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Cycling is more important than electric cars for reaching net-zero cities

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Re: Cycling is more important than electric cars for reaching net-zero cities

#601

Post by brailsafe »

Tiktaalik wrote: post #436

Switching to electric cars from ICE cars is continuing to do the wrong thing and make the wrong choices, but doing this wrong thing a bit better. It's still the same status quo, woefully terrible and unsustainable transportation model. Automobile oriented transportation doesn't scale, is a huge waste of resources, and perpetuates unsustainable, ultra expensive and resource intensive sprawling urban development patter…

I agree, but I think Vancouver has a pretty good handle on its car/parking situation. That's Vancouver proper, not the suburbs. Most new buikdings that go up have their parking underground, and then drivers in the city are squeezed for the most part in terms of parking options and so on. The parking lots that are still around seem to be from older buildings, that then get replaced with higher density eventually. When I do drive, it's actually still pretty pleasent, because it's for necessarily driving dependant activities.

Even though there's quite a lot of electric cars, there is still a remarkable level of noise generated next to patios along main roads, so improving that would be nice, if we can assume that cars won't go away entirely.

Compare that to the prairies, Alberta, or even the island, and it's a world of difference in terms of surface level lots. Would be curious what your opinion is as (presumably) a bc resident.

Re: Cycling is more important than electric cars for reaching net-zero cities

#602

Post by groaner »

blix wrote: post #538
digital-cygnet wrote: post #530

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure I fully follow "I am pretty far from your utopian dense dream yet largely living it", but I think there are two potential points of disagreement: 1) Living in dense cities is not for everybody, but given that large and (at least pre-covid) growing majority of people in the developed world do choose to live in cities, I think it's safe to say that there is a very sizable demand. For an example of the bene…

The pre-covid world is kinda over. Density has very clear downsides that have never been more apparent. I don't know how often you do the train + car rental thing, but the friction is much, much higher than driving (especially if you have any sort of gear like you would for skiing). Not everyone wants to be so contricted both in freedom of movement and in living space.

Blaming disease spread on density is kind of a cop out after how we saw the world respond to crisis. Singapore, Taipei, Hong Kong, and most Chinese cities are super dense places that, for most of 2020, I would have preferred to be living in compared to the US.

Re: Cycling is more important than electric cars for reaching net-zero cities

#603

Post by brailsafe »

fvdessen wrote: post #307

Cycling is not only good for the environment, but for cities in general. During the last confinement, when car traffic completely stopped, I realised that cars are the single biggest reason why living in the city can be unpleasant. People may not realise it consciously, but when they move out of the city, what they are looking for is a place with not as much cars driving around. Cars destroy cities by making a viciou…

Rather ironic that suburbs cause their own problem in this sense.

Re: Cycling is more important than electric cars for reaching net-zero cities

#604

Post by Laarlf »

mustafa_pasi wrote: post #353
globular-toast wrote: post #258

Only when cities completely ban car travel will cycling increase. Cars are currently first class road users. They get extra protection and sympathy from the police. All infrastructure is built for them with cycling infrastructure being laughable and often regressive. On top of that, most people are just too fat and lazy to cycle by choice.

Banning unnecessarily big cars would be enough. My utopia would be a city where people all drive around in micro city cars like the Citroen Ami. It would fix 95% of the problems with no real decrease in living standards for anyone.

For the price of an ami you can get a lot of used car. Why is that relevant? Because small electric cars suck. They really do. Driving them isn’t pleasant, charging them mostly impossible and they are about as ugly as you can imagine. Not really something I’d spend 4 months of my income on when it is basically just a replacement for a scooter. Which can be had for 50€ and some dedication.

Re: Cycling is more important than electric cars for reaching net-zero cities

#605

Post by Someone »

adamcstephens wrote: post #310
michael1999 wrote: post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Reducing lanes, when combined with other optimizations, can actually _improve_ travel time for cars. The problem is you have to actually implement the changes in order to prove this to people.

Even more so when combined with reducing the number of cars, which adding a bike lane can easily do.

If you replace 3 car lanes with n cars/lane/hour by 2 car lanes plus a bicycle lane, car traffic/lane/hour goes down as soon as you have over n cyclists/hour on that bike lane. At that density, that bike lane looks empty (https://www.boredpanda.com/space-required-to-transport-60-pe...)

Re: Cycling is more important than electric cars for reaching net-zero cities

#606

Post by zucker42 »

hello_newman wrote: post #582
rtlfe wrote: post #411

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honestly the easy solution is to ignore the CBs. Surveys show that the majority of people want more bus and bike lanes, so just build them and skip all of the "community input" aka "giving veto power to a small minority". https://www.nydailynews.com/new-york/ny-bike-lane-survey-dat...

Wow, the blatant hypocrisy of this comment. Imagine some cause or topic in your local government that you're passionate about and someone saying, "hey, let's just do what we want because f*ck what the other side thinks". If you don't like that a group of people have more perceived power than you in your local government then find a way to fix it ethically. Don't bypass local democracy just because you think it's easi…

Hmm, I think the problem the person you replied to sees is that sentiment community board meetings are not as good at measuring what the "average citizen" wants as opinion polls. Why do CB meetings have the moral high ground?

Re: Cycling is more important than electric cars for reaching net-zero cities

#607

Post by ido »

nightski wrote: post #512
digital-cygnet wrote: post #484

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my experience, most people really do not understand how fundamentally unsuited cars are to solving urban (or dense suburban) transportation problems. Without really staring at the underlying geometry, it is hard for laypeople to understand that automobile-centric development patterns are by-and-large incapable of producing the kind of human-scale, dense, walkable areas that are (1) instinctively pleasing to be in,…

How many people want to live in dense cities without any means of escape? It sounds miserable to me. But I live in a really small city (< 250k) and drive maybe 3-5k miles a year (mostly to our cabin in a neighboring state) and bike a LOT. It's kind of ironic I am pretty far from your utopian dense dream yet largely living it.

I live in Berlin with 2 little kids and have no car. We bike and take transit (including long-range trains when going out of the city). There's plenty opportunity to escape (corona lockdowns notwithstanding).

Re: Cycling is more important than electric cars for reaching net-zero cities

#608

Post by ido »

nightski wrote: post #583
patrickyeon wrote: post #542

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It sounds like you bike for most of your transportation in your city? That's what "anti-car" people (speaking as one myself) want: to emphasize infrastructure that enables and encourages that. The "anti-car" thing isn't "ban cars entirely in all cases", just "stop assuming everything needs to be car-first at the expense of every other modality".

Yea my point is that if you want to be less car centric, maybe try moving out of the big city. It's ironically easier to obtain that lifestyle in a small city in America than the "walkable urban utopias" everyone seems to desire on HN.

Mostly only out of American big cities (at least in the developed world), the point is to fix that. A lot of big cities in Europe and East Asia do fine without being car-centric.

Re: Cycling is more important than electric cars for reaching net-zero cities

#609

Post by jamil7 »

temp8964 wrote: post #182
umvi wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Put on a coat/rain jacket

Jacket might be ok for small rain, but for heavy rain and thunderstorm? No. Employers expect employees to come to work every business day, and people expect business to open every business day, even under heavy rain and thunderstorm. Watch! Heavy rain/wind! Most people can't go to work! Most businesses are closed! Teachers can't go to schools! Nurses can't go to clinics and hospitals! What a ridiculous picture of a m…

Couple of things from my anecdotal experience. Firstly, people already do this, yeah there are less cyclists in winter but the dedicated still ride. Secondly, nobody is advocating for bikes and nothing else, bike infrastructure in combination with a proper public transport system. Finally I see older people riding bikes regularly, often with a grandkid on the back or front and I'd guess they're in better shape for it.

Re: Cycling is more important than electric cars for reaching net-zero cities

#610

Post by jamil7 »

Robotbeat wrote: post #556
CabSauce wrote: post #10

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

Yeah, I find the article has things 100% backwards. If you live in a place where you don't need a car, then sure, I guess that might work, but the VAST majority of Americans do not. They would have to move somewhere else. There isn't enough housing in such places, so new apartments (and schools and stores) would need to be built. That takes time and emits a bunch itself. We don't have the time to empty the suburbs (a…

> (They also last at least 10 times longer than bikes, in terms of number of miles... including tires, etc.)

What? By what metric?

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