311–320 of 382 posts
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Though a sub 3 mile commute is also easy to serve with transit. I have a 12 mile bike commute. The bus is an option, but it only runs once an hour.
A sub-3-mile commute is walkable.
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The best practice that I'm aware of is: * AT AN INTERSECTION * Dismount and walk the bike across the cross-walk, as a pedestrian. IMO we've engineered intersections all wrong to begin with. There shouldn't even be cross-walks there (they should be mid-block dedicated services, placed where pedestrians WANT to cross and __VERY CLEARLY__ marked as existing; not the dinky lights many cities go for (Seattle comes to mind…
This is what I was taught when I was a kid and it's really dumb. 1. Bikes can't go on sidewalks, so you're already screwed one way or another. 2. It's a huge hassle to get off and on at every intersection. Of course there's a problem with the bike acting like a vehicle too, even if it can keep up with traffic. Stoplight sensors don't register bikes so you end up waiting for a car to show up so it can trigger the sens…
If you're a cyclist and stopped on a red, waiting for it to change, you're seriously breaking ranks. :)
I mostly just bolt for it when the coast is clear.
There are places where I wait, but if it's keyed to a sensor coil, I'm definitely not waiting for a vehicle to arrive.
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Isn't it safer, though? I'm not very experienced with this stuff, but one of the issues is having sufficient traction to make it up hills, and all-wheel drive is superior at that. If you have to roll back down a hill and try again with a running start, that may be doable, but that makes things more chaotic and unpredictable on the roads (compared to making it up the first time). In an ideal world, other drivers would…
No, it’s more convenient. I personally would argue that AWD can make cars less safe because of the false confidence it provides. The most important thing you can do with a car is brake and turn, as those affect safety the most. All cars brake with all four wheels, drive type has absolutely no effect at all. All modern cars have enough braking power to slide on clean concrete, let alone snow and ice. The only thing yo…
> The most important thing you can do with a car is brake and turn, as those affect safety the most.
Yep, I could notice that when I was leaving north of arctic circle. Each time my driving mates ended up in the ditch (failing to turn on a crossroad), it was with a 4WD. I tried to explain to them that 4WD does not help to brake and turn (especially when their 4WD land rover/cruiser is 50% to 100% heavier than their regular car), to no avail :-(
Luckily most of the landings happened in the snow banks and were relatively smooth, but the lesson was not learned :-( But hey! they finally get to use the 4WD to pull back out of the ditch :-)
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The best practice that I'm aware of is: * AT AN INTERSECTION * Dismount and walk the bike across the cross-walk, as a pedestrian. IMO we've engineered intersections all wrong to begin with. There shouldn't even be cross-walks there (they should be mid-block dedicated services, placed where pedestrians WANT to cross and __VERY CLEARLY__ marked as existing; not the dinky lights many cities go for (Seattle comes to mind…
This is what I was taught when I was a kid and it's really dumb. 1. Bikes can't go on sidewalks, so you're already screwed one way or another. 2. It's a huge hassle to get off and on at every intersection. Of course there's a problem with the bike acting like a vehicle too, even if it can keep up with traffic. Stoplight sensors don't register bikes so you end up waiting for a car to show up so it can trigger the sens…
Camera based sensors are far better than the induction loops used on older installations in my experience. Replacing the traffic light with a roundabout is even better :)
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> returning to the bicycle, an 18th century city technology, is regressive, not the way forward Just because something is old does not mean it is a bad idea. By the way, bicycles were first developed in the 19th century (not 18th) and have been continuously improved since then. And motor vehicles are not much newer, anyway. The Benz Patent Motor Car was sold in the 1880s. For comparison, the most popular type of bike…
You're mistaking the movement per unit energy efficiency of the car vs. The bicycle as the only reason for preferring one over the other. There are a myriad of emergent benefits to people having affordable climate-controlled engined-vehicles with storage that has improved their lives dramatically.
I never said bikes are better in every way, or even more efficient. Actually, I think a well designed motor vehicle could easily beat a bike in efficiency, particularly for common diets, but it would be smaller like a bike. E.g., a motorcycle could be better.
My argument was that old technologies aren't necessarily bad and that motor vehicles are nearly as old as bikes, so the age argument also applies to cars. I don't disagree that cars have benefits.
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Complexity matters, but gets swamped when you start talking about increasing infrastructure per person by an order of magnitude. Keep in mind that spread out suburbs also produce less tax revenue per acre, and thus less revenue per public dollar spent. There are “rich” suburbs in the US where a 100% tax rate wouldn’t cover future maintenance obligations.
No, I confirm what jbob2000 said: in my country (which is probably different from his), the local taxes ( and the state subsidies) go up as density goes up. Those are per inhabitant (and they don't comprise funding for regional equipments, just for the use of the municipality). I think they are a very good proxy for public infrastructure cost. They are lowest in rural municipalities, then they are small towns, then i…
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Complexity matters, but gets swamped when you start talking about increasing infrastructure per person by an order of magnitude. Keep in mind that spread out suburbs also produce less tax revenue per acre, and thus less revenue per public dollar spent. There are “rich” suburbs in the US where a 100% tax rate wouldn’t cover future maintenance obligations.
No, I confirm what jbob2000 said: in my country (which is probably different from his), the local taxes ( and the state subsidies) go up as density goes up. Those are per inhabitant (and they don't comprise funding for regional equipments, just for the use of the municipality). I think they are a very good proxy for public infrastructure cost. They are lowest in rural municipalities, then they are small towns, then i…
It’s not surprising that cities spend more on infrastructure in total, but they spend a lot less on infrastructure per capita. Better still, they tend to have more economic activity per public dollar spent. The point is to be efficient with public dollars and generate the maximal economic activity per public dollar. In this way things like public transit blow rural and suburban roads out of the water.
Measuring traveling speed is silly. What matters is time spent to get to services, jobs, food, and similar. You measure this based on time and cost, not distance and speed.
Oh, and ultra dense cities can offer more choices for short distance travel. I can get my commute down to 12 minutes by bike or 8 by electric scooter. This reduces wear and tear on the roads a lot, and packs more people per lane mile of road, meaning that my economic activity costs the public less in terms of infrastructure cost. This doesn’t work in low density suburbs (at least not in America).
While I can’t speak to your country, I can say that the vast majority of public subsidies in the United States actually flow to suburbs and not inner cities. Without federal largesse, suburbs would stop being a middle class expectation and return to being an ultra wealthy luxury.
Ctrl-F 'Snow' : No hits I know about Denver and Minneapolis...they both have times where cycling is a non-starter
We could use concrete barriers between bike lanes and traffic, that's for sure, but there are enough options that you can usually avoid having to be in traffic.
It's certainly not even close to the crazy quantity of cyclists we normally have, but it is by no means a non-starter or dead out. Fatbikes really make a difference.
Source: Resident of MPLS.
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Yeah that's the thing that annoys motorists (or at least what annoys me) -- bikes that you can't safely pass. Any time you have vehicles with greatly differing speeds sharing the same lane, it's unsafe.
What about lanes on interstate highways on upgrades that mix 40 mph truck traffic with 70 to 80 mph car traffic?