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Comment by garyrichardson | Hacker News Reader

I live on the west coast in Canada. We have lots of bike lines. It's 30KM of them up and down multiple hills (most people would consider mountains) for me to get to work.

Realistically, you've got to convince me to leave my 3000+sqft house (with bedrooms for all my kids) and yard to move to a 1000sqft apartment in the city (and make my kids share a room) and take on a bigger mortgage so that I'm closer to work. Also how do I get groceries for a family of 5 home on my bike?

Life for the majority of people where I live has not been set up to be bicycle friendly and bike lanes don't change that barrier.

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A more realistic proposal is making your neighborhood slightly denser and more pedestrian/bike/transit friendly. Most of the neighborhood can remain single family homes, but a central area should be slightly denser (3ish story buildings with retail on the bottom floor and residential apartments above). Your major transportation needs can now avoid cars in the following ways:

1. This central area should have a connection to a frequent public transit option which can get you to your job. BRT would be the easiest to roll out, but the ideal for most people would probably be some sort of medium/commuter rail with decent WiFi onboard and enough seating/frequent enough trains so that the average commuter can sit and work if they'd like. Obviously this won't take everyone out of their car, but the majority of commuters in your neighborhood could use this instead since it would be faster and more convenient. Ideally there would be trains/buses running at least every 10 minutes.

2. Because there is a retail area close to your residence you can realistically walk/bike to get groceries and do routine errands. Bike paths in your residential neighborhood make this easier because they feel (and are) much safer for everyday people to use instead of sharing streets with cars. Ideally the paths are safe enough for you to feel comfortable with your elderly relatives or children biking on them.

This is obviously very different from how North American suburbs are set up today and would require a large amount of investment and changes in the way that we do public policy and planning. However, it is certainly possible to have suburbs that are bike/pedestrian friendly if you put the infrastructure in place to do so.

Ah. interesting. I generally agree and fully support this method of urban planning, but the results here haven't resulted in more cycling.

What you describe is exactly how my suburb is set up. There are several clusters of mixed housing (single family, town houses, apartments) built around a few retail centers (and the retail centers usually have housing built on top of them). There is also both light rail and regular rail for transportation from the retail centers. I live 3-5K from the various central areas.

Here are my observations:

* cars are really only avoided for people in the residential apartments above or directly attached to the grocery stores. Nobody here rides their bike to shop (based on never seeing bicycles at the grocery store).

* there's still ~ 200M of elevation change inside of that 3-5K range. Only the most hard core are interesting in cycling that on a regular basis.

* It's a 5 minute drive or 30 minute bus ride to get to the light rail centre from my location (others are closer, some are farther). Some are content to take a bus, but many others drive. There are some who cycle but it's a tiny percentage.

* It's wet here all year long, but uncomfortably cold 5 months of the year. Those who cycle for transportation tend to only do it during May/June/July/August.

My guess is that it's not purely elevation/weather based, but that certainly is a factor for people's comfort. E-bikes can help with the elevation issue at the cost of being more expensive of course.

What's the level of bike infrastructure available? It can be surprising how protected people need to feel from cars to use bikes over other modes of transit. I personally only bike in bike lanes and will avoid sharrows and walk my bike on the sidewalk if there isn't a lane available. My partner will only bike on grade separated paths. This leads to us mostly walking or taking public transit since we're in an urban area, but both of us would gladly bike if we had a good network of bike lanes to do so.

E-bikes are magical--riding straight up steep grades without breaking a sweat. They really aren't even that expensive. The tax credit for a single EV car could pay for three decent ebikes in the US.

> It's a 5 minute drive or 30 minute bus ride to get to the light rail centre from my location (others are closer, some are farther). Some are content to take a bus, but many others drive. There are some who cycle but it's a tiny percentage.

That's simply not close enough. The station must be within a 10-minute bike ride to disrupt the car-centric commute. Ideally the rail stops must be spaced about 3km apart, then there's a corridor 5km wide that lets everyone inside use their bikes to commute.

> Also how do I get groceries for a family of 5 home on my bike?

Cargo bike. Also used for getting the smaller kids (too small to bike safely/fast enough) to daycare etc.

Or when living in a properly dense city just bring it with you one backpack at a time. This is what my mother did when I was a kid. Just stopped by the shop on her way home from work.

In the city you should be close enough to the store that you just get the days groceries as you go by.

The lack of affordable 2500sq ft apartments is the big failure. It doesn't cost that much more to build them, and so rent shouldn't be any more than a house payment ($1500/month!). If that doesn't exist it is because zoning won't let them build it. (or more likely they can, but why do that when you can get more $$$ from 3 800sqft apartments each at $1000/month. Until the high profit apartments are filled nobody will build the ones families would actually live in.

Or to put it a different way: it isn't 1880. People have always wanted more space, now with cars we can afford it in the suburbs.

Where I live the numbers your suggesting would be amazing!

In Vancouver proper, Average 3 bedroom house price is $2.1M. A townhouse or condo of that size is $1.5M. Your typical house payment is going to be much higher than $1500/month. Rents are probably in the $3K+ range -- I don't actually have data on this. Lots of factors there. I don't think zoning is one of them as there is constantly land assemblies and razing blocks of houses for town houses and condos. I suspect it's more geography: we're up against and ocean, a border and a mountain range.

The cost of building a new house that size is about 200-250k. Everything else is land value. Note that I was taking about apartments ,when land value us as high as you say that supports tall buildings to divide the land costs between more units.

The mountains don't help, but nobody is building the apartments people want to live in.

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