The underlining issue is that the working class mongrels utterly love their cars.
Let them drive I say - they spend more money, they die in car crashes...
We Need to Dream Bigger Than Bike Lanes
111–120 of 561 posts
Re: We Need to Dream Bigger Than Bike Lanes
#112Earlier quoted context omitted.
> A mom with three young kids in tow Ha! Go see how they do it in Europe. Bike trailers, extra seats in the front & back, built in cargo decks, longer bikes; there are lots of fancy ways to load a lot of kids & cargo onto your bike. And don't forget that kids can ride their own bikes too! My kid was riding a bike with me to daycare at 3-4 years old. Your thinking is too car-centric!
I live and travel around Europe. Seeing parents riding with their very young kids is not too common a sight and every major city I've been to has traffic problems, because a whole lot of people do want to use cars and do value their convenience. Whether that's a bad thing or not is another discussion but don't try to present Europeans as some sort of superhumans.
I only have experience with Berlin, Hamburg, Munich, and Amsterdam; but if you sit outside of a daycare in those cities in the morning you can see the multitude of people who ride their bikes to drop off their 1, 2, and sometimes 3 kids at daycare. Those cities do cycling right and it shows.
So I would disagree with you. The traffic problems are caused by having cities that are only setup to make cars convenient and everything else inconvenient. Cities that prioritize the lowest bandwidth people mover are going to have major traffic problems, of course.
Like you say, people want convenience. But I don't know why you think they particularly care about driving (or cycling or walking or taking the train). They just want the most convenient & cost effective thing. If that's a car, they will drive a car. If that's cycling, they will cycle. If it's the train, they will take that instead.
On practically every measure, owning a car is far less convenient (unless you live in a city built around driving cars) and more expensive than not owning a car. We owned a car in Germany but only used it for weekend trips. So the point here is to change cities to not be built around cars. Make cars less convenient.
Re: We Need to Dream Bigger Than Bike Lanes
#113Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't mind the weather in Copenhagen where the amount of people who bikes every day exceeds the amount of people who take public transportation every day by around 50% (1). Weather in Copenhagen is rarely very cold or very warm. But Copenhagen weather is not "startlingly good all year-round". It rains quite often and temperatures are often close to zero or sub zero. And it's windy all the time. It even snows a few…
Copenhagen doesn’t have 40 degrees Celsius heatwaves in the summer nor winter blizzards that make you feel like you’re in Siberia, while places like the US East Coast (and I guess even the Chicago area in the Midwest) have them both.
If the argument is that it's unbearable to commute by bike in scorching heat, I would argue you could still bike and ask your employer to install showers at your workplace. That's how it's done in the Netherlands, where most (modern-ish) offices have showers next to enclosed bike parking facilities.
Re: We Need to Dream Bigger Than Bike Lanes
#114> Cars are the slowest, lowest-bandwidth forms of urban transportation. This is the kind of thing I read a lot in micromobility advocacy articles, but it seems like it can't be true. How can a bike, scooter, or moped be either faster or higher-bandwidth than a car? Also, serious question: if electric SDCs became widespread, would it still make sense to advocate things like bikes? You can't transport a family of three…
You don't need air-bags if you don't have cars. You'd also have less obese people if they would ride bicycles. Car is not a solution - it's a cause of problems.
Re: We Need to Dream Bigger Than Bike Lanes
#115Earlier quoted context omitted.
The key word here is "urban". I ride my bike around the city core sometimes just for fun and I can easily keep up with cars because they are going so slow. Now imagine how many bikes you could fit on a two lane road vs how many cars. Obviously if the car is coming from the suburbs its going to be faster. > Also, serious question: if electric SDCs became widespread, would it still make sense to advocate things like bi…
> Now imagine how many bikes you could fit on a two lane road vs how many cars No need to imagine: http://lh3.ggpht.com/_9F9_RUESS2E/S7tbclwxiPI/AAAAAAAACmw/uI...
I feel the picture is misleading. First, the angle for cars results in a closer, more zoomed in picture than for the bus and bike. Second, it assumes 1 occupant per car, but a full bus. More likely, each car will probably average more than 1 occupant, and buses will probably be less than half full, if not 25%.
Re: We Need to Dream Bigger Than Bike Lanes
#116Earlier quoted context omitted.
Copenhagen doesn’t have 40 degrees Celsius heatwaves in the summer nor winter blizzards that make you feel like you’re in Siberia, while places like the US East Coast (and I guess even the Chicago area in the Midwest) have them both.
Melbourne, Australia has heatwaves exceeding that, and shivers through thoroughly miserable wet winters, and yet we have a large, thriving, and ever-growing corps of recreational, competitive, and commuting cyclists, and that's despite the increasing hostility and declining levels of competence exhibited by local drivers. The suggestion that cycling is a fair-weather activity is hogwash.
Those aiming to debunk me - and all I said is that public transport should take priority over some dramatic increase in spending as envisioned in this article - seem to read rather too much into the fact that some demographic cycles a lot.
There are huge demographic clusters (particularly late-middle-age to old, middle-aged-to-older women) who, statistically speaking, don't. I'm sure that we're off to the Proof By Anecdote races again about all the spry old folks who cycle everywhere. But in practice weekly cycling rates in places like NSW and VIC for the middle-aged are about 10%, tops, and this declines faster as people get older.
I would hazard a guess that on bad weather days, this skew gets even more extreme i.e. fewer people cycle total, and even fewer proportionally out of the demographics that don't ride much.
I don't know about Melbourne, but the idea that we should splash out Serious Cash on cycling infrastructure in Sydney (vs filling out our shithouse transit network) is just laughable. I'm pro bike lanes and better infrastructure (particularly at the expense of cars), but this 'think big' stuff is really on the nose in terms of equity of access.
Re: We Need to Dream Bigger Than Bike Lanes
#117Earlier quoted context omitted.
The biggest counterpoint here is what about families? A mom with three young kids in tow pretty much needs a car to get around. Or elderly people? I can't really take my 90-year old grandma out to dinner if it requires her to bike her way to the restaurant. Thinking about non-car based transportation methods is great. But the reality is that large segments of society are always going to need some sort of car-based op…
> The biggest counterpoint here is what about families? A mom with three young kids in tow pretty much needs a car to get around. Bakfiets: https://www.babboe.nl/bakfietsen/big
Ah the Dutch alternative to air bags just use your kids - not to go all nanny state that doesn't look very safe.
Re: We Need to Dream Bigger Than Bike Lanes
#118> Now, almost anybody can go for miles fairly quickly without breaking a sweat.
Yeah. Cars do that. Congratulations, you understand why people prefer motorized, individual over public or non-motorized, individual transportation. And btw, elevated freeways were one of the solutions for car traffic in the past...
In a dense city, if you want to "reclaim" your space, you have to invest massively. And I'd say the inhabitants need to pay. So tax everyone close to a city center by 50% of their current rent/mortgage and you can build the infrastructure of your dreams. It's not the commuters that profit from that investment, so they should not pay. If you merely want to protect the air quality, just forbid ICEs inside the city limits after, say, ten years. But please be consequent and apply that to your buses, taxis, delivery vans etc. as well.
Re: We Need to Dream Bigger Than Bike Lanes
#119I'm curious as to what planet you'd have to be living on to think that if we have billions of dollars to spare on huge transport infrastructure projects that aren't cars, that it should go to bikes and not public transport + walkability. I'm guessing it's a special magic planet with startlingly good weather year-round, without disabled people, where everyone gets to age into spry Euro-oldsters. Not wanting to kick of…
The point is not to ban cars completely, but to also accomodate other means of transportation as well. Also in city centers only limit cars to a strict minimum (delivery, disabled people, etc).
Honestly, I feel like a broken record bringing again countries and cities where it's working, they're not magical countries but real countries where different choices have been made.
Re: We Need to Dream Bigger Than Bike Lanes
#120Earlier quoted context omitted.
This "good weather" argument against biking is so bizarre and disconnected from reality... Have you ever noticed that the most biking friendly places in the world are in middle-to-northern europe? Copenhagen isn't a particularly sunny place. Many people don't care, if you give them good infrastructure they'll cycle with every weather.
It’s a regional statement, not disconnected. The reality is that many people in North American live far from their workplaces and some of us live in areas of extreme cold. This is where 15m of exposed skin can result in frostbite. We bundle up, but by cycling we’ve turned the commute into an unnecessarily dangerous adventure. The same applies to cities further south: a non trivial amount of days are extremely hot and…
I live in Edmonton, North America's northernmost major city. I've been cycling year round for about 15 years. It went down to -42 in February, and I was out riding.
I've never had frostbite. I've still got all my fingers and toes. Although it isn't enough fingers and toes to count all the people I've known personally who've been killed or crippled in car accidents.