didn't have to worry about traffic and stoplights. Not to mention, particulate and emissions exposure would drop like a rock.
A simple scooter gets 80 MPG - 90 MPG, can use all existing transportation infrastructure, and anybody can ride (if you can ride a bike then you can ride a scooter), and has low acquisition costs. Get states on board with allowing those having a drivers license to be able to legally ride a scooter, where presently many states require getting a motorcycle endorsement which is a definite obstacle. I'm really surprised the U.S. isn't pursuing this harder seeing as how we've built so much infrastructure for motorized vehicles. I'm an engineer - we don't need nirvana, we need improvement.
I have a 10 mile bike commute that I'm happy to ride with a e-bike. I don't much mind the rainy / cold weather in the PNW.
I'm a lot more worried about someone hitting me with their cars because protected bike lanes, and painted bicycle gutters have a tendency to end abruptly in my city leaving me scrambling in the middle of a 25 - 35 mph road while annoyed cars and trucks pass at high speed.
The situation is improving and more biking infrastructure is being built and I can't wait for the day when I feel completely safe riding my bike to work all the time.
I would like self driving cars because I find any travel that I have to do myself a waste of time and life. I like hiking but not to get from a to b. Bikes don’t make that better but possibly slower and more dangerous. Why not learn from HK or Tokyo where you can get anywhere easily, including during major typhoons, by the underground. The much praised London Underground is far worse (by a wide margin imho; boil in summer, freeze in winter and far less efficient than the Asian counterparts) and that is still one of the best in the world.
The concept of “jaywalking,” for example, is integral to the “car technology” of today. The crime of crossing a street without respecting the dominance of cars was invented by the car industry in the 1920s, who pushed hard to define streets as a place for cars, not people.
This story has been repeated in a lot of articles lately, but it doesn't seem to be true. If you read the linked article included as "evidence", it establishes that cities themselves started pushing for "jaywalking" as a concept. I haven't seen any evidence that the "car industry" played any role, even passively, in making "jaywalking" a concept.
As for the rest of the article, yes we should be biking more. I don't have a car and I bike for ~98% of my trips. When it rains, I want there to be an option to ride in a covered vehicle. Until by some miracle we build 10x more trains, I will be taking a car. Better it be self-driving and safe + electric than human-driven + gas.
It's also really obvious and definitely would be a side-effect of cars becoming more popular. Nobody considers the "anti-jaywalking" laws around crossing railroad tracks to be an issue, and everyone recognizes that a train will flatten a pedestrian without a problem.
People really like a conspiracy because it explains why things aren't "good now" without having to actually wrestle with the causes and reasons why things may be the way they are.
Bikes are a superior solution in some places, but they're just not compatible with the existing infrastructure and culture in others.
You'd have to redesign neighborhoods, add transit for long distances, convince people to live more densely, raise a generation of children who are fit enough to ride and aren't scared of heat and cold, etc. I think that's worth doing and the Netherlands and Scandinavian countries have set a pretty good example but that took them generations.
Whereas self-driving electric cars can simply slot into our existing auto-centric cities and towns without requiring Americans to change their behavior, get exercise, or experience any sort of discomfort. Sure, they solve only a proper subset of the problems caused by cars (e.g. tailpipe emissions, parking) so they're more evolutionary then revolutionary, but I suppose they're better than nothing.
I've seen enough of my friends get seriously injured on their bikes by vehicles. No thanks. I'm not riding my bike again on streets until my city starts protecting cyclists. (I'm in the US)
My anecdote. I ride a bike and wear a suit at work, instead of showering at home I shower at work - just shifting the location of the activity.
My employer has actually responded to the demand for non-car options and repurposed a huge section of the multistory car park for bike parking, lockers and showers all for $5 a week which includes a towel service.
At my previous employer there was no such service, but I was pleasantly surprised to discover multiple showers in every building we owned at different sites - most office buildings do it turns out!
As a copenhagener i fucking love my bike commute. I feel very safe, I'm able to zip across the city faster than most types of transports for <7km distances.
I also actively pick jobs where I'm forced to ride my bike to get some medium level activity. Several times I've thought about trying to live and work in other cities and I'm not sure I could live without this part of my day. I can really recommend it. American urban design is just really unattractive as a european due to being so anti-human and pro-car.
Or author think, people should only live on territories of forever summer?
Second important question, who will transport goods to shop network?
So, unless in some sort of radical concept, like linear city (where all business and most long way transport railroad or water), we should consider large share of automobiles (electro-), at least large part of year.
Bikes work in some cities, and I'm a big fan of bikes in general. Especially in the US, it would benefit a lot of people to get a bit of daily exercise.
However, I can't imagine riding a bike to work on where I live. First, it's too dangerous. The modern age of cell phones is very different that the days when I grew up when parents allowed kids to ride their bikes in the street to school every day. Distracted drivers now seem to mow down bicyclists regularly.
Furthermore, the cities I've lived in have weather too extreme to ride in:
Buffalo -- on average it snows during 6 months of the year, around 90+ inches/year (242cm/year).
Boston -- very cold four months of the year. I recall 30 consecutive days with a high below freezing. It also has high winter wind speeds (some days as high as 14mph (23km/hr) in December) and rainfall.
Dallas -- averages 97 days per year with a high over 90 degrees (32 degrees Celsius)
Houston -- averages 99 days per year with a high over 90 degrees (32 degrees Celsius) and very humid. Its also 637.4 square miles (1,651 km^2) in size making it very likely that one will have a long sweaty commute.
Austin -- averages 108 days per year with a high over 90 degrees (32 degrees Celsius)
Detroit -- one block from home I was beaten off of my bike by an organized gang of bicycle thieves that took my bike and were never caught. The weather isn't concussive to bike riding either.
There are cities in the US that have better weather. I enjoyed walking to school the year I lived in Marin County in California.
Segways are just not comfortable. It's more exhausting to stand still with your feet planted than it is to walk, because with walking each foot is getting a break while the other is doing the stepping.
It's have been trying out doing cargo bike pick up for one of my kids from school and I agree.
For most people, having someone pass you with less than foot clearance while speeding is the end of the experiment.
That said, parking protected bike lanes are a huge boon to bike use. Push for them in your town and people will use the bike lane. There's a group of highschool kids who are doing a bike pool on my morning ride who have showed up now that there is a protected bike lane.
The hood height thing is honestly insane. I am over 6 feet high and cannot see over them while standing let alone driving or biking. They seem actually designed as a deniable way to hurt people.
I've been hit on a bike by cars twice, both times in broad daylight in a bike lane. The second time was when I was just done with that. Drivers just aren't looking for you at all. Thinking about riding a bike in conditions where they might actually have some trouble seeing me is pretty terrifying.
Stupid blanket statement, while bikes work fine in flat Bangkok or Beijing where I used them daily, good luck riding bike for instance in hilly Prague or other places.
I would love to see how bike enthusiasts will deal with climate conditions like that: +35..+40°C in summer, -15°C and snow in winter. No sarcasm, genuinely curious.
Bikes make sense when the ambient temperature is between 12C and 27c (53-85f ish), when the distance is less than 5 miles. When it's safe (both traffic, theft, and personal safety in the areas travelled through such as high crime neighborhoods), when you dont need to transport people who cannot bicycle themselves, when you dont care about appearance at the destination (or have access to a shower/bathroom), when social status doesnt matter (eg after marriage, lol)... Remove the disincentives and people will flock to it.
I bike to work and back every day in a USDA 7b zone (the mean average annual extreme minimum temperature is -15 to -12.2 C).
I think the range of comfortable ambient temperatures is quite a bit wider if you're willing to invest money in proper clothing (I justify it by "saving" on gas, car ownership, etc.).
At 0C with decent gloves, you're fine. At -10C, good gloves and headwear are essential, but the ride is still pretty pleasant.
IME, moisture is a bigger issue than temperature. It's the biggest cause for me not biking around town. Biking in (heavy) rain or snow requires more (and more expensive) of mental and physical prep work, and more regular maintenance, and some days I just don't want to put up with it.
On the other points, I mostly agree, although discreetly-accessible showers on both ends of the journey go a long away towards mitigating social status.
I second this... Biking in a really
rainy and humid country is a nightmare for biking.
Another factor why we don't bike around is the irregular terrain with slopes. Biking in places like the Netherlands, New York is really fun as it's really effortles. Biking in places like Bolivia, Guatemala, Costa Rica or any city built within slopes not so much, and don't tell me that with a good bike gear it's solved...
Why is social status even mentioned? What’s that got to do with anything? If you care what people think about you or your status because you arrive on a bicycle that’s on you, it’s not a general “disincentive” for cycling.
> If you care what people think about you or your status because you arrive on a bicycle that’s on you,
No, that's on evolution. We all have a desire to fit in, ascend, procreate.
I'll give you a chance to guess which is more likely to attract a mate.
A guy who says "We're going out to dinner tonight... I hope you brought your bicycle and deodorant" vs "We're going out to dinner tonight, I'll pick you up in my Tesla"
Or if you just mean children, bakfietsen are great for this.
> when social status doesnt matter
Build more/better bike infrastructure and people of all classes will ride, not just those who are forced to because they have no other options like now. See: any city that’s built a usable network of good bike infra.
I mostly agree, if you remove disincentives people do seem to like biking a lot better.
That said, 12C is pretty warm for cycling actually. Are you sure you're not confused with F? At 12C you don't even need a hat yet. (And at that temperature you can actually ride pretty fast without needing a shower either.)
I disagree. A bike lane can transport more people per minute than a car lane. If some proportion of people take the bike lanes, there is more room in the car lanes for traffic too.
This makes both modes of transport more effective.
I hear what you’re saying, but the thing is that, while I agree with you on the efficiency point, more room for bikes still means less room for cars in sum. The fact that more bikes on the road means more room for the cars that remain, doesn’t take away from the fact that there are few cars, and less room dedicated cars in total.
Unfortunately, from a political perspective, drivers will still to maximize their share of road space, and tend to oppose shifting car lanes to bike lanes. When confronted with the issues that cars cause (pollution, accidents, etc), technology like EVs and self driving gets deployed as a way to suggest that the status quo is fine (despite the fact that plenty of drivers seem to be upset about the EV transition, but I digress).
So the actual challenge is to convince those car drivers that they really should be pushing for more bike lanes, since it really is in their best interest. O:-)
(edit: +if you don't have time for an entire video, just watch this one traffic light for single example that exemplifies the story: https://youtu.be/SDXB0CY2tSQ?t=437 ... comments on that video are good too!)
Logistics with young kids is hard. It's much harder without a car. I actually hate cars to be honest. I'd rather walk everywhere. But the proposition that bicycles would be so superior to self driving cars that we should pit these technologies against each other as mutually exclusive options is laughable, naive, and idiotic.
I think we should invest in both, and I don't think the article is saying we shouldn't.
I do think that (according to the article) the investments are a bit skewed towards self-driving cars, where more investments into bikes might have a higher yield.
Note that you don't need to get rid of your car to benefit from more people on bikes. More people on bikes on bike lanes means less people in cars to get in your way. So you still see quite a benefit indirectly.
That said, with city design like in eg. the Netherlands, you can have shops in walking distance, services and jobs within biking distances, and heavy items can be delivered to your door. This means you only really need to rent a car fairly rarely (be it normal or self driving one day) . This works for a lot of people. A lot of other people do still have cars, but might still eg. get on the bike for a quick run to the store when they get home.
Cycling in Amsterdam often involves eye contact between cyclists and drivers at busy junctions that don't have lights. I don't think self driving cars would be very good with that subtlety.
The main safety feature for cyclists in Amsterdam, is that almost every driver is also a cyclist. They know what cyclists are going to do and how much room they need.
I would be positively terrified cycling anywhere near self-driving cars in anything other than ideal weather conditions on recently renovated simple streets with simple streetscape and recently painted lines. Drivers may be poor, but they are poor in predictable, known ways. Self-driving cars will be sudden, unpredictable and disastrous poor drivers in edge cases for a very long time.
Sadly what is currently available as FSD requires a driver to be more attentative than if it was off (the car will bail on FSD and you have maybe 1 second to respond) . You would be safer on the road if FSD was off.
Self-driving cars are still a long time away from being widely available, but urban infrastructure changes can start to be deployed today: bollards, segregated bike lanes, at grade pedestrian crossings, pedestrianized streets, divergers, roundabouts, etc.
With mitigation infrastructure you either make it impossible for the bad thing to happen, or you greatly reduce their impact. Infrastructure doesn't have to rely on humans not screwing up, if anything it expects it.
IMO close calls need to become a ticketable offense.
The "no harm no foul" mentality encourages people to push the boundaries when they themselves do not bear the true costs (of being hit, vs monetary ... health loss > wealth loss)
Yep. A driver pulled suddenly in front of me into the bike lane I was in, to pass cars to make his right turn, saving him maybe 30 seconds. He didn’t check for me, hit his brakes to make the turn, and I had to split lanes left to avoid impact. Luckily I was familiar with this stretch of road and paying extremely close attention, and the other cars were driving safely, else I would have had a very bad day.
I confronted him and his response was “Well we didn’t collide, what more could you ask for?”
I love biking, and do it even in winter in Minnesota but this is not realistic. Winter riding is hard. Riding with kids is hard too. If you are elderly and have pre existing conditions how are you going to do it? So is this solution just for somewhat fit 15 to 65 somethings that are single and live in a specific urban area that is not too snowy?
Roads are generally very wide in this country. Plenty of space to accommodate both cyclists and cars safely. Cars for those who need it, biking without the threat of getting killed for those who can. It's and/and.
All of those people are by example rarely seen in the commute trafic. Lots of middle aged single person in a car. Even older / younger ppl can ride a (e)bike when its not too cold/hot. Get rid of heavy traffic, keep the cars for elderly and kids. Or drive them around in taxi/uber / buses. Edit: sp.
Support ebikes and change infrastructure to make biking safe. People will gradually prefer to ride bikes vs to ride, starting with the most cougareous and fit, but slowly, most people will join.
Few young girls were riding bikes in Paris a few years ago and now, it's exploding thanks to ebikes and better infrastructure (simply separate bikes from pedestrians and cars and give bike priority over cars).
Oslo, Norway was so clogged up by electric kick scooters they had to pass an ordinance to heavily restrict the number. Bikes and scooters are viable as a means to reduce car traffic plenty of places. They can't be the only means of transport, because yes there are people who can't use them, but they can be a significant mode of transport even in far colder places than California. Oslo isn't very hilly, but it's also not flat, and electric bikes and scooters can compensate for a lot of (not all) physical ability challenges.
London streets are full of delivery drivers on bikes and electric bikes these days. I can't remember the last time my Deliveroo delivery came in a car for example.
If you're not already doing that, then yes you do.
If you have just one mode of traffic ("everything is a car") , buses and fire-engines can get stuck in traffic, disabled people might not be able to park in front of the door, and delivery vans might end up blocking the road all over the place.
Once you start splitting traffic modes and managing them separately, you'll find that deliveries, moving trucks, emergency services and disabled mobility are all examples of modes that you could be splitting and managing separately, to get them to their destinations as quickly and efficiently as possible.
Canada Post just started an initiative to replace their smaller package trucks with electric trikes. Electric cargo bike delivery is VERY feasible, for everything but inter-city cargo. Even moving vans - my brother used to work for a bike delivery company, and he was able to borrow an electric cargo trike to help my with my last move. It took two loads instead of the one it would have taken with a van, other than that it was entirely painless.
Which is not to say that bikes can handle 100% of the tasks, but they can handle much more than you might think.
This will not work as well for eg. a thriving restaurant ecosystem, where whole animal carcasses and multiple pallets of produce need to be delivered. There are entire categories of stuff that cities need to thrive that bikes cannot fulfill. When I was talking delivery, I meant commerce-related delivery.
And commerce delivery is what the company my brother worked for does. This kind of trike: https://www.bicycleretailer.com/industry-news/2018/01/10/rad... can handle about 700lbs. You can add powered trailers if you need more in a single delivery, and since they're cheaper than vans to buy and operate, sending two or taking two trips is an option.
For probably 70-90% of commercial logistics within a city these will work fine. For the other 10-30%, yeah - we'll still need some vans and trucks around.
Some serious rethinking of our needs and expectations around transportation is absolutely required if we're going to cut this climate emergency off at the pass. Businesses can still run fine if their deliveries come twice a day instead of once.
With an aging population, these may be a powerful force for deprioritising cars in urban spaces. Particularly if pedestrians feel they're cramping their space.
Fitness and distance aside - it's hot out there y'all. The first world/western world is wholly and fully conditioned to not sweating during the day. There is absolutely zero chance we convince everyone to start riding bikes (with helmets!) in 80+ (27C) degree weather.
Go to a shopping center, or a sporting event, or any other place where people publicly gather en masse and ask yourself how many of them could realistically get around on a bicycle.
There are a lot of very fat people, old people, disabled people, and so forth who could not ride a bike half a mile.
This is ridiculous utopian nonsense. Society is not a blank slate, and we don't get to start over from scratch. We don't get to re-litigate the past and pretend it never happened. Some people seem to think that if something happened for bad reasons 100 years ago, we ought to just undo it, but that is not how the real world works. We have to build on what exists, no matter why or how it got to be that way.
We aren't going to rebuild our cities around bikes, and even if we did, a large number of people could not use them. On the other hand, we already built our cities around cars, and self-driving cars would fit right in (if they actually worked).
This sounds like a very American answer. Have you been to such an event in any other place, like Europe?
Near me is the largest open air weekend market of the Netherlands. Do you know how everybody gets there? By bike, public transportation, walking, etc. And then some small percentage that arrives by car.
> This sounds like a very American answer. Have you been to such an event in any other place, like Europe?
Of course, and I've been to the mecca of public transit, Japan!
And guess what -- outside of the super-dense cities, most Japanese people drive cars. I spent some time in a Japanese city about as dense as a California suburb. Two train stations in the entire city. A car or two in every driveway. I've also been to smaller cities in various European countries and it's the same story.
People need to stop pretending that the world looks like Copenhagen or Tokyo. In reality, most of the world is not dense.
This is an article explicitly about _urban_ mobility. If you're going to exclude large, dense metropolitan areas, are you even addressing the arguments being made here?
The point is that bicycling is not realistic outside of very, very dense cities. Most places that reasonable people call "cities" would not qualify. Even in Europe and Japan, which have world-class public transit, only a handful of cities have useful subways or usable bicycle infrastructure. Everywhere else, people drive cars.
People who are advocating for bicycles as a primary form of transit are using a hyper-narrow definition of "urban," in which most cities would not be considered urban, and that is deceptive and wrong.
The word dense is in the second sentence of the wikipedia article on cities. It is inherent to discussion of urban transportation. You seem to be using the word city loosely, but it's a rather specific term.
Even though I agree the policies here apply to a small fraction of the world's area, it affects a sizable fraction of the population.
> The point is that bicycling is not realistic outside of very, very dense cities
Bullshit. I grew up in a small village -- 300 people or so live there. It's a couple of kilometers from two other villages in the 2000-500 range. There's one school for the area shared between the villages. The daycare I went to was located in one of the other villages. I biked (alongside my parents) for 5 kilometers on non-separated roads to get to daycare at the age of 4. I biked first 2 kilometers to school every single day until 7th grade where I then had to bike 12 kilometers each way. It sounds tough if you don't bike. If you've done it your life whole it's just a mode of transport. Taking 30-40 minutes on the bike was faster than taking the bus too.
It's not dense because the same people opposing pedestrianization also oppose density.
If we let people build a couple Amsterdams or Londons in America, we could just self select and those that want to cycle and walk can do so, and those who want to drive can do so - just in separate places.
Having lived and traveled all over Europe without a car, I can say with confidence that urban environments of a wide range of density are incredibly well-served by public transit, pedestrian routes, and bikes. Cars are necessary in lots of cases, but the vast majority of day-to-day activity that requires a car for me here in the US would have been silly to use a car for in Europe.
Copenhagen is not super-dense, not even very dense. Berlin is even less dense than Copenhagen, yet both cities are very pleasurable for using the bike as your sole means of transportation.
Copenhagen would be the 3rd densest city in America and would represent less than 1/3 of a percent of the population. America is huge with a ton of space and people have spread out.
Yes, you are right. Bikes make sense only in dense urban areas or if you're relatively close to commerce or work. That's still a big minority of people, but getting onto bikes and out of cars is great where it's a possibility.
People who drive cars usually have a need for them. Cargo hauling for example.
> Two train stations in the entire city.
Probably wasn't a large city. I've been to some really small cities that had two train stations. You could walk between stations.
> A car or two in every driveway
For the most part, Japan doesn't have driveways. Even in less populated centers, they might have a parking space, or a garage, but not a driveway. It's a waste of space. Even street parking is limited. Some people may have two cars for whatever reason but I doubt that is the norm.
I'm wonder what region you were at that saw this many cars.
Interestingly, the number of cars in Japan is roughly the same as the number of bikes in circulation.
46% of people use their own car for commute in Japan, but it's 9.5% in Tokyo. Sorry this is written in Japanese but you can use translate. https://todo-ran.com/t/kiji/18920
So then what's the solution? Self-driving and/or electric cars aren't it. They may be an improvement, but they still waste a whole ton of energy in their construction and use.
Personally, I think this isn't an either-or kind of thing. I, and plenty of people I know, have both a bike and a car. They use the bike for relatively short trips, shopping, etc., and the car for everything else. As it turns out, the vast majority of driving people do are the sorts of trips that can be done easily (and more quickly) on a bike anyway.
People who simply cannot bike for whatever reason will continue to drive. That's fine. But we still need to shift the balance so that it's easier and safer for people to bike, even if it makes using a car slightly less convenient.
The solution is to let people choose what to produce and what to buy. Best way to ensure they care about the environment is allowing them to take home more than $5000 a month. Best way to get them to produce eco-friendly technologies, is to reduce barriers to entry; Like IP law, which is mostly gamed by big corporations to exclude competition.
> The solution is to let people choose what to produce and what to buy.
Huh? Do you mean that deregulation is the best way to solve this?
The cheapest options for end consumers will almost always be the things that scale the most: race-to-the-bottom, and exploiting the commons as much as possible. While I agree that regulations are gamed, to suggest deregulation as the key solution means disregarding why we have regulation at all.
The Netherlands used to be car-centric in the 70s, but they cleaned up their act. Paris is banning cars in the center of the city. Policy choices and incentives drive these trends. The car industry and fossil fuel lobby have a crazy stronghold on the US and most of the world and everyone is worse off for them.
In the UK you don't drive to a football stadium because they're not surrounded by an ocean of parking lots.
How do many Americans become disabled in the first place? Many of them get injured in a motor vehicle collision. Why do so many lack physical fitness? A big part of that is they have to be in a car all day. And it's not just bikes--look at the variety of new electric mobility options that have appeared over the last decade.
It's self-destructive conservatism to wave off avoidable problems as being inevitable path dependence and pretend like there's no other choice. In fact there is much that could change.
We aren't going to rebuild our cities around bikes, and even if we did, a large number of people could not use them. On the other hand, we already built our cities around cars, and self-driving cars would fit right in (if they actually worked).
Car makes us less us sedentary and less able to walk. Bikes work the opposite way, and encourage us to be more active and more able to walk.
The elder can't walk due in part because they didn't engage in enough physical activity, which in turn reduce their activity level.
Beside, we won't be able to redesign our urban architecture overnight, but with progress comes dividend that will make further progress much easier.
There will always be edge cases for people who are disabled and who are too obese, but I am confident we can find mobility options for them. A healthier society will have more money to support the hopefully dwindling reminders who can't use bikes.
> Go to a shopping center, or a sporting event, or any other place where people publicly gather en masse and ask yourself how many of them could realistically get around on a bicycle.
The vast majority, by a long shot.
The way you describe it seems to me dystopian nonsense, but maybe that's the American reality.
If people are gathering "en masse" that is exactly what public transport should be used for. Not every individual attendee showing up in their own car. Look at football stadiums in Europe. They don't have huge parking lots like stadiums in the US.
As for overweight, old, and disabled, in the Netherlands they can use mobility scooters on the bike paths. This makes the cities much more accessible for them to get groceries and visit the doctor independently. Also much safer and accessible for children, a huge portion of the population that cannot drive.
It's not about eliminating driving. It's about providing alternatives. If those that can cycle or walk do, then there is less traffic for those that need to drive because of distance, cargo, etc.
All three of fat, old, and disabled can use bikes. Adapted to their condition, of course; tricycle-type configurations are often a good adaptation in cases like that.
Not unless that bike also includes an engine. You exclude so many people who are incapable of propelling themselves around, let alone people who can't see well enough or lack the cognitive ability to navigate themselves
> let alone people who can't see well enough or lack the cognitive ability to navigate themselves
they aren't driving themselves either so what is your point? bicycles with passenger seats exist, as do buses and trains (and, of course, bicycles with motors)
The original conversation was around self driving cars. Self driving cars give freedom to people who can't drive themselves in a way that bikes never will. They also offer things above public transport, namely privacy, security, autonomy.
There are arm-propelled bicycles (or more specifically, drivetrains that let wheelchair users propel themselves with their arms as though they are on a bicycle).
If you're going into "paraplegic and/or legally blind" as your idea of people that can't get around by bicycle, you will find that most people in public gatherings are just fine going around by bike.
Bikes can include engines, sounds like you've described a solution.
If people can't see or think well enough to navigate on a bike... then cars etc. aren't the solution either. Sounds like they'd be passengers on bikes rather than riders.
> There are a lot of very fat people... who could not ride a bike half a mile
They can start with a quarter mile and work their way up.
> disabled people, old people
Perfectly capable of riding bicycles. Unless you're talking really old, like 80s or 90s. They can ride trikes or golf carts.
> This is ridiculous utopian nonsense
Our ancestors ran down buffaloes and woolly mammoths. Your suggestion that we can't do basic physical exertion anymore is downright dystopian and nanny-stateish. We could all do with a healthy dose of taking personal responsibility for our own transportation.
Biking is not going to be for everyone, nor is it going to work for many rural areas. But as many have pointed out we shouldn't let perfect be the enemy of good. Bikes are just one part of a larger solution to the problem of car dependence.
We need a variety of options for people of varying abilities. We need standard bikes, e-bikes, accessible vehicles[1], busses, trains, light rail, street cars, walkable cities and electric cars.
Self-driving cars are more likely to make traffic worse, not better here's a good explanation about it[2].
At the end of the day, less people driving is good for people living in cities, and for people who need/want to drive
Not only is it not an either or, but you just have to look at other countries to see how a bike friendly increases quality of life for everyone. If able bodied people significantly rode more bikes, this means less congestion, more pedestrian friendly zones for disabled people to drive, park and move around.
What’s the alternative to moving away from cars? Let the people be fat and unhealthy in perpetuity, and hope that we invent an “exercise pill” some day that can save them?
Everyone needs to start moving more, and we can do it gradually. The people who are extremely unfit and can barely walk right now would benefit from some extra movement a lot.
It’s not like entire cities & towns go from “all cars” to “all walking and bikes” immediately. It’ll phase-in over like 20+ years. There will be slightly more opportunities to walk around each year, and it’ll get a little less convenient to drive to the shop that’s 1/4 mile away. The unfit will have plenty of time to adjust!
Those with physical mobility issues have tons of alternative solutions:
1) If fewer people drive, it’ll be easier for a disabled person to drive
2) Focusing on walking/biking ties naturally to expanded public transit, which is also better for the environment and better for people with disabilities, visually impaired, and elderly who shouldn’t be driving anyways
3) disabled and immobile-obese people can also benefit from cycling infrastructure — the Netherlands has tiny little electric mobility scooters which require a special “disability registration” to use (similar to disabled parking), which are able to use the bike infrastructure.
It sounds like you're arguing that we can't decide to change what our priorities are as a society because previous generations already made a decision for us. In the US the decision was made around 100 years ago to focus on cars and focus less on public transit because it's easier to make money selling cars. The most important policy consideration in the US is always 'will it produce more profit for the owning class'. So we developed infrastructure that forces us to rely on cars. Different priorities prompted different decisions in other countries. In the Netherlands 27% of all trips and 25% of trips to work are made by bike. There are still fat people (though fewer), old people, and disabled people there. But they have collectively decided that bikes are a good idea. They have winters there. It rains there. The only real argument against biking in the US is we don't have as much infrastructure built for it as other countries. And that's because we have decided not to have it. We can always change our minds and build it.
Are our cities designed the way they are because people are unfit for better forms of transit, or are people unfit for better forms of transit because of the way our cities designed?
Is your contention seriously that we're incapable of improving anything because design decisions that have been made in the past are now unchangeable? Nothing must ever change after it is built for the first time? It's impossible to nudge people towards better transit possibilities incrementally through more thoughtful design? What a ridiculous take.
> There are a lot of very fat people, old people, disabled people, and so forth who could not ride a bike half a mile.
Maybe many of them wouldn't be in that state if their normal day to day activities involved cardio?
Sure, some people health conditions have nothing to do with their exercise level. But having a lot of people who couldn't ride a bike half a mile is not the expectation. People can ride bikes until pretty advanced ages.
We can reserve cars and other transportation for people who actually can't use anything else.
All three of those populations, aside from the very obvious extremes, can in fact use bikes. The former two without many modifications, the third with some hefty ones.
Plenty of fat or elderly people can ride bikes, especially e-assist bikes. More people can ride bikes than can drive cars… 82M people don’t have drivers licenses in America.
In fact, it’s much more devastating for elderly people in America who can no longer drive due to poor eyesight when the only mode of transportation in a city is by car.
It wouldn’t take much investment (compared to pricy car infrastructure) to make many American cities bike friendly.
I think for mass adoption, most people (young/old/healthy/infirm/frail) would want enclosed bicycles that are still useful for protecting passengers and cargo from precipitation. Those with physical challenges would need electrified recumbent bicycles. But those would need to be high enough to be easily seen by motor vehicles.
Most people will also want climate control options (heat, A/C).This should be possible in the future but may require more battery cost than would be supported by acceptable prices at the moment.
How much would people pay for a highly-visible-to-pickup-truck-drivers recumbent bicycle which can safely go 45mph and has air conditioning? How much would this cost? At a hypothetical $8,000 I'd be tempted to just spend twice as much on a car so I can go on the highway.
Cars also get stolen a lot less than bicycles, so the extra $8,000 for a car might pay for itself if the proposed recumbent might get stolen once or twice.
I love bicycles, I want to be able to use them for my commute. But I think to make that happen we need to focus on broadly-acceptable solutions rather than pipe dreams.
How many random people I see on the street could get around on a bicycle? Probably all of them. Where I live, most of them actually did. Of course: I live in the Netherlands.
Fat people: Most people aren't super-fat, though those that are ... do ride bikes.
Skinny people: Not a problem
Old people: Often use an E-bike. Although I've seen 80 year olds riding without assistance just fine. (And beating me to my destination besides)
Young People: Get kicked outside by their Moms in the morning, rain or wind or snow. "Kids are not the wicked witch of the west, you won't melt. Now get to school young man/lady/other , and don't let me get a call from the headmaster saying you were late!"
Disabled people: There are many ways to modify bikes for diverse disabilities (including pedalling with hands, having 3 or 4 wheels, etc).
Me? I actually drive a car a lot. I like driving, I need to travel long distances, and where I live the car infrastructure is pretty decent too. And most drivers are pretty good, because people who don't want to drive don't have to.
Go to a shopping center, or a sporting event, or any other place where people publicly gather en masse and ask yourself how many of them could realistically get around on foot.
There are a lot of very fat people, old people, disabled people, and so forth who could not walk for half a mile.
Is walking now an utopia?
>We aren't going to rebuild our cities around bikes, and even if we did, a large number of people could not use them. On the other hand, we already built our cities around cars, and self-driving cars would fit right in (if they actually worked).
And also we aren't going to magically reverse Type 1 Diabetes, but that doesn't mean everyone who doesn't have it shouldn't have a decent diet instead and instead eat like pigs and then get hooked on pills until the day they die.
It's sort of funny that the very reason you cannot get to most of these places by walking or by bicycle is because of the massive seas of concrete that have been built for "convenience".
And then you need to walk across them anyway, even if you drive.
To the response below as to why don't people don't invest energy to reply, I'd reckon it's because comments can be intellectually inconsistent within their own framing constantly here & sometimes you'd wish the original person took a bit more effort into examining the implications of what they're saying.
The contention that thinking societies could incentivize and build towards decreased reliance on car infrastructure and that bikes can have a serious role in that is 'utopian nonsense' is obviously entrenched in some 'nothing can ever change' mentality. Yet, interestingly, the point also highlighted that things that have cemented themselves in societies that are maladaptive or wrong have come about for bad reasons 100 years ago. It's almost as if those advocating for making better decisions in society today are acknowledging the previous bad decisions and working towards making better ones now, so that the actual conditions in societies 100 years from now is an improvement, y'anno, not pretending they have a magical history reversing wand to rewrite the past.
Guess what, there are even US cities in which a good proportion of the people at the store could have certainly biked, if the future came with dedicated infrastructure and incentivization making it easier to do so over the years. The above doesn't address that, or e-cargo bikes, or the increased mobility that ebikes provide to those that struggle due to physical limitations. I became fit by biking after a lifetime of not being so. Had you looked at me in the hypothetical crowd of incapable of ever biking, you'd make the incorrect assessment of what is possible for the future. And what of people gradually getting more exercise that are able to bike or ebike? who is saying disabled people must bike, rather than we should incentivize those that can, make it easier for all, and have public transit whenever possible. When I had issues for a period that made biking hard, I eventually got a homebuilt ebike for $600 which restored a lot of my freedom and enjoyment, and eventually made it so it was easier to bike unassisted again.
Believing we exist in some optimally selected world in which the market or some other magical force has made everything exactly the way it is for a reason and that we have no say in the matter is a pretty prevalent viewpoint around here. It's almost absorbed as naturalistic in people's brains, rather than reflecting as to what immense past and continued vested interests are at play in cementing the sales of large, expensive vehicles to every individual as our only 'utopian solution' to the future of transit or climate crises.
> a lot of very fat people, old people, disabled people, and so forth who could not ride a bike half a mile.
Fat tire e-bikes can support fat people and it's not an engineering impossibility to make bikes for fat people (it's largely market driven AFAIK). old people in many other countries routinely use e-bikes as they require very little effort. No, everyone on the planet can't ride a bike, but the vast majority of people who drive are capable of riding an ebike.
Of course, there may be fewer fat people if it were possible for ordinary people to run errands around the neighborhood on a bicycle. Go to Amsterdam and take a look around.
Fat and old people can use bikes, actually! Bikes are actually better than walking in many instances, because bikes reduce strain on joints (whether from weight or arthritis). An average bike can carry up to 275-300 lbs, and a specialized bike can carry up to 500.
This, but also just ordinary, perfectly healthy people too - who are just not young single people.
My litmus test is: Will this work for one parent, with two kids, and three bags of groceries. That description loosely fits a LOT of people!
Cars provide an incredible amount of liberty, flexibility and autonomy. You go where you want, when you want, you can bring whatever you want, and for the most part you don't have to answer to anybody else about it.
Clearly there are alternatives in some cases. Many people who own cars also own bikes and take trains and buses when it makes sense to do so.
>if you multiply, you know, all of the journeys by the space that the car occupies in the road by the amount of road that you need by the distance that that pushes people apart because you have to build more roads, you are in a red queen’s race that you cannot win.
Somehow we can imagine a world with low-pressure hyperloops and self-driving electric car swarms, but our creativity with bikes ends with 2 wheels and a rod ? Bikes are about space and ease first. At its very core, a bike is a small & slow people mover on wheels. That's it.
Disabled -> Electric wheelchairs are basically bike already [1]
Have things -> Delivery bikes [2]
Old people -> Yep, the ones that absolutely should not be driving? Old people use electrified bikes just fine in walmarts around the country. Same applies for obese people. [3]
Electric bikes of different shapes and sizes are completely redefining the usability of a bike. Most importantly, bikes are the last piece of a public transportation puzzle. They solve many of the last mile problems and force urban planning to be dense and walkable. This provides many additional benefits for accessibility. Walkable/ transit-based areas allow vision impaired people to independent. Bikes lead to many more smooth ramps that naturally accommodate movement impaired folks on wheels.
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> Society is not a blank slate, and we don't get to start over from scratch
Given that America literally destroyed cities and moved mountains to make the car-centric cities that we have today, your statement is demonstrably untrue. Le Corbusier's Paris almost happened and
America's biggest problems today are aging & crumbling infrastructure (owing to unsustainable building [4]) and low supply of housing. The nation is overdue for new economically-sustainable infrastructure and needs more space for housing. Guess what the most natural solution is ? -> Densification. (infrastructure costs shared over more people, allows for more housing when space is at a premium) Biking comes out as a natural side-effect of dense spaces.
It is also a little ironic that you name lack of accessibility, safety & obesity as big problems, without realizing how cars have been at the center of facilitating that very problem.
> aren't going to rebuild our cities around bikes
No one is asking for this straw man. The goal is to integrate into the existing fabric of cities. Building bike infrastructure has shown to reduce traffic and make it easier for those who NEED cars to continue using them. Bike infrastructure is the cheapest of all major forms of transportation infrastructure.
The fact that cities as dense as NYC have pathetic biking infrastructure is a testament to just how far behind America is on accommodating humans within its cities. We aren't talking about rebuilding Phoenix. This is about making biking a viable option for the densest of American cities.
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I’d much rather people who disagree with this point of view dissect it in a reply than reflexively downvote. I personally disagree with twblalock’s conclusions but acting like path dependency isn’t a powerful force reminds me of the kids who stick their fingers in their ear whilst shouting “I can’t hear you!”.
> People in agreement with the OP would be better served by someone who starts off acknowledging that biking and public transit work in other places and presenting their objections in that context.
Biking and public transit work, in a very small number of very dense places, and people drive cars everywhere else. Even in Europe and Japan, the supposed paradises of public transit, most people own and drive cars daily unless they live in London or Tokyo or other dense cities.
Accept that fact, and then you will be arguing in good faith. But to pretend that I'm ignoring some kind of bicycle-friendly paradise in other parts of the world is just silly. The super-dense cities where this works are outliers.
I feel that one of the problems of “bike urbanistas” is lack of utilitarianism. There is no realistic road map to make modern cities in the most of the world to look like Amsterdam/Copenhagen. That is my major problem with all this proposals. They try to see the problem in a vacuum and don’t take any real situations in to an account.
As for me, I wish it would be possible to choose bike to get to work (i have 5 of them already). But even with ideal conditions and electric bike i still live 15 miles/25km from work and the trip will take at least 1 hour. It rains and it snows from time to time here and there is no way that it would be possible to get rid of car infrastructure in any even the most idealistic dream.
25 KM is a decent ride but definitely doable and even if people would only do it 50% of the time (and let's be honest, if people in Stockholm chose to bike during the winter months we can probably up that 50% a bit) that would still be a huge reduction in traffic, freeing up valuable city space for more productive endeavors.
I live in Philadelphia and it’s absolutely feasible here. Our density is roughly comparable to European cities like Amsterdam. The vast majority of trips are under 3 miles. With a few relatively small tweaks we could be an excellent bike city.
But is it a better world? Outside of dense city centers it isn‘t. It‘s less comfortable, far less.
Today I quickly bought some things for breakfast. Got in the car in the garage, outside it was pouring. Got out 4 minutes later in the supermarket garage. I was back 15 minutes after leaving and there was absolutely no traffic at all. The car ride was nice and enjoyable.
I wouldn‘t have walked this, I would rather have stayed hungry until lunch. Even if I could it would have taken at least half an hour.
Sure, it took energy to produce that car, but that by itself doesn‘t mean it‘s worthwhile. It also takes energy to build houses. To live well. Anything takes energy.
It‘s possible to make a point that we should use the minimum possible energy in life for various reasons. Fine. But this is a very different argument then.
This is the thing you'll start to notice; any city that is good to bike/transit it will be even better for cars; and so it quickly becomes less of a "make this city walkable/bikeable" and more "ban cars in the city".
If we could harness the energy spent on talking about bikes replacing cars and convert it into electricity the worlds energy problems would be solved, with extra energy left over for charging self driving cars.
This quote demonstrates why this article shouldn’t be read:
But human progress is not limited to how complex and powerful our technological artifacts are. What’s happening in the U.S. with abortion laws and gun violence should make this fairly evident.
These concepts are entirely orthogonal and there’s nothing evident about how these issues in the US are at all related to technology, cars, progress, or bicycles. And while I’m not one of them an awful lot of folks think the abortion laws are a good thing. This little quote encapsulates the article quality.
More than half of all daily trips in the US are less than 3 miles[1]. If cities give people the option to ride a bike for those shorter trips without feeling unsafe, a lot of people will ride bikes to complete those trips. That's shown over and over again. Change is hard, but a future with less cars and more trips by bike and public transportation is better, and possible.
[1] https://www.energy.gov/eere/vehicles/articles/fotw-1230-marc...