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Comment by conductr | Hacker News Reader

That’s a chicken and egg problem. If you live in a city without ideal weather thats already built with automobiles in mind, getting even just a whole whopping 1% of trips by bike is nearly impossible and still makes no difference. Possibly even counterproductive as the bikes are consuming the infrastructure yet volume is not contributing enough to the “everyone can benefit” part.

Living in a place that is overly car dependent, I’ve watched as billions are spent on light rails and bike lanes and such but ultimately have very low utilization. People, on average, don’t want to use it here. They won’t want to use it until there’s any economic reason to use it.

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> Living in a place that is overly car dependent, I’ve watched as billions are spent on light rails and bike lanes and such but ultimately have very low utilization. People, on average, don’t want to use it here. They won’t want to use it until there’s any economic reason to use it.

Or, alternatively, until it can actually get them to where they need to go?

It’s always frustrating when cities put in a few disconnected bike lanes and then act surprised when nobody uses them. It’s like… yes, I would love to use this bike lane, if it didn’t just end abruptly and throw me into multiple lanes of fast-moving cars! There’s one near me that looks very nice in isolation but ends at a freeway on/off ramp, so I don’t dare use it.

Bikes/trains/buses/pedestrians taking up space that was once allocated for cars is actually a good thing though. By reducing road capacity you are increasing the cost of driving, which encourages people to get out of their cars and bike more. Think of it as the opposite of induced demand.

It doesn’t though. Not here. This statement is purely theoretical in an incentive vacuum. Or maybe just an ideal city repurposing old infrastructure (eg I think in NYC some old rails were converted to trails).

Let’s just consider the work commute/rush hours. The average commute where I live is probably 20 miles. But it has a wide range. I’d guess some double digit percentage commutes more than 50 miles one way. They do this because most of my city and surrounding area has grown in the age of the automobile. It wasn’t optimized for density and short distances. So, the driving commute would have to worsen severely to make someone consider even just the extra time of a bike trip. The weather, danger, physical capabilities, and limitations of a bike are added hurdles.

This is very observably true as when bike lanes are added, nobody uses them.

> when bike lanes are added, nobody uses them

People generally take the mode that makes the most sense from a time, money, safety, and comfort perspective.

If a city wants more people to switch from driving to walking, biking, or transit the only way to do that is to make the latter options some combination of faster, cheaper, and/or safer than driving. Adding a bike lane here or there only induces those people who were right at the boundary to switch from driving to biking.

Given that most cities have spent the last several generations making automobile transportation as efficient and cheap as possible it would be very hard for a few bike lanes to convince people to get out of their cars.

To really move the needle you'd have to start charging market rates for parking and road use and/or make walking/biking safe and enjoyable. Or you could just wait until population increases inevitably result in auto traffic slowing to biking speed.

> Given that most cities have spent the last several generations making automobile transportation as efficient and cheap as possible it would be very hard for a few bike lanes to convince.

I agree but would phrase it as "externalising all the costs of automobile traffic onto other people (and some of those 'other people' are other car commuters who in turn externalise their costs onto other drivers)"

The kind of nerdy efficiency argument free-market libertarians would make if they weren't owned by fossil fuel interests.

Your comment sent me on a bit of a rabbit hole, it turns out you can look up commute distance histograms in the census data here https://onthemap.ces.census.gov/

I looked at a few dozen cbsa metro areas, big cities, small cities, east, west, middle and the only 3 i could find with more people traveling 10-24 miles than <10 miles were Houston (34/36), Dallas (34/37), and Atlanta (34/38) so even in the worst case ~⅓ of commuters are doing less than 10 miles.

I couldn't figure out how to query this data via an api, but I did find a paper that looked at the 96 largest metros, which showed that Houston, Dallas, and Atlanta had the highest median between 12.2 and 12.8 miles. So I think that a 20 mile average is likely not true anywhere, though double digit over 50 miles does occur in all three of the above cities. Most cities have plenty of people commuting across the spectrum, though some are significantly denser than others (up to ~45% for <10).

Now looking at the per mode data, 10 miles is still on the long side for a bike commute. There is a steep drop off in people cycling/motorcycling to work (for some reason combined in the dataset) at the 30 minute mark. 20mph is fast even with a e-bike assist, probably somewhere around <2-6 miles would be the ideal probably.

I do agree with you that most people aren't going to start using bike lanes if that means a worse commute. I used to, but I cycle for sport and would do those hours anyways (now my bike commute is faster than train or car). Most Dutch people don't bike commute for fitness or sport or fun, they do it because it's the most efficient way for them to make their daily trips. Part of this is because of the density of that country and part of that is the infrastructure.

Thanks for doing the deep dive this is interesting data that I didn't want to research :)

> There is a steep drop off in people cycling/motorcycling to work (for some reason combined in the dataset) at the 30 minute mark

I live in Dallas which is one of your samples. I think on the above point what you would find is above a certain threshold and commuters are using a highway/high speed road and probably see it as a necessary component to keep drive time down. I just mapped my commute and it's actually 12.2 miles of which 9.3 are on a highway. It takes me a consistent 20 minutes to get to/from work; or about 35 if I avoid the highway for some reason. Average speed is probably a small factor and stop lights/merging traffic being the dominant slow downs.

On a bike, intersections still slow you down and you don't see people bike across a highway's path very often at all here because all of those intersections tend to be high speed, several lanes, and quite dangerous too. Since biking isn't a normal activity for most people here, I'd venture to guess most people would impose an additional danger to themselves until they got familiar with things.

The shear number of roads and infrastructure to be upgraded to make it feasible is daunting.

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