We Need to Dream Bigger Than Bike Lanes
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No. It is a balancing act, where cars, bycicles and public transport co-exist, and infrastructure is developed strategically in smart ways and in a prolonged effort.
When I was young in The Netherlands for the most part the cars still dominated the streets. Over time I've seen cities and road networks gradually being transformed to what I now consider a Walhalla for cyclists. Public transport plays a big role in that too, and the Dutch still love their cars.
I highly recommend reading this article: "No helmets, no problem: how the Dutch created a casual biking culture" [0] which interviews the American Bruntlett family that wrote the book "Building the Cycling City: The Dutch Blueprint for Urban Vitality" [1]
See also the great discussion on HN at the time [2].
[0] https://www.vox.com/science-and-health/2018/8/28/17789510/bi...
But it kind of bothers me that Danes and Dutchmen seem to be rather disinterested in one another's achievements on this front. There is a lot of lessons from both sides, that never seems to be discussed in one another's media, to the point (anecdote alert!) where I've seen people in either country be surprised that there is a similar biking culture in the other country.
And people still love their cars in either country, even though I believe it's even more expensive to own a car in the Netherlands (and I thought Denmark was pricey!).
In the densely populated Netherlands we are facing very serious gridlock problems now with cars clogging the highways and railways at full capacity.
We can't keep building new infrastructure (highways) at the pace we did before, because - besides being very expensive - we lack the space for it. New solutions may lie in promoting remote work, carpooling and shortening home/work commute distances.
I also suspect that bicycle infra will be developed even further (e.g. with bike highways) as they take less space and are less disruptive to the landscape.
You can build highways and rails in 3 dimensions. The bicycle simply cannot replace cars and trains in any meaningful way, despite the rise in numbers of single, childless urbanites.
Bicycle infrastructure is primarily about towns and cities. So if you want this big push, you have to do it at the city level, but not just a bike path here or there, but redesign the entire city for bicycles. Have bike thoroughfares, make sure bikes are the best way to get around the center, and for any kind of traffic that stays within a town or borough. Cars are only for getting out of the city.
Many Dutch towns are increasingly redesigned with that idea in mind, most thoroughly perhaps the town of Houten[0], where the only way to get anywhere by car is to take the ring road, whereas bikes get quick shortcuts through the center. That makes bicycles attractive and keeps the pollution from cars out of the center. Travel within the town will favour the bike because it's easier and quicker than a car, which reduces the amount of car traffic, and reduces congestion and pollution.
That's the level at which you need to address this. Well, that and revoking any national helmet laws for bikes, because that's been shown to keep people in cars.
IMHO, this is 120% just a chicken and egg problem. Sure, nobody bikes that far to work, but if you build it people can and will travel large distances to visit just to go on bike tours. In my state, we have an annual event which attracts thousands in which people bike hundreds of miles from one side to the other. Rural highways are closed down/protected for bikes, but just for that one week.
That's the case for a lot of the trails in my state - there are big, rural, rail trail loops, but the suburban/urban connections to the routes are excellent commuting corridors.
In Europe bicycle vacations are pretty common, but it's very different from a regular commute. I did have one coworker once who biked about 50 km to work, but he was very much an exception. For most people, 10 km is a reasonable maximum.
Yes, they do. There is a whole series of trans-Europe routes, the Eurovelo network, and some of them are downright crowded with whole families in the summer.
I do some cycling every summer in Serbia and Bulgaria and my route sometimes intersects the Eurovelo 6. It is often a crap shoot if I am going to find accommodation in the smallest towns, because the rooms might all be booked by French and Germans on a cycling holiday along the length of the Danube.
One driver of that is rail trails.
For example, why has bike commuting declined recently in the United States? https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2019/01/02/bike-w... It's not like cities like San Francisco and Seattle became bike hostile (if they have, I haven't heard it).
Bike commuting is only used by 1 percent of people in large metro areas in the United States. https://www.thetransportpolitic.com/databook/travel-mode-sha...
Public transportation use is also falling in the United States. https://www.govtech.com/fs/transportation/2018-Was-the-Year-...
I love bike commuting. My life is better when I ride my bike to work, but I can't always do it. It's critical that as we think about the future we think about how to improve personal mobility. That's the key.
I'm skeptical that the future is automobiles with single occupants or bikes or scooters. People will gravitate toward toward personalized transportation that gets to where they want to be comfortably, quickly, and within their budgets.
I guess it's a multi-criteria decision problem. On one hand we want people to get where they want to as quickly as possible, on the other we want the city to be "liveable" and safe.
Only "livability" isn't measurable here. IIRC the Dutch maximised mostly for safety.
> Despite the relative safety compared to automobiles, the number of fatalities and hospitalizations from cycling is significantly greater in the United States compared to other western states such as Germany, Canada, and the Netherlands. In a 2014 analysis, incidence of cycling death took place at a mean rate of 4.7 deaths per 100 million kilometers cycled in the U.S., compared to 1.3 deaths per 100 million kilometers in Germany, 1.0 in the Netherlands, and 1.1 in Denmark.
Sure, there will always be situations where it will be difficult, such as steep areas (electric bikes can do a lot here, as well as accepting a little sweating which is normal in NL) or heat that exceeds body temperatures which in turn makes expiration impossible (no easy solutions for this one). But that leaves most of the urban areas on this globe perfectly suitable for cycling, which would be in everybody's favor, and their own first and foremost.
Electric bikes are motorcycles, and I don't want vehicles with the speed and acceleration characteristics of a motorcycle in my bike lane, if you please.
postscript: my very concerns for my safety seem to be getting voted down a lot considering that our friend the Dutchman here has given a rather nice reply recognizing the substantive nature of this conflict
This is not ideal, as the (fast) electric bike is new, also in NL, and people will misanticipate them (which I've experienced first hand). You're right, mixing speeds is a bad idea. This will improve with better infra (wider cycling paths, bike highways) and getting used to this new vehicle. On the other hand, the problem is similar to the scooter, which also doesn't fit the car or bike class, so perhaps with time a new type of lane must be invented. Some cities/political parties in NL are thinking of lowering the car speed limit from 50 to 30 (in urban area), which will facilitate mixing in scooters and electric bikes with car traffic.
Another important fact is liability: heavier vehicles are more liable (weight makes responsible). So in any accident between, say, car and electric bike, the car will be at fault by default, unless there is proof to the contrary. This leads to more cautious driving.
Weight and velocity are also important (potential energy which could cause harm) but acceleration is the right way to sort things into lanes, there can also be an energy constraint for the lane but acceleration is about being able to anticipate the behavior of something so that you can avoid the accident in the first place.
Electric bikes can accelerate fast and the user will also not care as much about stopping (and losing hard won inertia) this could invalidate some expectation and cause an accident.
Finding a good compromise (such as [1]) I think is a better idea. Lowering car speeds such that we can mix is a good one, as well as the introduction of speed limits on cycling paths [2], which would force certain bikes to slow down.
[1] https://gratistheorie.nl/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/opgeblaz... [2] https://www.fietsersbond.nl/nieuws/een-maximum-snelheid-op-h...
As a cyclist, I don't believe this claim for a second.
When a car starts moving at the same time as me, it's faster than me from the start. Which makes sense, it has more horse power per unit mass.
Often I do start moving first, because I think I'm less likely to get right hooked if I do so. But that's a result of paying attention and having my for on the "accelerator" waiting to go. (Also maybe a tiny bit of lag for a car to get into gear, but that's not substantial).
I do agree that a good electric car may start faster than a cyclist, however.
The latter count as bicycles and the former as mopeds which are very often not allowed in bycicle lanes and have other rules to comply with.
Details: https://www.loc.gov/law/foreign-news/article/netherlands-new...
Edit: See brnt's comment that explains it better
I got a eBike (Bionix brand, it's been great!) when I was commuting across town and got sick of riding the bus (these days there's always somebody watching TV on their phone without headphones. It was just a matter of time until I lost it and slapped one out of someone's hand, and I really don't want to be that guy on the bus, y'know? So I bought an eBike.)
I'm a very defensive cyclist and one of the first rules I made up for myself is, "Do NOT use the acceleration boost to catch changing traffic signals." I saw that people (drivers, pedestrians, and other cyclists) around me mis-estimated my trajectory due to the artificial acceleration.
https://cybermotorcycle.com/gallery/peugeot-1903/Peugeot-190...
The fact that your bicycle has an electric motor and remains somewhat slim doesn't change this fact.
Calling an eBike a motorcycle in 2019 is over-exaggeration, IMO, FWIW.
But, again, I do agree with you that powered bikes are not the same as human-power-only bikes.
I don't think it's about looking cooler, it's about barrier to entry.
It's like adding a 15 character requirement to passwords on your application and rotating them weekly. Most people will give up on your application before they even give it a try.
OPs point is that cities should make it a goal for biking to be safe regardless of if you have a helmet. I daresay biking without a helmet in Copenhagen is vastly safer than biking with a helmet in any city in the states.
The sense of safety a helmet gives you when you cycle is mostly a false one. Lack of cycling infrastructure is a far greater danger anyway. In countries with the best cyclist safety records, no one wears or owns bike helmets, like not figuratively 'no one', but literally, no one. Can't be a very significant standalone determinant of bike safety then, can it?
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bicycle_helmet#Effectiveness
"Do bicycle helmets reduce the risk of injury to the head, face or neck? With respect to head injury, the answer is clearly yes, and the re-analysis of the meta-analysis reported by Attewell et al.(2001) in this paper has not changed this answer."
https://doi.org/10.1016%2Fj.aap.2012.12.003
If it's behavior that's being targeted by policies around helmets, then why would a more care-free attitude towards biking make it safer?
Fewer people are driving cars which are much more lethal to non-drivers, so fewer people get killed. People are more active and live longer because of increased physical activity.
Making bikes more appealing/ easier to access by not requiring helmets makes people collectively safer and healthier.
Could you explain why you think that? That’s a pretty general statement. Are you imagining city biking here, or something more like racing in the country-side?
Some data about how this is dangerous could be convincing: https://youtu.be/Boi0XEm9-4E count the helmets.
Just to be clear, I’m not against helmets (I wear one, as is custom in my country).
Only if you are riding a bicycle completely unsuitable for commuting or general urban use; like a mountain bike or racing bicycle.
Commonly used bicycles in Denmark and the Netherlands look like this:
https://omidbikes.nl/wp-content/uploads/mat-zwart-7.jpg
Note the handlebars and upright rider position that basically prevent going over the handlebars during an emergency stop. That kind of accident just doesn't happen here.
Of course, even then, as a teenager I still managed to get myself into some interesting situations a couple of times. But never went over the handlebars :-P
I go back and forth about the helmet issue personally. Though I've almost never not worn one.
My general feeling is that it's not much of a burden to me. And while the cases where it's actually going to help are narrower than most people think (especially people looking from the perspective of a car impact), it does improve the outcome in those cases quite a bit. So it's worthwhile.
If nothing else helmets are good places to mount lights, which are definitely an important safety measure! :)
As a pedestrian who walks about 30m each way on my morning commute, it terrifies me that if a car strikes me at 31MPH I have a 50% chance of severe injury. At 42 MPH, it's a 50% chance of death ( https://aaafoundation.org/impact-speed-pedestrians-risk-seve... ). Atleast I have a separated sidewalk most of my commute, minus street crossings. I would never consider biking in my city because I have to be there on the street next to a bunch of cars.
The lack of helmet laws makes me safer on my bike regardless of whether I wear a helmet or not because it means fewer people are driving cars. Cars are far more likely to injure/ kill me than a solo crash, adding barriers to getting people to adopt bikes makes cycling more dangerous. The more people on bikes, the more cars expect people on bikes, better bike infrastructure, and it makes people in cars more alert to the presence of cyclists.
We have a fairly popular bike-share program here. People can poke a few buttons on their phone and get access to a bike instantly. With a helmet law, that's not the case, they have to be prepared in advance. The presence and popularity of that bike share makes me safer. Removing several hundred motorists from the road every day in our city has a far bigger impact on cyclist safety than the presence/ absence of a helmet.
I have had countless banged up knees, elbows, ankles and hands, but never had a head injury. I used to ride a motorcycle, and wore the full getup aside from pants, and I feel cyclists would be far more protected wearing a jacket and gloves.
Anecdotes aside- figures from the UK (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1119262/) show that it takes 8000 years of cycling to produce a clinically severe head injury and 22000 years for one death. From that same source, roughly 1% of all head injuries admitted into hospitals are from cycling, and 60% are alcohol related. Yet people would find it ridiculous if you suggested they wear a drinking helmet.
The fixation on helmets really confuses me. Its not helped that a lot of it seems to be pushed by people who seem to use it as some kind of virtue-signaling issue. There is just such a focus on a fairly burdensome piece of equipment that in a small percentage of rides in which an incident occurs, and in a small percentage of those incidents, this piece of equipment may help reduce the severity of your injuries, while all other equipment is left out of the conversation.
That is a hilarious and wonderful comparison. I'm gonna save that one for future discussion of helmets and safety.
This stat means absolutely nothing. It's coming from a place where not that many people cycle, the summary even says that cycling experienced a decline, so of course there's not going to be that many injuries from cycling when very few people are doing it. By contrast, British people drink a LOT, so of course they're going to have a lot of alcohol-related injuries. It's just like America: there's very little cycling, and a LOT of drinking and drunkenness, so it doesn't take any great intelligence to predict that there will be far more alcohol-related injuries than cycling-related ones.
And yes, maybe people there should wear drinking helmets, with the way people in those two countries love to get drunk so much.
>There is just such a focus on a fairly burdensome piece of equipment
"Burdensome"? Are you kidding me? Something that weighs a few ounces? I guess you think seatbelts are "burdensome" too.
And yes, I do wear gloves when cycling; they have pads to absorb vibration, and can be helpful if I fall and scrape my hands. They're far more "burdensome" than a helmet, since they take more time to put on (which still isn't very much).
Still my point about a drinking helmet stands- drinking is a dangerous activity- 60% of all hospital admissions for head injuries involve alcohol. Clearly we could reduce the severity and incidence of these injuries with helmets. It would be interesting to see how many "drinking years" it would take on average to get a head injury worthy of a hospital admission.
Driving is dangerous too- and in virtually any accident it seems likely your head is going to come into contact with something- even if it is an airbag, and the mv^2 is much higher- we could reduce the severity and incidence of head injuries if everyone wore a helmet, especially an NFL style helmet with a faceguard...
And you accept that wearing gloves is ok, but you don't wear a jacket- so you know you may fall, and possibly scrape along the ground a bit, but you don't wear a jacket that most motorcyclists consider to be basic standard gear.
Do you understand where I am going here? You assess risk a certain way and make tradeoffs in what you are willing to do to protect yourself, as do I. However, what your risk assessment has determined wearing a helmet as necessary and foolish not to, I see as just another unnecessary burden, choosing instead to wear armored gloves in winter, and accepting other risks. You may feel not wearing a helmet is something a fool does, but my years of riding have given me intuition (in other words, my developed common sense) that the head is highly unlikely to be injured, and statistics back me up on this.
If I did a lot of high speed road cycling, it would probably change things, but my rides around town where I top out cruising around 15mph and if I go down a hill hit 30 for a brief minute or two, its just not necessary or reasonably useful.
So wear your helmet, but I feel denigrating those that don't because your "common sense" tells you its necessary is misguided and somewhat ignorant.
Unfortunately, I don't have the luxury of biking to work yet, but if I did, I'd be using a backpack for what I hope are obvious reasons. Any good backpack these days designed for cycling has a clip on it that attaches to your helmet so you don't have to carry it around. I even did this years ago in college when I biked to class; it wasn't a burden at all.
>And you accept that wearing gloves is ok, but you don't wear a jacket- so you know you may fall, and possibly scrape along the ground a bit, but you don't wear a jacket that most motorcyclists consider to be basic standard gear.
Jackets are incredibly hot. Bicycles don't go fast enough to mitigate this. Some skin scrapes are preferable to getting heatstroke.
>but my years of riding have given me intuition (in other words, my developed common sense) that the head is highly unlikely to be injured
The problem is, if your head is injured, it's either game-over or you suffer mental problems for the rest of your life. Other bodily injuries you can usually heal from. A broken leg? It sucks, but it heals. Skin scrapes? Not a big deal usually (not at bicycling speeds). Worst case you get a skin graft but that's not normal for cycling. But a concussion can leave permanent damage; the brain doesn't heal the way the rest of your body does. To make a computer analogy, I feel like you're talking about the relative risks to various computer parts, and equating potential damage to your laptop's screen to its hard drive. The screen isn't important, nor is the rest of the laptop: you can replace them at any time. But the hard drive is unreplaceable (going back to the last backup, which unfortunately we don't have for brains yet): if anything happens to the hard drive at all, you lose all your data and all your work, and you can't replace that.
I ride bikes a lot, I rode 7 miles this morning on those "slippery/ uneven roads". Most of my friends ride bikes and we all know someone who has been seriously injured or killed by a car. If you eliminate cars bikes are extremely safe (for riders with reasonable hand/ eye coordination). The only injury type that comes remotely close to cars is mountain bike crashes or crashes while racing road bikes and those injuries are far less common and far less lethal than cars.
So yeah... I focus on cars, because they are by far the single biggest danger to cyclists.
Helmets are obviously essential for reducing serious head injuries (although they're less effective than generally advertised[0]) and parents/individuals should strongly consider using them, but legislation should be focused on improving road safety through education, community outreach, and infrastructure design long before it starts to seriously restrict personal liberty and hampering adoption of better modes of transport. The Netherlands, Denmark, Sweden, France, Germany, etc, have all showed that you can have world class cycling cities without requiring helmet use.
>Seatbelts do not protect anyone other than the person wearing it but societies have deemed making them mandatory is a that good idea.
This is a dangerous misconception, unbelted rear passengers seriously increase the risk of fatal injuries for the driver and front passengers[1] and in general increase the overall amount of injuries, which should be obvious when you consider that unrestrained passengers essentially become ragdoll missiles in the event of a crash.
[0] https://sciencenordic.com/cars-and-traffic-cycling-denmark/b...
[1] https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/japan/138037...
Every study I've ever seen contradicts your statement here.
You are all over this thread making strong, sweeping claims about bike safety and your only supporting data point seems to be "KE = 1/2mv^2". But there are entire cities in Europe where biking with no helmet is the norm, lots of people do it every day, and serious accidents are all but unheard of - there are other comments on this post with citations to back that up. There is also evidence that getting more people out biking increases bike safety more than anything else [1], and requiring helmets for everyone at all times makes this very difficult to achieve.
Please stop passing off your gut feeling as fact, it is spreading misinformation and - though I know it seems counterintuitive - actually making biking less safe. To be clear, kinetic energy being proportional to the square of velocity is a fact, that fact's impact on real world bike safety is a much more complicated question.
Disclaimer for what it's worth - I've been biking to and from either work, school or social events about once a day for the past 11 years, and I almost always wear a helmet :)
[1] http://www.forbes.com/sites/niallmccarthy/2015/02/24/the-mor...
Secondly, there are a lot more than two factors at play to make the "cyclists killed per billion of km of bicycle travel" number. Culturally bikes need to be accepted. I don't see how helmets preclude cultural adoption.
And, yes, people are sometimes forced to take other steps that are primarily about their individual safety, such as wearing seat belts. I mostly disagree with those laws as well.
> I don't see how helmets preclude cultural adoption.
Case in point. It seems completely common sense to me that helmets are a massive barrier to widespread adoption! Leaving aside the issues it introduces with bikeshare logistics, having an additional thing to keep track of and carry around and periodically replace (helmets can go bad!), here's something that I suspect you may not have considered: women! Whether it seems reasonable to you and me or not (and I'll be honest, it doesn't seem reasonable to me), the 2 reasons every woman I've ever asked gives for why they wouldn't want to use a bicycle to get around more are
1) sitting on the seat is awkward/uncomfortable when wearing a skirt or dress
2) helmets would ruin their hair
Requiring helmet wear makes cycling a nonstarter for a large chunk of 50% of the population (how I wish I had a citation for this! as far as I've been able to find, nobody has done any kind of survey that attempts to figure out if this is as widespread as I've observed personally). This alone makes me opposed to it, never mind the exaggerated claims of helmet efficacy
Try watching a video of people in Copenhagen riding bikes. Women wear dresses and skirts there all the time while cycling. Same goes in Japan; women commonly wear dresses/skirts there and ride bikes.
It's both. Safety doesn't necessarily require helmets, as Netherlands and Danmark demonstrate. I imagine barrier to entry by requiring helmets would be a huge blow to bicycle culture here.
Also keep in mind, jogging can cause traumatic injuries. But I agree, biking does pose more risk as you have less control than being on your feet.
Maybe if your country is flat as a pancake. If there's hills, then yes, people really can hit 20mph, even with casual bikes.
In NL, the average is ~20kph for muscle-powered bikes on bikes like [1]. Sports bikes like [2] are not usually used in commutes and considered as dangerous as scooters if used at speeds of 20mph. E-bikes legislation takes 25kph as the limit above which the cyclist is required to follow certain extra rules, and of course muscle-powered cyclist reaching that speed should perhaps also be legislated accordingly. The reason it isn't is difficulty of enforcement, but there are people advocating a maximum speed for bike infrastructure [3], at 25pkh.
[1] https://omidbikes.nl/wp-content/uploads/mat-zwart-7.jpg [2] https://s3-wielrennen-xjspucykgif.netdna-ssl.com/welke_wielr... [3] https://www.fietsersbond.nl/nieuws/een-maximum-snelheid-op-h...
Instead they will sit in a car and die from heart disease, obesity etc.
> David Roberts: The Dutch don’t wear bike helmets. How safe is it to ride a bike in the Netherlands?
> Chris Bruntlett: We — like you — live in a place where helmets have been mandated by law, because they’ve been accepted as a commonsense safety device, normal as a seatbelt. But the Dutch show that [for them], safety in infrastructure, safety in slowing cars, and safety in numbers are all far more important than safety in body armor.
> David Roberts: Yeah, the US approach seems to be to up-armor the cyclist so that cars don’t have to change.
The danger comes mostly from bad infra design and other heavier traffic (cars). Those can be addressed separately, and it turns out pretty well. Leading causes of bike-accidents are now cyclists being distracted by their phones and skipping red lights (common especially in large cities). Public awareness campaigns are addressing the former, law enforcement the latter.
You're right, strictly speaking wearing helmets is safer, and you are free to do so. But then again, 4 point safety belts in cars too (but we don't), driving slower (but we don't), not calling while driving/cycling (but we do) and so on. There's a balance between safety, practicality and getting people to their destinations, it seems helmets are simply far less impactful than other measures.
Source (in Dutch): https://www.volkskrant.nl/nieuws-achtergrond/fietsers-voor-h...
While I don't think they should be required, I do think they should be worn. I've had a low-speed spill where the helmet saved my head considerably - I hit the pavement so hard my glasses were flattened out. You fall much faster, even at low speeds, and you fall much farther from a bike, than a pedestrian would fall.
For elderly and young children a helmet may make sense, due to the significantly higher risk of such injuries (due to reduced physical responses and inexperience). And for racing bicycles wearing a helmet is the norm.
A helmet can significantly reduce the impact of a fall, but the risk of that fall is so low that the measure becomes statistically meaningless. It is akin to always wearing a hard hat when you leave your home, because it would save you from serious brain injury if a brick fell on your head. Of course, bricks don't generally fall out of the sky, but you can never be too sure…
This doesn't mean that all safety measures are nonsense — having working lights and functioning brakes do reduce the chances of accidents. It is also tempting to compare the helmet to seatbelts in a car, but there the chance of needing them is simply much higher.
One well-researched source on the negative effects of bicycle helmets if made mandatory in the Netherlands (in Dutch): https://www.fietsersbond.nl/nieuws/fietshelmen-en-veiligheid...
As a safety heretic I fully agree with you that people can make their own decisions on helmet use but why should cycling get special treatment here? On every other issue of physical safety the HN gods have ruled the other way.
That's an easy thing to assert and a difficult thing to prove. I just assume the rules are the way they are because the Netherlands is a democracy and they want things that way, not because they're especially great at risk assessment (what population of people really is?).
I gather this is still a rather active topic of discussion and research in the Netherlands?
https://www.dutchnews.nl/news/2019/03/top-hat-bike-helmets-w...
Combining your two sources suggests that making helmets mandatory would have a large negative effect on public health. (the downtick in injuries would be overshadowed by the reduction in biking)
But a spokesman for the SWOV acknowledged that the protective head wear might be a hard sell in the Netherlands. ‘Helmets aren’t often worn in the Netherlands and we are aware of the arguments [that cycling could decrease if they were obligatory],’ he said.
I'm not invested in what happens in the Netherlands at all, but I wonder if a lot of people are just taking "the downtick in injuries would be overshadowed by the reduction in biking" for granted.
I'm willing to bet that a lot of the same people who think that not wearing a bike helmet (and especially allowing a child not to wear one) should be a criminal offense would think the idea of having to wear a helmet driving is just silly.
The attitudes around helmets for downhill skiing have gone through a similar shift. It used to be that essentially no one except racers (and then snowboarders) wore helmets. Now, at least some people will chastise you if you don't.
And it's not just a US thing. Copenhagen and Amsterdam are both big bicycling cities but a fair number of people in Copenhagen do wear helmets and you don't see nearly as many of the bare headed young kids perched on top of the handlebars that you see in Amsterdam.
Although I don't think biking without a helmet should be a criminal offense for adults, I think the comparison with cars isn't quite right. We do require people to use safety equipment like seatbelts and airbags when riding in a car. A helmet probably won't do much for you in a car crash but can if you wreck your bicycle just like a seatbelt would be silly on a bike.
Also, race cars aren't really comparable to normal driving situations since they go much faster and have a different set of constraints than normal cars. The racing helmets, rollcages, and 5 point harnesses aren't really as necessary at 70mph as they are at 200mph
https://www.treehugger.com/cars/why-all-cars-should-be-hi-vi...
https://www.cdc.gov/traumaticbraininjury/get_the_facts.html
The data disagree with you.
So no, based off of your links I wouldn't say the data disagrees with me.
In Cambridge, UK, where I used to live it once took me quicker to ride to the same destination than a taxi. In fact it’s well known that cycling in Cambridge’s city centre is much faster than taking a car.
A change of shoes and socks can also be appreciated if it's tipping it down.
I also use a raincoat with cap and rain pants, which should fall over your shoes. However, I only use this in heavy rain, because with light rain I get wet anyway from my own sweat (wet rain gear usually does not breathe enough for me).
Then there is the rain radar [1], but is probably not available for your locale ;)
I find it handy to simply have a pannier with my rain gear:
* https://www.rei.com/c/cycling-jackets
* https://www.rei.com/c/cycling-tights-and-pants
It's not heavy, though a bit bulky, and if it does actually start coming down, one can just pull over and put it over one's regular clothes. If you can, try to ensure that whatever over-gear you get says "breathable": wearing the equivalent of a garbage bag reduces comfort.
I personally wear the funny-looking cycle attire as well, but that's because I like to pedal hard to get some cardio (instead of going to the gym). If you pedal at a slower pace then you may not work up a sweat--at least not after ~2 weeks once you're in better shape.
Weather should really be one of the least concerns on anyone's list for cycling.
But if I was to indulge you, I would say that public transport doesn't mean rails. In the case of buses it also uses roads. And of course, if we were to abolish all motorized private person transport (again, no where even close to that) of course there would need to be a system to allow for the transport of items that are too big to be transported by individuals in public transport. I assumed that goes without saying.
Sound familiar?
You also haven't responded to my response yet. You just ignored it and are trying to derail the discussion with a meta argument. Unless you are going to address the actual content of the arguments, I'm done with this conversation.
Having a baby? Hop on a train, hopefully it's not delayed.
Mother dying? Walk a few blocks, train, hopefully she'll make it.
Public transportation in American cities barely works as is, and usually only for tourists (see LA) and yet you want to rely solely on it?
Just take the car in these situations, that's not the problem. The problem is people justifying 90% of the car usages (which could be replaced by bicycle or public transportation) by being snarky about the remaining 10% (and I'm being generous with 10%).
People have emergencies, and everyday people have dire emergencies like that. Trains do not fit those cases, which happen ALOT, every second.
You want to change everything without having a solution to fill the void.
It really is a waste to have people commuting like that, it's a city problem though, not a car problem.
Yes, cars should be limited in your cities, and yes you need better public transportation, but that doesn't mean getting rid of cars everywhere.
You need to structure around roads because you need to connect goods and services to the last mile, but you also don't need to have every citizen in your congested city driving to work. I don't see why you're conflating those two.
But the US is so far behind from that point of view that it's going to take a massive effort to stop subsidizing and requiring (via zoning) driving and facilitating other means of getting around.
I think that most of the anti-car mentality comes from how difficult this fight has been.
Instead the city council built a few bike lanes and even then people lost their goddamn minds.
"You're taking away parking space!" "All these bike lanes are slowing traffic" "No one wants to bike into the city"
Meanwhile, cyclists are steadily increasing in numbers and the centre of town is actually seeing some signs of life for the first time in decades.
But heaven forfend we actually do something radical and pedestrianise the city.
I love the place and I intend to settle there in a few years time but it is very disheartening to see a once in the life time opportunity to solve these issues get squandered in the space of a few years.
Thinking about non-car based transportation methods is great. But the reality is that large segments of society are always going to need some sort of car-based option. You can't just ban cars from a city center without totally excluding a lot of young people.
Of course if we ban cars we can't expect everyone to use a bike instead, or to rely on current public transport network. Train, tramway, metro, bus (, something new?) all need to be vastly reinforced (something between 10x and 100x maybe?) but there's room for that once cars are out of the picture (both from roads and parking space).
Cars are convenient, but not efficient at scale (and too dangerous, for now at least). We need another solution, and I think it has to be radical to really work. But then, banning or greatly reducing car use in cities will be a tough one..
Maybe some of that will go to drones but the point is that a device that shows up at your door and goes to any other door in the city for opens a huge number of new opportunities.
Or maybe someone will invent self driving bicycles/scooters for delivery tasks.
Safety is a factors, but that is more weight than size, 4 full grown adults take up a lot of space.
While not everyone can be that active, a steadily increasing number of people are using these micro-mobility devices. It really does improve the suburban and urban environment over cars. It's not like handicapped-accessibility considerations are going away when we start to cater to these smaller vehicles!
Guess what the biggest obstacle to my kids getting around on their own is? Cars! You don't have to exclude cars from cities, just make them be there in a way that also allows children to safely get around.
I rode a bike with a toddler in a toddler seat on the back until I was 8 months pregnant. You can also get little "cars" to tow behind your bike to hold two kids.
I always hated cars. My kids never felt like a barrier to going far free. My marriage did. After the divorce, my kids and I eventually went car free.
They are adults. They still live with me. We remain car free. We're happier this way.
As adults, I can understand the appeal of being car free, but I can't help but be struck by how dangerous it seems to commute on a bike pregnant with a toddler onboard.
I'm imagining biking down Market St, 8 months pregnant, with a toddler seat and two kids in tow. That's a lot of faith that nobody's going to open a car door at the wrong time or pull out into traffic without looking. I know fit dudes in their 20s that have had accidents and been seriously injured. I've never thought of myself as particularly risk adverse, but wow that seems risky.
When I was six months pregnant, I took my two year old to the ER via bike because his dad had our only vehicle. The kid needed stitches, having done a bit of climbing of the furniture and busted his chin open on the wood floor -- a rather all too common injury for children that age. I was told that the stitches he needed were really rather mild for such an injury. They had absolutely seen far worse.
The most dangerous place my toddler spent time was our home, where he persistently climbed the door frames and yelled for me to come catch him before he fell. He never did learn to climb down. He just counted on his young, energetic and very attentive mother to always safely catch him. (And I always did, so he was never cured of this expectation.)
I desperately wished I could find some way to remove our door frames. It would have brought my stress levels down about a thousand percent.
That's why it's important to ride where one can be easily seen. That means riding in the middle of the general purpose lane and not off to the side in a narrow bike lane within the "door zone".
I ride with my three kids (one in the rear child seat and two in the trailer) in the middle of the lane and never had problems with car doors or vehicles suddenly pulling out without seeing me.
People in Japan do it all the time.
Ha! Go see how they do it in Europe. Bike trailers, extra seats in the front & back, built in cargo decks, longer bikes; there are lots of fancy ways to load a lot of kids & cargo onto your bike. And don't forget that kids can ride their own bikes too! My kid was riding a bike with me to daycare at 3-4 years old. Your thinking is too car-centric!
Whether that's a bad thing or not is another discussion but don't try to present Europeans as some sort of superhumans.
So I would disagree with you. The traffic problems are caused by having cities that are only setup to make cars convenient and everything else inconvenient. Cities that prioritize the lowest bandwidth people mover are going to have major traffic problems, of course.
Like you say, people want convenience. But I don't know why you think they particularly care about driving (or cycling or walking or taking the train). They just want the most convenient & cost effective thing. If that's a car, they will drive a car. If that's cycling, they will cycle. If it's the train, they will take that instead.
On practically every measure, owning a car is far less convenient (unless you live in a city built around driving cars) and more expensive than not owning a car. We owned a car in Germany but only used it for weekend trips. So the point here is to change cities to not be built around cars. Make cars less convenient.
And Netherlands is just... Flat, and biking has been a tradition there long before the current ecological push.
However, most European old towns are frequently narrow one-way streets on hills and it gets really hard to get a buy in to reconfigure them altogether.
But I agree with the premise that streets should be given back to people, but pedestrians should first and foremost, with bikes and other micromobility tools "demoted" compared to them as to not cause mayhem (eg. pedestrians do abruptly stop :). Basically, pedestrian streets with traffic rules stating that pedestrians are always in right of way. That should provide plenty of space for both social activity and transit with bikes and such, even in small streets I mention.
Living in a climate that gets significant snow and is hilly means I would also like to streets to be efficiently "heated" to reduce risks for pedestrians and cyclists during winter months.
A certain amount of that, as an unavoidable byproduct, is okay with most people. What’s not ok is the perceived (or real) gratuitous destruction of convenience.
Besides, gratuitous destruction of that "convenience" is good for society and the planet. The obesity rate in America should be proof enough that cars are bad for you.
And even then that's mostly a function of lower incomes (vis-a-vis the US). The high-income European states of Luxembourg, Switzerland, Iceland, Monaco and Liechtenstein all have almost identical car ownership as the US.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_vehicles_...
Here in Silicon Valley, there's no more room to widen 101.
And especially the "ingress" roads do not block - from suburbs and further districts.
Now that is Poland, Warsaw, the city is designed to be more car friendly than most capitals in EU, more spread out, while still keeping strong public transport and bike as options.
The parts that block up are near choke points, City center, bridges, some big intersections.
[edit] looking at random stats such as http://internationalcomparisons.org/environment/transportati... seems to confirm that - the vehicle ownership rates are just a bit lower, but annual distance driven per capita in European countries is twice less than USA.
Or little league practice in one part of town while another kid has gymnastics in another part of town?
It’s silly that a country as huge as the United States is being compared with the tiny, flat, Netherlands. Some American neighborhoods are larger than entire Dutch towns. The Netherlands doesn’t have Texas hot and humid summers, or California terrain, or Michigan winters. And a 3-4 year old riding to day care? Just how long does it take a kid to ride a bike 5 miles vs. me driving 5 miles? It’s absurd.
I get it “let’s hate cars,” but cars are freedom. If I have to run to a CVS at 2am, a bike is the last thing I want to ride. In the event of a natural disaster or an evacuation, are people supposed to ride their bikes to escape a wildfire or a hurricane?Or wait on the city bus? People literally die if they can’t evacuate quickly — and anyone expecting public transportation to be working or effective at evacuations is delusional or living in a perfect dream world where nothing bad ever happens.
But again, the United States is lacking the infrastructure and population density for this. Yes it's a big country but they could've gone for small dense settlements with everything you need in reach and then big distances between those towns. But having everything spread apart was a cheaper solution.
This article is arguing for cycling/public transport infrastructure in city cores. Of course cars (or high speed trains in developed countries) are more suited for travelling large distances.
Building more bike lanes in the inner city doesn't stop people from evacuating by car.
As another commenter said, density and urban layout problems are one of the major problems relating to your other points.
Also - kids love riding bikes by themselves when it's safe, at least myself and my friends did!
In rural areas with few roads and sudden population movement, those roads can quickly become congested. This was a big issue for the city of Paradise during evacuation from the Camp Fire last year[0].
In urban environments, large vehicle movements can also become a public safety issue. Try commuting out of a major city at 5pm on a Friday and you'll frequently find delays and congestion at freeway entrances - exactly as you would during a mass exodus.
That's not to mention the rush on gas stations[1] which can occur as a subset of car owners realize they have to fill up before leaving town. This in itself will lead to delays and congestion - and even if you yourself have set aside plenty of fuel, you still suffer as a result of those who are less prepared.
Neither of these urban problems affect cyclists who can continue even in the presence of road traffic. I'd imagine they'd in fact be more at-risk from frantic and desperate vehicle owners who suddenly realize that using a car is failing and that they want a plan B.
Regarding CVS at 2am -- cycling at night can be surprisingly enjoyable since the roads and surroundings are quiet. In some places with cold/wet weather - or with larger distances to travel - it might be less pleasant though.
[0] - https://www.apnews.com/e856b9efef7b426a90fd175510cd54dd
Bakfiets: https://www.babboe.nl/bakfietsen/big
Doesn't get stolen and doesn't care about rain.
My bike spent a single winter out on my balcony after we needed the space inside the apartment for baby stuff. It's now rusty in multiple spots.
My previous bike, I left on the small back yard of my last apartment, locked up. It got stolen a few months after I started doing that.
So again, this is not feasible for a lot of people, myself included, and it's very privileged to think that everyone has access to a garage next to their home.
Offtopic, but this has to end. I do not understand how it is socially acceptable to put huge pieces of your private property on the public streets. You cannot just put your washing machine on the street because you have nowhere else to put it! Why can you do that with a car?
> What gasoline taxes are bikes paying to use the roads?
Bikes can't pay taxes, neither can cars. People that own them can, and most cyclists I know also own a car. So if you're attempting to stipulate that people that ride bikes don't pay taxes on the infrastructure that they use, you're wrong- at least in my experience.
In any case, bicycles cause far, far less damage - maybe even 0 damage - to the roads used by motorists. So, if a side effect of motorists paying taxes to build and maintain roads is that cyclists also get to use them for free, a sensible person would be okay with that.
> Tolls?
I can't think of a single toll road that I have ever been on in the US that was not a highway. Cyclists don't ride on highways unless absolutely necessary. In most cases this probably isn't even legal for the cyclist to ride on the toll road.
> Are they getting mandatory inspections each year?
Can you find even one example of a poorly maintained bicycle causing someone other than the rider's death/injury?
Anyway, I don't even suspect that you read the article. Instead you just came in here to rant about how anti-cycling you are, which is not a great look, but suit yourself.
> bicycles cause far less damage... to the roads used by motorists
This only holds true as long as bicycles are a small amount of traffic added on. It's like the SMS bands with telcos: a small bit of auxiliary slack being used for something else. If bicycles become a large part of the traffic, there will still be an impact. Even if the bikes don't tear the roads up much, elements and natural wear make up a fair part of that. If bikes take half the road rather than the break-down lane, they will need to start paying for it (even if not necessarily the same amount, dollar-for-dollar.)
This argument is also relevant to electric cars. They tear up the roads, but are not taxed like normal cars are. Registration fees are also still relevant; at least some of that goes to administering a road network, which has to be done for cars or bikes.
> Can you find even one example of a poorly-maintained bicycle causing someone other than the rider's death/injury?
This is a silly standard to set, given present conditions. The people who use bicycles today are enthusiasts, fairly well-trained, and very likely to take care of equipment. If, however, it becomes commoditized, this will doubtless change. Cars didn't need much regulation at first, either; that changed at scale.
> Anyway, I don't even suspect that you read the article. Instead you just came in here to rant about how anti-cycling you are, which is not a great look, but suit yourself.
This is a poor attempt to dismiss someone's arguments out-of-hand. The point that he pays for certain amenities (even if they are subsidized more than they ought to be) is still valid.
I did read the article, and it still leaves the biggest issue un-answered. Namely, _"micro-mobility", as it is therein-termed, only works on a micro scale_. Many cities aren't built this way, and it is only practical if you live in a tiny urban bubble. I've lived places where I drove forty-five miles each way for a commute. Why did I put up with this? Because I didn't want to live in the expensive, yuppie parts of town. For all that money, I'd have gotten a small apartment, built no land equity, and had very little space. I don't like it much in cities for this reason: everything is small, little green space, trash, crime, etc. The other option is the hippie neighborhood with seven-dollar-a-cup coffee shops on every corner; when those pop up, people instead complain gentrification is pricing out the poor.
The reason I don't like the whole bike thing is because it's emblematic of a culture and a vision I don't like: everyone living densely-packed into the stereotypical SF or Seattle city. This isn't often argued, but it's part of the larger "culture war." I know on which side most people on HN fall, but most people on the other side like their culture the way it is. Telling them to just import the dutch bike culture isn't a good solution, and will work just about as well as any other time people have told another group to just import their culture.
> everyone living densely-packed into the stereotypical SF or Seattle city.
I don't think you need that much density to encourage biking. Even a city with a lot of townhouses, 3-4 story apartment buildings (for the yuppies), and no parking minimums for businesses ought to be dense enough.
https://www.denenapoints.com/relationship-vehicle-weight-roa...
Right, which is why I also wrote this:
>> Even if the bikes don't tear the roads up much, elements and natural wear make up a fair part of that.
Roads degrade on their own, and the people who use them should still pay for them. I also specified that this need not be dollar-for-dollar, but it is not costless.
> I don't think you need that much density to encourage biking. Even a city with a lot of townhouses, 3-4 story apartment buildings (for the yuppies), and no parking minimums for businesses ought to be dense enough.
Would you please provide a citation for this? I'm guessing your source is only accounting for being able to pack required amenities into a hypothetical biking range. This wouldn't take into account that many people work across town , have to go there to see people and do things, etc. Without a source, however, I can't accurately respond to this.
I saw another commenter raise the point that if you want comparable convenience, you often end up with EVs. What is the objection to those? Assuming carbon-neutral electricity, that is. I'd hazard a guess that producing the energy required to move people via nuclear electricity is more efficient than producing it via consuming food.
I'm also curious if you'd be open to biking in, say, Texas where summer temps are easily above 100 degrees and above 110 in some places. I have trouble seeing how you could convince people to do this; most hesitate to step outside unless necessary in such weather. How would you mitigate this?
How much do roads degrade on their own vs due to usage? In dry places like California or the southwest, I can't imagine it's a lot. In places with harsh winters or heavy rain it's probably more.
But if roads are designed to maximize bike throughput rather than car throughput, they'd probably be built differently too. They wouldn't need to be as wide or support speeds as high. This would reduce maintenance costs by a bit.
> many people work across town
If towns are denser "across town" isn't as far anymore. Not to mention if driving across town is no longer as fast, people will live closer to work. In any case, on an electric bike a distance of 10 miles is trivially bikeable in under an hour, which is also the length of an average car trip.[1] Implying half of all car trips could be done on an electric bike.
> comparable convenience
Cars are convenient when there aren't many other cars around. As the number of car drivers goes up, I don't really see convenience. Traffic, pollution, fatal accidents, needing to find parking.
> What is the objection to [EVs]?
They take up just as much space on the road and cause accidents at similar rates. Particles from tires and braking are still a health hazard. EVs are awesome and we should all move to them because they're lightyears beyond ICE vehicles but I don't think they should play the exact same role.
> I'd hazard a guess that producing the energy required to move people via nuclear electricity is more efficient than producing it via consuming food.
Maybe. But I'd hazard you have to produce less energy overall because a cyclist is moving 100 times less weight than a driver. Also there are second- and third-order effects of less energy spent on road maintenance (less wear and tear) or healthcare (everyone's getting more exercise). And the cyclist has to eat anyway - biking may add maybe 500 kcal/day to their diet at the high end.
> if you'd be open to biking in, say, Texas where summer temps are easily above 100 degrees and above 110 in some places
It depends. If I'm going to work and can change and/or shower at the office sure. If I'm riding an electric bike and have to go less than 10 miles, sure.
> I have trouble seeing how you could convince people to do this; most hesitate to step outside unless necessary in such weather. How would you mitigate this?
These are all fair points. Most people value convenience. Ultimately everyone needs to decide what they want. Endless traffic, noise, pollution, sprawl, risking death (car accidents are the number one killer of children in the US) seem like a pretty high price to pay for convenience to me.
1. https://www.energy.gov/eere/vehicles/fact-728-may-21-2012-av...
Ah, well, there it is. It's hard to argue in good faith with one who assumes that all things related to cycling are a part of a culture war being waged. I'm out.
You actually can in the US, that's legal in many places as long as it isn't kept there permanently. (I.e, you leave it on a trailer). We even put our trash bins onto the street almost every week. But that's beside the point.
> how it is socially acceptable to put huge pieces of your private property on the public streets.
Because that's what public transporation is, and the value it imparts.
We dedicated public streets to the public, because the value of public transportation is much higher than the small temporary cost of having any one person occupy it. Cars and roads are the most efficient form of public transportation ever invented so far (in terms of travel time, distance traveled, safety, and equability). That's not to imply they are perfect on any/all of these things, just better than the alternatives available today.
Yes, in a perfect world, everyone would have a beautiful light rail train at their front door, that takes them everywhere and anywhere they ever need to go. But that level of infrastructure is insanely expensive, and the cost of that expense is pushed into the housing nearby that infrastructure. Paradoxically, the act of building alternative public transportation like this prices out most of the public you tried to transport, because the value of that infrastructure gets captured in rent, which gets passed onto residents.
If you look at light rail, and say, "how can we get most of the benefits of light rail, but in a package cheap enough that most people could afford" or "what would a light rail train look like, if it could arrive at everyone's door, take them directly where they need to go, have the lowest construction cost to every possible location so as to have the lowest impact on land value and have the lowest possible detriment to housing prices" -- if you follow that line of thinking, you reinvent zero-emission EV cars and public freeways, which is why they are everywhere in the first place.
2. You've acknowledged that bikes are 5-10x more space efficient than cars. So it's an obvious win.
Substantially more than that. Don't forget about vertical staggering and about the space saved from not needing a safety margin between car spaces.
Why is it that whenever people talk about designing cities for pedestrians and bikes, someone on hackernews thinks it means eliminating all cars entirely forever. For a forum ostensibly designed for entrepreneurs, it shows a tremendous lack of imagination.
Answer: * Public transportation inside cities such as buses and trams
* Trains to rural areas
* Park-and-ride garages for people to drive in, and park next to transportation hubs
* Underground parking garages at the edges of pedestrian zones, or even underneath them, coming up directly above them
* Ubiquitous bike storage and bike attachments such that yes, in fact, a mom with 3 young kids can tow them from a single bike - moms in Amsterdam and Berlin do it all the time.
The Dutch experience simply doesn't translate to most of America because of the terrain and climate. Elderly people people will die if you make them walk in the Florida summer. 7 year old children lack the leg-strength to bike up California hills. Both groups are likely to slip and crack their heads open in the icy Boston winter.
Lots of places bike. People who don't like bike infra make all kinds of excuses, but the truth is that bikes work almost everywhere short of the Himalayas. It's just our lack of investment that holds them back.
Most of Christchurch is pretty flat.
---
It only breaks 100 occasionally here in Colorado, but it's plenty hilly and I ditched my car for a bike 8 years back. I arrive at the office sweaty pretty frequently, and I neither shower nor bring a change of clothes. Luckily the air is so dry that the sweat evaporates quickly.
At first I did a lot of showering, but then my skin suffered. The doctor recommended using less soap without going into how much less, so I asked a few close friends to be brutally honest about whether I was stinky while I reduced my soap exposure and started to look for correlations.
I pretty quickly ended up reducing by soap exposure to practically none (I still use hand soap though).
About two weeks after I quit using soap while bathing my skin has started behaving differently. I can no longer correlate sweating a few hours ago with being stinky now. (Admittedly, is hard to get real data on stuff like this).
Somebody always tells me I'm gross when I confess that now I only shower once every four days or so, but 90% of the time somebody mentions a case where I was stinky, they're taking about day two after the shower, not day five.
My theory is that even exposure to just hot running water depletes the skin of some resource, and about 24 hours after the shower I'm at my stinkiest because whatever process replenishes that resource is at a peak. By 48 hours this has subsided and my scent is steady-state. (i.e. body odor correlates with the derivative--not the absolute value, of this resource. It might be bacteria, or oils, or pheramones, I'm not sure).
I've also found that by avoiding cotton or synthetics in my shirts, I can get get a week's worth of wears out of them (I just cycle them so that the color changes and nobody asks).
I think that people in general are frequently wrong about the causes and effects around bathing, but the social conventions are too strong to help them, so occasionally I go on a rant like this, just in case I can help save somebody else from soap. Thanks for listening.
But I don't think that means we can't borrow any lessons at all from them. The biggest lesson we can borrow from the Dutch seems to be that they set out to intentionally make their cities more pedestrian friendly and bicycle friendly starting in the 1970s when people became extremely fed up with children dying due to being hit by cars.
Ahem. The Alps, the fjords, the Netherlands, the Mediterranean coast of Spain, are all very different landscapes.
The population density of the combined regions is probably a red herring, too: nobody sane will cycle from California across Nevada to Salt Lake City, except as a fitness holiday. Even my 1080-km cycle along the Rhine (flat from Hoek van Holland to Switzerland) isn’t something anyone sensible would do to get from A-to-B, and I flew home instead of cycling back to the UK.
Instead, what will matter is the average journey time from where people live to where they want to go, and how much effort it is to get there. Electric bikes will help on both counts.
Yes you have a wide variety of population densities and climates. So does Europe. So does everywhere else in the world.
It's the most boring and lazy argument to make, and it never actually answers anything. Exactly what is so different about LA compared to Paris that it can't have good cheap internet and cyclists must die at 5 times the rate?
I've lived without a car in the US for over a decade. I no longer have a driver's license. I would like to see America become more pedestrian friendly and bicycle friendly.
I don't think you accomplish that by arguing that "Well, you just do everything exactly like the Dutch!" I think that's a lazy, unhelpful and disrespectful answer that actively ignores real and meaningful differences between the literal and figurative landscapes of the two countries.
It's not good communication to say "Just do everything exactly like the Dutch." If you want real solutions in the US, you need to think in a more nuanced way about what pieces of the Dutch experience you can reasonably use in the US, taking into account real differences between the two places.
Ignoring the differences between Europe and America very often comes across as open contempt for Americans and their presumed stupidity and laziness. It's not an effective means to promote actionable ideas.
No one is likely to take advice that they are just wrong and stupid and lazy and should wholesale copy a system that works well elsewhere without bothering to examine differences between the two places and trying to make some alterations that will hopefully result in a better fit.
Based on the comment I replied to, I feel like San Diego, California could try to borrow ideas from the Netherlands without a lot of critique beforehand. But LA has vastly different weather from Paris and a very different landscape and history of development. So, no, you aren't realistically going to replicate Paris in LA.
I will also note that they have been rioting in Paris. Paris is not some perfect paradise that has figured everything out and never has any problems.
Claims of European superiority are frequently overblown.
You are right that it would suck in the humid south. There are good reasons the obesity rate spikes in those areas.
They do it the dutch way.
Things you wouldn't do anywhere else, like leaving babies in their strollers in the streets outside shops when they go shopping.
Denmark is really a big village.
Source: my girlfriend family is Danish and I had saw them last time 4 days ago.
> * Trains to rural areas
It's more easily said than done.
Rural areas are also resistant to things that would make the area less rural, like high speed train.
Look at the fights happening in northern Italy against the TAV (the Italian version of the TGV)
> * Park-and-ride garages for people to drive in, and park next to transportation hubs
Many cities in old Europe cannot do that. Think about the central areas of Paris, Rome, Milan, Madrid.
And those that could are reluctant to do it, because it would immediately lower the value of the buildings around.
Imagine you bought a house for 100 and its value drops to 70 because they made a giant parking lot just below your window.
> * Underground parking garages at the edges of pedestrian zones, or even underneath them, coming up directly above them
In most cities in old Europe digging is very costly and sometimes impossible (most Italian cities for example)
> * Ubiquitous bike storage and bike attachments such that yes,
That would steal space to pedestrian transit
> a mom with 3 young kids can tow them from a single bike - moms in Amsterdam and Berlin do it all the time.
Compare the average street in Berlin[1] or Amsterdam[2] with those of Milan[3]
You will immediately notice a few things: in Milan trams railways are in the middle of the street, they are very slippery and dangerous for bikers; Berlin sidewalks are much larger on average; much of the transport in Amsterdam happens along canals, where cars are usually not allowed.
Things are in a certain way not because people are simply stupid or ignorant, but because the surrounding environment poses a lot of limits.
[1] https://lets-travel-more.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/Ryke...
[2] https://i2.wp.com/www.amsterdamredlightdistricttour.com/wp-c...
[3] https://live.staticflickr.com/205/495030650_6d7bf355b8_b.jpg
> Denmark is really a big village.
?????
For your grandma you might consider a three-wheeled version of a bicycle.
My cousin's granddad stopped cycling in the city at the age of 94 since he had problems getting off the bike. He got himself a home trainer and is doing 10k/day at home now. He's turning 96 in a few days.
Cars only work with kids due to most people having smaller families these days. I actually think the car limitations is a reason family sizes have shrunk. Start imagining moving ten kids around.
The part that always makes me laugh is when they inevitably call cyclists entitled. It's always "I demand massive amounts of probably subsidized infrastructure, to be able to drive at maximum speed all the way and to have a personal space reserved to store my car for the next 8 hours, but those entitled cyclists get in the way".
Not to mention the reliance on the government to provide the infrastructure to drive on, to build the ports to import fuel, huge multi-national companies to extract and transport the fuel, multiple foreign governments and the military interventions necessary to keep them in line, all so you can get that feeling of freedom when you drive.
[1] https://www.umweltbundesamt.de/en/press/pressinformation/nit...
[2] https://news.stanford.edu/2015/01/12/emissions-social-costs-...
Now they just need to add a "congestion tax" like London has to penalize drivers for spewing fumes into the air in the city center.
I have never seen a collective group of people lose their shit during the town hall meeting that much. It was like the end of the world. Apparently during the 750 years history it has become mandatory to have visitors parking right on the monumental cobblestones. Walking 450 meter, even with the free provided wheelchairs, became impossible. I wonder how people survived back in 1438 without the ability to park their car right in front of the shops.
Studies show that - particularly in Europe - most people are already walking to these shops everywhere. The 'weekly shop' is not really a thing that inner-city dwellers tend to do that often - they either rely on deliveries (cheap and efficient due to density) or smaller shops throughout the week (which often means less perishables waste.)
Something I wish the holier than though types thought of when they banned plastic bags here. No I can't just keep my reusable bags in the back of my SUV so I have them when I go shopping.
You can have the same lifestyle almost in the states, just live in a downtown area. Watch out for all the cars though, and wading through huge parking lots can still be a problem (I currently live in downtown Bellevue WA, which is only halfway pedestrian friendly, especially compared to Lausanne CH where I lived as a post doc).
Lausanne has nice cobble Stone pedestrian only zones, and it is considered more car friendly by European standards (there are lots of car commuters, and lots of people living in suburbs).
That single location remains to this day the only hypermarket in the Netherlands [1].
Note that there are exceptions where there are stores. However before you point them out, remember that in a generalization there is specifics that are wrong. Even if there are stores, are there enough stores to cover each tiny neighborhood or do a lucky few get stores and the rest have to drive because the stores are not close enough to be useful.
Even red-state St. Louis had a grocery store downtown, though it took a bit to find one near the hotel I was staying at.
I will grant most people I know living in Amsterdam rarely get outdoors into the green, which is why I did own a car when living inside the ring.
They parked their horse / carriage in front of the shops?
From what I've seen what follows next is usually the same: the plans are executed, as long as you don't insist on driving your car to the store front in the middle of a medieval city, you're happy because the city became more pleasant and after all there's a ton of parkings, studies one year after execution show less severe accidents involving cyclists and pedestrians, no measurable effect on commerce and less pollution. (again: this is only what I recall from having heard and read here and there, I did not research this in depth so reality might be different)
Just put the bike lanes on the sidewalk instead of in the street then. That's how it's done in Finland and it seems much safer for everyone involved.
This makes those lanes dangerous for both cyclists and pedestrians as a result, and very slow for cyclists compared to a regular bike lane. A third to a half of the cyclists opt for the bus lane instead (despite it being forbidden to cyclists). And they are not slowing the traffic. In fact, cyclists move faster than cars at the particular location I have in mind.
Those points probably don't even matter. Each bicycling convert means one less parking space used, and one less car sitting in traffic.
That's why some enthusiasts in .fi choose to cycle in traffic (even though that's not really legal if there's a bike path on the right).
The main street in front of my neighborhood was recently repaved end-to-end (3 miles or so). Prior to that, it was 2 lanes in each direction, with a few left turn lanes. As part of the repave, they wanted to add a semi-protected bike lane (by removing one car lane in each direction). The outcry was ridiculous. This isn't a major thoroughfare, it's a moderately travelled neighborhood road. There's a small shopping center at one end and a school complex in the middle.
Long-story-short, the government add the bike lanes. EXCEPT for in front of the schools and shopping center. So, it's half mile of 4-lane cars, then 1 mile 2 cars/2 bike, then at the school it's back to 4-car for half mile, then back to 2 car/2 bike for the remainder.
And now all the non-cyclists cry "Look! Nobody uses the bike lanes!" Well, of course not. They're completely fucking useless because they come and go almost at random and don't lead anywhere.
It's infuriating.
Crime happens on the trail, no question. But it also happens in parking lots and at the local 7-11 and many other places.
Really? This was the first I had heard of it since moving to the area last year, and it has me a little worried. I thought NoVA was supposed to be one of the wealthiest places in the US.
Of course, I think it's pertinent to note that people in other countries don't have to worry much about armed robbery while cycling, since people in those countries don't have so many guns like Americans do.
Very little of the crime on the W&OD is "bike specific" - it's just "normal" stuff that happens all over. I'm more concerned about getting run over by a road-raging douchebag in an SUV on my way to the trail than mugged while I'm on the trail. Honestly, I'd be more concerned walking back to my car at the mall than riding down the W&OD.
I've lived in the area most of my life. I can't think of any areas I'd actively avoid during the day. Well, except Tysons Corner, but that's not because of the crime, I just hate the place.
The result is a quiet, safe setting for 'micro-mobility' bicycles and scooters with decreased bike-car interaction. You don't even need bike lanes, because almost all of the traffic on those roads is bike traffic.
The article talks about bus + bike roads, sort of like Market St. in San Francisco, but I don't think that's optimal. For one thing, buses should be able to go much faster than bikes, especially Bus Rapid Transit, and as such pose collision danger. Also, BRT should be upgradeable to light rail, and rails are very dangerous for micro-mobility devices with small tires. Buses and cars coexist easily on the road. Buses should have their own lane, next to the cars.
Also in practice, the extent to which buses can go faster than bikes is limited. There's a route I take to the local Ubahn Station, and in practice biking is about as fast as the bus, assuming the same starting time. Obviously the bus has a higher top speed, but it also has to stop every couple blocks, which eliminates its advantage.
For BRT, probably a different story, but if it has a completely separate lane infrastructure, you can just have the same for bikes.
- Has lower cost-of-entry in terms of purchase/rental
- Keeps you healthier, which can also contribute to remaining active and mobile in older age
- Provides easier self-maintenance for most common faults
- Requires less fuel (particularly combustible/fossil)
- Can be just as fast, or faster, for transit from A to B in urban environments (especially with e-bikes)
- Is more social and human - cyclists can chat to each other while commuting or in transit, rather than being isolated in glass bubbles (which sometimes leads to misunderstanding and road rage when a simple conversation - even if a little confrontational - might resolve things)
- Requires less physical space - which eventually will make it easier to park cars, once we reclaim this inefficient use of our environments
- Pollutes less
- Is more easily portable within other modes of transport (trains, aircraft, or cars)
- Is, in the presence of good bicycle infrastructure, simply a much more pleasant, enjoyable, and self-directed way to travel
One remaining issue perhaps is large load-carrying; and that's certainly somewhere where cargo bikes and cargo e-bikes are innovating. And also a situation where the physical distribution of goods is changing (for example, via on-demand delivery services, some of which themselves use bicycle couriers).
It's really time to get people shifting towards bicycles in a big way. The arguments against it broadly do not stand, especially in the presence of e-bikes. Cars aren't going to go away, but they're way overused currently.
I'm guessing it's a special magic planet with startlingly good weather year-round, without disabled people, where everyone gets to age into spry Euro-oldsters.
Not wanting to kick off a unproductive circular firing squad vibe - in an ideal world, we'd do both, and more public transit frees up existing roads for cyclists. But public transport has to come first.
I'm faster with my bike no matter the weather. Especially when it's snowing outside. Gosh, snow slows cars down massively. I love this time of the year: no one tends to speed any more since drivers are afraid of crashing their cars.
I guess that you've never been on a bike on a very hot day. It's much, much more pleasant to be ventilated by your self-created airflow on a bike than it is to to have sweat pouring down your back as you walk around.
The 'self-created airflow' INCREASES the rate at which you gain temperature. Windchill is only 'chill' when the ambient air temperature is lower than your core temp.
To cycle on a summer day, you need to slather yourself in SPF-40 sunscreen including underneath clothing, wear SPF clothing, and make sure to be constantly drinking water. And when you get to your destination you're definitely going to need a shower. I'll take public transport over that, thanks. So does the majority of people.
The more wind you experience (or the faster you ride your bike) in those conditions, the more work your body needs to do for maintaining homeostasis via sweating. You will certainly not perceive a >39c wind as a 'cooling' wind in any conditions, and the faster that wind is the hotter it will feel.
The efficiency of sweating depends on rel. humidity. Not what's being discussed here.
The fact that increasing airflow will increase the rate at which you heat up (and how much heat your body must shed) if that airflow is hotter than your core body temperature is just physics 101. Why do you think fan-forced ovens have lower cooking times or temperatures in recipes?
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evaporative_cooler#Physical_pr...
Funnily enough I was thinking that about you, because on 40+ days we've got people out riding, overcrowding beaches, walking and some even sunbaking, many will be doing that without shirts on in the open sun and they're not going up in flames. Some poor buggers even have to work outside doing physical labor on such glorious beach days. Personally on days like that I like to go for a quick swim and spend the afternoon with a beer on a bowling green if I can. We've been doing this for generations, my great grandma was doing it before cars, sunscreen and aircon were invented and kids had to walk to school, indigenous people were doing it much longer. We aren't scared of the sun as our skin cancer rates will testify.
Of course these days there's people that take the doona off in the morning and enjoy their air conditioned house, run to their air conditioned car to work in their air conditioned office for 8 hours then do it all in reverse and never see the sun. Of course they don't climatise because they're living in a different climate.
And then you have most populated regions in Asia with 40 degree summers with air so humid that taking a deep breath makes you cough. People still ride bikes, but there are days where it’s deadly to do so for long distance commuting. That’s not including typhoon periods where you’re liable to be whacked with debris and die (because work isn’t canceled for any reason).
Skin cancer is estimated to kill 1,725 in Australia in 2019 [1].
During 2018 there were 1,135 road deaths [2].
I think we could reduce the number of road deaths far faster than the number of skin cancer deaths would increase.
[1]: https://melanoma.canceraustralia.gov.au/statistics [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_motor_vehicle_deaths_i...
edit: Or bicycles with roofs, similar to the car solution?
Which would become closer to 18% if the number of individuals exposed to prolonged sun time doubled (e.g. by promoting Cycling). We literally run public awareness TV campaigns telling people to stay out of direct sunlight as much as possible regardless of what protection they're wearing.
I don't think you realise it but you're proving the point.
Bikes are fine when the weather is favourable, but a lot of the people commenting here just don't grasp the fact that in some parts of the world, unfavourable weather doesn't mean you might sweat a bit, it means that the weather will make you sick and kill you in short order. The same people that dismiss warnings when visiting countries like AU and then leave with their skin peeling off.
Doesn't 'Tour down under' happen during Australian summer months? Somehow they manage, too.
I am not sure how that translates to everyday commute for tens of millions of people of all fitness levels and ages.
This 'if I can do it then surely everyone can do it' attitude is incredibly myopic given the scale of the issue. You represent less than 1% of the population (A total of 1% of Aussies report cycling to work once a month or more). Your views don't matter or don't apply for the other 99%.
The article is about giving space to -all- participants. Currently we highly prioritize cars due to arguments like the weather. As pointed out, weather is not an issue for many folks out there.
In turn this partly explains Australia's high emissions.
As someone with very fair skin I check the UV index meticulously: there is no day in the year that I would be riding to or back from work with a UV index higher than 3 in Sydney.
Now if I was cycling at 2pm on a summer's day I would use SPF50 sun cream or wear a UV shirt, just like I do when I walk outside at 2pm.
It also helps that Copenhagen and Amsterdam are really flat cities.
I don't think it's a question of either or. It's a question of prioritizing both bikes, and public transportation, and electric cars and scooters.
Sadly, even in Copenhagen, where there are dedicated bike highways, elevated bike bridges, and generally very good biking conditions (mostly flat city), the amount of people who use cars every day far exceeds the amount of people who bike.
1: Page 11: https://www.regionh.dk/til-fagfolk/trafik/Analyser-og-rappor...
The suggestion that cycling is a fair-weather activity is hogwash.
There are huge demographic clusters (particularly late-middle-age to old, middle-aged-to-older women) who, statistically speaking, don't. I'm sure that we're off to the Proof By Anecdote races again about all the spry old folks who cycle everywhere. But in practice weekly cycling rates in places like NSW and VIC for the middle-aged are about 10%, tops, and this declines faster as people get older.
I would hazard a guess that on bad weather days, this skew gets even more extreme i.e. fewer people cycle total, and even fewer proportionally out of the demographics that don't ride much.
I don't know about Melbourne, but the idea that we should splash out Serious Cash on cycling infrastructure in Sydney (vs filling out our shithouse transit network) is just laughable. I'm pro bike lanes and better infrastructure (particularly at the expense of cars), but this 'think big' stuff is really on the nose in terms of equity of access.
The demographic that bikes are young, fit adults. Can't bike much of anywhere without struggling with hills.
If only young/fit people use the infrastructure then the infrastructure is really poor! Note than I'm from the Netherlands and comparing countries is a bit weird. Why not aim for a better infrastructure than the Netherlands?
Anyway, for hilly areas I expect a large share of people to use electric bikes. And way more care for safety. In Netherlands they think about possible safety issues. Meaning, someone on a bicycle going down a huge bridge is probably going fast and doesn't want to stop. You could argue that a bicyclist shouldn't do that, but that's pretty pointless. What's better to engineer the infrastructure in a way that deals with that. Hillier areas would require a lot of thought.
Electric bikes come at a large cost premium over that.
Low participation from a particular group != low latent demand.
I've ridden in every Australian state capital bar Darwin, and rate Sydney drivers as the most aggressively incompetent of the lot - which, combined with the spectacular hostility of the state government to cycling, is a clear recipe for low participation.
Notwithstanding which, I agree that mass transit infrastructure should be built up to the level where it is an easy choice for every commuter, and not the unhappy choice for those within reach of a station.
Yet the bike infrastructure is mostly bike lanes painted on the road and used as additional parking.
BTW how many people use a bike is a useless metric, how far they travel and for how much time is more important.
Copenhagen is not a good example, it's very small, very flat and public transport is very expensive and it doesn't have to handle the same number of commuters many other cities have to. For example in Milan everyday a million people come to work from cities around it, in Rome it grows up to a staggering 1.5 millions.
Bike is not favourite because it's better, but because politics made it preferable (less expensive)
Things are changing, Copenhagen had it's first subway only in 2002, decades later other major cities and people will start using it more and more, because the city has invested a lot of money on it and can't handle people not using it or, as it is now, prices have to be very high, which kinda defeat the purpose of a public transport.
Subway it's a good rival for bikes, because they use different paths.
If you increment surface transport in cities with a large number of bikers, they start to compete for road space and it create tensions that need to be resolved.
Bikes in Copenhagen and many other small/medium northern city are the effect of inertia (historically they usesd bikes because it's what they always used), much as the ridiculous number of cars in cities like Rome.
As reference, the Copenhagen subway is run by ATM, the public transport company of Milan (Italy), where prices are an half even though the city is much bigger city, but there are public bikes as well, bike lanes everywhere and lots of car sharing companies.
But the best feature of Milan is still walkability + public transport (subway it's much better than buses and very good on average) because much of the population cannot ride a bike for more than a few kms at a time.
As a Dutch person: what you're forgetting is that often the entire design of a city accommodates using bikes. Meaning: everything you might need is close by.
Further, the more people use a bike, the more people are aware of people on a bike. The same people who use a car also use a bike (at least in Netherlands and Denmark).
For Rome, the city is designed in a weird way. Cycling there is awful. Further, the traffic lights are utterly terrible. You're waiting way too long (though this is the case in pretty much most countries in the world).
When infrastructure is designed in The Netherlands the impact is assessed on public transports, roads, cycling infrastructure, etc. That determines where office space is put, etc.
Now for Netherlands there's millions using public transportation, also e.g. using a train. The bike storage areas around the big train stations are massive.
Notice how I mentioned that Dutch people are using bikes, cars, public transport? There's not 1 solution or something that's bad/good as you make it out to be.
Then there are real economic and social trade offs that need to be seriously discussed. Historically the beautiful, walkable, lovely human scaled cities we all love before the automobile had large inequalities in land ownership. A small number of landlords owned most of the living units and everyone else rented from them. This was because the jobs were in the cities, so landlords could effectively tax people for having access to the high paying jobs. Once they got 1/3 of everyone's income, they could roll that over to purchasing more units faster than the renters could both pay rent and save to buy their own house. This creates a situation where a small number of families own most of the beautiful historical buildings that renters occupy in those lovely downtown cities.
It was the introduction of the car that created a real middle class and increased home ownership allowing people to escape the thumb of their landlords and buy cheaper land surrounding the cities while keeping their jobs in the city. This shifted the economic rents captured by urban landlords and transferred it to auto manufacturers and other producers, shifting resources away from rent extraction and towards production, which spurred economic growth, home ownership, and family formation all together. The growth of suburbs was merely a byproduct of this economic geography.
As transportation technology improves, cities become less dense over time. All cities, the world over, are slowly getting less dense. Living units are growing a few percent each year size, so what used to house a family over time becomes a studio apartment, and in this way, even as the buildings remain the same, urban density declines. Even builder taller buildings doesn't overcome the inexorable decline of density, a process uninterrupted since the early 20th century.
Global populations are diffusing, spread out constantly trying to stay one step ahead of the urban landlords and take better advantage of new transportation to buy units farther away where land is cheap enough for them to buy their own small lot.
When you start reversing this, you also start rolling back homeownership rates. Those lovely, dense walkable cities in the US are majority renter populations. They are also demographic sinks -- people don't reproduce at anywhere near replacement levels compared to more rural environments where homeownership rates are higher as are fertility rates.
In other words, there are real inequality and social sustainability problems with dense living. It's not even something that is demographically sustainable. These cities require a constant inflow of people from more rural areas or immigrants from other countries to prevent demographic collapse.
That doesn't mean that there aren't solutions -- perhaps there are! You can adopt public policies that disincentivize renting and subsidize homeownership in cities. You may (or may not) address the demographic collapse of urban areas. Spain (and the Netherlands) have massive problems with demographic collapse but have achieved high home ownership rates, but it addressing transportation promotion with homeownership and family formation all together, because all of these are intimately related.
This is something that the anti-car crowd has never done, nor is it even on their radar.
That people leave the city because they want to buy their own house and have kids, and once they are in the suburbs you really need a car -- that doesn't seem to register. Instead, it's all talk about building more infrastructure and this will suddenly reverse these trends. This isn't a serious engagement of the issues.
As others have pointed out it's definitely a combined approach to increasing both public transport as well as cycle infrastructure. Electric bikes give you quite the range, which may compare with the average car commuting distance in many cities. Taking public transport from the suburbs and then getting on a bike within the city centre is also very common here in Copenhagen. Heck, even driving to a train station, to take the train/bus, to take the bike, can often by faster than driving with bad traffic.
So while I agree that the car gave people the freedom to keep their job and buy a home, I don't think that argument holds given a decent public transport network and cycle infrastructure.
If you imagine an urban core in the center and a disk of suburbs around it, the availability of housing rises with the square of the radius from the core, and the cost of providing a rail/bus line to the core will grow with the square of the radius, but the cost of giving each person an individual vehicle grows with the population. So there is a density in which personal vehicles make sense and a density in which rail lines make sense, and this trade off is determined by the relative cost of providing individual cars versus rail lines. But because of this squaring effect, it's always the case that at some distance from the radius you need personal transportation.
While Holland is notable for its bike usage, it has 440 cars per 1000 people, or more than 80% of households own 1 car even in Holland, and 30% of Dutch households own 2 or more cars (See Figure 15, https://repository.tudelft.nl/islandora/object/uuid:a33eb3a5...)
Now maybe in the future there will be a fleet of self driving cars that you can call up -- who knows? Maybe electric bikes. There are many options, but density remains key in this trade off, and it's important to realize that different households have different circumstances.
I don't own a car, I live in San Francisco, but I realize this is because I am rich enough to live in the more expensive urban core, and that I am wealthy enough to be able to walk to stores staffed by people who are earning less money than I am and have to drive into the city in order to serve me coffee, food, alcohol so that I can just walk to their business. I am also dependent on goods being trucked in from far away so that I can walk up and buy them. So, it would be a bit inconsiderate for me to tell those people who can't afford to live in the dense core that they need to do without their cars and share my lifestyle. They are doing the best they can under the circumstances.
In Sweden people take the bike even when it's minus 20 degrees and snow everywhere.
The thought of hopping on a bike in the Pittsburgh winter, with hilly, iced-over roads sounds at best something for the young and extremely able, or possibly the suicidal.
The reality is that many people in North American live far from their workplaces and some of us live in areas of extreme cold. This is where 15m of exposed skin can result in frostbite. We bundle up, but by cycling we’ve turned the commute into an unnecessarily dangerous adventure.
The same applies to cities further south: a non trivial amount of days are extremely hot and you’re risking heat strokes.
Edit: don’t get me wrong. Bike infrastructure is awesome and I wish there were less cars on the roads, etc. We just have very different variables to play with so we need to come up with different distributions of mass transit vs personal transportation. Comfort is important!
I've never had frostbite. I've still got all my fingers and toes. Although it isn't enough fingers and toes to count all the people I've known personally who've been killed or crippled in car accidents.
My point is that we default to easy and comfortable when given a choice, and cycling in -42 is neither. We won’t see mass adoption of cycling in these areas, regardless of infrastructure, unless we forced people to do it... and I don’t think pushing the majority of people towards enduring that kind of weather is something we should do, when there are alternatives.
You bike in during the dead of winter, and that’s amazing. But how long is your bike ride in? How far out of the city do you live? Would you still do it if your commute was double?
Additionally, in Ottawa, many people live far out of the city and commute in via the highway for 30-40 minutes by car because it’s more affordable than living in the city. The bike ride is well over two hours. They will need other solutions as well.
I don't think I've met a bicycle commuting advocate who doesn't also advocate for improved mass transit and walkable development. We stopped building neighbourhoods that way and razed many of the ones we had in the second half of the 20th century, so there's a huge supply and demand imbalance for walkable neighbourhoods in North America.
Yes and that's exactly where 90% of our pollution/climate issues are coming from: convenience.
However I think when citylab is writing about the balance between cars and bicycles, they are refering to cities, where you (A) wouldn’t ban cars completely because of delivery and people with mobility problems and (B) the usage of cars by everybody has very tangible problems attached to it (space, noise, pollution, air quality).
And when we are talking about balance we are usually talking about one that is extremely on the side of the car anyways. Even in european cities there is are often two 1 meter bicycle lanes for six 3 meter car lanes and as a cyclist who often rides on crowded bicycle lanes while the streets next to me are empty, I can just dream of the things that could be done with the space of one car lane.
I have also lived for some time in Denmark and the Netherlands, where cycling is extremely widespread and I know what difference the infrastructure makes. When you cycle in a big german city you have to be constantly on the watch to not get overlooked by motorists, in the Netherlands nearly everbody cycles and the infrastructure is so much better, that cycling feels (and probably is) much less dangerous. This is also why it is more popular there.
That beeing said, I don’t believe that cycling alone will be the solution of the cities of the future. Cheap and good public transport systems and a clever network of delivery routes will also be needed.
And those who really need a car will certainly be granted permissions to use them (as they are now when it comes to all european historical city centers/pedestrian areas). The spry Euro-oldsters you mentioned seem to swear on E-bikes, because they can use electricity when they have to go up steep hills or just feel like it. Gives them the security they will make it even if their powers are running out. They would probably say sth. like: “There’s no such thing as bad weather, only bad clothes”
https://www.newyorker.com/culture/personal-history/how-i-lea...
No one is not having diabetes because is biking...
As I said, I'm pro-cycling. Good for you, all you hardy souls. But it is a seriously boneheaded point of view to imagine that cycling is going to be more important as a mode of transport than public transport in most of the world under the conditions that exist now.
There's a large plurality - even in the totally cycle-happy countries - of people that don't ride, and that's a majority past a certain age. These people will get a small benefit (aside from cleaner air and fewer cars on the road, which is nice) from cycling infrastructure. Conversely, a drastic improvement in public transit infrastructure benefits almost everyone - cyclists are pedestrians and transit users some of the time, and they will also benefit from getting cars off the road.
Frankly a lot of folks are confusing their hobby with good public policy.
As a European myself this made me laugh hard. Yes, people here have a tendency to see everything in black and white and be really religious about their way of life.
Ah, come on. You asked for it, didn't you? You wrote "I'm guessing it's a special magic planet with startlingly good weather year-round, without disabled people, where everyone gets to age into spry Euro-oldsters". Of course, such an extreme statement will trigger a reaction from people who actually experience every day what you claim to be impossible. It's not possible in every city and it's not possible for everybody, but it's possible in more places than we think once we accept the idea. One quarter of the Dutch population cycles every day and the number of cycling people (obviously lower than the average) over 65 is actually increasing thanks to better a infrastructure and, of course, e-bikes.
And talking about hot climates: You remember the pictures from South China in the 1970s or 1980s where everybody was cycling because cars were too expensive and public transport was bad? Now everybody has a car and nobody with a sane mind would cycle in China.
If only the world was flat and below the sea level as Holland...
together they represent almost a billion people and the world's biggest cities. Should we ignore them because they're not snowy North American/European cities?
There's various reasons not to use a bike, e.g. the mentioned way too humid/hot weather. However, the high usage is not due to "flat". Netherlands used to have a very high car usage and pretty much no bike usage.
Here in Toronto, Canada, we are building out bike lanes, they are heavily used and it's pretty cheap to dedicate some lanes to bike traffic. They are used ALL year long, even in the snow. Yes, more people use them in the spring, summer, and fall, than in Dec-Feb, but they are used all year long.
Your complaints are not based in reality, either in cost or in usage patterns.
Improving bicycling also improves public transit and walkability usually because bicycles take up so much less room than cars so buses have more space, and it's extremely rare for a bicycle to injure a pedestrian, but it happens hundreds of times a day just in the US alone with cars.
Also bicycle infrastructure is way cheaper to build and maintain than car infrastructure. And even when bicycle infrastructure is totally busted for awhile, people find a way around, where as with cars if there is any blockage it becomes an incredibly high priority emergency.
Most bike-car accidents are the fault of the cyclist, at least in Mountain View.
What's entirely strange is to blame one person and blame all the fault on the other. Accidents happen. What's great is to find ways to minimize them. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swiss_cheese_model
Cars respect pedestrian much more than bikers do
As a walker I hate walking in Belgium or Berlin, where you have to share the sidewalks with bikes that usually go high speed, faster than the average car, don't look too much around them and treat pedestrian as obstacles (try to walk on a bike lane in Bruxelles or Berlin and wait for the biker to start a fight with you, it's not gonna take long)
If you optimize you infrastructures for basically unregulated means of transport, you're just moving assholes from cars to bikes.
At least when they are on a car they can be policed and fined.
Bikes should share roads with cars, they have wheels, they are not pedestrian friends.
> Bikes should share roads with cars, they have wheels, they are not pedestrian friends.
Biking is its own thing. You have walking speed, cycling speed, moped speed (or quick electric bikes), car speed. There are different speeds between them. They should NOT share the same space!
Further, the bike lane should NOT be some crappy paint on the pedestrian path. It should be an obvious difference to any other form of transport.
Having bikes which go 10-15 km/h share the same infrastructure as 45-55km/h just makes the accidents and the severity of the accidents go up like crazy.
Earth, today, in Denmark / Netherlands.
Kneejerk reactions like yours, without looking into the issue at all, are the main hurdle.
The article specifically talks about switching our mindset away from a strictly bike lane oriented world view to one that emphasizes diversity in micromobility solutions. That's why it wants the reader to "Dream Bigger Than Bike Lanes". Public transport and especially walkability do not contrast with this viewpoint.
Honestly, I feel like a broken record bringing again countries and cities where it's working, they're not magical countries but real countries where different choices have been made.
You can see a lot of people in the bike lanes with mobility problems, in their electric wheelchairs, scooters, etc. Completely impossible in my car oriented city, specially because these people often cannot afford a car in their situation. It's so nice to see an old lady going in her electric vehicle in the bike line.
Cycling infrastructure is almost ludicrously cheap. You can build pretty good bike infrastructure for a decent-sized city with O(€100m). A single metro line normally costs O(€1bn). The reason that bike infrastructure doesn't get built isn't cost - it's political. Car users don't like having lanes and parking spaces taken away from them.
> startlingly good weather year-round
Not _everywhere_ has weather suitable for cycling. However, a lot of places do have suitable weather and yet no infrastructure. That leaves plenty of room for improvement. Many cities could be suitable for cycling with some effort - e.g. clearing snow from bike lanes (see Copenhagen) or adding shade.
> disabled people
Cycling infrastructure is actually great for many disabled people. It makes safe space available for specially-adapted bicycles and mobility scooters.[1]
> spry Euro-oldsters
As far as I know, there's not much of an inherent genetic difference between the Dutch and the rest of the world. Perhaps having an active lifestyle is what _causes_ you to age into a 'spry Euro-oldster' - and is something everyone should aspire to.
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2018/jan/02/cambridge-dis...
Also MMT.
The solution, as this article touches on, is light weight electric transport using the existing road structure. There's a strong indication of this future in the fact that last year the Dutch bought more electric bikes than normal bikes in total. And they paid twice as much for their electric bikes ($2000) than they did for their pedal bikes. Let that sink in: The Dutch are already starting to abandon their pedal bikes. This is the future of urban transport: lightweight electrics.
One underappreciated, but critical aspect of electrics is their lack of exhaust fumes. This will allow much more of city roads to be covered or even inside. With electrics you could park inside almost everywhere.
Electrics will soon start to invade the "slow lane" of cities with bikes and mopeds. Even a cheap electric bike already feels much safer in urban car traffic than a pedal bike because it has super fast acceleration from a dead stop and therefore can ride in regular traffic without being an impediment or needing its own lane.
If you want to lead this revolution forget about city council; buy yourself an electric bike and ride it in regular traffic with a hi-viz vest. The more people that do this the sooner the transition will happen. The current urban roads are the 'bike' lanes of tomorrow.
(One thing city councils could usefully do right away is to immediately ban any fossil fuel motors under 125 cc from their roads.)
You just need the appropriate clothes & gear.
Well, neighbouring country in which it rained on 199 days on average in the past 20 years or so, but since it doesn't rain all 24hrs of those days, a more interesting figure would be that it apparently only rains about 10% of the time here. Meaning about 90% of the whole time there is no rain.
(N.b. I ride in the snow for hundreds of kilometers every winter. I know you can take a fatbike to powder snow but that's just too strenuous for most people.)
For example my commute of about 20km has about 10km that gets cleared early in the morning if humanly possible; maybe 9km that usually gets cleared during the evening; and maybe 1km that may take 3-5 days after a big snowstorm.
When faced with something like that, I usually just switch to the bus for a day
Nothing / depends on the rider.
There's proper clothing which keeps you dry. Personally I find fresh snow awesome to ride in. Not so fresh snow is less fun, but I still do it. But indeed if you cannot / do not want to take the risk then in most places infastructure is not quite ready yet and we do need solutions. Shared electric vehicles combined with decent public transportation services would be my bet.
Then you ride with appropriate clothing, as usual.
Yes, that means that if one insists on "business" attire, one has to change on arrival - which I do.
What happens when it rains?
As someone who lives in the developing world, I'm always a bit taken aback when people seem to be so unaware of the lived experience of the billions of people outside of America & Europe. This isn't some hypothetical scenario that we don't know how it plays out. It is the lived experience of hundreds of millions of people who get by just fine.
I live in a city in Southeast Asia where every day over 6 million people commute on two wheeled vehicles. We have monsoons, so 6 months of the year are the rainy season.
What happens when it rains? We don't need to make theories. We just look at the real world in places where people can't afford cars and have to deal with rain. They get by just fine.
Go to almost anywhere in Asia, from India to Taiwan and everywhere in between, and you'll find hundreds of millions of people that get to work, school, hospital, and everywhere else they need to be on two wheels despite torrential rain and sweltering heat.
I guess the key is: don't be lazy?
Within Netherlands the number of accidents with bikes also has skyrocketed. That's due to often older people buying these bikes. They're more mobile, however they're slow to respond, plus not used to the speed of these bikes. As a result, more accidents plus the accidents are more severe.
The electric bikes are often restricted to 25 km/h (15.5 miles/h). That's actually too quick for most electric bike users.
It's great that older people aren't reliant on others to get around. Still, electric bikes do have a huge impact on the safety of their users, plus other people on the road.
Note that wearing a hi-viz vest can actually make you more accident prone. There's been various studies that a helmet or a hi-viz vest means other cars will pass you closer than before.
Even worse, when I used to ride a motorcycle I got complaints and agression when wearing a hi-viz vest. Either people though I was a traffic controller and sometimes approach me more aggresively (aggression toward police/traffic controllers is getting more common these days in the Netherlands), or they where angry and comment that I should not pose as a traffic controller. Because if every motorcyclist whore a hi-viz vest, how can the distinct them from traffic controllers?
To me this sounds pretty funny: you make it sound like an electric bicycle is not a bicycle, whereas to me it's still a bicycle, just with the addition of a motor. Even a speedpedelec is normally still considered a bicycle here: after all it doesn't move unless you pedal, unlike a moped for instance.
Electrics will soon start to invade
Small city in Belgium here with historically a lot of cyclists: this has happened already despite infrastructire not being sufficient :)
Even a cheap electric bike already feels much safer in urban car traffic than a pedal bike because it has super fast acceleration from a dead stop
Hmm, having used more than one cheap and not-so cheap and expensive electric ones, that is not my experience at all and for more than one reason: it only works really well (i.e. better than a non-electric bicycle) if your bicycle is in the highest power mode and in a low enough gear. Even then, it takes some experience to be able to use that fast acceleration safely. Seriously, I see people struggle everyday with starting from dead stop just because they're still in the wrong gear or fail to put their foot on the pedal in time etc. Or they succeed and then they get suprised by the acceleration and can't keep the bike straight. Just ask people in the hospitals: amount of injuries is up since electric bicycles happened.
My feeling is that initially the 'e' revolution will start with e-bikes but ultimately will end up with electric mopeds (no fiddly gears) and electric tricycles (two wheels at the front) with seat belts and modest roll cages.
Sure, the difference can be substantial depending on model, but my point here was that I interpreted your comment as the latter not being a bicycle anymore.
NHTSA: "For every mile traveled, motorcyclists have a risk of a fatal accident that is 35 times higher than a car driver." [1]
In my experience, light weight electric transport mingles great with bikes, as long as they're limited to something reasonable. I can clock up pretty high speeds on a normal bike!
So no - we do need bike lanes because cars are too dangerous, whether your bike is electric or not.
[1]: https://www.askadamskutner.com/motorcycle-accident/how-do-ca...
Cars only are a danger when the driver can't easily see you. A bike lane tells a cyclist to ride close to the edge of the road. That's not where most drivers focus their attention on. Bike lanes also encourage cyclists to pass traffic making a right turn on the right, make cyclists harder to see for traffic making a left turn, and can catch drivers pulling out from side streets and driveways off guard.
If cyclists rode in the middle of the rightmost general traffic lane, then they are much more easily seen by others, get more clearance when passed by faster traffic, and don't have issues with right it left turning traffic or traffic pulling out from side streets.
In Sydney we have dedicated bike signals at intersections (with dedicated infrastructure) so turning is no issue.
I agree with your point that it is safer to ride with traffic in the middle of the lane rather than an unseparated bike lane - that's not infrastructure, that's paint on a road.
A good friend of mine was cycling in a painted on bike lane and got car doored by a policeman. There is no hope of the general population checking their mirrors when opening car doors if policeman can't!
And back home is still above global average in terms of income. It might work for western hipster places like SF, but globally this is harder to achieve.
Ebikes are restricted to 25km/h, at least in my region. You sometimes see them going faster so you know they've been modded or aren't compliant.
A lot of ebike riders are going faster than their skills would suggest, i.e. no time to build up experience of safe riding.
I accelerate faster than many ebikes, on my CX bike (which is vastly better than your typical Amsterdam upright bike), and will peak around 30-35 for bursts when in traffic as needed. Having said that I ride hard even though unfit, and have to avoid the typical bike lanes as they're just too slow for my liking - taking the longer way home is less stressful.
I like your points about getting rid of exhaust fumes, but why stop at sub 125cc..
As deployed, they’re also often on vehicles that don’t get inspected and often don’t get maintained until they flat out don’t work.
Well, except when going downhill. Or just because the cyclist puts some effort into it and rides faster, which isn't impossible at all on flats.
The extra weight of the ebike system becomes a significant factor when trying to push past the cut off point manually. Speaking from experience with a Bionic system.
I think we're generally headed for slower roads in built up areas. It's the cheapest option. 15mph roads will probably be safe enough for cyclists and I personally believe stopping distances have got to come down a lot if we're ever going to let the robots drive cars in towns.
This is nonsense. Those ebikes are pedal bikes, they're just electrically assisted up to 25 km/h. You still have to pedal to move forward. And you have to ride them on bike paths/lanes just like normal bikes. So they certainly don't enable getting rid of bike paths: mixing those 25 km/h (often elderly) ebikers with car traffic would be a disaster.
In cities with reasonable 25mph speed limits and traffic calming then riding around with a regular bike works fine. EBikes are only icing on the cake for some people but I disagree that this is a simple single technical fix (i.e. more ebikes).
(Old people! They still need to get around, they tend to be not so great drivers, and they don't mind the mellow, easy route.)
It was great!
Then we moved in together, and because she had a dog, Palo Alto became prohibitively expensive, and we had to move a few miles away. I only used my bike three times after that. Even worse, my job then moved in the opposite direction, so I ended up with a commute that was only possible by car.
This is why I laugh at these kinds of articles. There's a lot we can do to encourage many forms of transportation, but the nature of a large world is that a car lets you drive 20 miles from point A to point B in a manner that's prohibitive by foot, bike, or train.
IMO, I think extremely large, subsidized, easy-in, easy-out parking lots on the edge of population centers makes sense. Within the population center, vehicles should only be for public transportation, deliveries, and people with physical disabilities. It's a great compromise that works for people who just can't bike 60 miles a day, or for people who live in areas where trains don't make sense.
If the transit network was that large the freeway network in cities would not be worth it, thus further biasing trips to the train. However there is no easy way to get there from here.
We need to get away from the myth of single people and their small steps changing the world...we need our governments to actually invest in their own society's well-being and structure.
Right now transit construction costs are out of control in the US. (Road is only slightly better). Spain is able to build subways for about 1/5th the cost of New York city. Nobody knows why - we can find people doing nothing, high wages, and more harder rock, but all these together are just a fraction of the cost difference. Until this problem is solved we are better off building roads because we can afford them.
Thus if you want to advocate for build more, you should first advocate for figuring out how to build cheaper. (whatever this means - though if you sacrifice safety I'll oppose you)
In the past 50 years, we didn't build those sorts of projects frequently. When we did, they were often one off projects in one city not repeated until another 10 or 20 years passed, and there have rarely been these sorts of projects going on in many places around the country at once.
As such, you've got:
- A very small number of suppliers for anything, especially with any track record of succeeding at contracts in North America, because the market has been unable to sustain more. Competitive bidding isn't when you get 3 bids and only 1 or maybe 2 of them fully meet your needs/requirements.
- Very few people with any real depth of expertise on building these projects on your management side, so running them effectively is unlikely at best. International hires may have more experience building a subway in the abstract, but that doesn't help them navigate very different regulatory/permitting/planning/contracting environments.
--------
I'm not necessarily saying "just throw money at it and eventually they'll figure out how to do it better", but to some extent we're never going to get to faster/cheaper construction until we're actually doing it consistently.
Not prohibitive to do by electric bike though.
You can't do 20 miles in an electric bike in the rain, or in the cold. It's just absurd.
Meanwhile, I support bike/scooter lanes in dense urban core areas. They're not a solution for most people though, unless you can afford to live in the densest and usually most expensive parts of a city.
Autonomous buses should be within reach this decade. I can't think of a better mass transit solution more easily fitted into the existing systems than autonomous buses or micro buses that could fill more niches and provide reliable service 24/7.
Sit in a cafe near a busy street in Utrecht, Amsterdam, Groningen, The Hague or Leiden, and you’ll see all walks of life riding a bike. It’s a lovely, human thing.
It's not workable at U.S. scale. Many workers live 10, 20, even 30 miles from their jobs.
Further, it's pretty common in Netherlands to live in one big city and work in another. The Netherlands is small, so it'll usually be 10-20 miles away.
That we have freeways between cities is no real issue for bikes, in Germany they have the Autobahn system and they still have reasonably bike friendly cities like Munich. Similar situation for Dutch cities IIRC.
But the autobahn system doesn't cut through the middle of cities in Germany nearly to the same extent as it does in the US. Actual high speed parts of the Autobahn basically stop a certain part of the way into Munich, and you have to get off onto surface streets.
But anyway, that's just one problem among many for car dominance in the US.
Autonomous buses are an ambitious but realistic solution to people's transportation needs based on the reality of American real estate, roads, and commuter needs.
You won't get there with bikes in the U.S.
If you look at cities that DO have good infrastructure, they have relatively high bike rates even without being particularly high density, like Davis, CA, or Portland. The idea that it just can't happen in US cities is not borne out by the facts.
Or we could just deploy more buses, more bicycle lanes and reduce car reliance right now?
"A gadgetbahn is a speculative transportation concept that proposes to solve planning and financial issues via some sort of magical techno-fix, likely some technology that doesn’t even exist yet.
Classic examples of gadgetbahns are: monorails, “personal rapid transit”, maglevs, or the newest addition to the family, the “hyperloop”." [1]
Labor is one of the most significant costs of running a bus. We've got semi-autonomous cars on the road today. This isn't some far off tech. This is imminent. And it would be theoretically easier for a bus to run a predictable route autonomously than what they're doing with Teslas and Waymos already.
Chicago arguably has a true “cycle superhighway” with its 23 miles of continuous bike lane on the lakefront I was able to commute 10 miles to work very fast and with little exposure to cars.
London is a work in progress, with lots of infrastructure slotted in.
What I’ve come away with being a pretty committed bike commuter is that a good bike network should incorporate routes that are disassociated with the road network where possible. Like the lake path in Chicago, these routes are much safer, accessible to new cyclists, And fast (with few intersections). Also see Chicago’s elevated bike path the 606 for another example.
London could develop something similar along the river Thames (it does exist in parts, but it needs to be continuous, wider, and better developed), and improve routes along its canals. London could also develop and allow more routes through its parks. This in particular is low hanging fruit as routes through many parks are limited and have just been added to roads that cut through parks in many cases (another issue worth debating is whether roads should be cutting through parks to begin with).
The bike takes an hour, the bus 90 minutes because of its indirect route, and the car about the same with morning gridlock. You could do it in 35 minutes with no traffic.
When I take the bus I arrive to work tired and groggy. When I cycle I arrive energised. I don’t drive because parking on campus is usually impossible.
The problem is that there are limited shower facilities and the ones in my building are extremely grotty, so much so that some colleagues have stopped cycling. Appeals to facilities has only resulted in them locking one of the showers permanently. If more people cycle that’s great but it’ll have knock on effects on other infrastructure and organisations need to pull their finger out and make changes to encourage cycling.
It was not a cheap bike so I keep it in my office and I have a charger at home and at work should I need to top up.
This is the kind of thing I read a lot in micromobility advocacy articles, but it seems like it can't be true. How can a bike, scooter, or moped be either faster or higher-bandwidth than a car?
Also, serious question: if electric SDCs became widespread, would it still make sense to advocate things like bikes?
You can't transport a family of three or a baby as safely in a vehicle smaller than a car (as they lack things like walls and air bags), and the many obese, elderly, and disabled people in the US can't use micromobility easily.
Bicycles can do more on account of less spacing front/back and side to side. (This is sort of surprising given that bikes have a slower top speed, but it's really the time-spacing between vehicles, not their top speed, that matters when you're operating at capacity.) Bus can do more on account of being more passengers per vehicle. Trains are denser yet. All these have drawbacks on other metrics, of course.
Pushing people out of cars would probably speed up the cars that are used by reducing the traffic around them. Families can handle more than you'd expect, and I regularly ride the bus with elderly and disabled people, but even if you have someone that needs a car, they don't necessarily need a parking space at each end.
In Manhattan or Brooklyn on normal streets my bike goes the same speed as cars when everyone's moving... but I don't suffer any of the bottlenecks. A delivery or moving van or garbage truck might be blocking traffic for two minutes but I go right by. At each red light there might be ten cars stopped but I go straight to the front and cross first when the light turns green. It's significantly faster, in congested Manhattan streets I'd estimate often twice the speed of taking a car/taxi, certainly during rush hour.
And higher-bandwidth if you've ever been to, say, China. When you see 50 cyclists crossing an intersection taking up the space that would fit 5 cars, well it's pretty obvious.
When I moved apartments recently, I easily beat my movers' truck via bike-subway-bike from my old place to the nee one because there was some temporary congestion on one of the main roads but the subways were fine.
> Also, serious question: if electric SDCs became widespread, would it still make sense to advocate things like bikes?
Yes, absolutely yes. The cars would still have to go somewhere after they have dropped off their occupants. Hopefully we will get on-demand carpool services that allow us to have vastly fewer vehicles on the road, which would free up space for bikes and other public transit.
> You can't transport a family of three or a baby as safely in a vehicle smaller than a car
Not everyone can use a bike of course. Some will have to use public transit, and yes some will have to use a car for various reasons. The streets don't have to be car-less, we just need to get enough cars off the road to ease congestion and be able to turn existing lanes into bike lanes or public transit lanes. Once good reliable and quick public transit exists, there won't be such a strong incentive to own a car.
No need to imagine:
http://lh3.ggpht.com/_9F9_RUESS2E/S7tbclwxiPI/AAAAAAAACmw/uI...
https://m.wisegeek.com/what-is-the-average-vehicle-occupancy...
https://www.nfpplanning.com/uploads/2/4/0/5/24056719/taxi-tr...
Queues of buses, and during the day they will often only have one or two passenger.
Plus car drivers are advised to give a bike the same room as a car, so on mixed use roads a bike effectively takes up the same space as a car.
Yes, that is one case. On the other hand:
1. The fact that such advices are given doesn't mean they are followed. I also heard that car drivers are supposed to leave at least 1 meter of space between themselves and a bike when overtaking said bike. In my experience that happens only on an empty wide road; otherwise car drivers won't hesitate to overtake as close as possible.
2. In case of bike lanes, bikes obviously do take much less space, both when driving and when queuing.
3. Even in case of mixed road, there may be multiple bikes which do not need to stay so far away from each other.
4. Also on mixed road, when queuing together with cars, bikes will usually position themselves alongside cars, therefore effectively taking zero space in the queue.
5. Finally consider also requirements for parking. A single car parking space could probably fit 10 bikes.
That's true, but I don't think it makes much of a difference. I couldn't fix the angle, but here's the same picture with second and third images also zoomed in similarily: https://imgur.com/a/2GMcSlE
> Second, it assumes 1 occupant per car, but a full bus. More likely, each car will probably average more than 1 occupant, and buses will probably be less than half full, if not 25%.
Actually, below is an example for a few countries. Average number of persons in a car seem to be decreasing with 1.8 in the 80s, down to around 1.4 in 2005. At the same time average seat occupancy for buses seem to be around 70%. This matches what I observe everyday - vast majority of cars has only the driver inside.
https://www.eea.europa.eu/data-and-maps/indicators/occupancy...
The reality of cars (single occupant) is lower-bandwidth than the fantasy of bikes (lots of bikes traveling like a school of fish). I agree with that.
But if you compare the reality of both, cars are still massively higher throughput in the US.
And if you compare the fantasy of both (fully-loaded cars vs. herds of bikes), then cars would again be higher-bandwidth.
However at the same time we should be investing in density and figuring out ways to make that work. Urban sprawl is massively innefficient by it's nature.
It's a pretty convenient way of transporting your children in and out of the city, as it actually gets you to where you need to go. Compare this to a car: you cant really get to the store you need to be, instead you have to park in a parking garage and then carry your baby in the maxi-cosi to the store. I prefer a bike.
I believe that you and other people do this. I wouldn't do it because I'm afraid of what even a minor cycling accident could do to a child.
Of course I'm coming from a US-centric viewpoint, where bikes share space with cars, pedestrians, and (now) scooters.
To your second question, though, I think the answer is it depends on your intended location and use case. Most micromobility and cycling advocates want changes made to dense urban centers, which are less likely to cater to families with children. SDCs might actually make traffic worse in these places the same way ridesharing has since they will be spending some time driving around empty and also causing congestion when they pick up or drop off passengers. In more suburban settings, though, SDCs make a lot more sense.
I haven't observed this, but it makes zero sense in the US.
The only way you could get 25+ bikes on a road in most of our cities is if they're in a very dense place with great public transit.
Otherwise, average commute distances are going to be too long for most people.
So for space spent on one car to move it and park it in the city you could be moving far more people. If you move to a less car centric CBD, you can still keep some car infrastructure there for people who need a car to get around. But public transport can also be improved, I am willing to bet more mobility challenged people would benefit from that than assuming they all use cars to get around. Not everyone has a carer, or a car that they can utilize.
Lastly they are the most dangerous to other traffic due to their high mass and high speed.
https://www.theurbanist.org/2016/05/26/the-supply-and-demand...
A more visual demonstration:
https://humantransit.org/2012/09/the-photo-that-explains-alm...
From my point of view the top priority should be good public transport.
Most families of three can drive their own vehicles, though. And air bags are really only necessary because of... you guess what.
The "not everyone can ride a bike" argument is vastly overplayed. Not only can almost everyone ride a bike -- but even the ones that can't get a better road environment if fewer people go for the single-occupancy personal automobile as the default. It just occupies so much space that is 99% completely unused.
https://www.dcrainmaker.com/2019/10/continued-expansion-of-t...
Of course it's the Netherlands, and it is safe to do so when there is infrastructure for it like there.
The road should be used by bikes in my opinion (lower infrastructure/maintenance cost, and the separation between road and bike lanes is actually how I broke my right clavicle), and bikes should have priority against individual cars (not urgency and shared transports of course)
I don't understand why people keep suggesting this when bikes generally already can use the road, and this is clearly a failure as far as getting more people biking.
Meanwhile, basically everywhere that implements protected bike lanes and off-street bike paths aplenty gets tons of people biking. But we shouldn't do the thing that's proven successful, because...?
It's always the cars fault.
If the law were to change to favour the smallest, lest protected vehicle at all times then those driving cars would take much greater care when driving around them.
Parents are never gonna feel safe letting their kids bike just because hey, if they get hit by a car it'll be the driver's fault!
In Germany you see them quite often because the bike lanes there are often too narrow and their surface is in bad shape.
It’s going to take me a long time to get over how broken hearted I am about people’s reactions to various bike and scooter share programs. I understand not using the services, but people were openly hostile to them.
So many people like to equate this to a motorist doing the same thing but they're so clearly wildly different.
There’s a real sweet spot somewhere around where electrified pedal tricycles, electric three wheel mopeds, and small electric cars like the Renault Twizy, that has huge potential.
I cycle everywhere but I’m realistic about the issues with mass adoption. Bicycles are fundamentally unstable and they are too narrow to expect road discipline by cyclists to be an emergent property. There is also a very narrow band of weather conditions, especially as a function of how hilly it is, where most people can cycle without overheating.
Electrification is a game changer but there’s no two ways about it: these are now literally motorbikes, with all the same potential for antisocial behavior (pavement riding, traffic weaving, shortcuts through pedestrian only areas.) Not being quite so efficient with the amount of road space used might benefit cyclist behavior and force the authorities hand into providing first class infrastructure for non-car travel.
My personal solution is a bit of a hack: ride a cargo bike with a large front bucket. Keeps me slow and riding safely :)
Aka the copenhagen model.
Nobody is gonna ride a bike if it’s unsafe or difficult or if the bike paths are disconnected.
So yes, we should be dreaming beyond bike lanes, because we ought to be building proper ones right now!
But this "let's dream big about bikes" is like saying "we should feed the planet". Well that's a great notion, and we can totally do that. But who the fuck is going to pay for it?
The car lobby had lots of money, and was able to seize on an abundance of necessity and want: the military needed to be able to move things, cities needed to be able to expand housing out to suburbs, the country needed work, and politicians needed an answer to these problems and a big win. Interstates were a godsend to all these various issues, and the car lobby's funding made that an easy argument to make.
What the hell does the bike lobby have? Chump change. A lack of necessity. Hopes and dreams. Nobody's going to build a Futurama world based on that. You need more than dreams; you need a cause. And you need to be able to provide real value for everyone, not just people who like to bike. That means businesses, politicians, etc
Think about why you can't just walk everywhere and if the answer is that you don't have the time, maybe you should consider just taking that time or reconsider life choices. Why can't you live near the things you need to regularly visit? There's nothing really preventing you. You just don't want to, right?
So maybe everyone should think hard about themselves first, before dreaming about remodelling the environment.
Even as a walker, cities would be so much nicer to walk into without the threat of cars and the pollution that they generate. Imagine walking in the middle of the road, fresh air, you have the space to cross people, some space could be reclaimed for plants and benches. Why not create the ideal environment if we can?
Peds; Bikes; Light EVs (scooters, kick and seated, small cargo movers, narrow (1 seater) cars); Buses & Cargo Trucks; Trains;
Take advantage of grade (slope). Roads should have short ups followed by long downs (in both directions, it's possible) to let people take advantage of gravity. I once saw a fascinating pamphlet advocating for graded runways: planes taking off head downhill, landing, uphill. The idea was that you would save a ton of fuel.
It doesn't work, unless you build double the number of runways, at huge expense, because you'd have to have runways going both uphill and downhill in the same direction.
Runways in real airports go both directions, not just one. They change direction depending on the prevailing wind direction. You never land with a tailwind, or take off with one. So a graded runway wouldn't be usable part of the time, unless you built two of them like I said, or made the runway much longer.
Honestly, this idea sounds like something dreamt up by someone who's never piloted an airplane. I've seen other proposals for airport/runway design like this which also were dreamt up by people who had never flown an airplane, and the reasons their ideas made no sense were easily pointed out by actual pilots.
I'm certainly not knowledgeable enough to argue the point.
This reminds me of someone's crazy proposal not too long ago (I think it showed up on this site) to make an airport with a big circular runway around it, with the idea that planes could be continuously taking off and landing. It didn't take long for some pilots to chime and and call the whole idea utterly insane and stupid because it's incredibly dangerous to take off or land while turning.
Circular runway made me LOL. Cheers!
The irony of this feelgood narrative is that cyclists don't want pedestrians on their ways, either.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bicycle_boulevard#Netherlands [2] https://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fietsstraat
Not nearly enough. What we need are breathing cities. Cities that are more friendly to humans and that function well.
The problem with cars is that they are dangerous. On top of that they also create air and noise pollution and take a lot of space. Is it really worth living in a hostile environment when we have better alternatives available?
The article is too focused on bikes. There are a lot of different aspects to a breathing city and bike lanes are an implementation detail.
I would have assumed that the lack of cycling infrastructure in cities is more influenced by the people who have power over our town councils and planners -- wealthy developers and transport lobbyists. How likely are these people to use bicycles over cars themselves?
Yeah. Cars do that. Congratulations, you understand why people prefer motorized, individual over public or non-motorized, individual transportation. And btw, elevated freeways were one of the solutions for car traffic in the past...
In a dense city, if you want to "reclaim" your space, you have to invest massively. And I'd say the inhabitants need to pay. So tax everyone close to a city center by 50% of their current rent/mortgage and you can build the infrastructure of your dreams. It's not the commuters that profit from that investment, so they should not pay. If you merely want to protect the air quality, just forbid ICEs inside the city limits after, say, ten years. But please be consequent and apply that to your buses, taxis, delivery vans etc. as well.
Maybe the big engineering project he's looking for is parking garages to get the parked cars off the street. Maybe also block side streets to reduce intersections.
It's possible that a shift to driverless cars is an opportunity to do it. If driverless cars do succeed, there could be a shift away from private ownership.
At that point, there's an opportunity to be encourage much narrower, slower, lighter vehicles in cities. You don't a 2 ton car to transport one person 9km @ 25kmph. The cars we have are so big because they occasionally need to transport a whole family long distance on a highway. With self driving taxis this could (plausibly) be handled by a different car.
The conflicting road needs of bikes and lightweight vehicles (say <25kmph & <200kg) are much more manageable than bikes and pickup trucks (or buses).
Not sure how that translates to cancer risk but came as a surprise to me.
How did they become so successful? Is there anything to learn from their experience?
Bikes, by their nature, are rather terrible at moving things around like cows, refrigerated goods, building supplies and such. They are excellent at moving around people, and providing them healthy exercise in the process.
The demonstrable economic impact of a road closure in terms of real wages, purchases, freight, and more is analyzed with incredible depth here: https://www.purdue.edu/discoverypark/nextrans/assets/pdfs/Fi...
From an economic standpoint, the value that bike transportation facilitates is the aggregate value of the wages, production, and consumption of its riders. They represent 0.6% of urban commuters, with 86% in automobiles and 5% in mass transit. Even in Portland, OR only 3.5% of the workforce commutes via bicycle, and certainly less on the rare snow day.
Many would argue that our transportation infrastructure is the cause of this disparity. I think that they are in fact a reflection of economic reality. In places where bicycles carry lots of economic value, such as a highly compensated workforce, they have more infrastructure. In places where they convey relatively little economic value, they receive virtually no accommodation. In agricultural areas, roads have special accommodations for tractors, and rail is extremely valuable.
I could imagine, as many have and the article suggests, a vision for urbanism that is centered around human-first transportation networks. In a place where knowledge work dominates, this is entirely possible. Its happening now, in NYC where roads are being closed off to cars block by block. The roads themselves still exist because people still need things that are most efficiently moved by trucks, such as refrigerated goods, construction equipment, and so on.
A pedal-powered utopia would need to have a robust solution for moving kilotons of things like food if people want to eat, building materials if people want shelter, stuff if people want stuff to put in their shelters, and raw materials if people want to make things instead of just consuming stuff.
Bicycling provides plenty of recreational value, which is in itself economic value, and that should not be discounted.
If we're envisioning things, I'd like to see integrated networks of airborne, ground-level, and subterranean conveyance, each with macro, micro, and intermodal transit solutions that have maximal economic bandwidth and minimal environmental impact. Better yet, technology that eliminates the need for transit, like localized manufacturing and recycling... ie, instead of a garage sheltering a car, it could hold waste materials, shredders, extruders, 3d printers/fabbers, etc for anything from plastics to proteins. If everything we needed to transport could be transported via bike or drone at the last mile(s), if everything we needed came in small packages, if labor happened in place, if everything we made came from commodity components and openly shared designs... roads would vanish rather quickly.
Until then, bikes will get the infrastructure budget commensurate with the value they transport, and the same goes for each other mode. At least cyclists don't have to pay gas tax.
And you can do some deliveries with bikes, I do see people doing it for DHL here on electric cargo bikes for that last mile. Doesn't work for everything of course, but I don't think the goal is literally zero cars ever, it's reducing the unnecessary usage.
Streets are typically city-owned and managed though, and if you’re in a place with a tax regime like California’s, then you’re in a place that relies heavily on things like sales taxes and capital gains taxes which tend to go down the gutter, because good old fashioned property taxes, while extant, are not nearly adequate enough when 1. the assessed value of a property is completely disconnected from the market value which 2. leads to an illiquid property market which artificially inflates prices and 3. the actual property tax rate is largely outside the hands of the people who need to draw up a budget(supervisors, councilors, legislators).
So you want more and better bike infrastructure? I want more and better bike infrastructure. I know! Let’s pay for it! But how are we going to? We could tax and spend, but now you need to see if voters would like more and better bike infrastructure. Oh I know! We can tax the future taxpayers! Sell bonds. Kick the can down the road. I’m sure there is nothing wrong with that.
So now we know how we’re going to pay for it, how much are we going to pay? Well, how much do you like unions. If you’re a union guy, you have no incentive to get the job done any faster than on time, and plenty of incentives to not get it done on time. Well what about contractors? Small business owners have every incentive to get the job done on time because after this, they’ve got their next job to move onto. The more projects they can work in a calendar year, the more money they can make.
Ah, but you don’t want them to just go in wily nilly, make a mess of things and disrupt the flow of traffic and business, wake up the neighborhood and just make things generally unpleasant! You’ve gotta have rules! Sure, you’ve gotta have rules. In fact, you’ve gotta have an environmental impact report, confine portions of the project to certain days, confine actual work to certain hours, have adequate signage posted everywhere, and marketing fluff posted all over about how all this “stuff” is going to make life worth living (here) even better! All of which costs time and costs money. And quite a lot of this really just extends the time it takes a project to complete.
Like Irving Street, San Francisco. An extensive project to kick two or three bus stops down the road and extend the sidewalk a few feet on a couple of street corners which has taken, I don’t have a number on this, but well over a calendar year and has either just wrapped up or is about to wrap up. Actually I take that back, I just remembered part of the project is to move a couple of stops to 5th or 6th Avenue, the ones at 4th and 7th precisely are to be consolidated in the middle, and last I checked that ain’t finished. To say nothing of the numerous public meetings that must have gone into this project.
It was even a good plan, it just took too damn long. But hopefully we can repeat this process block by block, and create dedicated bike infrastructure of the kind that would make a Dutchman feel right at home, and if it takes 30 years and enough money to fund a train between San Francisco and Los Angeles, then who cares because we’re rich and therefore time and money don’t mean anything at all! Even if you only have the same 80 or so years to love and live as everyone else.
So let’s dream big, and maybe tackle the crisis or more like tragedy that is well, every single part of a modern day public project from start to finish so we can maybe build some bike superhighways from here to six blocks down the road within one human lifetime and only a little bit over budget.
So, build some private bike infrastructure. If Elon Musk wants to make Hyperbike, sure, let's see if it gets built and forms part of a functioning network.
Also - how come your arguments don't apply to building roads themselves? How did Central Freeway get built? How did the Bay Bridge get built and rebuilt?
The Bay Bridge was built in a different time under a different regulatory regime and with fewer rules. The Eastern Span, because the Western Span hasn’t been “rebuilt”, much like the Central Subway (Not Freeway, I’m intentionally switching gears here) was built in a more modern regulatory regime, over budget, in more time than planned, and with defects which will limit the effective life of the new span (near as I’m aware the Subway doesn’t suffer this particular deficiency).
Let me be clear, I support building more bike infrastructure, but if we start tomorrow without addressing the regulatory and public budgetary issues of today, it will take more time than necessary and cost more than necessary and not by small amounts. I don’t want to privatize our bloody Streets, I want a sane taxation and budgetary regime that doesn’t depend on the will of finicky voters, worse: a supermajority of them in the case of California under certain conditions.
Oh and my friend, not all criticisms are inherently Anti-American. This is just that regular kind, the kind or a dissatisfied taxpayer dissatisfied with the level of service provided by the State and Local government, and the conditions which ensure that ain’t changing anytime soon. It’s the thing that guarantees that if you dream big and imagine every City an Amsterdam, you’re going to be disappointed. The more friction there is to doing stuff, the less stuff that voters have the stomach for to have done.
tl;dr Ballot box budgeting (to say only the least!) is insane, and ballot box budgeting for bikeways will net you more twigs than bridges.