Why Amsterdam Works So Well for Bikes

A pet peeve of mine is how infrastructure-oriented, and therefore how mid-to-far-future-oriented, city cycling discussions tend to be. There are people on the road right now. City planners like to assume that all current cyclists are a distinct breed of weirdos and there are no marginal gains to be made by making marginal improvements. It will take grand action to get "normal" people to ride bicycles. In truth, regular cyclists are just the tail of a larger population of people who want to bike more and drive less, and who occasionally try. Every improvement to safety and convenience means more of those people will ride for transportation more often.

1. All streets are bike streets

This is already true for people who leave home on a bicycle expecting to handle all their daily business. Please consider that basically everyone who leaves home on a bike is forced to include some segments of "car" streets in their route. Planners like to imagine all of a city's cyclists moving around on the streets and paths they've specifically improved for bicyclists, like they've laid out a model train track and all the toy trains are running on it. If cyclists were restricted to traveling that way, it wouldn't be a practical means of transportation. Educate drivers and take cyclists into account in traffic engineering. Make cycling a little more tolerable now and you'll have more cyclists and more of a political mandate for infrastructure projects in the future.

2. Separated cycle tracks, not bike lanes

I hate the "not" here. I know the author is describing Amsterdam, but he calls his five points a "template," and "not bike lanes" doesn't belong on any city's template for becoming bike-friendly. Bike lanes are cheap and quick to install, so put them everywhere you can spare the space. I know they're not all that safe. I've been hit in one. At the same time you work on installing bike lanes, work on the grant and bond proposals that will let you build separated cycle tracks in the future. There's grass-roots interest in cycling right now in the United States. People want to bike, and they're trying, despite the lack of infrastructure. Focusing solely on expensive, high-profile improvements that are years out is a disservice to people who are taking to the roads right now, and it could leave a lot of them with a sour taste in their mouths as they struggle to safely navigate the streets near their work and wonder why there's so much excitement about projects that even if fully completed years from now will still leave them many blocks short of their work and other nonnegotiable destinations. Bike lanes might not have a place in the future, but none of us live in the future as of yet.

(I suspect planners and advocates feel pushed towards the most ambitious projects by career considerations, and I can sympathize with that. Everyone wants to be the most forward-looking. Everyone wants to have the highest hopes and standards. Everyone wants, when the future finally arrives in reality, to have been the first to get there in their heads. Everybody wants to be seen as valuing the least advantaged and most vulnerable people who will be the last (in perception, not necessarily in reality) to finally be brought onto the road by the most advanced evolution of infrastructure. Nobody wants to be associated with the suboptimal and downright dangerous compromises we will live with until then.)

The problem is lack of trust for local and county government to run public transit. People don't want to lose their job because they depended on poorly run public transit. I've met more than a few people who have lost jobs or were going to lose jobs due to poor transit services.

Here in So. Cal, Metrolink trains are expensive and run very rarely. I have yet to go a week without a major delay or cancelled train. Bus and train schedules are essentially one way and leave early. Meaning I usually have to leave work around 3:30 to get home.

Not to mention that despite driving through some of the worst traffic in the state, trains and buses take two or three times as long to get me to my destination than my car. This is despite massive funding increases and bonds for public transit in our state.

If you play good cop, then you're easy to dismiss. If you play bad cop, then you're 'guaranteed to create another pointless culture war'. You can't win.

But jumping the shark with the personal automobile is certainly wrong and harmful.

From a social standpoint it manufactures inequality. Access to effective transportation is the single greatest factor in determining an individual's opportunity for upward economic mobility. And if you live in a world built for cars and can't drive, well, fuck you.

It's environmentally destructive. This one's easy, but it's important to note that it isn't just the emissions from the tailpipe, it's all the sprawl and infrastructure built to accomodate the car. Mankind has chalked up a lot of black marks in it's short history, but rendering the biosphere uninhabitable? That takes the cake. In the grand scheme of things, what the hell are we doing if we aren't at least making a nominal effort to leave the place in better condition than it was when we arrived?

Economically it's bad for us too. James Kunstler called the suburbs 'the greatest misallocation of resources in the history of western civilization'. When I first read that it struck me as a sensational and hyperbolic statement, but after having it knock around in my head for a few years, I don't think it is an outrageous claim to make.

One of the inherent contradictions of human nature is that we're surprisingly adaptable, yet stubbornly resistant to change. Nobody likes to be told they're doing it wrong, but what else is there to say? You're doing it wrong.

I don't play cop at all. I like biking and use public transport fairly often. I do separate garbage etc. I don't think that driving is inherently immoral. I think that when you are framing it that way, you are overstating individual contribution to bad environment. Otherwise said, you are manipulating and exaggerating and using fear to get your wish.

And better public infrastructure for biking here did came after a lobbying and money collection and what not from activists. They did not used the "you are all bad people unless we get what we want" nor "we are hollier then you" strategy. And yep, such strategy breeds more stubborn resistance - because while many people are with accepting bike trail and what not (it does not costs all that much in the grand scheme of things), once you insult them you pretty much lost before you even started.

Thank you, this is the point that I was getting at.

The stretch of road in question has no bike lane and half of foot of pavement to the right of the lane at most.

The right solution is to put in a dedicated bike lane, in absence of that you're putting everyone else on the road in danger by choosing bike with a large delta of speed.