181–190 of 198 posts
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The comparison to rentals is dumb imo. I own my own electric scooter. Many people do. This problem has to do with scooter ownership in general, regardless of the owner.
Really you just leave yours anywhere even though you own it?
This article reeks of spin. I'll bet real money that it's a PR piece.
Yes the all powerful bike lobby
In all seriousness, Have A Go is not affiliated with any bike sharing/renting companies. If you visit our site, you'll see that we are actually based on the ownership model. Our mission is to help transition us to green, healthy, fun, affordable, and efficient modes of personal mobility, and that's why we wrote this piece! Not because of the $13,500 dollars we received......d'oh!!!
If Hertz or Avis attempted to use public space to park their inventory, local residents and city officials would pitch a fit. Public parking exists for the benefit of the public at large, not as a cost-saving measure for rental firms. The same is true of bicycles. You can store your private bicycle almost anywhere you like in public. But city fathers will naturally take a dim view of a business using that public spac…
We forget that cities are quite old and cars are very new and our acceptance of streets being for cars isn't actually historically normal and is really a huge concession by cities and citizens to historically public, spaces for walking, commerce, festivals, meetups, musicians, artists, kids, the elderly, etc. The right to freely use and leave bikes/scooters anywhere is simply one tiny push back to this historic uses of streets.
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I do it with a boosted board, which is even worse. These e-scooters are not your typical kid scooters, they have pneumatic tires, and those tires are bigger than the 80-90mm skateboard tires that are available on electric skateboards. Here is one example: http://www.mi.com/us/mi-electric-scooter/
I've only tried the Birds but it was awful.
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I'm having a hard time imagining how you could park in a bike lane without blocking bicyclists. "You may park in a bicycle lane if your vehicle does not block a bicyclist and/or there is not a “No Parking” sign posted."
We have the same law in my city. The answer is that, and I'm honestly not trying to be snarky here, the bike lanes are very often deserted. The seem to be placed in areas and roads that are woefully inappropriate so that some city planner can go to a conference a talk about how green and progressive the city is.
Many bike lanes Austin has added or "enhanced" in the past 5 years I've lived here were wastes of time and money, or even worse than what was present before.
The cycle track on Guadalupe is a good example of an "improvement" that was actually worse. It's not deserted, but I almost never use it because it makes cyclists much less visible. Far too often a driver will turn without checking for oncoming cyclists. No thanks, I take the lane. Not that I'm that much slower than traffic there anyway. The speed limit is 35 mph and it's downhill, so going 30 mph isn't that hard. It would have made a lot more sense to add the cycle track on the uphill side of the road, though that wouldn't solve the visibility problem.
(The installation of the cycle track also greatly increased the number of wrong-way cyclists. I've found that these cyclists firmly believe that going the wrong way is safer. The statistics show quite clearly otherwise.)
I think a better solution is for drivers to get used to cyclists being on the road. Driving slower for a couple minutes at most before you can safely pass a cyclist is nowhere near as bad as most drivers seem to think it is. Some drivers become livid...
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True, but those people who moved out found that the externalities of their driving made driving itself less pleasant. It's great to live in the suburbs and drive in to the city when you're the only one doing it. When parking gets scarce or the roads are too narrow or congestion is bad, though, it gets annoying. For the US, the response was to mandate large amounts of parking and large roads that are built so they can…
I think you're focusing optimizing lifestyle to suit a desired transit style (public transit and walking), while the historical development mindset was to optimize transit style for a desired lifestyle (suburban living).
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I think you're focusing optimizing lifestyle to suit a desired transit style (public transit and walking), while the historical development mindset was to optimize transit style for a desired lifestyle (suburban living).
But.. a lot of people don't desire suburban living. They don't get much choice because those neighborhoods are illegal to build.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
True, but those people who moved out found that the externalities of their driving made driving itself less pleasant. It's great to live in the suburbs and drive in to the city when you're the only one doing it. When parking gets scarce or the roads are too narrow or congestion is bad, though, it gets annoying. For the US, the response was to mandate large amounts of parking and large roads that are built so they can…
I think you're focusing optimizing lifestyle to suit a desired transit style (public transit and walking), while the historical development mindset was to optimize transit style for a desired lifestyle (suburban living).
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> According to new numbers just released from the U.S. Census Bureau, 80.7 percent of the U.S. population lived in urban areas as of the 2010 Census https://www.citylab.com/equity/2012/03/us-urban-population-w... I assume that number has only gone up since 2010.
> 80.7 percent of the U.S. population lived in urban areas as of the 2010 Census "Urban areas" includes where I live, which is not dense enough for public transportation to work well. Reading the article you cited, it looks like about half of the population labeled "urban" by the Census Bureau lives in areas that are like mine (or even less dense).
You lose me here. I live in a major metro area and public transportation works fine, even out into the suburbs where it is not as dense, but the public transit spokes out to the major hubs and people drive to those transit stations and park for the day.
Public transportation works for the vast majority of the country.