141–150 of 561 posts
An idea i have is bike tubes.
You joke, but I’ve kicked around the idea of bike tunnels with collimated air blowing down them at 20mph to make riding at that speed more comfortable, and make loitering uncomfortable. Microautonomy might make that feasible.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
My point is that we default to easy and comfortable when given a choice, and cycling in -42 is neither. We won’t see mass adoption of cycling in these areas, regardless of infrastructure, unless we forced people to do it... and I don’t think pushing the majority of people towards enduring that kind of weather is something we should do, when there are alternatives.
Earlier 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.
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.
Honestly I go to work to work, not to shower.
The bike takes an hour, the bus 90 minutes because of its indirect route, and the car about the same with morning gridlock. You could do it in 35 minutes with no traffic.
When I take the bus I arrive to work tired and groggy. When I cycle I arrive energised. I don’t drive because parking on campus is usually impossible.
The problem is that there are limited shower facilities and the ones in my building are extremely grotty, so much so that some colleagues have stopped cycling. Appeals to facilities has only resulted in them locking one of the showers permanently. If more people cycle that’s great but it’ll have knock on effects on other infrastructure and organisations need to pull their finger out and make changes to encourage cycling.
Earlier 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…
> 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!
And even then that's mostly a function of lower incomes (vis-a-vis the US). The high-income European states of Luxembourg, Switzerland, Iceland, Monaco and Liechtenstein all have almost identical car ownership as the US.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_vehicles_...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The point is at air temps >39c, increasing airflow around you increases apparent temperature. The more wind you experience (or the faster you ride your bike) in those conditions, the more work your body needs to do for maintaining homeostasis via sweating. You will certainly not perceive a >39c wind as a 'cooling' wind in any conditions, and the faster that wind is the hotter it will feel.
This depends strongly on humidity.
The efficiency of sweating depends on rel. humidity. Not what's being discussed here.
The fact that increasing airflow will increase the rate at which you heat up (and how much heat your body must shed) if that airflow is hotter than your core body temperature is just physics 101. Why do you think fan-forced ovens have lower cooking times or temperatures in recipes?
Rarely I take bike lanes, they are less fast and irregular The road should be used by bikes in my opinion (lower infrastructure/maintenance cost, and the separation between road and bike lanes is actually how I broke my right clavicle), and bikes should have priority against individual cars (not urgency and shared transports of course)
I don't understand why people keep suggesting this when bikes generally already can use the road, and this is clearly a failure as far as getting more people biking.
Meanwhile, basically everywhere that implements protected bike lanes and off-street bike paths aplenty gets tons of people biking. But we shouldn't do the thing that's proven successful, because...?
A bit off topic: but what I’ve asked myself since I’m biking through town daily. Is there an increased lung cancer risk for city bikers with all the car traffic out there?
Not sure how that translates to cancer risk but came as a surprise to me.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Ask the Dutch. How do they do it? Or do you assume they do not have young kids or grandmas? Why is it that whenever people talk about designing cities for pedestrians and bikes, someone on hackernews thinks it means eliminating all cars entirely forever. For a forum ostensibly designed for entrepreneurs, it shows a tremendous lack of imagination. Answer: * Public transportation inside cities such as buses and trams *…
The difference is that Holland is entirely flat, has an average high of 71 in the summer, and rarely if ever gets icy. The Dutch experience simply doesn't translate to most of America because of the terrain and climate. Elderly people people will die if you make them walk in the Florida summer. 7 year old children lack the leg-strength to bike up California hills. Both groups are likely to slip and crack their heads…
Lots of places bike. People who don't like bike infra make all kinds of excuses, but the truth is that bikes work almost everywhere short of the Himalayas. It's just our lack of investment that holds them back.
I live in Christchurch, NZ. After a massive earthquake in 2011, I had high hopes that we might redesign the city for the next 100 years instead of the previous 50 (i.e. for people, not cars). Instead the city council built a few bike lanes and even then people lost their goddamn minds. "You're taking away parking space!" "All these bike lanes are slowing traffic" "No one wants to bike into the city" Meanwhile, cyclis…