291–300 of 764 posts
That's great. Assuming the following: - Your commute is sufficiently short - You have facilities to shower and dress at work - You have sufficient time to shower and dress at work - You don't have to bring kids or sizable cargo - Weather is sufficiently good - You're sufficiently healthy
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They're minor investments practically, and major investments politically. As you say, for many motorists, giving up space on even some roads to cyclists is treated like some sort of war crime. There's very much of attitude of, "we can't just have a majority of the road space -- we need nearly all of it!"
It can be a real winner politically, depending on the electoral boundaries. Roads have such limited throughput that a new bike lane might inconvenience only a few hundred people in cars, while opening up the city to thousands of people on bikes. Once politicians figure out that calculation, it can go very quickly.
> colleagues and I reveal that people who walk or cycle have lower carbon footprints from daily travel, including in cities where lots of people are already doing this. Not to disagree with the broader point, but I think it's worth distinguishing "travel" from "transportation". I don't have a car, and I bike and walk for almost all of my daily personal "travel". But, I think this also makes me more willing to use del…
You might be offloading some carbon onto delivery service, but those services are almost certainly more carbon efficient and you using a personal car to go shopping. A delivery van might do 200+ deliveries in one trip. Compared to a single delivery in your personal car. That a huge number of people to split the carbon cost between. You might argue that delivery can travel further, but that would just be ignoring the…
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This reads like you're someone who's never cycled in a city.
On the contrary, if you act like a car, using the same streets as the cars is quite safe in my experience. I've safely cycled with a cello on my back by simply following the rules most cyclists claim to follow but ignore: stopping at stop lights, signalling when I'm about to turn. You know, looking out for my own safety. EDIT: If following the same rules as everyone else is too much to ask, maybe you should just stay…
The last year before I moved to Germany, I got hit by cars twice, and neither time was I at fault. Once I got t-boned by someone who didn't look before turning, the other time someone suddenly went across the bike lane to pull into a parking lot. Neither crash was serious, but the first rattled me quite a bit -- my son was on my bike with me and got a scratch (and the bike rear wheel was totaled).
For that first crash, the more serious one, a cop showed up and wrote a report, but didn't even give the guy a ticket. In the US, driving a car makes you the privileged class, and you can get away with a lot.
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That study is either flawed, misinterpreted, or does not apply to American workers. The average US commute is 32 miles round trip, and that happens every work day . There is just no possible way that everyone is now driving Every other look at this, including things like the Apple Maps reports and government stats have shown that miles driven is way down. In fact I know a lot of families who have had to buy battery t…
The last two times I filled the gas tank in my car were 9/19 and 12/21. Not US, but still.
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Wait until you try to replace some car parking lanes with protected bike or bus lanes to improve throughput.
Already happened. https://www.minnpost.com/cityscape/2020/12/after-major-upgra... - Thanks to “mill and overlay” repaving, the city and county have added short stretches of bike lanes on: Territorial Road, Larpenteur Avenue, Fairview Avenue, Arlington Avenue, Marshall Avenue, and Tedesco Street. Together these connect bike lane gaps around the city, including a few key bridges and dangerous intersections. - Ramsey Co…
If you search "Minneapolis war on cars" you can definitely find some people complaining, though.
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Oulu, Finland is way further north than most cities and handles it fine: https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.euronews.com/amp/2021/01/22...
Being further north should actually make it easier. If it's consistently below zero then you're less likely to get the really dangerous ice.
You could look at Stockholm or Amsterdam or Copenhagen or Munich for biking, too. Those are all colder cities (but not as cold as Oulu) with decent or better bike infrastructure and cycling rates.
I'm in Munich and can speak to my experience here. Munich isn't as good as Dutch cities, but it's still better than any US city I've visited or heard of, by a fair margin. Weather is similar to Seattle, so kind of cold on average, but not horribly so. This winter we definitely had a fair amount of freezing though, and actually the last couple days we had snow again.
Munich makes it work with lots of protected bike lanes that clearly used to just be sidewalk. That's not ideal -- it cuts into walking space, obviously -- but it's still better than no bike infra, or painted bike lanes. There's also a fair number of off-street trails, multi-use paths (half the time these are just sidewalks where bikes are allowed, really) and walk/bike cut-throughs in neighborhoods. Oh, and the default road width in residential neighborhoods is small, which helps a lot.
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Try cycling through 3ft of snow or on ice... with snow-plows lumbering by. Even if you're walking, -20C and below is just too damn cold even if you have proper gear.
> Try cycling through 3ft of snow or on ice... with snow-plows lumbering by. That sounds like bad infrastructure, which admittedly is the default almost everywhere.
There's also a safety issue in that if you're in that kind of cold for long enough, it'll kill you, jacket or no jacket.
I think the main issue people have with cycling is that it's not a quick fix compared to the promise of the electric car. It means a real investment in biking infrastucture and a change of mindset & funding at the national, state, and city level. It means a complete re-thinking of how the average American city is built. It means you need to actually get outside and leave the comfort of your perfectly climate controlled life. None of these things are easy for the average person to accept. We are far too spoiled.
TL;DR - It's easy to greenwash with an electric car. And people like things that are easy.