491–500 of 561 posts
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> I wonder how people survived back in 1438 without the ability to park their car right in front of the shops. They parked their horse / carriage in front of the shops?
They didn't have carriages in 1438 except maybe for royals.
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This depends strongly on humidity.
No it doesn't. 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?
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As a Dutchman who's lived in a few places abroad, the cycling 'problem' is quite simple: it needs to be the norm. No helmet, because neither do you require them for pedestrians. You can cycle in all weather, just as you would walking (a hard mental one, my non-Dutch partner can't get over the idea cycling is for sunshine). Public space design must start with safe (no sharp turns, looking at you France!) and separate…
>In urban areas, cycling is faster, and electric biking is expanding your reach a few times over. In Cambridge, UK, where I used to live it once took me quicker to ride to the same destination than a taxi. In fact it’s well known that cycling in Cambridge’s city centre is much faster than taking a car.
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It's a matter of risk assessment. The chance of a healthy adult cycling in the Netherlands getting a head injury that would have been prevent by a helmet are so incredibly low, that making it a requirement would have a detrimental effect on the collective health of Dutch society due to slightly lower uptake in cycling. For elderly and young children a helmet may make sense, due to the significantly higher risk of suc…
A lot of people get really dogmatic about safety gear in very specific ways. I'm willing to bet that a lot of the same people who think that not wearing a bike helmet (and especially allowing a child not to wear one) should be a criminal offense would think the idea of having to wear a helmet driving is just silly. The attitudes around helmets for downhill skiing have gone through a similar shift. It used to be that…
Although I don't think biking without a helmet should be a criminal offense for adults, I think the comparison with cars isn't quite right. We do require people to use safety equipment like seatbelts and airbags when riding in a car. A helmet probably won't do much for you in a car crash but can if you wreck your bicycle just like a seatbelt would be silly on a bike.
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I didn't jump there. The parent statement is "More public transport and less cars is always an improvement" jumped there.
Pretty sure that was you.
Sound familiar?
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Holland is the densest nation in Europe, but still has substantial farmland, so the urban parts are very dense. It is flat with a mild climate, and the entire urban areas combined would fit into an area smaller than New York City. This is somehow a reproducible model in your mind. Then there are real economic and social trade offs that need to be seriously discussed. Historically the beautiful, walkable, lovely human…
Some really interesting points, thanks. As others have pointed out it's definitely a combined approach to increasing both public transport as well as cycle infrastructure. Electric bikes give you quite the range, which may compare with the average car commuting distance in many cities. Taking public transport from the suburbs and then getting on a bike within the city centre is also very common here in Copenhagen. He…
If you imagine an urban core in the center and a disk of suburbs around it, the availability of housing rises with the square of the radius from the core, and the cost of providing a rail/bus line to the core will grow with the square of the radius, but the cost of giving each person an individual vehicle grows with the population. So there is a density in which personal vehicles make sense and a density in which rail lines make sense, and this trade off is determined by the relative cost of providing individual cars versus rail lines. But because of this squaring effect, it's always the case that at some distance from the radius you need personal transportation.
While Holland is notable for its bike usage, it has 440 cars per 1000 people, or more than 80% of households own 1 car even in Holland, and 30% of Dutch households own 2 or more cars (See Figure 15, https://repository.tudelft.nl/islandora/object/uuid:a33eb3a5...)
Now maybe in the future there will be a fleet of self driving cars that you can call up -- who knows? Maybe electric bikes. There are many options, but density remains key in this trade off, and it's important to realize that different households have different circumstances.
I don't own a car, I live in San Francisco, but I realize this is because I am rich enough to live in the more expensive urban core, and that I am wealthy enough to be able to walk to stores staffed by people who are earning less money than I am and have to drive into the city in order to serve me coffee, food, alcohol so that I can just walk to their business. I am also dependent on goods being trucked in from far away so that I can walk up and buy them. So, it would be a bit inconsiderate for me to tell those people who can't afford to live in the dense core that they need to do without their cars and share my lifestyle. They are doing the best they can under the circumstances.
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> The benefits of lower barrier to entry aren’t worth the increased, unnecessary risks. Every study I've ever seen contradicts your statement here. You are all over this thread making strong, sweeping claims about bike safety and your only supporting data point seems to be "KE = 1/2mv^2". But there are entire cities in Europe where biking with no helmet is the norm, lots of people do it every day, and serious acciden…
Firstly, I am not making sweeping claims. I am making a very narrow, specific common sense claim. I have not seen a single paper that refutes the safety benefits of a rider wearing a helmet. Helmets reduce brain injuries. Does this need a citation? Secondly, there are a lot more than two factors at play to make the "cyclists killed per billion of km of bicycle travel" number. Culturally bikes need to be accepted. I d…
> I don't see how helmets preclude cultural adoption.
Case in point. It seems completely common sense to me that helmets are a massive barrier to widespread adoption! Leaving aside the issues it introduces with bikeshare logistics, having an additional thing to keep track of and carry around and periodically replace (helmets can go bad!), here's something that I suspect you may not have considered: women! Whether it seems reasonable to you and me or not (and I'll be honest, it doesn't seem reasonable to me), the 2 reasons every woman I've ever asked gives for why they wouldn't want to use a bicycle to get around more are
1) sitting on the seat is awkward/uncomfortable when wearing a skirt or dress
2) helmets would ruin their hair
Requiring helmet wear makes cycling a nonstarter for a large chunk of 50% of the population (how I wish I had a citation for this! as far as I've been able to find, nobody has done any kind of survey that attempts to figure out if this is as widespread as I've observed personally). This alone makes me opposed to it, never mind the exaggerated claims of helmet efficacy
Fuck bicyclists. They are freeloaders on the infrastructure bought and paid for by people who buy gas for their automobiles (and heaped upon electric car owners where I live). In my city, there is a push to charge bicyclists an annual licensing fee, similar to cars, and to require they have license plates. Once bicyclists are paying their fair share for the roads, then we can start dreaming bigger than bike lanes.
Cyclists are already largely subsidizing drivers, because a) it's more than gas taxes and registration fees that go to roads, it's also general income taxes and local/state taxes, and b) bike infrastructure is radically cheaper than car infrastructure. You're looking at at least an order of magnitude difference in cost, which overwhelms the difference in taxes paid. That cyclists may only be paying 50% or even 25% as…
Now, if you’re talking bike trails, then yes. Those are cheaper. If you’re advocating that bicyclists should be limited to bike trails, then I’m in full agreement. If they’re on the roads, however, they should be forced to pay all the road fees cars have to pay.