I'd also argue the potential savings and advantages of e-bikes are undervalued because the bike infrastructure in even the best US cities isn't particularly great. I've spent a fair amount of time in Denver, and while there are some good spots and ongoing improvements, the bike infrastructure in the city is honestly a lot worse than you might expect. Better bike infrastructure would almost certainly increase the e-bike value for people who buy them anyways, but even more importantly make them worth it to a lot more people.
You can click around to pretty much any street in the city, and 100% of the space is dedicated to cars. A complete bike network that enables mass cycling is a dense grid that makes basically every street safe to cycle on: http://www.aviewfromthecyclepath.com/2015/05/the-grid-most-i...
Yes, but those bus lanes shown are also allowed to be used as turning lanes by private cars.
What those busy streets don't show is that there is almost always a calm street one block over and parallel that is frequently a designated bike route (not that the designation means much, but they are better streets for bike riding).
I used to commute by bike in Denver, and it isn't the worst major city in America, but it certainly could be improved, especially in the downtown core where bike lanes exist, but drivers constantly cut across them/parked in them. I normally felt safer using a traffic lane than the bike lane downtown for that reason
Maybe legally, but because they don't have barriers protecting people from cars, they lack "Subjective Safety," which is one of the fundamental principles of Dutch cycling network design (and is essential for the average person—as in children and elderly people, not just the brave lycra warrior—to feel comfortable cycling): http://www.aviewfromthecyclepath.com/2008/09/three-types-of-...
Of course they have most of their space dedicated to cars because that is how people want to get around in Denver. Denver is a sprawling metro with around 50 days of snow per year. I'm all for bike lanes but if you start trying to create traffic congestion by taking away more of the streets from cars you will lose elections because you aren't appealing to the masses.
If you're clicking around on random streets in Google Maps, it's clear you have no actual knowledge of the city. It's far less dense than any place you are comparing it to. Paris has been inhabited by city builders for thousands of years. Denver for about 150.
It has such an uphill battle against its historical context as a Western U.S. mining town. Before that, the area was sparsely populated by Native American hunter-gatherers. You're not even pretending to consider the starting point.
Why not compare it to places like Salt Lake City, or Boise? Cities that actually have some similarity to it terms of population and historical development.
I encourage everyone to disregard the comment I'm replying to. It's totally ridiculous. Peak HN big-brain BS.
I live in Denver, near the streets the parent commenter posted, and I agree with those comments.
I do not know why the parent commenter chose those streets, nor what knowledge they have of the city, but if they posted 1000 more links it'd be more of the same.
Denver is not even trying. The landscape is completely dominated by cars, and utterly hostile to humans. The Mayor and City Council pay only lip service to making Denver more bike and pedestrian friendly, but little meaningful work has been done. Money has been spent, and things have been done, but none of it impactful.
In the 10 years I have lived in my house in central Denver, I cannot think of a single project, within a mile radius, that the city has planned and completed[1] that has made me feel safer as a cyclist, or pedestrian[2]. And I live in the densest part of the city, where these projects should be happening.
We even have a Vision Zero program, which is a joke. With the exception of the pandemic, traffic deaths continue to rise.
> Since Vision Zero was implemented in 2017, traffic fatalities have increased every year, except 2020, which saw a significant decrease due to stay-at-home orders and people working remotely. In 2021, traffic fatalities reached an all-time high with 84 deaths, surpassing Denver’s 2019 record high of 71 people.
And road safety aside, bike theft is out of control in Denver. I only take my bike to do errands if I know I lock it up where lots of eyes will be on it, during daylight hours.
That all said, I am happy if the incentive program is paying off. Let's see. Maybe the city got it right. I remain skeptical, for now, given how hostile these streets are.
[1] - During the pandemic they closed 80% of the roads in Cheesman Park and have not reopened them. I am glad the city has stuck with it since it has completely transformed the feel of the place. I truly love it, more than I did before. But they did not plan this. It was a fortunate accident.
[2] - For context, my wife and I share one car, and otherwise we walk or I bike. My wife does not bike. She is afraid to, and I do not blame her.
That's a terrible part of Denver. I agree. Rome wasn't built in a day.
Why would you ever lock your bike outside anywhere in the U.S.? NYC is no better. It's actually worse out East in my experience. That's a separate issue. One exacerbated by the naive views of liberal voters.
You live in the remnants of the Wild West. Millions of poor Central Americans are pouring across the border and setting up shop in your backyard. What do you expect? You are never going to get European city living unless you move to Europe.
I suspect the comment you encourage others to disregard is pointing toward intentions and the implementation of design. What about the age of a city dictates that there is a point it must choose to dedicate 100% of available space to cars? Amsterdam wasn't as navigable by bicycle only 20 years ago.
I live in Phoenix, which is even more sprawled than Denver. I have a grocery store less than a mile from my house, and a bike path almost all the way there. Unfortunately, that path leads through an unlit and flooded underpass, through a flooded drainage canal, then ends with a stretch of grass and a guardrail to a 6-lane 55 mph road. They're so close, but there has to be an intention to complete the job. So far the powers that be intend only to serve cars. I hope that continues to improve in Denver (and elsewhere!) but sprawl and age aren't great excuses for clear choices.
Yet another person who's never been to any part of Denver outside downtown. The bikeability of Phoenix is atrocious. The two cities are not even comparable in this regard. Denver, like most places in the U.S., discovered bikeability in the last couple of decades. Meanwhile, Phoenix has maintained or even exacerbated the status quo. Denver has invested tens of millions into becoming a denser, more bikeable locale. It also elects politicians who campaign on and further this goal. The same cannot be said for Phoenix.
You're gonna have to educate me on the projects you're talking about. It's taken them 7 years to put a bike lane down Broadway and it isn't even gonna be that fantastic.
The safe streets program created some wonderful spaces and routes, so of course they dismantled them for no reason.
Cap Hill, the most densely populated area of the city has no north-south bike route that I would ever dream of taking my children on. The East-west route on 11th is a death trap that cuts in and out in order to maintain a few car storage spaces.
The crown jewel, the I-25 for bikes in Denver, the Cherry Creek Trail requires users to play frogger across Speer, a 4 lane highway, in order to access much of it.
We can go on and on with these.
DOTI is an organization that is 100% dedicated to moving cars, every bike and pedestrian project is implemented with the first goal being to not inconvenience drivers.
That being said, you are right that it's light years ahead of Phoenix.
I visited Denver, excited to see all of the supposed new cycling infrastructure, and aside from like, a handful of bike lanes here and there, I didn't feel comfortable biking around the city. Would prefer not to bike in six lanes of high-speed traffic.
I think people mistake city planning where 12min Car / 55min Bus / 2hr Walk / 30min Bike is “driving culture” where so much noise is made about encouraging people to not drive while doing nothing and covering your ears when it comes time to make not driving viable.
I would love to give up my car, we went down to one because wfh but there is no chance in hell we could go zero. We don’t even have a bus route down my street and I live in an area that is entirely dense apartments. The closest one is a mile walk to the nearest main road with no sidewalk.
I decided to check my friends who live across down and it’s 20m by car, impossible by bus (Google just gives up), 6 hrs walking, and 1hr30 biking.
I swear it’s “we tried bike lanes, what else do you want?”
Yeah that’s a very typical spread of travel times. There’s very few cities in America where a majority of trips are not best served by a car. Even cities like SF and Chi which ostensibly have good public transit, mostly have what I would call “downtown shuttles”. Any trip to the CBD is pretty reasonable by transit, but most trips both in the city and greater region are by bus which are by definition slower than a car.
Cities oriented around the car (even relatively dense ones like LA) are very difficult to adapt to transit because there are no logical nodes at which to place the transit.
I'm an outlier because I've been a bike commuter for over 10 years, but I recently bought myself an e-bike and one of the things I noticed is that it helps me cope with the poor cycling infrastructure where I am. It's really expanded the routes I feel safe taking in my city versus my "acoustic" bikes.
I live in Denver, and find the bike infrastructure to be criminally inadequate.
The same is true for the road infrastructure, but the bike lanes are set up to ensure that there's a continuous stream of dangerous and complex interactions where bicyclists would be effortlessly killed by a driver.
I ride a scooter around the city full time, like a small motorcycle, and it's so fast and easy and convenient.
I used to bike around the city but will never go back to biking.
heres a cool litle project showing where ive ridden in denver (and the world)
I've worked as a bicycle courier in Denver and DC.
Bike lanes have always felt kind of silly in my view. You're always being set up to collide with an opening car door or get T-boned by someone making a right on red. Worse yet, drivers will often try to overtake cyclists to make that right turn. Many are terrible at judging relative speeds.
Easy solution is to just skip the bicycle lanes. Move with traffic on the main thoroughfares. When possible operate on the residential side streets.
Bicycle lanes are part of the problem in that they create the wrong expectations for both cyclists and drivers. Cyclists still need to maintain just as much if not more situational awareness. Drivers expect cyclists to stick to the lane. As you approach any intersection you are going to want to move towards the center. Sure, get over to the side when it makes sense. No need to make a nuisance of yourself, but bike lanes create more problems than they solve.
Denver itself is a relatively rural area. Many drivers are unaccustomed to urban driving. On the plus side, you have extremely wide streets. I never attributed my experiences to a "lack of bike infrastructure". From my perspective the less planning, the better. Like the bike lanes, when they do build something, I doubt it would solve more problems than it creates.
London had a lot of these, when even after the first bigger set of infrastructure "cycle superhighways" went in.
There was a lot of outcry and fixes of some of the worst ones after various accidents.
Still a lot to do, but during COVID a lot of roads were experimentally closed, with pedestrian space increased and more cycle lanes it's been a big jump in some parts of London at least.
They may be less dangerous than a bike because they can go quite fast, matching the speed of cars when riding on the road, which helps you avoid dangerous situations in which car drivers try to pass you without enough space to do so. Good bicycle infrastructure can minimize this, though it doesn't seem like Denver has it.
I think in Europe they are defined as max of 50cc and top speed of 45. So slightly under urban speed limit. Not that lower limits aren't coming more common.
The 50cc/45 kmh or 4kw/45 kmh for electric ones defines a class of vehicles (mopeds L1, L1e-b if two wheels) that have a simpler registration and need a simpler driving license.
Electric powered bikes exist (Powered cycles, L1e-a) with 1 kW/25 kmh, while electric assisted bycicles and scooters[1] are "out of scope".
[1] the kind of electric sccoters with tiny wheels and no seat, "scooter", at least here in Italy, is commonly used to call anything with smaller wheels than a motorbike, it is used also for (powerful) motorbikes of class L3.
- the usual pedal-assisted ebike which is classified as a bicycle, pedal assistance up to 25 kmh
- bikes with pedal assistance up to 45 kmh, these need to be registered and need a special licence plate, and you need a driving licence to ride them. Bonus is (compared to a scooter) that if you turn the motor off then they are treated as normal bicycles, so you are allowed on all the bike paths where regular bikes are.
These latter ones are actually fast enough to keep up with city traffic easily, even though in Zurich there is a lot of bike infrastructure, so you wouldn't necessarily need them. I think they are the best of both worlds, bicycles and mopeds.
I want the robocars to take over for the selfish reason of being able to safely ride a bicycle everywhere without any intervening bike infrastructure campaign.
Like, the "urban traffic problem" really can be reduced in almost every respect to either "humans are unsafe drivers" or "cars take up too much space". Shrink the fleet down to robotaxis and ebikes and you've solved everything last-mile related with no streetscape changes, leaving just the longer journeys for shared modes. As a bonus, kids become much more self-mobile again.
