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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

#81

Post by joveian »

lifeformed wrote: post #78
joveian wrote: post #75

I like that they are trying to consider different possibilities, although I'm not personally fond of what they came up with. For example, one picture looked like ramps for bikes to go over cars, but in practice it works better for cyclists to go under (even though from an engineering standpoint it is more work to put the heavy traffic on top). I also don't want bikes to be indoors (and I primarily bike for transporta…

Why should bikes go under the cars?

Otherwise bikes get an extra hill :). And then you get extra speed when you don't need it. Down and then up is easy. Although for typical intersections I'm not sure either is a particularly good idea most of the time. Other options are separate signals or giving priority to cyclists (Hembrow has a bunch of pictures of this stuff), or, as someone else mentioned, for high density areas having a separate fully elevated bike path could work too.

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

#82

Post by logfromblammo »

logfromblammo wrote: post #26
Avalaxy wrote: post #3

A bike ramp into the apartment is useless. You can just take the elevator with your bike, or you know... Just make a garage for bikes on ground floor. The article doesn't really say much about how to design a city for bicycles, which mostly comes down to providing good roads where you aren't bothered by cars.

Yes. I stopped reading there. Any architect who thinks floor-traversing ramps will ever be preferred over elevators had best start designing temporary homes from cardboard, in anticipation of living in one.

Elaborating on this somewhat.

Let say, for example, that the interfloor distance in your city residential building is 150". According to ADA codes, the maximum slope for a ramp is 1:12. The maximum rise for a ramp is 30", requiring a landing before and after at least 60" long.

So to climb one story in the ramped building, you need 5 ramps total, plus 6 landings. Each ramp is 360" long, and each landing 60" long. The total horizontal distance, per floor, is 2160", or 180', or 55m. The minimum width of a ramp is 36". Your ramp area is going to be at least 540ft^2 (51m^2). On each floor.

In contrast, each elevator takes up about 27ft^2 (2.5m^2) per floor. You could have 20 elevators operating in the same space as a ramp only wide enough for one person to use at a time.

And if you live on the 11th floor, are you really going to ride your bike around in tight circles for at least a third of a mile just to reach street level? Or are you going to ride to the bike-through elevator and have it move you that vertical distance instead?

So when I imply that the architect that puts bike ramps on the inside of high-rise buildings will eventually be homeless, it is only because that person suffers from a fundamental disconnect from reality that is so much worse than just a simple lack of common sense. New passenger elevators in urban high-rise buildings are probably the most efficient vehicles for moving people between locations that currently exist.

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

#83

Post by logfromblammo »

Super_Jambo wrote: post #24
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.

Really? You're using up an absolutely vast area in your building for bike paths. You also are forced to build everything into a ramp shape so that the bikes can get in. Oh and alternative solution (put a bike garage on the ground floor). Is cheaper and probably nicer to live in since the people on the top floor can use lifts instead of riding an extra couple of k up hill.

An alternate alternate solution would be to install elevators more friendly to cyclists. I imagine they would have to be larger in floor area, with wider doors, both front and back, and have different floor request controls.

I see the appeal of biking up to your own front door without getting off, but ramps may be the worst possible way to do it.

In the use case where you are carrying heavy items in panniers on your bike, you need some way to get those items from the garage to the apartment. Why not use the bike itself? And if you can put your bike in your apartment, you don't need the garage.

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

#84

Post by logfromblammo »

s73v3r wrote: post #62
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.

Other than all the other people that outbid you for less distant homes, you mean. Or those who consistently NIMBY-veto any potential development of high-rise residential buildings near their existing homes. Or the zoning boards that outlaw the very concept of homes being adjacent to businesses.

Actually, there are quite a lot of people who force me to live further away from my job than is strictly necessary. They are the very same people who would almost certainly undermine--and eventually destroy--any bicycle-oriented development. It would be unwise to dismiss those factors as mere whining.

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

#85

Post by throwaway41597 »

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…

My comment is the only one using the word "absurd" so I take it you're talking about it. Let me try to defend it.

I called the title misleading, so I shortly described the gist of it. I also opined it's absurd because the idea doesn't seem to have been thought through (because of the large amount of space dedicated to bikes, as I wrote). This was just a warning to other readers, so they aren't baited like I was.

Notice that even the submitter (geezsundries) wrote "I'm confused as to why they created bike paths in apartment building hallways." This really isn't a good submission.

In my opinion, you're just picking the wrong article to seek great discussions about bikes and city planning. I'm looking for the same but this thread isn't the place. When the reporting is done by someone who's just trying to grab pageviews cheaply on someone else's bad content, then comments will be mostly negative. If it was a "Show HN" by someone who's poured reasonable effort, then negative comments would be more significant to gauge gratuicious negativity.

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

#86

Post by kazinator »

s73v3r wrote: post #62
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.

Also, if that 43 miles consists of bumber-to-bumper traffic, you'd be foolish not to whoosh by it on a bicycle, even if doing so takes two hours or more.

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

#87

Post by zyxley »

jrock08 wrote: post #36
zyxley wrote: post #19

> and maybe even wheel their bike through stores as they shop, with a sleeping baby in the bike carrier, or use the basket to hold groceries Anyone who has ever actually had a bike for more than a week and who actually shops for their own groceries will know this is a terrible idea.

Why? I use panniers for my groceries, however, the grocery store won't allow me to just bring my bike inside, so instead I have to take the panniers off my bike and put them in a cart. Using my bike as the cart would make sense.

Now imagine trying to get something from a freezer or off of a top shelf without having to put the kickstand down and then up again after over and over and over.

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

#88

Post by sanderjd »

hackuser wrote: post #53
_delirium wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mostly agree. I do sometimes find valuable counterpoint in the HN comments, but most often that's on topics where the community here has actual expertise (mostly programming) and the counterpoint is pretty specific. This has been a discussion on HN for years, though, and even has its own jargon term, the "middlebrow dismissal": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5072224

Thanks for the interesting link. I think the discussions used to be much better. There was less 'noise' and some truly excellent 'signal', which made the discussions worthwhile. Recently, my impression is that the noise has significantly increased and the excellent signal has almost disappeared. But: That could be simply my mistaken impression, it could be just normal variability, or it could be something else. Certa…

In my opinion, there is plenty of noise, but the truly excellent signal remains and pops up at a reasonable rate. But I've only been around 5 or 6 years, so I always wonder if I simply don't have a concept of the "good old days" that people are nostalgic about.

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

#89

Post by s73v3r »

logfromblammo wrote: post #84
s73v3r wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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.

Other than all the other people that outbid you for less distant homes, you mean. Or those who consistently NIMBY-veto any potential development of high-rise residential buildings near their existing homes. Or the zoning boards that outlaw the very concept of homes being adjacent to businesses. Actually, there are quite a lot of people who force me to live further away from my job than is strictly necessary. They are…

No. Sorry, but it's still you who choose to live that far away from your job. You could have chosen another job, or you could have chosen to spend more money on a house, or buy less house.

Nobody forced you to live where you do right now. That decision was all you.

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

#90

Post by 7952 »

_delirium wrote: post #48
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…

I mostly agree. I do sometimes find valuable counterpoint in the HN comments, but most often that's on topics where the community here has actual expertise (mostly programming) and the counterpoint is pretty specific. This has been a discussion on HN for years, though, and even has its own jargon term, the "middlebrow dismissal": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5072224

In a discussion where the community has expertise there is a tolerance for practicality and getting things done even when it may not be the most perfect solution in an intellectual sense. I find that this is not extended so readily to other domains. People will often have a good understanding of the abstract concepts involved and assume that decisions should be tested on that basis alone. It is a bit like an intelligent but non-technical executive choosing database software.
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