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We Need to Dream Bigger Than Bike Lanes

citylab.com

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Re: We Need to Dream Bigger Than Bike Lanes

#471

Post by kalenx »

s_y_n_t_a_x wrote: post #424
cyborgx7 wrote: post #377

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How silly of me. We should definitely organize MORE of our society around the needs of car owners. /s

Have fun getting your stores stocked by trucks with no roads. Having a baby? Hop on a train, hopefully it's not delayed. Mother dying? Walk a few blocks, train, hopefully she'll make it. Public transportation in American cities barely works as is, and usually only for tourists (see LA) and yet you want to rely solely on it?

See? That's the precise problem with car advocates. How many times in your _life_ are you having a baby? How many times in your _life_ is your mother dying?

Just take the car in these situations, that's not the problem. The problem is people justifying 90% of the car usages (which could be replaced by bicycle or public transportation) by being snarky about the remaining 10% (and I'm being generous with 10%).

Re: We Need to Dream Bigger Than Bike Lanes

#472

Post by magduf »

enriquto wrote: post #68
inertiatic wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My car gets parked across the street from my apartment building. Doesn't get stolen and doesn't care about rain. My bike spent a single winter out on my balcony after we needed the space inside the apartment for baby stuff. It's now rusty in multiple spots. My previous bike, I left on the small back yard of my last apartment, locked up. It got stolen a few months after I started doing that. So again, this is not feas…

> My car gets parked across the street from my apartment building. Offtopic, but this has to end. I do not understand how it is socially acceptable to put huge pieces of your private property on the public streets. You cannot just put your washing machine on the street because you have nowhere else to put it! Why can you do that with a car?

It's a good point. Parking should be allowed only on privately-owned land. Look at how it's done in Japan: you're actually not allowed to buy a car if you can't prove you have a place to park it.

Re: We Need to Dream Bigger Than Bike Lanes

#473

Post by willis936 »

wool_gather wrote: post #434
willis936 wrote: post #376

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, I don’t have the data on hand or the time to hunt down studies that may well not exist. That shouldn’t keep people from knowing what they know. City biking regularly gets up to 15 mph. No I don’t have a citation. Falling over the handlebars is likely when coming to a sudden stop. Brain injuries are not going to be rare occurrences in such cases. No I don’t have a citation.

Can you say whether you are yourself an active cyclist?

Yes I am. It’s nice for all the reasons people beat the drum about, but the biggest one for me is convenience. Driving and parking in a city is a nightmare. Biking is marginally slower than taking the bus and by comparison biking grants much more freedom. Frankly, I think it’s insane that anyone who regularly bikes would not wear a helmet. I push back so hard against this notion of not wearing a helmet because of how catastrophic a tiny incident can be.

Re: We Need to Dream Bigger Than Bike Lanes

#474

Post by s_y_n_t_a_x »

kalenx wrote: post #471
s_y_n_t_a_x wrote: post #424

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have fun getting your stores stocked by trucks with no roads. Having a baby? Hop on a train, hopefully it's not delayed. Mother dying? Walk a few blocks, train, hopefully she'll make it. Public transportation in American cities barely works as is, and usually only for tourists (see LA) and yet you want to rely solely on it?

See? That's the precise problem with car advocates. How many times in your _life_ are you having a baby? How many times in your _life_ is your mother dying? Just take the car in these situations, that's not the problem. The problem is people justifying 90% of the car usages (which could be replaced by bicycle or public transportation) by being snarky about the remaining 10% (and I'm being generous with 10%).

You're missing the point.

People have emergencies, and everyday people have dire emergencies like that. Trains do not fit those cases, which happen ALOT, every second.

You want to change everything without having a solution to fill the void.

Re: We Need to Dream Bigger Than Bike Lanes

#475

Post by grawprog »

Freak_NL wrote: post #390
stronglikedan wrote: post #366

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> No helmet While I don't think they should be required, I do think they should be worn. I've had a low-speed spill where the helmet saved my head considerably - I hit the pavement so hard my glasses were flattened out. You fall much faster, even at low speeds, and you fall much farther from a bike, than a pedestrian would fall.

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…

I think the terrain may play a part in it. As far as I know, the Netherlands is generally flat, where I live it's nothing but hills, people tend to wear helmets here, it's also the law, though I've never heard of it really being enforced. I've personally had a couple good falls going down hill where my helmet saved my head.

Re: We Need to Dream Bigger Than Bike Lanes

#476

Post by cyborgx7 »

s_y_n_t_a_x wrote: post #424
cyborgx7 wrote: post #377

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How silly of me. We should definitely organize MORE of our society around the needs of car owners. /s

Have fun getting your stores stocked by trucks with no roads. Having a baby? Hop on a train, hopefully it's not delayed. Mother dying? Walk a few blocks, train, hopefully she'll make it. Public transportation in American cities barely works as is, and usually only for tourists (see LA) and yet you want to rely solely on it?

How does any of this justify the amount of people taking the car to work every day driving for upwards of 45min-1h to and back? Of course transport of goods and emergency situations need to be accounted for. Your pretending that any of what I said dismisses this is incredibly dishonest.

Re: We Need to Dream Bigger Than Bike Lanes

#477

Post by s_y_n_t_a_x »

cyborgx7 wrote: post #476
s_y_n_t_a_x wrote: post #424

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have fun getting your stores stocked by trucks with no roads. Having a baby? Hop on a train, hopefully it's not delayed. Mother dying? Walk a few blocks, train, hopefully she'll make it. Public transportation in American cities barely works as is, and usually only for tourists (see LA) and yet you want to rely solely on it?

How does any of this justify the amount of people taking the car to work every day driving for upwards of 45min-1h to and back? Of course transport of goods and emergency situations need to be accounted for. Your pretending that any of what I said dismisses this is incredibly dishonest.

That should be solved. Cities have noone else to blame but themselves for poor public transportation (see California's train).

It really is a waste to have people commuting like that, it's a city problem though, not a car problem.

Yes, cars should be limited in your cities, and yes you need better public transportation, but that doesn't mean getting rid of cars everywhere.

You need to structure around roads because you need to connect goods and services to the last mile, but you also don't need to have every citizen in your congested city driving to work. I don't see why you're conflating those two.

Re: We Need to Dream Bigger Than Bike Lanes

#478

Post by triceratops »

briandear wrote: post #183
Fricken wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I live in Edmonton, North America's northernmost major city. I've been cycling year round for about 15 years. It went down to -42 in February, and I was out riding. I've never had frostbite. I've still got all my fingers and toes. Although it isn't enough fingers and toes to count all the people I've known personally who've been killed or crippled in car accidents.

I’m supposed to commute with toddlers in -42?

Sorry, your profile says you live in Mountain View. It's hardly ever +42 there, let alone -42.

Re: We Need to Dream Bigger Than Bike Lanes

#479

Post by magduf »

carapace wrote: post #465

Make several separate but interconnected transportation networks. Peds; Bikes; Light EVs (scooters, kick and seated, small cargo movers, narrow (1 seater) cars); Buses & Cargo Trucks; Trains; Take advantage of grade (slope). Roads should have short ups followed by long downs (in both directions, it's possible) to let people take advantage of gravity. I once saw a fascinating pamphlet advocating for graded runways: pl…

>I once saw a fascinating pamphlet advocating for graded runways: planes taking off head downhill, landing, uphill. The idea was that you would save a ton of fuel.

It doesn't work, unless you build double the number of runways, at huge expense, because you'd have to have runways going both uphill and downhill in the same direction.

Runways in real airports go both directions, not just one. They change direction depending on the prevailing wind direction. You never land with a tailwind, or take off with one. So a graded runway wouldn't be usable part of the time, unless you built two of them like I said, or made the runway much longer.

Honestly, this idea sounds like something dreamt up by someone who's never piloted an airplane. I've seen other proposals for airport/runway design like this which also were dreamt up by people who had never flown an airplane, and the reasons their ideas made no sense were easily pointed out by actual pilots.

Re: We Need to Dream Bigger Than Bike Lanes

#480

Post by magduf »

anyzen wrote: post #181
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…

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?

It rains all the time in Tokyo and other parts of Japan, and bicycling is extremely common there. It's also very hot during the summer months.

I guess the key is: don't be lazy?

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