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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

#151

Post by clairity »

adrianN wrote: post #39
eru wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

you really only need to price it properly.

one approach would be to require landlords to list the cost of parking separately in their lease agreements, and allow renters to opt out of that cost independent of the rest of the lease.

edit: oh, and have city-wide permit parking as well, so that municipal street parking is priced properly too.

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

#152

Post by acdha »

dsfyu404ed wrote: post #118
acdha wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not mandatory but it's quite common because it's been so heavily subsidized for the previous century. Fire up street view and look through residential neighborhoods: notice how many street parking spots and driveways there are? Here in DC, the figure is something like 40% of residents not owning cars in a city with well above average transit options by U.S. standards. That leaves a lot of people driving and if y…

>Fire up street view and look through residential neighborhoods: notice how many street parking spots and driveways there are? Number of parking spaces means nothing without the number of residential units. Two lanes (one on each side) of street parking in a neighborhood that's all six apartment triple deckers is very different than two lanes of street parking in a neighborhood that's all single family homes. Some of…

I was specifically responding to the “Where would you even be driving to or from in cities like that?” part — the huge demand for local parking makes it clear that many people have answers to those questions even if they're often “because the city has neglected transit infrastructure” or “the city chooses not to enforce traffic laws or design roads which are safe for non-car usage”.

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

#153

Post by IshKebab »

itamarst wrote: post #88
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.

E-bikes! They're amazing. Bicycle with small assist engine. You start pedaling, and the bike engine helps you, so going up hills is easy. Riding one feels like you have super-strength.

Ebikes still cost way too much. You can get a really great bike for £500. An ebike is going to set you back £1500 or more.

I think the price will come down but I don't think they're a great solution yet.

Fortunately they don't need to be a great solution. In all but the hilliest places plenty of people will bike if the cycle lanes are there. Loads of people cycle in Bristol despite it being quite hilly and not really cycle friendly (but they are very slowly improving).

Flatness definitely helps but it isn't the only thing that matters. The Netherlands was completely car based until the 70s for example, and it was just as flat then.

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

#154

Post by Tepix »

ARandomerDude wrote: post #128

It would be awesome if you had something like a bicycle, only more comfortable that could hold you, a friend, and some of your things. You could enclose it to protect you from the weather, too. For longer distances, or people with disabilities, you could add some mechanical contraption in case you can't pedal that far. That'll be the day.

It seems to be very hard to produce such a vehicle that is affordable and doesn‘t look like something only seniors would use. Most attempts fail at both. The Pedilio https://www.pedilio.de/ looks quite ok but will be too expensive from what i‘ve seen. The cheapest new cars cost less than 8000€, making an ebike more expensive than that is a hard sell.

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

#155

Post by wool_gather »

ehnto wrote: post #94
close04 wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Bikes can certainly share pedestrian areas, they just need to ride slower, the walkways need to be wide, and the walkways should be easy to enter and exit in the case you need to ride around groups of people (shallow curbs you ride up and down). Look at Osaka, you have almost free reign on a bicycle there. Bikes are slow, cars are slow, but it all flows. Bikes even join foot traffic in shopping precints. But when it'…

For some types of bike riding, sure. But not for commuting or general getting around. Then the whole point of using a bike is to go at a much higher speed than walking.

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

#156

Post by vinylkey »

everyone wrote: post #70

A big traffic jam would be nothing like 'Carmageddon' An extremely popular series of computer games starting in 1997, where u race around smashing into other vehicles and running over pedestrians. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carmageddon Why do they keep saying carmageddon????

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interstate_405_(California)#%2...

There's some other precedent for the word Carmageddon other than an old game that a lot people haven't heard of.

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

#157

Post by chinesempire »

bloogsy wrote: post #43
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 This is absolutely not true in the UK, and probably not in most major cities. The overwhelming proportion of cyclists here are adults, and many have decided to take up cycling after already going through the normal rite-of-passage of learning to drive. Base on data from the national travel survey, it's estimated that 83% of cyclists hold a driving license in the UK[1].…

Where does op says they are not adults?

My fiance is an adult and she doesn't have a driving license.

Because public transport allowed her to move without driving

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

#158

Post by brailsafe »

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.

As a former but not current car user, congestion does not factor into how desirable car use for commuting is. I don't keep my eye on how many less cars there are, waiting for that moment when I can finally get another one because my hypothetical commute time dropped 5 mins. If it's even on par to not drive to work, that's what I'll do, and I'd pick a job in such a place that allows it. Driving to work sucks.

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

#159

Post by ClumsyPilot »

tpxl wrote: post #42
eru wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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'.

This is generally called Jevons paradox: When you make something more efficient, demand rises because it is more efficient, which in the end leads to using more of the base resource (but getting a lot more for it). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox#

Not true at all, like all paradoxes its loosely defined and not quantified, so should not be taken too seriously. Demand I crease assumes that demand is perfectly elastic, which it isnt for ant real world case - price of shoes dropping 100x would not result in demand for shoes going up by same amount. In fact many demands are totally inelastic, I.e. food consumption does not change much, because people have to eat the same amount of calories.

Secondly the price of a good is made up of more than its base resource, it's people's time, arketing, opportunity cost etc. So a 2x increase in resource efficiency of shoes manufacturing does not result in shoe price dropping 2x.

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

#160

Post by chinesempire »

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

It doesn't fix the problem of having to drive 40kms a day to go to work and the fact that many people don't live in the city because it's more expensive.

So now you have two problems: you have to convince them to bike and to live in smaller houses spending more money

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