261–270 of 380 posts
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What would you do with the bike thieves you catch? Fines mean nothing to the career petty criminals, and jailing people for petty theft leads to hopeless US style mass incarceration.
There is plenty of middle ground, from community service to light jail time, maybe even rehab for some of them.
Why wouldn't it be? It's faster than the tram; a bike is cheap and cycling is free; its way easier to park than a car; its healthy; there are cycle paths everywhere (inside and between cities); and everyone else does it, so you usually have company.
While cycling is obviously much, much cheaper than a car, I'd argue its a myth to say it's 'free'. Start commuting a _reasonable_ distance regularly by bike and you are going to incur running costs, as well as often not insignificant investment in essential accessories you might need depending on where you live - clothing, panniers, lights, helmets, locks... There's a fair amount of things on a bike that, like many o…
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Can anyone explain why police don't do a huge crackdown on bike theft in Amsterdam? I heard repeatedly when I was there about how bad the theft is. Is there something stopping cops from putting out a dozen fancy bikes without locks every day and arresting everyone who grabs one and rides off? Is the legality of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entrapment different in the Netherlands? Because it seems like a relatively s…
They do decoy bikes, e.g. here's a news article about a thief being caught by police stealing a decoy bike for the second time in 6 months published just 3 days ago (in Dutch, but it Google Translates): http://www.nhnieuws.nl/nieuws/207931/Fietsendief-in-Amsterda... The problem is that the police have other stuff to do, and they might as well be pissing in the wind with the amount of bike theft here. They could do a…
Actually, there's evidence that a sustained crackdown can succeed in changing norms. I believe that the biking rate in Copenhagen is almost as high as Amsterdam but the theft rate is far lower. Norms matter. Here's an example:
http://www.slate.com/blogs/moneybox/2012/10/15/buenos_aires_...
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Bike infrastructure in most countries is generally very bad compared to car infrastructure, or even walking infrastructure. This leads to not many people cycling, which gives you a chicken and egg problem: few cyclists mean little political support for biking. For cars in the US it's the opposite: even when major cities get big enough to where cars clearly aren't scaling well anymore, cities are often reluctant to re…
>Bike infrastructure in most countries is generally very bad compared to car infrastructure... My city just created a law that motorists who don't leave a 1m gap between their vehicle and bike will be fined. The problem is the "bike lane" is just a picture of a bike on what used to be the paved shoulder, the 30cm wide paved shoulder. And the biked lane can narrow down to nothing in some places. And it often includes…
It also has awesome weather for cycling all year round.
People are just hard to change.
> If anything, having a tatty, battered old > bike affords more status as it attests to > a long and lasting love. As an Amsterdam resident: What a romantic characterization of our high crime rates! Yes, the reason I still ride a shitty old beater of a bike is definitely my long lasting love for that piece of shit, it's not because I know that if I buy anything fancy I'm going to have to never take my eyes off of it,…
Don't you folks have chorbazar's [1,2]? Virtually every big city in India has one. Your stuff gets stolen, you go to the chor bazar, it'll be on sale, buy it back after some haggling over price. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chor_Bazaar [2] http://www.indiatimes.com/culture/who-we-are/14-reasons-you-...
> If anything, having a tatty, battered old > bike affords more status as it attests to > a long and lasting love. As an Amsterdam resident: What a romantic characterization of our high crime rates! Yes, the reason I still ride a shitty old beater of a bike is definitely my long lasting love for that piece of shit, it's not because I know that if I buy anything fancy I'm going to have to never take my eyes off of it,…
Funny. In Japan, there are many places where people don't even bother locking their bikes.
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There should be vinyl wrap for bikes that provides a paintable, duct-tapeable substrain for camo tape and radioactive fuchsia and orange also camo ejaculation. Flat (no shine) paint makes a bike even less attractive. PS: I had a old/ugly bike that I had for 16 years in Davis, CA that I still locked and it was stolen from an apt complex the one and only time I forgot to lock it. There are thieves whom ride around in c…
Protip: "Plasti Dip" spray paint is like vinyl wrap on a spraycan, it comes in all sorts of matte (or even sparkly!) gaudy colors. I think they even sell a desert camo tri-pack. I've seen it sold in car part/accessory shops in Europe.
Bicycles are an amazing transportation tool. Why are they so unpopular everywhere else?
There are many factors, but IMO it has a lot to do with urban sprawl. I'd never consider living somewhere where I'd have to own a car to be able to do my groceries and to go work. In the same idea, I'd never take a job that requires me to do more than a 30 minutes commute by public transportation/biking distance. That makes me a perfect candidate for biking, unfortunately I'm more of an outlier. Most people, includin…
we decided on a bike tour so we walked to a place where i could rent a bike. Of the 50 or 60 "top bar" (men's) bikes, every one was too big, even if they collapsed the seat post, the frames were still to big. (I'm 175 cm, or 5'9"?) I had to settle for a ladies' step-through.
Here there are bike paths everywhere (pretty much alongside every road) and they're quite wide. Bikes have their own set of traffic lights.
If you manage to get your hands on a yellow public transport card (ov-chipkaart) then you can even rent a bike from the train station (some train stations have a separate section where they keep the bikes) and it only costs about 3 Euros per day.