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What a City Would Look Like If It Were Designed for Only Bikes

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Re: What a City Would Look Like If It Were Designed for Only Bikes

#61

Post by sliverstorm »

hackuser wrote: post #37

I had thought the custom on HN was to post valuable, constructive comments, and not to find fault or to post typical Internet forum sniping and hyperbole. Perhaps it's my impression, but I've rarely seen anything constructive recently. Almost everything in this discussion, for example, is reaction and sniping ("useless", "absurd", "stupid", etc.). It's a way to hang out and socialize online; there's nothing wrong wit…

It's always been present. I can't construct proof or a solid timeline. However I recall back when comment scores were public and upvotes had much more momentum (the more upvotes the comment had, the more it would get), there was a much-lamented problem of two-bit posts of the sniping variety, ostensibly as a low investment spray-and-pray strategy to try to catch a runaway upvote train.

I want to say it actually improved after comment scores became private, though it could have easily regressed since then.

Re: What a City Would Look Like If It Were Designed for Only Bikes

#62

Post by s73v3r »

coldcode wrote: post #38

I live 43 miles from my job, all on major interstates, in a big metro area. What good would this do? Unless you designed the city for mixed living/working/shopping in the first place, most US cities could never change to be bike first. This isn't SimCity where you can raze the whole town.

"I live 43 miles from my job, all on major interstates, in a big metro area."

Nobody forced you to live so far away from your job. You're already catered to by virtue of having those interstates in the first place. Quit complaining that other people, who aren't you, are finally getting some attention.

Re: What a City Would Look Like If It Were Designed for Only Bikes

#63

Post by pi-err »

jules wrote: post #42

I wonder if that expert has been to the Netherlands or Copenhagen. In fact I wonder whether he has really experienced a bike for day to day use, because some of the ideas are very strange. It's telling that most bikes in the pictures are racing bikes. What's the advantage of bikes in apartment buildings? Why not park the bike at the ground floor? It would waste a lot of space in the corridors. Think about what you'd…

Agreed. Strangely, this concept seems to replicate with bikes most mistakes done previously with cars (and 60's concepts around planes). The designer is actually sort of aware of this, not understanding the consequences:

> "Residential bike parking should have the same space-syntax relationship to the front door and kitchen as car parking does in a contemporary house in the suburbs," Fleming says.

Designing cities around people, not a way to transport them, is missing from this approach.

It's actually a much harder challenge than figuring out funny (and unsustainable) ways to bring "speed" to personal transportation within cities. Creatively, this concept is entirely underwhelming.

Re: What a City Would Look Like If It Were Designed for Only Bikes

#64

Post by netcan »

There seems to be a great amount of enthusiasm in the zeitgeist about the future, positive and negative predictions. A lot of it comes with some far out economics baked in nonchalantly. Basic incomes, abundance economies & zero marginal cost everything.

I like it and I do quite a bit of indulging in this sort of thing myself. But…

I don't think I'm seeing the trends in gadgetry, software, and manufactured goods at work everywhere. The production cost (and often the price) of manufactured goods (used to be "mass produced) has come down tremendously compared with average income. The trend is hundreds of years old. Underpants, sugar bowls, cereal commodities and almost everything else you can fit under a very wide umbrella of "manufactured goods" is heading towards free, or at least extremely cheap. We've seen it happen with a lot of things. Clothes pins & pencils used to be worth something, but I can't remember cost ever being a factor. They're basically free. Software also. I agree that a lot of things are headed towards "abundance." The things that aren't are often things that keep getting better, things where we have an appetite for (qualitative) more, iphones & whatnot.

The bicycles come into it at the points where there isn't a fruitful trend towards more, better everything. Housing & transport are still most people's 2 biggest expenses. These have improved in quality over time and we consume more (bigger house, long commute, overseas holiday…) but there isn't an obvious "trend towards abundance."

The fact that a radical idea (radical because of the radical trade off of eliminating cars) like this is interesting is kind of proof that this thing is not moving and we're frustrated. We still commute a lot, and we don't enjoy it. It pollutes. It's noisy. Expensive. Slow. It's not much different than 1980 or even 1965.

I think housing and transport are the stick in the abundance ideas. In 25 years roads might be full of quite, clean, electric, driverless, parkingless cars but even that amazing achievement will still not match the technology trends that have brought other things up the quality and abundance curve.

Re: What a City Would Look Like If It Were Designed for Only Bikes

#65

Post by WorldMaker »

dalke wrote: post #29
WorldMaker wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The "hallway with lanes"? The thing that isn't obvious at first glance (but is more obvious in further design depictions) is that it is setup like a miniature version of a typical street in which to the immediate sides of the bike lanes are "bike parking" spots and on the far sides of those spots are pedestrian "side walks". It seems like a fair design to me.

You consider it a fair design. I look at it as a waste of space. All it does is replace "car" with "bike". It even says so, with "Residential bike parking should have the same space-syntax relationship to the front door and kitchen as car parking does in a contemporary house in the suburbs." Look at how much hallway space it needs to have a cycle path, plus bike parking. It adds, what, 2-3 meters of hallway width? Pl…

You do have some interesting questions here about hypotheticals if one was to try to build something like this.

Yes, these hallways you would probably not want to carpet if you expect people to ride in them with dirty bikes. They'd probably be something easy to clean like concrete or tile or plastic.

I think that children playing would probably get priority over bicyclists much as such things happen in neighborhood cul-de-sacs.

Also, if there is some explicit ownership of the "bike parking spaces" in front of/near a unit then I absolutely would expect people to use them as they see fit, including things like planters, assuming such things don't impede the other uses of the hall (biking, walking). Most buildings consider hallways common space that units have no ownership of. There's nothing wrong with maybe giving some ownership to part of a hall. It could add to the sense of community of the building. (In my own condo building our car parking spaces are owned by unit owners, so our spaces will sometimes get used as temporary workspaces or child toy storage zones when our cars are out parked on the street, so long as we don't block other spaces and stick to our area. If I decided to set planters on my space while my car was in the shop, I certainly could.)

Re: What a City Would Look Like If It Were Designed for Only Bikes

#66

Post by jamoes »

hackuser wrote: post #37

I had thought the custom on HN was to post valuable, constructive comments, and not to find fault or to post typical Internet forum sniping and hyperbole. Perhaps it's my impression, but I've rarely seen anything constructive recently. Almost everything in this discussion, for example, is reaction and sniping ("useless", "absurd", "stupid", etc.). It's a way to hang out and socialize online; there's nothing wrong wit…

> EDIT: Sorry, I know it's off-topic, but there's no other place to post it (that I know of).

Yeah, as annoying as it is to see hostile comments, it's also kind of annoying to see meta comments. I understand that meta comments are important for making the site better, but it distracts from the discussion on the articles themselves.

Perhaps a good solution would be to have a separate "meta" comments section for each posting. This would be similar to how wikipedia has a separate "discuss" section for each article. This would be a useful place to put comments like yours and mine, and moderators could even move comments over to the meta discussion to keep the main comment section on-topic. It would also be a good place to post title-change requests, and other moderation requests.

This would lower the prevalence of off-topic meta discussion, while also providing an appropriate venue for discussing important topics that make the site better in the long run.

Re: What a City Would Look Like If It Were Designed for Only Bikes

#67

Post by TulliusCicero »

Kluny wrote: post #47

I'm a cyclist and I love the idea of making cities more bike friendly, but this group of designers has missed a major point. Cities are for PEOPLE. Not for cars, not for bikes, but for humans. Space for people to live and exist in should be the highest priority, and anytime you start cutting into living space to make more room for vehicles, you're making the city less human friendly. That's what these guys seem to be…

> I'd even suggest that a major reason why cars have supremacy at the moment is that they are more inclusive of people than bikes are.

This is mostly true because >>we make it truePlus, it's not like cars universally win at inclusiveness: They're less inclusive of the poor, for example, because they're vastly more expensive to own and operate than a bike. The poor who need a car because there's no good transit or biking options have to spend a huge % of their income on transportation.

> This redesigned city needs to make room for people who aren't 25 years old and single.

Honestly, it sounds like you just haven't been to any city with a high (15%+) bike modal share, because then you'd see how your assumptions are wrong. If you live in America, that's understandable, because we don't have any major cities like that. But they do exist, elsewhere in the world. Visiting Amsterdam or Copenhagen could be eye-opening.

Re: What a City Would Look Like If It Were Designed for Only Bikes

#68

Post by TulliusCicero »

jules wrote: post #42

I wonder if that expert has been to the Netherlands or Copenhagen. In fact I wonder whether he has really experienced a bike for day to day use, because some of the ideas are very strange. It's telling that most bikes in the pictures are racing bikes. What's the advantage of bikes in apartment buildings? Why not park the bike at the ground floor? It would waste a lot of space in the corridors. Think about what you'd…

I'm a huge bike transportation enthusiast, and I agree with you. You don't have to take a bike literally everywhere for it to be useful. Even in the US, people don't demand that they be allowed to drive through an indoor shopping mall.

That said, there's a ridiculous amount of room for improvement in terms of adding bike paths and protected bike lanes in the US. Getting more of those would result in a huge boom in biking.

Re: What a City Would Look Like If It Were Designed for Only Bikes

#69

Post by Kluny »

TulliusCicero wrote: post #67
Kluny wrote: post #47

I'm a cyclist and I love the idea of making cities more bike friendly, but this group of designers has missed a major point. Cities are for PEOPLE. Not for cars, not for bikes, but for humans. Space for people to live and exist in should be the highest priority, and anytime you start cutting into living space to make more room for vehicles, you're making the city less human friendly. That's what these guys seem to be…

> I'd even suggest that a major reason why cars have supremacy at the moment is that they are more inclusive of people than bikes are. This is mostly true because >>we make it true Plus, it's not like cars universally win at inclusiveness: They're less inclusive of the poor, for example, because they're vastly more expensive to own and operate than a bike. The poor who need a car because there's no good transit or bi…

> Honestly, it sounds like you just haven't been to any city with a high (15%+) bike modal share, because then you'd see how your assumptions are wrong. If you live in America, that's understandable, because we don't have any major cities like that. But they do exist, elsewhere in the world. Visiting Amsterdam or Copenhagen could be eye-opening.

I believe you, for sure, I just don't think the concept in this article does it correctly. You're right that I've never been to Copenhagen or Amsterdam, but honestly, do they have roofs that slope to the ground so they can be bike ramps, and extra wide hallways to permit bike riding indoors, with pedestrians marginalized to the side of the corridor even inside their own homes?

A more bike friendly city is definitely more inclusive. But prioritizing bikes at the expense of pedestrians isn't correct either.

Re: What a City Would Look Like If It Were Designed for Only Bikes

#70

Post by netcan »

jules wrote: post #42

I wonder if that expert has been to the Netherlands or Copenhagen. In fact I wonder whether he has really experienced a bike for day to day use, because some of the ideas are very strange. It's telling that most bikes in the pictures are racing bikes. What's the advantage of bikes in apartment buildings? Why not park the bike at the ground floor? It would waste a lot of space in the corridors. Think about what you'd…

I think there's a different culture in places where bikes remained (like Netherlands & Denmark) as a major vehicle type and where they can back in recent decades.

In the places where they came back, it was a trendy sporty thing. Very expensive bikes became normal and when these new age cyclists try to use their bikes for transport they hit the theft and vandalism issue. Part of the solution in (EG) Netherlands is riding fairly inexpensive & simple bikes so that theft is not such a show stopper.

To the sporty newcomers, this seems like a crappy trade-off.

In fairness, The Netherlands is flat & small. You can cycle from the outskirts to centres of major cities in 30-45 minutes and even between some cities (EG Hague & Rotterdam) in an hour. Even with the wonderful infrastructure, it's probably not applicable in places like Sydney. To get from the centre to the western suburbs where most people live would take 3+ hours cycling. On a rickety Amsterdam classic it'd be quite a chore, much hillier and hotter. Even inner city Sydneysiders travel farther that Amsterdam Suburbanites. So, sydney cyclists dreaming of a bike-first world are thinking about maximum speed, the fitness to power up hills, sweat clothes and showers at every destination.

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