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No ‘carmageddon’ on auto-free Market Street: study shows bikes and buses benefit

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Re: No ‘carmageddon’ on auto-free Market Street: study shows bikes and buses benefit

#31

Post by chinesempire »

eru wrote: post #27
asjw wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You live in a flat country, were cities are quite densely populated and you don't have to travel a lot. Mine is not.

The density could be fixed in lots of cities.

How?

How can you move the offices of a company that has 2 thousands employees near to their homes, when in decades the surroundings have been optimised for that purpose: keeping big offices out of the cities.

It's not so easy to fix, it could be fixed but it would take a lot of time and money but nobody knows if it would improve people lives

Once you have done that, you have to convince people to bike

Re: No ‘carmageddon’ on auto-free Market Street: study shows bikes and buses benefit

#32

Post by dr_dshiv »

ChuckNorris89 wrote: post #9
brnt wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a Dutchie blunders like the one you mention are so stupifying... Takes you a ten minute visit to NL to figure out why you need to separate modalities consistently, yet even as close as Germany and France cities are designed so obviously by people who never ever bike.

Same in Austria, we simply grew accustomed to bikes sharing the road with cars, busses and trams which I'm sure would be terrifying to someone from NL. The problem is, after the post war boom, the cities were planned for cars and now there's simply no space left for cycling lanes unless we ban cars which as much as I wish for will never happen in my lifetime.

Car-focused infrastructure planning was intense in NL too -- separate bike lanes were a very late addition (after the famous "stop murdering our children" campaign against pedestrian deaths)

Re: No ‘carmageddon’ on auto-free Market Street: study shows bikes and buses benefit

#33

Post by close04 »

Quequau wrote: post #21
ChuckNorris89 wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Same in Austria, we simply grew accustomed to bikes sharing the road with cars, busses and trams which I'm sure would be terrifying to someone from NL. The problem is, after the post war boom, the cities were planned for cars and now there's simply no space left for cycling lanes unless we ban cars which as much as I wish for will never happen in my lifetime.

I live in Graz and I'm hard of hearing. Hearing aids make locating where some kinds of sounds come from difficult, so I miss a lot of acoustic cues that pedestrians use to navigate their way through busy places. I've been run down once by a bicyclist and once by a skateboarder while I was walking on mixed use pathways. The skateboarder took a harder fall than I did, still helped me up, and sincerely apologized. I fra…

Bikes shouldn't share the lane with pedestrians any more than they should share it with cars. In an ideal world they would look more like Danish ones, with all 3 separated by at least a small kerb. This helps pedestrians, cyclists, and drivers alike. Cycling in Denmark was the best cycling experience I ever had relative to the way bike lanes are designed (definitely not related to the cyclists that were sometimes falling like bowling pins when the huge crowd was starting to move at a green light).

Getting used to some bad compromise hardly makes it good.

Re: No ‘carmageddon’ on auto-free Market Street: study shows bikes and buses benefit

#34

Post by aguyfromnb »

eru wrote: post #26
loa_in_ wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As the number of cars drops below critical saturation, the flow can transition to intermittent to smooth

Of course, that makes car use more attractive again.

Yep. Physicists laugh at economists, but this is the same underlying structure that explains how even though everything we use is now more energy efficient, we use more energy overall.

Re: No ‘carmageddon’ on auto-free Market Street: study shows bikes and buses benefit

#35

Post by eru »

chinesempire wrote: post #31
eru wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The density could be fixed in lots of cities.

How? How can you move the offices of a company that has 2 thousands employees near to their homes, when in decades the surroundings have been optimised for that purpose: keeping big offices out of the cities. It's not so easy to fix, it could be fixed but it would take a lot of time and money but nobody knows if it would improve people lives Once you have done that, you have to convince people to bike

You fix it over time, by allowing (but not forcing!) people to build taller.

Also check out http://urbankchoze.blogspot.com/2014/04/japanese-zoning.html

Re: No ‘carmageddon’ on auto-free Market Street: study shows bikes and buses benefit

#36

Post by half_way »

asjw wrote: post #25
Tepix wrote: post #2

Just the fact that riding a bicycle got more attractive and 25% more people are using their bicycles now means that there will be less people left stuck in traffic in their cars. Not to mention the people who are exercising by using their bicycles will have health benefits as well.

> more people are using their bicycles now means that there will be less people left stuck in traffic in their cars It doesn't follow though More people using bikes is not a direct consequence of less people using cars It could be, but there is no cause-effect relationship For example in Milan where I live more people are using bikes because many people moved in recently and owning a car is expensive here and the wea…

> Most of them don't even hold a driving license

Maybe true in Milan, but not anywhere in the US. Driving is near imperative in all areas of the country, unfortunately even in big cities, meaning everyone who can get a license, does.

Re: No ‘carmageddon’ on auto-free Market Street: study shows bikes and buses benefit

#37

Post by eru »

aguyfromnb wrote: post #34
eru wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Of course, that makes car use more attractive again.

Yep. Physicists laugh at economists, but this is the same underlying structure that explains how even though everything we use is now more energy efficient, we use more energy overall.

What time in the past are you talking about?

Funny enough, the total amount of physical stuff churning through the US economy has declined since the 1930s (or so?) just in terms of sheer mass.

Btw, your observation sounds much less surprising when you say 'transistors got cheaper since the 1970, yet we are spending more in total on transistors than ever'.

Re: No ‘carmageddon’ on auto-free Market Street: study shows bikes and buses benefit

#38

Post by chrisseaton »

half_way wrote: post #36
asjw wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> more people are using their bicycles now means that there will be less people left stuck in traffic in their cars It doesn't follow though More people using bikes is not a direct consequence of less people using cars It could be, but there is no cause-effect relationship For example in Milan where I live more people are using bikes because many people moved in recently and owning a car is expensive here and the wea…

> Most of them don't even hold a driving license Maybe true in Milan, but not anywhere in the US. Driving is near imperative in all areas of the country, unfortunately even in big cities, meaning everyone who can get a license, does.

Is driving an imperative even in cities like NY and SF? Where would you even be driving to or from in cities like that? Where would you be parking? I wouldn’t attempt to drive in NY in a million years.

Re: No ‘carmageddon’ on auto-free Market Street: study shows bikes and buses benefit

#39

Post by adrianN »

eru wrote: post #35
chinesempire wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How? How can you move the offices of a company that has 2 thousands employees near to their homes, when in decades the surroundings have been optimised for that purpose: keeping big offices out of the cities. It's not so easy to fix, it could be fixed but it would take a lot of time and money but nobody knows if it would improve people lives Once you have done that, you have to convince people to bike

You fix it over time, by allowing (but not forcing!) people to build taller. Also check out http://urbankchoze.blogspot.com/2014/04/japanese-zoning.html

And get rid of parking minimums.

Re: No ‘carmageddon’ on auto-free Market Street: study shows bikes and buses benefit

#40

Post by dsfyu404ed »

close04 wrote: post #33
Quequau wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I live in Graz and I'm hard of hearing. Hearing aids make locating where some kinds of sounds come from difficult, so I miss a lot of acoustic cues that pedestrians use to navigate their way through busy places. I've been run down once by a bicyclist and once by a skateboarder while I was walking on mixed use pathways. The skateboarder took a harder fall than I did, still helped me up, and sincerely apologized. I fra…

Bikes shouldn't share the lane with pedestrians any more than they should share it with cars. In an ideal world they would look more like Danish ones, with all 3 separated by at least a small kerb. This helps pedestrians, cyclists, and drivers alike. Cycling in Denmark was the best cycling experience I ever had relative to the way bike lanes are designed (definitely not related to the cyclists that were sometimes fal…

I'd just like to point out that we've known that mixing classes of traffic in the same space is bad for safety since the industrial revolution brought heavy rolling objects to the workplace. This stuff is well known. It's a politics and resources problem.
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