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What a City Would Look Like If It Were Designed for Only Bikes

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Re: What a City Would Look Like If It Were Designed for Only Bikes

#51

Post by ju-st »

saiya-jin wrote: post #23
tonyedgecombe wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"no cars allowed is nice in theory but not workable" I think cities existed before cars.

well they did, but you wouldn't want to live in most of them. what about ambulances? fireworkers? once your place is on fire, or your dad is having heart attack, you want help to arrive in eco-friendly manner half an hour too late? even places like Zermatt in Switzerland, which prides itself in banning all cars except electric has medical, technical and police guys routinely cruising the village in... you guessed it,…

Then just ban all cars except emergency vehicles? Replace all roads with single lanes and use the road pavement as pedestrian walkway.

Good delivery trucks could only be allowed between 5 and 6am. If shops need something urgent there are always transport bicyles/tricyles (with or without electric support).

Re: What a City Would Look Like If It Were Designed for Only Bikes

#52

Post by _delirium »

Kluny wrote: post #47

I'm a cyclist and I love the idea of making cities more bike friendly, but this group of designers has missed a major point. Cities are for PEOPLE. Not for cars, not for bikes, but for humans. Space for people to live and exist in should be the highest priority, and anytime you start cutting into living space to make more room for vehicles, you're making the city less human friendly. That's what these guys seem to be…

That's very cultural I think, not really inherent. My impression from living in Copenhagen from some years is that bikes in that context are somewhat more inclusive than cars, though neither is perfect. (I personally mostly used a mixture of walking + transit.)

Families with two kids use bikes all the time [1], and the median bicyclist is a middle-aged office commuter, not a 25-year-old single person. Mobility scooters are also permitted in bike lanes (and you see them fairly often), which further expands the inclusiveness of bicycle infrastructure.

[1] These are popular among families: http://livingcph.dk/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/christiania.j...

Re: What a City Would Look Like If It Were Designed for Only Bikes

#53

Post by hackuser »

_delirium wrote: post #48
hackuser wrote: post #37

I had thought the custom on HN was to post valuable, constructive comments, and not to find fault or to post typical Internet forum sniping and hyperbole. Perhaps it's my impression, but I've rarely seen anything constructive recently. Almost everything in this discussion, for example, is reaction and sniping ("useless", "absurd", "stupid", etc.). It's a way to hang out and socialize online; there's nothing wrong wit…

I mostly agree. I do sometimes find valuable counterpoint in the HN comments, but most often that's on topics where the community here has actual expertise (mostly programming) and the counterpoint is pretty specific. This has been a discussion on HN for years, though, and even has its own jargon term, the "middlebrow dismissal": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5072224

Thanks for the interesting link.

I think the discussions used to be much better. There was less 'noise' and some truly excellent 'signal', which made the discussions worthwhile. Recently, my impression is that the noise has significantly increased and the excellent signal has almost disappeared. But: That could be simply my mistaken impression, it could be just normal variability, or it could be something else. Certainly I'm not the first to say, in any community, 'it's not like it was in the old days'.

Re: What a City Would Look Like If It Were Designed for Only Bikes

#54

Post by _delirium »

AnimalMuppet wrote: post #50
jacquesm wrote: post #11

That's a city designed for ONLY bikes, and no city will ever be designed like that, no cars allowed is nice in theory but not workable. To be practical it would at a minimum have to accommodate foot-traffic, supply lines to stores (or did you think that those stores will be supplied by cargo bikes?) and access for disabled people (not everybody can ride a bike). So it's a nice thought experiment but not at all practi…

> To be practical it would at a minimum have to accommodate foot-traffic, supply lines to stores (or did you think that those stores will be supplied by cargo bikes?) and access for disabled people (not everybody can ride a bike). And trash removal. When people design their utopian non-car city where everything is by bike or by train or whatever, they always forget about trash removal.

There's always the Roosevelt Island solution, pneumatic trash pipes: http://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/04/nyregion/garbage-collectio...

Re: What a City Would Look Like If It Were Designed for Only Bikes

#55

Post by drsim »

Kluny wrote: post #47

I'm a cyclist and I love the idea of making cities more bike friendly, but this group of designers has missed a major point. Cities are for PEOPLE. Not for cars, not for bikes, but for humans. Space for people to live and exist in should be the highest priority, and anytime you start cutting into living space to make more room for vehicles, you're making the city less human friendly. That's what these guys seem to be…

It's extreme for sure, but it's a concept. 'Concept cars' are produced as a visionary direction a car manufacturer may take their range. This should be read the same.

I live in Copenhagen and can't observe any way in which cars here are more inclusive than bikes. A high percentage of bikes have a child seat, there are cargo bikes for multi-child families and the rail network is geared up to take bikes for commuters.

Older people cycle well past retirement, so their lifelong mobility keeps them healthily mobile too.

The big, fast metal box of a car dehumanises people by isolating them from slower and more vulnerable road users. Bikes mix much better with pedestrians when they need too than a looming car.

Re: What a City Would Look Like If It Were Designed for Only Bikes

#56

Post by yodsanklai »

hackuser wrote: post #46
yodsanklai wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No problem with people saying "it's useless" as long as they make their point with some arguments (which was the case with some of the other comments).

> No problem with people saying "it's useless" as long as they make their point with some arguments My opinion differs: 1) IME, comments which begin with hyperbole such as "it's useless" rarely improve beyond that. I generally stop reading there (I don't have time to read everything). My theory, anecodotally confirmed, is that if they are careless with their language (i.e., the lazy use of hyperbole), probably they w…

> if they are careless with their language (i.e., the lazy use of hyperbole), probably they will be careless with their content.

Don't forget that many people don't speak English as their first language and it may be difficult to express an adequate degree of nuance (it is for me...).

Overall I agree with you, and I prefer when commenters are respectful of everybody's else feelings. But I don't think it's that bad on hacker news: the ranking system is quite efficient and I often learn something from the comments.

Re: What a City Would Look Like If It Were Designed for Only Bikes

#57

Post by ilaksh »

I like the general idea of moving away from cars and creating architecture that supports that. I feel that my idea solves many more problems than this design though. I do not have drawings and 3d renderings etc. or own a firm and I am just an individual, but my tiny villages concept is much more comprehensive.

http://runvnc.github.io/tinyvillage/

Re: What a City Would Look Like If It Were Designed for Only Bikes

#58

Post by s73v3r »

Avalaxy wrote: post #3

A bike ramp into the apartment is useless. You can just take the elevator with your bike, or you know... Just make a garage for bikes on ground floor. The article doesn't really say much about how to design a city for bicycles, which mostly comes down to providing good roads where you aren't bothered by cars.

Not everyone wants to park their bike in a garage with everyone else.

Re: What a City Would Look Like If It Were Designed for Only Bikes

#59

Post by WorldMaker »

WorldMaker wrote: post #35
dalke wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You consider it a fair design. I look at it as a waste of space. All it does is replace "car" with "bike". It even says so, with "Residential bike parking should have the same space-syntax relationship to the front door and kitchen as car parking does in a contemporary house in the suburbs." Look at how much hallway space it needs to have a cycle path, plus bike parking. It adds, what, 2-3 meters of hallway width? Pl…

By "fair design" I don't necessarily mean "practical", I'm implying "interesting" and "conversation starting" and "worth examining/talking about".

Also, the specific context here was "Given semi-protected sidewalks this design seems to provide equal access to both bicyclists and pedestrians".

Re: What a City Would Look Like If It Were Designed for Only Bikes

#60

Post by benkuykendall »

jules wrote: post #42

I wonder if that expert has been to the Netherlands or Copenhagen. In fact I wonder whether he has really experienced a bike for day to day use, because some of the ideas are very strange. It's telling that most bikes in the pictures are racing bikes. What's the advantage of bikes in apartment buildings? Why not park the bike at the ground floor? It would waste a lot of space in the corridors. Think about what you'd…

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