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We Need to Dream Bigger Than Bike Lanes

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Re: We Need to Dream Bigger Than Bike Lanes

#211

Post by bkor »

asjw wrote: post #136
flexie wrote: post #62

Earlier 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…

I don't speak danish, but according to that graph your claim is not supported BTW how many people use a bike is a useless metric, how far they travel and for how much time is more important. Copenhagen is not a good example, it's very small, very flat and public transport is very expensive and it doesn't have to handle the same number of commuters many other cities have to. For example in Milan everyday a million peo…

> BTW how many people use a bike is a useless metric, how far they travel and for how much time is more important.

As a Dutch person: what you're forgetting is that often the entire design of a city accommodates using bikes. Meaning: everything you might need is close by.

Further, the more people use a bike, the more people are aware of people on a bike. The same people who use a car also use a bike (at least in Netherlands and Denmark).

For Rome, the city is designed in a weird way. Cycling there is awful. Further, the traffic lights are utterly terrible. You're waiting way too long (though this is the case in pretty much most countries in the world).

When infrastructure is designed in The Netherlands the impact is assessed on public transports, roads, cycling infrastructure, etc. That determines where office space is put, etc.

Now for Netherlands there's millions using public transportation, also e.g. using a train. The bike storage areas around the big train stations are massive.

Notice how I mentioned that Dutch people are using bikes, cars, public transport? There's not 1 solution or something that's bad/good as you make it out to be.

Re: We Need to Dream Bigger Than Bike Lanes

#212

Post by L_Rahman »

asjw wrote: post #191
tralarpa wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I appear to have kicked off a frenzy of folks eurosplaining Ah, come on. You asked for it, didn't you? You wrote "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". Of course, such an extreme statement will trigger a reaction from people who actually experience every day what you claim to be impossible. It'…

> One quarter of the Dutch population If only the world was flat and below the sea level as Holland...

Not below sea level but close to it and mostly flat: Kuala Lumpur, Dhaka, New Delhi, Kyoto, Ho Chi Minh City, Bangkok, Beijing, Seoul, Mumbai, Lagos

together they represent almost a billion people and the world's biggest cities. Should we ignore them because they're not snowy North American/European cities?

Re: We Need to Dream Bigger Than Bike Lanes

#213

Post by bkor »

fit2rule wrote: post #107
hannob wrote: post #77

Earlier 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.

Indeed, there is much evidence that even when the weather is shit, getting some exercise is really much better for you than sitting in a static seat, parked in traffic.

In Netherlands a bike is a means of getting somewhere. If the argument is "getting exercise", the usage would be pretty much nothing.

Re: We Need to Dream Bigger Than Bike Lanes

#214

Post by jakecopp »

chrisco255 wrote: post #83

This article paints the interstate highway system as some sort of evil incarnation without even giving so much as a breath to the idea that the Interstate highway system is one of the largest and most successful civil works projects of all time. The Romans had their aquaducts. The Americans have their highways. Prior to the Interstate system, it would take as much as two months to travel coast to coast. Eisenhower wa…

> Autonomous buses should be within reach this decade.

Or we could just deploy more buses, more bicycle lanes and reduce car reliance right now?

"A gadgetbahn is a speculative transportation concept that proposes to solve planning and financial issues via some sort of magical techno-fix, likely some technology that doesn’t even exist yet.

Classic examples of gadgetbahns are: monorails, “personal rapid transit”, maglevs, or the newest addition to the family, the “hyperloop”." [1]

[1]: http://www.cat-bus.com/2017/12/gadgetbahn/

Re: We Need to Dream Bigger Than Bike Lanes

#215

Post by Tepix »

11235813213455 wrote: post #130

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)

That depends entirely on the bike lanes. In the Netherlands you don't see any bicycles on the road when there is a nice, wide bike lane present instead.

In Germany you see them quite often because the bike lanes there are often too narrow and their surface is in bad shape.

Re: We Need to Dream Bigger Than Bike Lanes

#216

Post by chrisco255 »

TulliusCicero wrote: post #176
chrisco255 wrote: post #83

This article paints the interstate highway system as some sort of evil incarnation without even giving so much as a breath to the idea that the Interstate highway system is one of the largest and most successful civil works projects of all time. The Romans had their aquaducts. The Americans have their highways. Prior to the Interstate system, it would take as much as two months to travel coast to coast. Eisenhower wa…

But Eisenhower wanted the interstate system to go between cities, not through cities. And it's the latter that's the real problem. That we have freeways between cities is no real issue for bikes, in Germany they have the Autobahn system and they still have reasonably bike friendly cities like Munich. Similar situation for Dutch cities IIRC. But the autobahn system doesn't cut through the middle of cities in Germany n…

Germany has a fraction of our population. In 1950 the U.S. had 150 million people. Today it has 320 million. The interstates were largely built outside of urban cores but sprawl often took them over. Most European cities were built before the car. Their grid and design is totally different than U.S. cities.

Autonomous buses are an ambitious but realistic solution to people's transportation needs based on the reality of American real estate, roads, and commuter needs.

You won't get there with bikes in the U.S.

Re: We Need to Dream Bigger Than Bike Lanes

#217

Post by dancek »

mschuetz wrote: post #202
anyzen wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even electric bikes are not the solution, at least not in many parts of the world. What happens when it rains / snows? I don't know what the solution is though, maybe small electric cars, self driven, as part of public transportation service?

There is no wrong weather, just wrong gear.

And when there's a lot of snow, a bicycle is "wrong gear".

(N.b. I ride in the snow for hundreds of kilometers every winter. I know you can take a fatbike to powder snow but that's just too strenuous for most people.)

Re: We Need to Dream Bigger Than Bike Lanes

#218

Post by aequitas »

bkor wrote: post #187
sunstone wrote: post #174

While it sounds preposterous right now this problem will soon solve itself with already built "bike lanes". And bicycles are not the solution. The solution, as this article touches on, is light weight electric transport using the existing road structure. There's a strong indication of this future in the fact that last year the Dutch bought more electric bikes than normal bikes in total. And they paid twice as much fo…

> Let that sink in: The Dutch are already starting to abandon their pedal bikes. Within Netherlands the number of accidents with bikes also has skyrocketed. That's due to often older people buying these bikes. They're more mobile, however they're slow to respond, plus not used to the speed of these bikes. As a result, more accidents plus the accidents are more severe. The electric bikes are often restricted to 25 km/…

> Note that wearing a hi-viz vest can actually make you more accident prone. There's been various studies that a helmet or a hi-viz vest means other cars will pass you closer than before.

Even worse, when I used to ride a motorcycle I got complaints and agression when wearing a hi-viz vest. Either people though I was a traffic controller and sometimes approach me more aggresively (aggression toward police/traffic controllers is getting more common these days in the Netherlands), or they where angry and comment that I should not pose as a traffic controller. Because if every motorcyclist whore a hi-viz vest, how can the distinct them from traffic controllers?

Re: We Need to Dream Bigger Than Bike Lanes

#219

Post by jakecopp »

anon9001 wrote: post #153
DoreenMichele wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most families in the developed world are having one to two kids. I rode a bike with a toddler in a toddler seat on the back until I was 8 months pregnant. You can also get little "cars" to tow behind your bike to hold two kids. I always hated cars. My kids never felt like a barrier to going far free. My marriage did. After the divorce, my kids and I eventually went car free. They are adults. They still live with me.…

> I rode a bike with a toddler in a toddler seat on the back until I was 8 months pregnant. You can also get little "cars" to tow behind your bike to hold two kids. As adults, I can understand the appeal of being car free, but I can't help but be struck by how dangerous it seems to commute on a bike pregnant with a toddler onboard. I'm imagining biking down Market St, 8 months pregnant, with a toddler seat and two ki…

Again, this is why we should build bike lanes, not give up and drive.

Re: We Need to Dream Bigger Than Bike Lanes

#220

Post by bkor »

asjw wrote: post #188
vhold wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not a zero sum game. Improving bicycling also improves public transit and walkability usually because bicycles take up so much less room than cars so buses have more space, and it's extremely rare for a bicycle to injure a pedestrian, but it happens hundreds of times a day just in the US alone with cars. Also bicycle infrastructure is way cheaper to build and maintain than car infrastructure. And even when bicyc…

In my 44 years on this planet, having traveled a lot in many biking friendly cities and living in one, the opposite is true. Cars respect pedestrian much more than bikers do As a walker I hate walking in Belgium or Berlin, where you have to share the sidewalks with bikes that usually go high speed, faster than the average car, don't look too much around them and treat pedestrian as obstacles (try to walk on a bike la…

> As a walker I hate walking in Belgium or Berlin, where you have to share the sidewalks with bikes that usually go high speed

> Bikes should share roads with cars, they have wheels, they are not pedestrian friends.

Biking is its own thing. You have walking speed, cycling speed, moped speed (or quick electric bikes), car speed. There are different speeds between them. They should NOT share the same space!

Further, the bike lane should NOT be some crappy paint on the pedestrian path. It should be an obvious difference to any other form of transport.

Having bikes which go 10-15 km/h share the same infrastructure as 45-55km/h just makes the accidents and the severity of the accidents go up like crazy.

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