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Comment by zdw | Hacker News Reader

Having just travelled to Beijing, these bikes literally are everywhere, frequently stands of 20-50 or more from the many many companies that offer them outside a subway station, so I can see the pushback about cluttering up the place.

Most of the people I talked to are pretty positive on them - it's fairly easy to find one, and they're dirt cheap to ride (most are sub-$0.10/hr if my math is right).

I like to think of this as closer to Uber's driver-free endgame - manage a bunch of rentable objects that provide transportation, except in this case they're taking advantage of public parking areas and that's a public bad.

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The amount of space taken up by car parking makes me generally unsympathetic to complaints about bike sharing "taking up too much public space" - though perhaps there is less car parking in china.

Space taken by car-parking is typically in dedicated parking lots: out of the way and doesn't impede public rights-of-way - compare to having bicycles ridden on sidewalks and interfering with car traffic.

In the US, the majority of streets have at least a lane of space taken up by parking. If half of that was offered to bikes there wouldn't be any bike parking issues.

It's the same in biger cities in France, Eastern Europe, even in Germany, although the Germans are better behaved probably because of huge fines.

In Germany the fines for parking where you aren't allowed to park are something like 10 €, probably much lower than the European average.

In some cases it does not impede public right of way; but it has a much deeper, longer term, insidious cost.

https://youtu.be/Akm7ik-H_7U

Also "interfering with car traffic" is silly. Bikes are traffic too and have just as much right to being in the road as cars.

Many bicyclists are afraid to be on the road, and many drivers believe roads are for aggressive car/truck drivers only. There is some basis for this, as novice bicyclists can have difficulty maintaining 25mph for miles, and many drivers are eager to prove their engine is stronger than a pair of legs.

> as novice bicyclists can have difficulty maintaining 25mph

That's 40 km/h. Are you trolling or is that a typo?

I've been bicycling nearly daily for >45 years and I've never gone that fast.

It's not terribly hard for a fit male to maintain 40km/h for a while on a nice racing bike. But I think 25km/h is a more reasonable top speed. It's also the speed where electric bicycles stop supporting the driver, at least here in Germany.

To average 40 you'd have to live somewhere quite flat I suspect.

Or more likely downhill.

To add a data point:

I cycle to work daily (22km) and have cycled pretty much all my life since. Sustaining 40km/h for longer periods is unrealistic if 1.) your terrain is not completely flat; 2.) there is wind; 3.) you do not want to get to your destination soaked with sweat; 4.) you have to carry some luggage like a laptop; or 5.) you cannot use a touring bike because of the terrain.

I sometimes cycle with a GPS and have Pedelecs (limited to 25km/h for electrical support in Germany) as a reference point. The vast majority of cyclers that I encounter cycle less than 25km/h under normal conditions [1]. Probably somewhere between 20 and 25. If there is strong wind or uphill, it's definitely less than that.

40 km/h average is crazy! I can get slightly above 20 km/h sustained average for about an hour. There's no way I could double that, and I'm pretty fit.

My 20 km/h includes a few stops and normal traffic so it's probably closer to 30 on a flat straight with no traffic. Perhaps a special bike with narrow tires could help, but that's less versatile (and I need to ride on dirt roads too).

The highest I've measured is 54 km/h, on a big down hill pedalling full strength on top gear. I regularly exceed 30 km/h but not for sustained periods.

Of course 40km/h does not include traffic, hills, or wind. It is also pretty crucial to have a bike with a racing geometry so that your head is low and air resistance is reduced.

40 km/h is not impossible by any means but as a sustained average speed it takes a special bike and a person with pretty mighty athletic background. Definitely not something for the average commuter. Even 20 km/h sustained for an hour is more than most people can do.

I could probably do 40 km/h for 15-30 minutes if I went all-in and had a racing bike. But my commute includes dirt roads and pathways through the forest so a racing bike is out of question and I don't want to take a shower every day arriving to work.

I don't really have to share the road with cars at any point on my commute so driving too slow isn't an issue. A part of the way is shared with pedestrians (and slower bicyclists) so going too fast is more of a problem.

1999 was the first year Tour de France cyclists managed to get 40km/h on average for the whole 3200 km and three weeks long race. According to http://bikecalculator.com/ 40 km/h requires between 260W and 450W from the rider, doing 40 km/h on avarage will be even more extreme.

I've used a good recumbent bicycle and I could actually hold 35 km/h easily in that one, in the same place I usually average 23 km/h upright with an ordinary ~$700 city bike.

I haven't owned a bicycle since I have been able to drive a car, so my estimation may be wildly inaccurate. I grew up in a distant suburban/rural area in the Seattle region, where the nearest stores are 15 minutes away at 45mph.

These are mostly 2-lane country roads, with 6 foot drainage ditches on the sides on the roads instead of sidewalks, and sometimes even large delivery semi trucks drive these. You'd have to be crazy to ride a bicycle on such a hostile road. I did so twice and my mother refused to let me bicycle to work, insisting I use my father's car.

I occasionally drive up by Point Reyes in California, and on the weekends, Highway 1 near there is a popular cycling route—packs of Lycra-clad cyclists along a narrow 2-lane, winding road with hills on one side and a short cliff to the ocean on the other. You definitely have to be careful passing them, but given that the news is not routinely filled with headlines of "another cyclist plowed down on Hwy 1", I'd disagree with your assessment that you'd have to be crazy to do it.

>packs of Lycra-clad cyclists

There is a huge difference in both perceived and actual safety between being part of a large group of bicyclists that occupies a significant fraction of the lane and being a lone bicyclist going along the verge of the road while cars and trucks pass you at 65 mph.

Similar to schools of fish, and maybe flocks of smaller birds.

I think he was referring to the bit of the article where it said bicycles were "haphazardly along streets and public squares, snarling traffic and cluttering sidewalks" rather than bikes being ridden.

Isn't the road and foot path a public right of way? Is there anything rivalling cars in terms of public space taken up by private property?

> Space taken by car-parking is typically in dedicated parking lots: out of the way and doesn't impede public rights-of-way

In some developed cities, but in most of China cars are usually parked on the sidewalks. When they're angle-parked along the full width of the sidewalk, pedestrians need to drop onto the roadside to continue walking.

Almost all services are now about $0.07USD/hour, or less and, even better, free on the weekends.

Having just come back from living in Shanghai for some time, nothing makes it more convenient than not having to think about the price.

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