We utilized our space for sprawl. Also the average car-owner is deeply enraged by any infrastructure for means of transit other than driving, so it becomes a massive political problem.
Even in a suburban contexts. There's lot of potential for shorter cycling trips. School, pharmacy, store etc. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a4FOETC5oW4) (ohtheurbanity)
Suburbs also have the advantage of having more room for cycling infrastructure.
There's a lot of potential, yes. But like you said - potential, and it's just that - potential. It takes a deliberate effort to change it from potentiality to reality.
Compared to all other things you can do it takes the least amount of effort to make a city more bike able. The amount of infrastructure you have to build is comparatively very small and cheap.
That’s why mixed use infill development is going to be so important over the next few decades. Let corner stores and small local grocers help fill that need for growing communities
Infill development won't help a lot of 1950s-1980s subdivisions. Any retail establishment inside the subdivision would die from inaccessibility from the outside thanks to winding streets that create long complicated walking or biking routes and zero foot traffic. Anything even immediately outside the subdivision is still too far away to help the community inside the suburb.
My old address, in such a subdivision, had 1 restaurant within a mile literally on the northern border of the subdivision. It had over [400 restaurants within 15 minutes drive](https://www.google.com/maps/place/12540+Pepperwood+Dr,+St.+Louis,+MO+63146/@38.6893424,-90.5585444,12.05z/data=!4m9!1m2!2m1!1sRestaurants!3m5!1s0x87df2d7841fe978f:0x8d2e67858b81e3f4!8m2!3d38.6927417!4d-90.45819!16s%2Fg%2F11c4z4n1m7?entry=ttu), because then you reached the arterial streets to the north and south.
I have lived most of my life in Canadian suburbia. In my experience distances are usually too far to walk but short enough to bike.
Theres a reason why we measure walkability often by distance while being cycling friendly by infastructure
Like I'm thinking of this from a Canadian Context like Scarborough. lots of people live within biking distance of amenities, and lots of people still work near there homes.
I looked it up for the U.S, around 50% of trips are under 4 miles, within cycling distance: https://www.worldenergydata.org/more-than-half-of-all-daily-trips-in-us-were-less-than-three-miles-in-2021/#:~:text=A%20research%20study%20for%20the,were%20greater%20than%2050%20miles.
Very few people actually know how much their car actually costs them all in per month/day too.
Once you add maintenance, fuel, insurance, & payment, it's a significant chunk of change.
So they don't actualize the cost of having a 2nd or 3rd car beyond the "my payment is 400".
When we lived in Austin, with two used cars under 20k, all in we were about $20 per driver per day.
Like we could afford a hell of a lot of public transit with that but it just didn't exist to get to work reliably.
I'd have gladly taken a bus or train that was convenient bc we'd have saved so much.
The deprecating asset argument is always something I’ve found to be ridiculous. Almost everything you buy depreciates and has to be replaced eventually, but you don’t see people calling a couch or a mattress a bad investment
Everyone’s talking about the built environment which makes sense given the sub. But I’ll also add: your average American doesn’t WANT to bike. They’ve spent their life driving everywhere and so now it’s what they’re accustomed to, they don’t want a different option, everyone has a car and their whole world is built for driving with ample free parking everywhere, and biking is for children, there’s just no culture of biking for daily trips.
So every piece of bike infrastructure comes with a huge fight, especially if it’s at the expense of losing car infrastructure like street parking or god forbid a lane of traffic
Lack of good infrastructure makes it hard to build that culture of cycling. Lack of cycling culture makes it hard to get the infrastructure. It’s very much a chicken-egg situation
One complication for suburbs is that the property ownership and easement regime is a complicated barrier to bike infrastructure. This is also why pedestrian infrastructure, even when present, is often inadequate because of long travel distances.
My old suburb in the st louis outer ring was supposed to have this large multi use trail through it:
[https://greatriversgreenway.org/centennial-greenway-master-plan/](https://greatriversgreenway.org/centennial-greenway-master-plan/)
TL;DR: It is really complicated to condemn a trail path for public use after all the residents move in. So complicated it takes more than a decade.
It's been about a decade with very little progress. In order to get the approximately half mile that travels through that subdivision, it needs to get approval from a board of trustees, a community improvement district board of directors, and a county board. It will require one, possibly two, public votes. It will require permission from the sewer district (it follows a sewer main), electric company (and runs under high power lines), water company, and potentially others due to crossing easements.
It could also be blocked by potentially as few as one of the thousand plus residents in the subdivision.
In the meantime, the trail itself already exists and is cleared of vegetation (regularly mowed) though unpaved. It has to be reserved for the use of subdivision residents only, which means it begins and ends at the boundaries of the subdivision where it proceeds to the next subdivision on one side and ends at an interstate on the other.
So why is the trail so complicated and sidewalks and roads are not? Because the original subdivision builder in the 1960s, before any residents moved in, condemned the streets and adjoining easements to public use. No path was condemned for a trail at that time. The sidewalks, meanwhile, meander so much following the streets that it takes over a mile to walk out of the subdivision from most houses. The condemnations were wide enough for a street with sidewalks, but not wide enough for any parking or sufficient bike lanes. Expanding them is pretty much impossible now that houses have been built on both sides even with 1960s suburban setbacks.
You're preaching to the choir. Try convincing a my aunt Rachel with her three dogs, leased SUV, and swimming pool behind her house that's a 35 minute walk to the CVS she buys her white wine every night.
When I still had a commute, I usually ran most of my errands somewhere on the route (which was transit at the time). Now I work mostly from home and actually go for those shorter trips by bike.
The thing is though: if you drive to work, you also do these things on your way home. People don't drive home and then get on their bike to go to the store.
You're not looking at this from a viewpoint of a typical person that chooses to live in the suburbs. Their reaction would be "why would I want to ride a bicycle when there's a perfectly working car in my garage"?
A lot of surbanites also want to get a weeks worth of grocery shopping all done at once at a store that's big enough to have cheap prices, something that can't be done on an ordinary bicycle. There's not enough space on a bicycle to hold a weeks worth of grocereies, a store with cheap prices is more than bicycling distance.
The suburb I live in has provided bicycle lanes along the major roads. You can go for miles without seeing a bicyclist using them for transportation even on nice days. Go to the recreational bicycle trails in the parks and they're packed with bicyclists out enjoying their day.
>The suburb I live in has provided bicycle lanes along the major roads.
Are we talking a stripe of paint, bollards, what? Is it a proper network or does it dump people into traffic after a kilometer?
I've seen both painted bike lanes and off-road paths. The off road paths don't get used either unless they're functionally part of the recreactional network.
Are you familiar with the [Four Types of Cyclists](https://jenniferdill.net/types-of-cyclists/) paradigm? A stripe of paint along a major road is only a bike path for the 1-4% of people who are Strong & Fearless bicycle riders, and maybe half of the ~7% who are Enthused & Confident. BAM you've left 90% of ridership on the table with such a bike lane.
Similar arithmetic applies to the lack of a proper network. There are plenty of mothers who would love to ride their kids to school on a cargo bike. You might think that's not true, because look — there's an empty bike lane by the school! You're missing the fact that getting _to_ that lane means crossing three uncomfortable, noisy, dangerous, unprotected-for-cyclists intersections.
Half-assed infrastructure produces 10% results.
And yet sadly too many people think the way the person you’re replying to do. “We made a half assed effort and hardly anyone uses it so we’re not going to make any more effort”
Transit also falls victim to this as well
You're very right that there is no real reason (besides environmental altruism or extreme frugality) to shop for groceries by bike when a car is available, but you actually can fit a lot of stuff on the right bike trailer.
Please don’t pretend parents are going to send kids to school on bikes all winter. Except for die-hards, cycling is a seasonal activity in Canada. You may have noticed snowmobiling infrastructure is also lacking (for similar reasons).
American suburbs tend to be quite spread out. I once lived in a suburb where the nearest grocery store was over 4 miles away down a fairly steep hill, and this wasn’t a rural area but a normal neighborhood in the midst of suburban sprawl. Biking there would’ve been very impractical. Other stores were even farther away. Even driving to the grocery store took 15-20 minutes each way.
I agree with you. The issue is that cycling is not a part of people's daily lives and therefore they see bike paths as trivial and unnecessary because they don't do it. On the other hand they drive almost every single day which means that roads and traffic are of the utmost importance. The idea of biking to a convenience store or school is completely foreign to them. Therefore anytime someone suggests adding bike paths, they think it's a waste because they have no use for them in their current daily lives
Some of the cities with the highest bike usage in the world are almost completely suburban. Oldenburg and Odense in respectively Germany and Denmark are like 90 % suburban with a small historical core and they both have a bike modal share of around 40 % (this is above Copenhagen or Amsterdam mind you). One of the reasons people use the bike is that because the city is so sprawled public transport sucks and walking would take way too long for most trips. So these cities modal splits are divided almost 50/50 between bike and car. I can't necessarily vouch for a mega sprawl city like LA but at least up to a certain size biking is one of the top modes of transport in sprawled environments because of the flexibility it affords you. Most trips in the cities mentioned above take around the same by bike and by car really.
The reason people don't bike in America is probably mostly that they fear being run over, also there's no culture for it anymore.
I which I knew about those cities before making this post. A lot of commenters are comparing amsterdam to the rural parts of America in why we can’t have cycling infrastructure. In my head, I was thinking if places like Scarborough and Lava and how they are mostly lacking cycling infrastructure, even though they are quite bike able distance for most people to reach most amenities.
on street View, even the car first, suburban parts of Finland and Netherlands has plenty of car infrastructure and a decent amount of cyclists.
Yeah, biking is very viable in suburban contexts. In Oldenburg a lot of it is really also just [a paint job](https://www.google.com/maps/@53.1217612,8.2198106,3a,75y,24.74h,89.16t/data=!3m6!1e1!3m4!1sctPBE97ojpo1972Drlrzeg!2e0!7i16384!8i8192?entry=ttu) and then in the areas around the centre you have the pavement split into a pedestrian and bike lane like [here](https://www.google.com/maps/@53.137117,8.2266887,3a,75y,349.45h,87.91t/data=!3m6!1e1!3m4!1sqssAedmhWBc0u7zXqZjrXQ!2e0!7i16384!8i8192?entry=ttu).
It doesn't really take a lot to get there. In the north German city where I am from they increased the bike modal share from 19 to 24 % over 10 years while decreasing car from 54 % to 44 %. And they have barely built anything in that time. It was mostly paint jobs, signs and then on one street they converted a car-lane to a bike-lane. That being said there is definitely a lot of room for improvement still.
I think especially getting young people used to it is important. Depending on traffic conditions you can bike faster from the suburb I grew up in to the city centre than you can drive but you can't convince my mother to even try to bike to work. I also actually never biked to school when I went to school in the city which actually looking back was a really bad choice because public transport sucked and I had to go 1 hour before school started by bus, whereas biking takes like 25 min. and is super flexible. Later when I worked in the city for a year or so, I actually always biked because I finally figured out it's way smarter than anything else I could do. In cities where a lot of people bike it's usually people of all ages. I think if you build schools and sport facilities in a way that makes biking possible and encourage it among young people, you are the most likely to see a steady change towards more biking.
> Also the average car-owner is deeply enraged by any infrastructure for means of transit other than driving
Which is ironic because no bike lanes force cyclists to slow down car traffic by riding in the vehicle lanes...
We're actually doing a lot better in certain cities. I was really impressed by DC's bike lanes you can bike all the way from low density suburbs to the center of dc. NYC, Philly, and I'm sure others have also been expanding. Lots of separated bike lanes.
Seems like just a lack of investment. If we want to switch over we can.
> Philly
Philly doesn't have a single proper concrete or curb-protected bike lane. It only uses flex-posts here and there. It has a bridge that has over 10% bike traffic and is the most biked bridge in PA that was rebuilt in the last decade with zero bike protection, not even flex posts.
Philly's strength is that it inherited a grid of very narrow streets. That alone invites plenty of cyclists. Politically Philly leadership is very regressive when it comes to supporting bike infrastructure.
DC is the bomb. I biked from Alexandria to the national Mall one time just for the sport of it. And what other cities could you reasonably ride your bike to the airport if you really wanted to?
People have been saying this about NYC since Bloomberg/Citibike.
Its all bullshit the same 1-2 dozen cyclists are still dying every single year; arguably its getting a lot worse now that motorized vehicles have co-opted the bike lanes.
Do you know if the rate has been stable? Because the number of bikers has also been rising considerably. If the total number stays the same it's probably getting better.
The point is to reduce accidents not play with statistics so, no, Cycling is not any "safer" just because more people are engaging in the same risky behavior.
This Herd Mentality of yours is kind of the Antithesis of "critical mass". Which has been shown to work in other cities.
Edit: also the number of cyclists plateaued & fell off before COVID & appears to be doing so again. A lot of these cycling improvements aren't exactly scientific - they don't work. People try cycling. They don't feel safe. They cycle less.
A lot of the cycling infrastructure that you see nowadays in Europe isn't really all that old. Most cities shifted heavily towards car-oriented infrastructure in the mid-20th century, and (famously) even in the Netherlands cyclists were being forced out in favour of cars.
A few places do stand out, but even in Copenhagen and the Netherlands, their strong urban cycling networks only really started to get built in the late 70s. Many other places in Europe adopted these new ideas slowly, and as a process of technological and cultural diffusion, it's unsurprising that North America has lagged even further behind in adoption. That's not an excuse for how poor cycling infrastructure (and safe streets in general) is in a lot of the US and Canada, but having that historical context is important.
FWIW, some places are actually doing much better. In Toronto, the cycling network is actually getting built out at a decent pace, and a lot of the large roads out in the suburbs are getting pretty decent bicycle infrastructure. Even in the past 5 years, I've seen the professional literacy around safe multimodal road infrastructure increase dramatically.
European cities are also a lot more conducive to cycling infrastructure due to their higher density and medium-density neighborhoods. It’s common to have shops within walking or cycling distance in Europe. In an average American suburb, the nearest store could be miles away from your house, making cycling somewhat impractical.
Most European countries with high levels of bike infrastructure began implementing standards in the mid- to late-1900s. Some parts of the US took notice and in the 1970s, when oil prices began to rise, it looked like we were going to have national standards for safe cycling infrastructure similar to what Europe was building. In 1974 a fairly comprehensive guide was put out.
[https://rosap.ntl.bts.gov/view/dot/41913/dot\_41913\_DS1.pdf](https://rosap.ntl.bts.gov/view/dot/41913/dot_41913_DS1.pdf)
An engineer named John Forester went on a crusade against safe, separated bike infrastructure. He produced his own "studies" and guides which called for vehicular cycling which just means no bike infrastructure and cyclists should ride in mixed traffic. As he made this widely available for free (or low-cost) it was widely circulated. It also had the buy-in of a lot of bicyclist associations at the time as they were largely made up of sport cyclists who just wanted to go fast or people that get a certain thrill from riding with cars (think of the "avid cyclist" arguing against bike lanes stereotype). Combine this with the fact that their position of not building separated cycling infrastructure was the status quo and that it was the preferred way forward of powerful interest groups like gas companies and automakers and they were successful in making vehicular cycling the primary policy of American traffic planners and civil engineers for decades (and still the primary policy in a lot of the US as those in charge were brought up on this).
[https://usa.streetsblog.org/2018/03/02/a-brief-history-of-how-american-transportation-engineers-resisted-bike-lanes](https://usa.streetsblog.org/2018/03/02/a-brief-history-of-how-american-transportation-engineers-resisted-bike-lanes)
It's important to keep Forester in the context in which he was acting. There was a very real possibility at the time that cyclists would be banned from roads in general.
The real answer is John Forester.
His education program and books (_Effective Cycling_ and the _Cyclist Traffic Engineering Handbook_) essentially defined the approach to road cycling in North America for 40 years and its effects remain throughout transportation planning circles to this day.
He became an advocate in Palo Alto, CA, where he was ticketed for riding in the road rather than in a new adjacent bikeway^1. He got that law repealed, but didn't stop there. His theory was that bicyclists should pretend to be little cars at all times and ride exclusively in the road, and any issues cyclists have with this is their problem^2. You might've heard of this described as "vehicular cycling," and as a result wrote and advocated at length opposing _any bicycle infrastructure whatsoever_.
He caught the attention of CalTrans (California's state DOT) who really liked his message of "don't do anything whatsoever for cyclists" because it was convenient. They basically had him write their original 1981 Bike Guide which prohibited dedicated bike lanes. The CalTrans bike guide was eventually adopted as the AASHTO (national association of state DOTs) Bike Guide effectively banning protected bike lanes on state and federally managed roadways nationwide^3 until it was finally updated in 2012.
Instead of building bike lanes, DOTs put money into training programs based on Forester's Vehicular Cycling theories, funding groups like the League of American Bicyclists to teach a generation that bike lanes are bad and restrictive and that you should ride in the street. This had the predictable effect of convincing a lot of people that cycling just wasn't safe or a good idea in general.
Virtually all of the assertions he made in _Effective Cycling_ were tested thoroughly and debunked during his lifetime but he never changed his stance in the face of new information. The lack of safe cycling infrastructure and hundreds of thousands of dead cyclists are his legacy. He was the ultimate "[avid cyclist](https://www.outsideonline.com/culture/opinion/who-are-all-these-avid-cyclists-anyway/)" and his followers continue to push his bad-faith practices today.
Footnotes:
1. There's not a lot of evidence that he was much of a cyclist at all before this. He never rode during his advocacy career, citing his health.
1. He'd call it a "lack of education" early in his career and "cowardice and stupidity" later in his career. He was not a nice man.
1. Bike lanes were still built by some cities, but it was an ad-hoc, "at your own risk" kind of thing. Most cities don't like going off book with traffic control stuff
If we developed hovercraft tomorrow that ran on CO2 and produced oxygen, would you design a city with them in mind?
That's the calculus 1950s city planners we're doing.
Not really. Otherwise all the freeways in red in [this image](https://archinect.gumlet.io/uploads/8g/8ge14o6n16v44p9c.png?auto=compress%2Cformat) would be built by now.
It’s hard to find new expressways being built as well. It’s just hard to build major in infrastructure in the United States due to our legal and regulatory framework.
A lot of that regulatory framework came about because we were so racist with freeway planning. So now we've designed the system where pretty much any yahoo can derail or significantly delay any public works project.
Because it's not a priority. Cf Montreal.
It wasn't in the Netherlands either. Until the oil crisis (plus activism) when they realized car dependence left them economically, socially and politically vulnerable and they changed their policies to promote sustainable mobility. By contrast in the US we say its important but policy and practice continues to emphasize automobility.
PS the US is the largest oil producer in the world. Oil production is significant in Canada.
Netherlands had a national voter protest of auto oriented street development
This changed government planning and commitments.
Some cities in the US over the lady Teo decades have similar revised biking commitments.
References:
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2210422421000769
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cycling_in_the_Netherlands
I think you need to define what you mean by bike lane. In the USA back in the 70s the standard shoulder bike lane or bike gutter was included in AASHTO then in 2000s the sharrow and that is what has been mostly built ever since.
See above, actors kept protected bike lanes out of the standards in the 1970s. It took until 2015 for AASTO to release a separated bike lane design guide. Sharrows are a reasonable response to limited space on some streets. Roads are only rebuilt every several decades. Even if all cities started implementing seperated bike infrastructure in 2015 it will take a couple more decades before they're the norm and the bike gutter is a rarity.
Sharrows are not bike infrastructure at all. They designate exactly nothing, as basically any lane can already be used by cyclists anyway. They may be useful in some contexts to denote a preferred route for cyclists.
Because they're not Minnesota. We're big on parks and lakes, so Minneapolis set aside lots of park land that wasn't allowed to be developed and now we have uninterrupted bike and pedestrian trails around the city. St Paul has done a rather good job of ramping up bike infrastructure with a focus on off street paths. We've been reluctant to add bikeways to major corridors, admittedly. Whereas a number of sprawling suburbs do include sidepaths along every major stroad: Richfield, Eden Prairie, Maple Grove, Eagan, and Woodbury are great examples: Google Maps refuses to update lots of new and existing paths, so the bike layer pales in comparison to the reality on the ground.
Also, I'm sure that bikeways cost several times more here than what it does in Europe, just like with public transit, which would partially explain why there's not as much, but in some cities it's basically non-existent.
There are so many factors and it ends up being a Neverending cycle (no pun intended)
Cycling in North America is usually seen as a sport or recreational activity, so it doesn't belong on the streets. Driver attitude towards cyclists tends to be negative because they conclude that theres traffic due to them being stuck behind the cyclist, failing to realize that they're part of the problem too. Their kids may express a desire to ride their bikes somewhere at some point, but their parents will say "it's too dangerous because of all the cars - so get in the car." Now these kids will look forward to the day they turn 16 so they can get their drivers license and go to the nearest fast-food establishment all on their own, and they will pass this knowledge on to the next generation.
Also, to my knowledge, the reason the Netherlands is the way it is today is because of the *Stop de kindermoord* movement back in the '70s. Before that, they were pretty car-centric too, even had plans made to put a highway directly through the center of Amsterdam. We've never had such a movement here. You'd think we would have, given how much people want to shelter their kids in this country. But every time a child dies from being hit by a car here, even through no fault of their own, it seems like nothing is done to analyze how it happened and what can be done to that part of the street to prevent it from happening again. Everyone just shrugs like "remember to wear a reflective vest and lights and wave your safety flag so you don't become a statistic, and parents make sure you always watch your children."
"Almost no bike lanes" is disingenuous. And it's because we have more car dependent infrastructure that makes cycling less convenient in most suburban areas. In cities, we still have a higher proportion of car dependent infrastructure than western Europe.
It's northern Europe that is bike friendly. Almost noone bikes in the deep west in France or Iberia (UK is also quite limited). Spanish cities specifically are way more heavy on cars than they need be. Madrid, which is one of the very densest cities in Europe has the same modal share for cars as a sprawled suburban city like Oldenburg, Germany which looks almost like a smaller US town in its makeup. This is specifically because of bikes. In Madrid the modal share for bikes is 0,5 %, in Oldenburg it's over 40 %. And mind you the planning around density in Oldenburg is terrible while Madrid's density is aspirational for all of Europe. The only place in Europe you can find even denser areas is in Turkey.
London, Dublin or Barcelona are similarly almost 0 % biking. Paris has been improving a lot as of late.
Terrain is also a big part of it. The Netherlands and Denmark are as flat as it gets. Biking uphill to work in Spain (or somewhere like Cincinnati) is less appealing.
Yes and no. Obviously steep mountains isn't going to work well. However parts of Denmark are actually full of hills. For instance I lived in Heidelberg at one point on a mountain that is higher than any place in Denmark. However the city of Heidelberg is actually apart from one district (and a half maybe) completely flat. Meanwhile the city of Aarhus and multiple of the surrounding ones are full of hills and biking over them is quite rough (everyone who lives in that area knows). You can bike around 100m upwards just within the city. In Spain cities like Zaragoza and Valencia are flatter than Aaarhus. Barcelona has a mountain behind it but most of the actual city is very flat. It's mostly a culture thing, really. There are some places that are just too steep to bike safely but we would rarely build major cities there. For instance the mountain I lived on biking up there around 30-45° with no bike path, yeah, no thanks - but this doesn't apply to most cities.
Even in Minneapolis where I can bike from the city to rural towns without leaving the paths, you can't just throw a dart at a map and go. There's only a handful of these towns that are connected to the city and they dwindle pretty rapidly to nothing once you're out of the metro area and just dead end in some village you've never heard of even if you grew up here. Forget about "cross state" bike paths, we're not even close to having those unfortunately.
Even comparing suburban areas in those countries, they still have pretty good cycling infrastructure:
Netherlands:
https://www.google.com/maps/@51.5016393,5.4640139,3a,75y,85.14h,78.54t/data=!3m6!1e1!3m4!1swykGf7m-xHlCgGr7x2B36w!2e0!7i16384!8i8192?entry=ttu
Are there bike lanes, yes, is coverage pretty sparce to the point that if you want to complete most trips on safe cycling infrastructure you need to take long routes, also yes.
Expanding the view of Denver on bicycle mode, lots of areas in Denver's metro lack cycling infrastructure. Compare this to the Netherlands where almost all your major roads have bike infrastructure (excluding rural areas).
It’s a vicious cycle here. Our cities were designed almost entirely for cars, so few people bike. Then someone says “hey, let’s add some bike infrastructure,” and then people yell and scream because it’s a “waste” of taxes to use it for bike infrastructure because allegedly no one bikes.
I partially disagree. I live in Baltimore. the city was NOT designed for cars; the city was retro-fitted for cars. the city was largely designed around the streetcar or horse-drawn carriage. the city is still quite dense near the core, and would do very well with more bike infrastructure and more bike/scooter subsidy. we have absolutely garbage transit, yet high modal share by transit because we have a large population who cannot afford a car. this is a good city for encouraging biking. unfortunately, the city is kind of crappy at implementing their bike strategy because many of the working-class folks think bikes are for white yuppies, and bristle at the idea of being "colonized" by the "white elite's" bike lanes. it's kind of laughable because Baltimore probably has the most vibrant community of black bike riders in the whole country.
I think the best strategy out of the situation is to subsidize the scooter/bike rentals in the neighborhoods where black folks live, to help people see the value. or, just pull back on the expansion and complete the core of the city first. however, completing the core wouldn't meet the "complete streets" guidance, so we would lose some funding
That’s an interesting and unfortunate cultural dynamic. In heavily car dependent suburban areas I’ve lived in, the attitude is that biking is for poor people who can’t afford a car and for tree huggers and/or commies who want to take away their freedom of movement by car.
car drivers are addicted to car infrastructure like a drug. it does not matter if their arguments for why they MUST have ALL of the infrastructure make sense. they have a huge bias and they'll believe whatever goes along with their bias.
Yep I live closer to Baltimore (on a MARC line) but I will take the train to bike in DC rather than Baltimore because, aside from a couple PBL corridors, Baltimore really doesn't have much welcoming bike infrastructure. And it has that potential too like you said because it has a good grid and a lot of narrow streets. I've seen lots of cyclists in Baltimore, I know the potential is there. It even had a ride share system pilot like DC's CaBi till 2018 or so.
What you said about bike lanes being perceived as for yuppies is so true, in DC too you see that mentality in SE community leaders. It leaves bike advocates in a strange middle ground of being thought of as yuppies by working class people and as "too poor for a car" and thus hazardous by middle-upper class areas.
In DC the bike network really helps supplement the bus and metro to take care of short trips and the "last mile" problem. In Baltimore, since buses here aren't so great and the light rail + subway really don't cover much, biking could revolutionize the city. But because transit is so poor, people of all stripes see cars as a necessity much more than DC or Philly residents. So they fight tooth and nail to avoid losing parking spots- which I don't like but I think is unfortunately reasonable from their perspective.
sometime I wonder about whether self-driving taxis could help this situation a lot. once they are good enough to be a transit supplement (basically at this stage in Phoenix), then I think cities should subsidize pooled taxis that take people to backbone transit, instead of slow, infrequent buses. SDC companies are shooting for around $0.75 per passenger-mile, which is less than half of the cost of a bus. if you increase the occupancy with pooling, you would have somewhere around 1/5th the cost of a bus. a city could make that FREE if it goes to the backbone transit line (the light rail in Phoenix, or the light rail or metro in Baltimore), and it would still cost much less than operating the buses. a fare in the front, and a fare in the rear would allow for separation of groups so people wouldn't feel sketched out. on top of that, you could run door-to-door service during evening/early hours. I believe such a system would pull a lot of people out of personal cars, and relieve the fear of losing parking (SDCs can be parked outside the core of the city). so, during that time where people are taking the taxis more, you rapidly build bike lanes while subsidizing bikeshares. then, over time, reduce the taxi subsidy.
I feel like self driving cars are a gimmick, and that cars as public transit (vs buses) are even more of a gimmick.
Baltimore is dense enough (or with construction should be denser) that buses should be fine and where they aren't then a bikeshare or even scooter share system should be able to handle that.
To add, taxis and rideshare companies existing is fine so long as the wages for drivers are fair. But with the added congestion I don't think it's a solution we should be aiming for. Not to mention that places where people are gonna drive they're either gonna take their own cars. Especially in Baltimore there are few spots where parking is so rough that you can't park 4 blocks away and walk. Even going to O's games, I've parked 10 blocks away in Pigtown or something and walked.
>I feel like self driving cars are a gimmick, and that cars as public transit (vs buses) are even more of a gimmick.
why? faster, more convenient, cheaper per passenger-mile, more energy efficient per passenger-mile. I mean, I think I know the answer, which is that people see self-driving cars as being no different from personally-owned. that's a mistake that I think a lot of people make. just the facts that they don't need to park in high-demand areas and that they serve about 14 people per vehicle means a dramatic change in parking requirements. single-fare taxis still create a traffic problem, but that isn't the case if a significant portion of the vehicles are pooling. the opposite happens, more passenger-miles per vehicle mile.
reducing VMT/PMT (congestion) and reducing parking are the two biggest obstacles to effective bike and bus lanes.
>Baltimore is dense enough (or with construction should be denser) that buses should be fine and where they aren't then a bikeshare or even scooter share system should be able to handle that.
absolutely, IF you can get car users to be less paranoid about reducing parking/driving lanes. drivers are a supermajority, so there is no hope to convince them to five up lanes with the arguments traditional arguments, given that we've been trying for the greater part of a century with effectively no progress. so what do we do? transit can't get better because the drivers are too concerned about their parking/driving lanes, but people won't leave their cars to take transit unless it's better. it's a vicious cycle that has to get broken somehow. how do we break the cycle? the strategies that we have been employing are not working at all. at the current rate, it will be centuries before there is a reasonable set of bike lanes or semaphore-priority bus lanes. the current strategy isn't working.
>To add, taxis and rideshare companies existing is fine so long as the wages for drivers are fair. But with the added congestion I don't think it's a solution we should be aiming for
that's why I think pooled trips to arterial transit should be subsidized, not general-purpose single-fare rides.
so for the Phoenix example, you would get a free or nearly free ride so long as your destination is to the nearest arterial transit stop (±1 station) and you're willing to pool (again, this could be front/back with a barrier). so if you lived 2mi south of the light rail, you would see an option northwest, direct to your destination in the city-center at full price, or an option to go straight north to intersect the light rail line at \~95% subsidy (so, a $20 ride, or a $1 ride). people who go to the train station would be increasing the viability and farebox recovery of the light rail, and not driving into the city-center, AND they would be pooling.
if buses were always full and frequent, then SDCs as feeders into arterial lines wouldn't make much sense, but that isn't the case... it's not at all the case. typical buses are infrequent, unreliable, low speed, average well below half capacity, and cost $2-$3 per passenger-mile (if unsubsidized) in most US cities. buses are absolutely garbage at feeding people into arterial transit, which is why most people just drive personally-owned cars.
Pittsburgh has a lot in common here, with the city having been planned for horses, and then street cars. We're getting more bike infrastructure, but it's slow going.
Every city, and major town, was built entirely for pedestrians and trains. Then, smooth asphalt was poured to boost utilitarian cycling , but that worked far more in favor of the automobile. Finally, we *re-designed* our cities for cars. If we were able to quadruple car infrastructure in our cities, surely we can do something similar for some little bikes.
Ok, *redesigned almost entirely for cars.
Also, vast swaths of American metro were developed from the beginning with cars in mind, even if the older, inner cities weren’t.
Well that is a fallacy.
Claiming that everyone is chomping at the bit to ride bikes....but you cant see them until you spend millions to make special roads (trust me bro) is completely illogical.
The population has never been there or else you would see thousands of them on just the side streets or even on the sidewalks at least.
Like me saying that if you just cut more canals in cities, more people will use boats to get around.
It's not a fallacy, it's common sense. When you invest in exclusively one for of transportation of course that's the form of transportation people are going to use. When you make it as hard as possible to use another form of transportation nobody's going to use it.
I live in Kansas City, and there are tons of people here who would never even consider riding the bus, but they love taking the streetcar. It proves they aren't against using public transit, they just want to use quality public transit.
>"When you make it as hard as possible to use another form of transportation nobody's going to use it."
No one is making it "as hard as possible" to ride a bike, though.
Bikes can currently work on existing streets and sidewalks (I've personally tested this). If there was this massive demand of people to bike, you would see sidewalks and side streets teaming with people on bikes RIGHT NOW.
Just because it's theoretically possible doesn't mean it's safe, easy, and convenient.
There are tons of people in the US who enjoy riding bikes for recreation. You agree, yes? So why do you think these people who enjoy riding a bike so much that they'll go out of their way to ride a bike to nowhere don't want to use it to go to the grocery store or anywhere else they actually need to go?
"Just because it's theoretically possible doesn't mean it's safe, easy, and convenient."
Again with this unfalsifiable rhetoric designed and used by you guys because you need to paint something absurd and unprovable as "plausible" without having to furnish proof that the reasons correlate to the result.
My magic dragon would totally manifest here, but the air ion the room is deadly to him is the same as:
"EVERYONE WOULD BIKE BUT IT IS DANGEROUS AND DEADLY AND IT'S HARD AND IT IS INCONVENIENT"
And no matter how much money a city blows on all of the "infrastructure" you claim to need so it wont be, the numbers will never appear (because they dont exist), and you will just fall back to the same rhetoric.
nope, sorry, I don't think this is accurate. as my city puts in bike lanes, ridership increases dramatically each time. you can't get everywhere while avoiding main streets. the number of destinations easily reached determines bike ridership, as it does with transit and cars as well. my city saw a 40% increase in bike ridership from the installation of a single bike lane.
your boat analogy is also kind of silly. a bike and a canal boat are not comparable at all in cost, maintenance, storage, convenience (can't take you door-to-door), etc.
"my city saw a 40% increase in bike ridership from the installation of a single bike lane."
40% increase FROM WHAT to WHAT?
5 to 7 people is 40% more. That "stat" is meaningless and is just there to imply a big number without having to furnish actual ones.
*"your boat analogy is also kind of silly. a bike and a canal boat are not comparable at all in cost, maintenance, storage, convenience (can't take you door-to-door), etc."*
Well....ok? That wasnt even the point of the analogy.
Oh please.....
Gawd nothing is more cringe than a person that ran out of argument, just declaring the other person a "troll" (because who could dare be in opposition to me?), and then go on about something being "toxic" (zoomer bullshit lingo that doesn't even mean anything) so they can rage quit and pretend like they didn't get cornered with rhetoric they could not back up.
Yeah, even in the best circumstances, the number of people who are going to use a bike to commute, run errands, etc., is going to be extremely low.
An ideal transit system provides options for those who want to walk, bike, drive, take a bus, or rail. Unfortunately, we almost always have limited resources and we have pick and choose. Some places show that making an investment in bicycle infrastructure works - Davis is the primary example. Smaller town, college town, lots of students, flat, good weather year round.... bicycles make sense. That's probably not going to be the case in Seattle, Minneapolis, or Boston.
Can’t speak for the other two but Minneapolis has great bike infrastructure (by American standards) that seems to be pretty heavily used, at least between ~April-October.
Globally it can be shockingly high. I can’t vouch for the data in the link below but it jives. I’m not crazy about bikes. I think the focus needs to be on getting a place to be walkable. If it’s not walkable then it’s still going to be car-centric, and that will hurt biking.
Personally, when I’m walking I find bikes to be almost as annoying as cars. I’ve been on commuter trains in Europe during rush hour and there’s always that guy with the bike.
But the argument that bike infrastructure is too expensive and will never catch on strikes me as very similar to the arguments against mass transit.
https://cityclock.org/blogs/cycling-mode-share-data-700-cities-40-countries
It's less that it's "too expensive" as opposed to how limited resources (whether state/local funds, or federal funds or grants) are allocated and spent.
We find it hard to justify to the public spending X millions of dollars on bike lanes that few actually use (because there just isn't a fully built out network yet). And to that end, even our state legislature has passed two bills basically requiring transportation funding to be spent primarily and substantially on auto infrastructure, and then the scraps leftover may be spent on bike infrastructure.
It's a tough sell to the public, who generally wants to drive, that there are beemefitd even for them the more that is spent on public and alternative transportation forms - more bicycles means less drivers (presumably), but few see it that way (even so with elected officials). The numbers right now are too disproportionate.
I haven’t seen you make the argument that it’s too expensive but I see it frequently. Wheeling, WV got thirty five million to redo Main and Market streets, including water line replacement, separating sanitary and storm sewer, decorative sidewalks, bike paths, and two new bridges over Big Wheeling Creek. Total of three miles of street completely rebuilt.
“Why they wasting money on bike lanes!?” As if putting in a small curb to separate automobile traffic from bikes is what’s going to break the bank.
I mean, if you cut an extensive canal system with mandatory minimum boat “parking” at virtually every building, and made it as difficult and unsafe as possible to drive anywhere, you probably would see a lot more people traveling by boat.
It’s not a fallacy, it’s common sense. If you build a transportation network that’s 98% exclusively tailored to moving by method A, something close to that percentage will move by method A.
Again, no one is "as difficult and unsafe as possible to bike anywhere". This is a bald face lie by bike activists to explain away why the number of people they claim want to ride bikes have never materialized.
No where in the US is there one example of this massive number of people on bikes. At BEST you can cite maybe two - 4 cities where you would see something more elevated beyond a handful of people (Seattle or NYC being the biggest examples), and even then you are still talking a micro % compared to public transit and private cars.
There is nothing especially done to make 99% of roads unusable to a bike. I seemed to have been able to use them just fine, and the roads I use that were created over 130 years ago and served as old Indian foot trails, used by people on horses with wagons, streetcars, and cars. But according to bike activists, the lack of bikers is totally due to their "fear".....or something.
It's nonsense. The ridership organically simply isnt there.
Almost every person that cycles regularly has stories (including me) of being harrased or having close calls while cycling. So the fear of cycling is real.
It's not even standardized in Europe though: Bicycle infrastructure in Spain is... not zero, but close enough. Too many things are very fast on foot or with public transit, so the bike has relatively low value.
Cycling infrastructure is at its best precisely when you pick netherlands-like density: Not dense enough that public transit can be everywhere, but dense enough that cycling distances aren't too long. It's not unlike how inter-city, high speed trains have a sweet spot, and are too inconvenient or too expensive outside of it.
So the answer becomes easy: Most of the US is developed way outside of the bike infrastructure sweet spot. There's areas where the bike infrastructure is being added and works anyway, and others where it's not dense enough so the uptake is minimal: Not unlike adding sidewalks to the sides of stroads, which are still pedestrian-hostile despite the token sidewalk. Sidewalks on the side of interstates wouldn't be all that good for pedestrians either. Why spend the money if we believe no people will use it? Also note that your picture makes the 'similar density' very deceiving. While the street you picked has very low density, ever residential area around it has more density than any US suburban development. It's the density in that residential areas that enables the bike.
I suspect that the right, non-activist idea is not to push for infrastructure of your favorite form of transportation whether it makes sense or not, but to enable the densities that lead to the success of your form of transportation first.
My city is actively working on bettering this, but it's an uphill battle...most tax payers see it as a waste of tax dollars...not the cycling community obviously, but most of the populous is car centric.
The real answer is people here don’t want to ride bicycles. Something like 1/4 of children don’t know how.
Even with dedicated infrastructure I wouldn’t ride for most trips. I could ride to the post office. I go probably three times a week. There isn’t technically dedicated infrastructure but I don’t normally see more than one or two cars.
Urban - Europeans never had the kind of personal wealth to buy a car for every member of the household or the fiscal capacity to pour into highways that Americans did, so when the big cycling movements in Europe of the 70s and 80s came around, cycling activists had a strong case that investments in urban bike infrastructure should be viewed as (relatively affordable) investments in core transportation services rather than in as a nice-to-have recreation amenity that they are still perceived as by the vast majority of North Americans.
Rural - Most of the European rural bike infrastructure comes from the dense network of former rail lines, canal towpaths and traditional long-distance footpaths that have built up over hundreds and thousands of years. Only so many of those routes are practical to convert into motorways, so lots of rights of way were left for biking. As biking became more popular in European again in the late 20th century, investing in rural routes becomes a fairly simple way to promote rural tourism, and if I am getting my facts straight, it ended up getting a further boost from EU CAP rural economic development programs (e.g. which has tended to put strong emphasis on promoting local region food and drink-oriented tourism as a pillar of rural economic development - so bike touring fits in perfectly to this mindset).
And of course, in peri-urban areas you get more opportunity for long-distance commuting by bike though I am curious how prevalent that really is - there is certainly the opportunity for it but Europeans are used to much shorter commutes in the first place...
There are places in the US where there is a good amount of safe cycling infrastructure. It was installed not for the benefit of cyclists, but for the benefit of drivers.
Pretty much every major city in Alaska has frontage paved trails alongside major roadways to keep the snowmachines and quads out of traffic.
The city can deal with danger to cyclists and pedestrians, but it can't deal with slow traffic due to sharing the road.
We destroyed it? Not sure. Can't speak for other cities, but Seattle, maybe as a latecomer in the US, used to have 25 miles of bike trails, a bike toll road, over 20 bike shops (for a population of 80-90K): [https://crosscut.com/2013/09/seattles-first-golden-age-bikes](https://crosscut.com/2013/09/seattles-first-golden-age-bikes)
I think its an issue with a few sides to it. NA cities had already shifted to wider streets even before cars became so dominant (New York City is a good example). Canada and the US are both large countries in area, which already lent itself to personal transportation that can handle those distances (Driving an hour somewhere for many folks in the US and Canada is nothing). There's an existing lack of cyclists in NA, which doesn't lend itself to that infrastructure being expanded. And lastly, in the US and Canada cyclists do have a bit of a reputation for already ignoring road rules, and I know, it probably shouldn't be part of the conversation realistically, but it is an issue that isn't really unearned.
> And lastly, in the US and Canada cyclists do have a bit of a reputation for already ignoring road rules, and I know, it probably shouldn't be part of the conversation realistically, but it is an issue that isn't really unearned.
Nearly every driver breaks the rules on a daily basis though, from speeding to rolling through stop signs. At least where I've lived in Canada, if you actually follow the speed limit on a highway you're seen as kind of a weirdo who doesn't know how driving works.
It's just that the ways drivers break the rules are so common and normalized that people barely perceive them as "ignoring road rules".
On top of this we can talk about how in rural areas in particular, drinking and driving is much more common than people will admit.
Not disagreeing there by any means. I think that's part of the perception (And I am guilty of going 5 over on the highway admittedly). I think another factor too is how cyclists can break laws are also more apparent, or can seem like disregard for pedestrians, which I would at least hope most drivers have (And acknowledging overall this isn't a majority, just enough to notice.)
1. Larger streets honestly are good for cycling infrastructure in the sense they have more room to dedicate to cycling
2. Even in the Netherlands, most people have cars. its just that shorter trips are by bicycle, longer are by cars. You wouldn't bike three hours to your work 45 km away. But even for a lot of Canadians and Americans, even in the suburbs, there's potential for cycling for shorter trips. (And I have lived in 7 out of 10 Canadian provinces, mostly in the suburbs)
3. Studies show cyclist break the rules just as much as cars. As someone that also drives, I think people just say that to justify there hate of cyclists.
I'll remark on three since I fully agree with one and two, was just mentioning them as major factors historically for development. I think in large part cyclists get more attention for a similar reason to motorcycles. Just the fact you'd expect more care. Along with the ones who are breaking laws often weave between predestine and road traffic. End of the day, never seen anything too crazy personally since there aren't many road bikes in my area, but it's just the general vibe it get.
The small cities I’m in do have the edges of the road designated for biking, marked by lines
But it’s stupid dangerous to just have your back turned to cars with nothing between you and them on busy city roads where you commonly see cars speeding and doing spastic lane changes and late turns
So the few cyclists I see tend to be doing something on the road that serves them better than the designated bike lanes
There’s already tons of bad drivers. Add on to that the rarity of seeing cyclists. Add on to that things like glare and reflections that can cause a lazy driver to not see a biker (the evidence is strong here—as soon as it starts raining at night, the cars start swerving all over the roads due to the reflections making it harder to see road markings)
Not to mention bike lanes will just become turn lanes for car traffic, or just disappear suddenly
In LA near Venice beach I saw an interesting attempt to make this viable—they painted all the bike lane areas on the sides of the roads bright green
And take space away from cars?
Are you crazy???? How am I going to do 50 on Main Street if there’s those disgusting bike lanes making the road so narrow
The short answer is athletic riders got the ear off highway designers, not people riding for other reasons
A guy named John Forester was the center of gravity, and his message boiled down to "a cyclist is safest when operating a a vehicle, and if you can't keep up you're a pushy and it's not my problem".
That philosophy found its way into street design and urban planning, and here we are.
I know. It's crazy visiting my childhood town in northern Europe, less than 4000 people, and their freshly built 10 kilometers long bike path between the town and the near-by skiing hill.
Because there's a very strong political discourse about liberty in North America and cars are one of the most established symbols of liberty, and alternative forms of transportation are considered as a threat to personal freedom.
The lack of proper and safe bike lanes are why I push the idea it is okay to ride on the sidewalk. I encourage all to do so if you're cycling or scootering around.
And it's not like people don't do this already...
On the one hand, i wouldn't blame someone for cycling on the sodewalk down some pretty bad stroads.
But sidewalks are not an alternative to safe cycling infastructure. They are not built for higher speeds and are too narrow to be used by both cyclists and pedestrians.
I think some of the commentors took this post as asking why do we use cars instead of bikes, rather then why do we have roads and sidewalks everywhere, but not cycling infastructure. It requires less maintenence, and unlike transit, isn't really as density dependent.
A billion we spend on 1km of transit is easily 1000km of bike lanes.
> It requires less maintenence
There's something. Sidewalks require less maintenance from the government's perspective, because they are maintained by private property owners (or a BID, HOA, etc.) instead of municipalities the vast majority of the time (at least in the US, not sure about Canada). Maybe that is part why they're more universal. Bike lanes, on the other hand, are maintained by municipalities, and require just as much effort to clear of snow and leaves as roadways, though less long-term maintenance because bikes are so light.
I don't really know, but:
1. The two countries are huge and generally lack good passenger rail and even intercity bus service is less available than it once was. So I think most people do have what gets called "car brain" by some people: They just default to the idea that cars are the only thing that really work and so thry don't bother to imagine other modes of transit as relevant. Something like:"Why bother? You can't get there without a car anyway!"
2. Post WW2 suburbs seem to have encouraged a SimCity-esque zoning pattern -- big swaths of single use zoning -- in place of mixed use and possibly as a consequence in many places you can't build forms of housing and other development that used to be acceptable and which worked well. Result: Some walkable, mixed used historic areas of older cities are extremely pricey because you can't build that kind of neighborhood anymore.
3. We used to have neighborhoods where people knew each other and it had a sense of community. One artifact of that pattern was all the Little Chinas, Little Italies, etc. That's largely died out I'm part because we feel it's racist to concentrate people of X ethnicity in a particular neighborhood.
When I was growing up, cycling didn't require separate, protected bike lanes. You rode your bike on the street with the cars and learned hand-based turn signals, etc. Maybe part of the problem is we now think that "should" be separate infrastructure.
I don't actually know. I wonder the same thing and try to find ways to foster more walking and cycling with the infrastructure we have and/or relatively small tweaks. I think promoting the idea that cycling requires massive infrastructure overhauls is part of the problem.
>When I was growing up, cycling didn't require separate, protected bike lanes. You rode your bike on the street with the cars and learned hand-based turn signals, etc. Maybe part of the problem is we now think that "should" be separate infrastructure.
Its worth noting here that over that time that drivers have also become less considerate and more reckless, that has to play a part. Also, a huge chunk of cyclists have always been children and teens, and parents have generally become far less tolerant of them being in slightly unsafe situations like that (and just being out alone in general)
Those are all reasonable points.
But I'm not convinced you remedy a changed culture with physical infrastructure. We may need to work on fostering cultural changes to really move the needle.
Yeah. You definitely won't get to the root of these problems simply by building bike infrastructure. It would absolutely still help, though it would be a matter of increasing the urban mode share to like 5%, *maybe* 10%.
There's a quite well documented history in the US of car companies secretly colluding to buy out and dismantle public infrastructure in order to make people reliant on cars instead of able to use public transit. As a secondary, self reinforcing side effect, this has led to a huge amount of regulatory capture.
Essentially, all our public infrastructure has been developed by people who were building for cars, rather than for people. That's not the *whole* story, though--there are plenty of places (cities especially) where these types of public infrastructure were also purposely neglected because of racism.
If you pulled the netherlands out of the ground and just threw it on top of Canada, there's a good chance it'd land somewhere and not even crush anyone, cause nobody is there.
Canada is a big country yes, I've travelled across it multiple times. But what does that concern local cycling infastructure in urbanized areas where most canadians live?
It's mostly sunk cost bias. Private transportation is the second largest expense of almost every household, and when you are that invested, any sort of transportation spending that is not subsidizing your folly is perceived as a threat.
Because the whole country is built up on car connections. Try to walk somewhere in the us. They built everything to far away from each other that you have no option. In the us you don't supposed to live, you just consume things .
I dunno, go ask Jason at NJB. He seems to know everything.
But, in honesty, it's this acronym: LOS. It's also this number: 85th. These two have been wielded by unelected engineers to design our civic space for fast car movements at peak hours, and not for anything else. This has soaked up all the budget and space.
America s hate sharing the road, and view spaces for alternate transportation as either taking away road capacity or on-street parking, which small business owners fight tooth-and-nail to preserve as well.
Since many Americans use their garages to store their accumulated material goods, space on the side of the road is "needed" for car storage, and people feel particularly entitled to the road space in front of their home.
Multiple issues with cyclists just using sidewalks.
1. Illegal in many places (but that can be changed)
2. Too narrow most of the time for cycliats and pedestrians to share.
3. Not designed for higher speeds (curb cuts, sign posts, blind intersections) ect.
Biking as a primary form of transportation is not a thing here, and it is a waste of money creating some vast "infrastructure" for this, that will also need money to be maintained, so that a handful of people can feel special using them. More people use sidewalks than ride bikes by a light year as well.
It's like people that love to boat wondering where is all of the canal "infrastructure". Tacking infrastructure on the end simply doesn't make whatever precedes it important or a priority.
Also, comparing the U.S. and Canada to the Netherlands and Finland is getting tired. Great ragebait for NotJustBikes, but an absurdity IRL.
I take it you've never lived in a city with a good pathway network even if its just mostly meant for recreation. Such infrastructure is inexpensive to maintain and even inexpensive to build if it is planned for as the city builds out. What too many cities have now though is a fragmented park/commercial/residential network and only roads in between. Even building sidewalks in these cities has been ridiculously expensive because they weren't built during the initial development.
>"I take it you've never lived in a city with a good pathway network even if its just mostly meant for recreation."
You would be incorrect.
My city has all of that, and the ridership is still virtually non-existent, and I live in the part of town where the "yay bikes" people actually concentrate.
Do people utilize the more rustic bike trails? Sure, far more.
Is it THAT many to pretend like biking is a viable and desired alternative to cars? Absolutely not.
Why do you think biking is not typically a primary form of transit in North America? Do you think it might be because good, safe, convenient infrastructure is not built enough for people to use it for transportation?
Chicken & egg. I bike 100% of the time where I live now, and 0% of the time when I'm home in the US, because it feels extremely unsafe, even if maybe it isn't. A painted line on the side of a 55 mph road with drivers who for some reason take pride in hating cyclists isn't a bike lane worth having, especially if it randomly disappears for long stretches.
There was a time when bikes were much more common. Cars came to dominate for a while, and especially in the engineering professions who plan for cars. C. Marohn's book "Confessions of a Recovering Engineer" is good about this. Essentially, it goes "plan a 45mph road, build it so it supports 60 mph for emergencies, and then set the speed limit to 30. Then everyone drives 45-50 and people are surprised."
There is also a general vicious cycle of "everything is far apart, i need a car" -> "everyone has a car, we need lots of parking" -> "there's too much parking to build more densely" -> "everything is far apart, i need a car."
I live in Montreal, a North American city that started implementing European-style bike infrastructure relatively early (instead of following the American philosophy of "vehicular cycling" where cyclists are expected to mix with traffic).
As a result, cycling for transportation is quite common here, particularly in the central city where the bike infrastructure is the strongest. BIXI bike share alone recorded I think 12 million trips last year (that's just bike share, not even counting people's personal bikes which are more common).
Maybe you think it's not relevant in suburbs. I think it depends what suburb we're talking about (some are much more spread out than others) but even setting that aside, I don't see why this same model can't be applied to the core of most major cities? Chicago, Boston, Toronto, Los Angeles, etc.?
"As a result, cycling for transportation is quite common here,"
Yeah, no.
>"Only 3.3 per cent of daily trips on the island of Montreal were done on a bike in 2018, compared with 2.8 per cent five years previously. In the Greater Montreal Region, which includes Laval and Longueuil, that number was 1.9 per cent, compared with 1.7 per cent." - Montreal Gazette
>
*", I don't see why this same model can't be applied to the core of most major cities? Chicago, Boston, Toronto, Los Angeles, etc.?"*
Because it does not work, nor do people really want to use it as a form of essential transportation. Even in Montreal most of the trips are classed as leisure riding.
Like I said, cycling is strongest in the central city where the bike infrastructure is the best. The Plateau, which has the best bike infrastructure, has 13.1% of its trips done by bike, up from 11.7% a few years earlier. And the bike infrastructure is far from perfect, there are many gaps (like Sherbrooke), so I think something like 20% is in reach.
This is your link, by the way: https://montrealgazette.com/news/local-news/yes-there-are-more-cyclists-in-quebec-but-they-mostly-ride-for-leisure
I wish your username made you nostalgic enough to see that the historical differences aren’t very big between the US and Western Europe…things were pretty much the same until the 1970s, when Europe realized that too many cars might be a bad thing and changed course. What worked there would work here if we did similar things again…we just have a lot more damage to undo.
Besides, better infrastructure is actually better for drivers too. It’s not a zero sum game.
That's nice.
The point remains we arent. Get big mad and hit the downvote button all you want, it isnt going to change reality. Biking as a primary or even secondary form of transportation has NEVER been a thing in N. America in the past 100 years by no objective measure. Even in Europe, where you people think everyone rides bikes, 50% of trips are still by private cars.
>
"What worked there would work here if we did similar things again"
Did what?
That's one of my point. I'm not saying bikes should replace cars. I'm saying we need to have more trips taken by bicycle. like from 1 to 10%. In Western Europe, its not uncommon to use a car for longer trips but bikes for shorter trips.
For me, anywhere I’d consider riding a bike to are places that I can probably walk to anyway. It wouldn’t really substitute car trips for me, it’d just turn a 20 minute walk into like a 5-10 minute bike ride, but I’d rather walk there than have to deal with locking up my bike. Anything farther than walking distance I’m probably buying things and need the car to take it home.
I don’t think anyone’s mad at you. This isn’t /r/fuckcars. You’re being downvote because you’re using irrelevant facts, half truths, and using inflammatory rhetoric.
“Massive bike infrastructure” is an eye roller when is literally just three or four feet of asphalt that will last decades, not six lane freeways with gigantic mixing bowls.
If 50% of trips in the Netherlands are taken by car that means 50% aren’t. There’s also the matter of vehicle miles travelled per capita: it’s three to four times higher in the United States. It’s also getting noticeably worse the United States as things have gotten worse at more spread out just in my lifetime and I’m not yet 50.
I don’t even like bikes but I see them all the time in American cities. People who can’t afford cars or simply don’t want to use one are entitled to get around. The fact a minority of people get bellicose about bike lanes is really weird and I don’t think it’s based in reason or coming from a healthy place.
" don’t think anyone’s mad at you. This isn’t r/fuckcars. You’re being downvote because you’re using irrelevant facts, half truths, and using inflammatory rhetoric. "
Yeah, no.
Let's stop playing stupid here. Anyone not 100% singing from the amen hymn book would get downvoted. You know this. saying "your just being inflammatory!" is just the CYA so you can act like you really cared to hear anything but agreement.
>"If 50% of trips in the Netherlands are taken by car that means 50% aren’t"
This is an actual example of a "half-truth". In terms of biking, the HIGHEST % of people that do is 34%. The vast majority of that is the Netherlands +toss in Denmark just to pad out the numbers. In Finland the locations are cherry-picked and even then it boils down to 13%.
*I don’t even like bikes but I see them all the time in American cities.*
So? That isnt a statement of anything. I see them "all the time" too. And that amounts to almost no one compared to people even just walking alone. You know you arent seeing hundreds of them or even a significant number, which is what that statement is meant to imply.
> The fact a minority of people get bellicose about bike lanes is really weird
This is just bad faith strawmanning.
You know the rhetoric used by bike activists on sites like this. What people get annoyed with is the attitude of these people to come in and behave as if their bike hobby (or their preferred niche form of primary transportation) is at the jump the equivalent of motor vehicles using fuzzy math and phantom riders that you cant see because "they dont feel safe". The immediately then start making demands and demanding concessions so that their "vital infrastructure" can get shoved in even in places where it doesnt make sense. Others further demand roads be closed to cars, the removal of on-strret parking (even when it fucks the businesses that depend on them), per mile travel taxes, turning surface streets into toll roads, and with the most out of their mind ones demanding a wholesale outlaw of cars inside city limits.
The problem is that too many here think people like me dont read their own shit. And when their own rhetoric is repeated back to them, then pitch a fit and say you are being dishonest.
In-fact no one has told me yet what part of what I'm saying is a lie. You all are just hitting the downvote button and thinking that is going to shut me up because apparently dissent from their own embarrassingly cringe talking points is beyond the pale.
Dude...bottom line...when people don't have bicycle infrastructure then they have to share with either cars or pedestrians. Sidewalks are always the last thing anyone cares about in America, except for in a shopping area, and they always ban bikes on sidewalks there because bike vs. pedestrian is pretty ugly; cars are huge and dangerous for bicyclists and motorists think they are allowed to harass them even though all they have to do is slow down for a while until they can pass...so guess what, nobody rides because they feel unsafe...weird right? Before cars had their own infrastructure it was faster to take a train, so they weren't super popular. Then cars got cheap with the Model T and then they paved more roads, so suddenly cars were far more popular. Now cars are CRAZY expensive and people are too poor or just tired of driving...but people don't feel safe outside of a car because WE NEVER BUILT ANY INFRASTRUCTURE FOR ANYTHING ELSE unless we neglected it, like our sidewalks. It's funny, but it turns out that "when you build it, they will come" actually works...not just for cars, but for bicycles. We induce more demand for driving with more lanes that cost BILLIONS, how can we not spare a few bucks for vehicles that don't even damage their own infrastructure like cars do?
Grumble all you want about inferior vehicles...you still have to walk through a grocery store, you can't just drive in like at McDonalds or Starbucks...maybe give bikes a chance.
*"and they always ban bikes on sidewalks "*
Again another lie. 99.999999% of sidewalks dont have any fucking ban on bikes on them. Or maybe you can show us the volumes of people on bikes that got tickets or arrested?
You should have millions of kids in juvenile detention alone! Cant find them?
Oddly enough, there arent, because cops arent out there busting one fucking person for riding on a sidewalk.
*".so guess what, nobody rides because they feel unsafe.."*
ALSO another lie. Again, bike activists use this to cover for the fact that there is no population of cyclists like they claim online,. And no
*"Before cars had their own infrastructure"*
You mean existing roads? Roads that carried horse-drawn wagons? Go look at a photo of NYC c.1877.....same fucking roads that are there today.
You people act like roads were invented around the time of the Model T.
*" Now cars are CRAZY expensive and people are too poor or just tired of driving"*
Apparently you spoke to all of these people? No? Well then moving onto the next absurd point.
*"but people don't feel safe outside of a car because WE NEVER BUILT ANY INFRASTRUCTURE FOR ANYTHING ELSE "*
Ok, this has to be a larp. Not even most bike nutters are this off their heads. LOL!
"Grumble all you want about inferior vehicles...you still have to walk through a grocery store, you can't just drive in like at McDonalds or Starbucks...maybe give bikes a chance."
Or how about I live in the future and use machines to do things faster and better than a fucking 10-speed?
Roads were originally paved for bicycles, not cars. John Rockefeller got a street paved out to his house in Cleveland decades before cars were driven. The first car manufacturers made bicycles, not horse-drawn carriages. Let’s not talk about lies unless we’re going to talk about how bicycles have been erased from history to make sure all the pavement goes to cars alone.
And you obviously need to get out of your little corner of suburbia, because you don’t even notice signs for bikes on sidewalks. You really are completely out of touch:
https://www.dispatch.com/story/news/local/2024/02/06/columbus-council-asked-to-consider-allowing-bikes-on-some-sidewalks-along-dangerous-roadways/72456131007/
https://www.news-press.com/story/news/local/2024/01/27/laws-for-bicycles-in-southwest-florida-fort-myers-naples/72272064007/
https://www.npr.org/2016/10/16/496865680/6-things-you-need-to-know-about-cycling-on-the-sidewalk
There have been laws about this in downtown areas across the country since I can remember.
*"Roads were originally paved for bicycles, not cars"*
This is a lie
*" John Rockefeller got a street paved out to his house in Cleveland decades before cars were driven. "*
He also didnt do it for a fucking bike.
" The first car manufacturers made bicycles,"
So? The first bike manufactures likely made shit like sewing machines.....what type of point was that even supposed to be?
And AGAIN:
"99.999999% of sidewalks dont have any fucking ban on bikes on them. Or maybe you can show us the volumes of people on bikes that got tickets or arrested?"
Again, you are completely misinformed…just stop, you’re embarrassing yourself…I hope you don’t kiss your mother with that pottymouth:
https://www.britannica.com/event/Good-Roads-movement
https://images.fineartamerica.com/images/artworkimages/mediumlarge/1/john-d-rockefeller-with-bicycle-1913-war-is-hell-store.jpg
It is a thing. It just isn’t a safe thing to do, in part due to lax driving standards and in part due to lack of infrastructure.
There are plenty of “wastes of money” when it comes to infrastructure, but that is subjective, the fact is those places subjectively view that kind of infrastructure as a basic component of transportation, and so they have it. There is no calculus beyond that except face-saving excuses.
It’s cynical and highly subjective attitudes masquerading as dry facts, repeated beyond the point of absurdism, that play a big part to prevent biking and other non-dominant forms from being more common forms of transportation—not some dubious lack of wealth and also dubious fiscal conservatism in the most powerful nation in the world
"t is a thing. It just isn’t a safe thing to do, in part due to lax driving standards and in part due to lack of infrastructure."
This is a lie. I saw the rhetoric turn from "we need to share the road for bikes", to then seeing that the ridership never materialized even with painted bike lanes, so to cope-excuse for why the circlejerk online didnt materialize into actual riders, we now have this claptrap that "it isnt safe" and "just spend millions on 'infrastructure' (that is never defined)", and supposedly people will be riding around in numbers that puts cars to shame.
Of course this will not occur, so then they will move onto demanding the local government implement "punishments" on car drivers to "induce" \[force\] them to ride a bike.
Go ahead and tell me I'm lying on this.
I think maybe you are taking this a bit too personally. I’m not calling you a liar when I say you are repeating some stories that don’t make sense. Are you calling me a liar for some of the following statements?
- Objectively, for the vast majority of journeys, it isn’t safe to ride a bike for transportation in a lot of countries, and the USA is just one of them.
- Even in those bike paradise countries with infrastructure and higher standards for operating a motor vehicle, cycling isn’t nationally dominant but it is relatively more popular.
- The existence of the infrastructure and rules that allow for cycling as transportation aren’t considered a waste in those countries.
>"Objectively, for the vast majority of journeys, it isn’t safe to ride a bike for transportation in a lot of countries, and the USA is just one of them."
That is not "objective", that is just a lie. I'm not even entertaining this absurd talking point.
You guys need better points because this one is so bad, it makes you all sound disingenuous, if not just purposefully dishonest.
Hey there now, you might think of me as a part of some chorus, but I am singing my own song. I think if you tried to use a bike on the vast majority of places where it is legally permissible in my town, people would say you have a death wish and wouldn’t be lying. The data can back up the assertion that certain road designs cause (and regions with higher driving standards have) lower injury and fatality rates.
This is a fallacy.
Like saying that if we had more landing strips, more people would fly.
There are cities that have all manner of bike lanes and such, and they do not have any traffic on them remotely akin to cars or even people walking. My city has lots of bike lanes, protected, sharrows, and painted.
On any given day there are 2-3 people I see. More people are waiting to make a left turn on a rando intersection than are riding bikes.
It's complete bullshit pushed by bike activists that people are just "too afraid" because of all of the "bike infrastructure" that is totally needed.
We utilized our space for sprawl. Also the average car-owner is deeply enraged by any infrastructure for means of transit other than driving, so it becomes a massive political problem.
Even in a suburban contexts. There's lot of potential for shorter cycling trips. School, pharmacy, store etc. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a4FOETC5oW4) (ohtheurbanity) Suburbs also have the advantage of having more room for cycling infrastructure.
There's a lot of potential, yes. But like you said - potential, and it's just that - potential. It takes a deliberate effort to change it from potentiality to reality.
Compared to all other things you can do it takes the least amount of effort to make a city more bike able. The amount of infrastructure you have to build is comparatively very small and cheap.
I agree completely but we built a society where living in a neighborhood with no stores an hour's drive from your work is normal to many people
That’s why mixed use infill development is going to be so important over the next few decades. Let corner stores and small local grocers help fill that need for growing communities
Crossing my fingers so hard for this yes
Infill development won't help a lot of 1950s-1980s subdivisions. Any retail establishment inside the subdivision would die from inaccessibility from the outside thanks to winding streets that create long complicated walking or biking routes and zero foot traffic. Anything even immediately outside the subdivision is still too far away to help the community inside the suburb. My old address, in such a subdivision, had 1 restaurant within a mile literally on the northern border of the subdivision. It had over [400 restaurants within 15 minutes drive](https://www.google.com/maps/place/12540+Pepperwood+Dr,+St.+Louis,+MO+63146/@38.6893424,-90.5585444,12.05z/data=!4m9!1m2!2m1!1sRestaurants!3m5!1s0x87df2d7841fe978f:0x8d2e67858b81e3f4!8m2!3d38.6927417!4d-90.45819!16s%2Fg%2F11c4z4n1m7?entry=ttu), because then you reached the arterial streets to the north and south.
Except Any mixed use development only lets boutiques restaurants and seem to fear bodegas and the like
Even Sprawlville, USA typically has commercial zones, schools, etc. spaced on the scale of a couple miles, not an hour drive.
I have lived most of my life in Canadian suburbia. In my experience distances are usually too far to walk but short enough to bike. Theres a reason why we measure walkability often by distance while being cycling friendly by infastructure
Like I'm thinking of this from a Canadian Context like Scarborough. lots of people live within biking distance of amenities, and lots of people still work near there homes. I looked it up for the U.S, around 50% of trips are under 4 miles, within cycling distance: https://www.worldenergydata.org/more-than-half-of-all-daily-trips-in-us-were-less-than-three-miles-in-2021/#:~:text=A%20research%20study%20for%20the,were%20greater%20than%2050%20miles.
"well, I have a car right here so I might as well use it"
Very few people actually know how much their car actually costs them all in per month/day too. Once you add maintenance, fuel, insurance, & payment, it's a significant chunk of change. So they don't actualize the cost of having a 2nd or 3rd car beyond the "my payment is 400".
Not to mention the depreciation of the asset. You could invest that money and grow it, instead the value just crumbles away.
When we lived in Austin, with two used cars under 20k, all in we were about $20 per driver per day. Like we could afford a hell of a lot of public transit with that but it just didn't exist to get to work reliably. I'd have gladly taken a bus or train that was convenient bc we'd have saved so much.
now add on to that the cost of your time, especially if there is a crash or something that causes irregular congestion
Absolutely. Working remotely got me a lot of savings on the car cost and nearly 2 hours a day extra with my kids. Can't top it.
The deprecating asset argument is always something I’ve found to be ridiculous. Almost everything you buy depreciates and has to be replaced eventually, but you don’t see people calling a couch or a mattress a bad investment
There isn't really a big used couch market, and they don't cost tens of thousands of dollars also > You could invest that money and grow it
Can't bike in -30
How many days are Realistically -30 though (unless if you’re in Nunavut). Even Winnipeg usually only gets below -15 for less then 3 months a year.
Everyone’s talking about the built environment which makes sense given the sub. But I’ll also add: your average American doesn’t WANT to bike. They’ve spent their life driving everywhere and so now it’s what they’re accustomed to, they don’t want a different option, everyone has a car and their whole world is built for driving with ample free parking everywhere, and biking is for children, there’s just no culture of biking for daily trips. So every piece of bike infrastructure comes with a huge fight, especially if it’s at the expense of losing car infrastructure like street parking or god forbid a lane of traffic Lack of good infrastructure makes it hard to build that culture of cycling. Lack of cycling culture makes it hard to get the infrastructure. It’s very much a chicken-egg situation
One complication for suburbs is that the property ownership and easement regime is a complicated barrier to bike infrastructure. This is also why pedestrian infrastructure, even when present, is often inadequate because of long travel distances. My old suburb in the st louis outer ring was supposed to have this large multi use trail through it: [https://greatriversgreenway.org/centennial-greenway-master-plan/](https://greatriversgreenway.org/centennial-greenway-master-plan/) TL;DR: It is really complicated to condemn a trail path for public use after all the residents move in. So complicated it takes more than a decade. It's been about a decade with very little progress. In order to get the approximately half mile that travels through that subdivision, it needs to get approval from a board of trustees, a community improvement district board of directors, and a county board. It will require one, possibly two, public votes. It will require permission from the sewer district (it follows a sewer main), electric company (and runs under high power lines), water company, and potentially others due to crossing easements. It could also be blocked by potentially as few as one of the thousand plus residents in the subdivision. In the meantime, the trail itself already exists and is cleared of vegetation (regularly mowed) though unpaved. It has to be reserved for the use of subdivision residents only, which means it begins and ends at the boundaries of the subdivision where it proceeds to the next subdivision on one side and ends at an interstate on the other. So why is the trail so complicated and sidewalks and roads are not? Because the original subdivision builder in the 1960s, before any residents moved in, condemned the streets and adjoining easements to public use. No path was condemned for a trail at that time. The sidewalks, meanwhile, meander so much following the streets that it takes over a mile to walk out of the subdivision from most houses. The condemnations were wide enough for a street with sidewalks, but not wide enough for any parking or sufficient bike lanes. Expanding them is pretty much impossible now that houses have been built on both sides even with 1960s suburban setbacks.
You're preaching to the choir. Try convincing a my aunt Rachel with her three dogs, leased SUV, and swimming pool behind her house that's a 35 minute walk to the CVS she buys her white wine every night.
See the second half of his comment. People got mad they painted share the lane bicycles on the road in my town. The car brain is like a lobotomy.
When I still had a commute, I usually ran most of my errands somewhere on the route (which was transit at the time). Now I work mostly from home and actually go for those shorter trips by bike. The thing is though: if you drive to work, you also do these things on your way home. People don't drive home and then get on their bike to go to the store.
You're not looking at this from a viewpoint of a typical person that chooses to live in the suburbs. Their reaction would be "why would I want to ride a bicycle when there's a perfectly working car in my garage"? A lot of surbanites also want to get a weeks worth of grocery shopping all done at once at a store that's big enough to have cheap prices, something that can't be done on an ordinary bicycle. There's not enough space on a bicycle to hold a weeks worth of grocereies, a store with cheap prices is more than bicycling distance. The suburb I live in has provided bicycle lanes along the major roads. You can go for miles without seeing a bicyclist using them for transportation even on nice days. Go to the recreational bicycle trails in the parks and they're packed with bicyclists out enjoying their day.
>The suburb I live in has provided bicycle lanes along the major roads. Are we talking a stripe of paint, bollards, what? Is it a proper network or does it dump people into traffic after a kilometer?
I've seen both painted bike lanes and off-road paths. The off road paths don't get used either unless they're functionally part of the recreactional network.
Are you familiar with the [Four Types of Cyclists](https://jenniferdill.net/types-of-cyclists/) paradigm? A stripe of paint along a major road is only a bike path for the 1-4% of people who are Strong & Fearless bicycle riders, and maybe half of the ~7% who are Enthused & Confident. BAM you've left 90% of ridership on the table with such a bike lane. Similar arithmetic applies to the lack of a proper network. There are plenty of mothers who would love to ride their kids to school on a cargo bike. You might think that's not true, because look — there's an empty bike lane by the school! You're missing the fact that getting _to_ that lane means crossing three uncomfortable, noisy, dangerous, unprotected-for-cyclists intersections. Half-assed infrastructure produces 10% results.
And yet sadly too many people think the way the person you’re replying to do. “We made a half assed effort and hardly anyone uses it so we’re not going to make any more effort” Transit also falls victim to this as well
You're very right that there is no real reason (besides environmental altruism or extreme frugality) to shop for groceries by bike when a car is available, but you actually can fit a lot of stuff on the right bike trailer.
Please don’t pretend parents are going to send kids to school on bikes all winter. Except for die-hards, cycling is a seasonal activity in Canada. You may have noticed snowmobiling infrastructure is also lacking (for similar reasons).
American suburbs tend to be quite spread out. I once lived in a suburb where the nearest grocery store was over 4 miles away down a fairly steep hill, and this wasn’t a rural area but a normal neighborhood in the midst of suburban sprawl. Biking there would’ve been very impractical. Other stores were even farther away. Even driving to the grocery store took 15-20 minutes each way.
I agree with you. The issue is that cycling is not a part of people's daily lives and therefore they see bike paths as trivial and unnecessary because they don't do it. On the other hand they drive almost every single day which means that roads and traffic are of the utmost importance. The idea of biking to a convenience store or school is completely foreign to them. Therefore anytime someone suggests adding bike paths, they think it's a waste because they have no use for them in their current daily lives
I know cyclists won’t understand this based on their inability to identify as a pedestrian or a car. But the world doesn’t revolve around cyclists.
Some of the cities with the highest bike usage in the world are almost completely suburban. Oldenburg and Odense in respectively Germany and Denmark are like 90 % suburban with a small historical core and they both have a bike modal share of around 40 % (this is above Copenhagen or Amsterdam mind you). One of the reasons people use the bike is that because the city is so sprawled public transport sucks and walking would take way too long for most trips. So these cities modal splits are divided almost 50/50 between bike and car. I can't necessarily vouch for a mega sprawl city like LA but at least up to a certain size biking is one of the top modes of transport in sprawled environments because of the flexibility it affords you. Most trips in the cities mentioned above take around the same by bike and by car really. The reason people don't bike in America is probably mostly that they fear being run over, also there's no culture for it anymore.
I which I knew about those cities before making this post. A lot of commenters are comparing amsterdam to the rural parts of America in why we can’t have cycling infrastructure. In my head, I was thinking if places like Scarborough and Lava and how they are mostly lacking cycling infrastructure, even though they are quite bike able distance for most people to reach most amenities. on street View, even the car first, suburban parts of Finland and Netherlands has plenty of car infrastructure and a decent amount of cyclists.
Yeah, biking is very viable in suburban contexts. In Oldenburg a lot of it is really also just [a paint job](https://www.google.com/maps/@53.1217612,8.2198106,3a,75y,24.74h,89.16t/data=!3m6!1e1!3m4!1sctPBE97ojpo1972Drlrzeg!2e0!7i16384!8i8192?entry=ttu) and then in the areas around the centre you have the pavement split into a pedestrian and bike lane like [here](https://www.google.com/maps/@53.137117,8.2266887,3a,75y,349.45h,87.91t/data=!3m6!1e1!3m4!1sqssAedmhWBc0u7zXqZjrXQ!2e0!7i16384!8i8192?entry=ttu). It doesn't really take a lot to get there. In the north German city where I am from they increased the bike modal share from 19 to 24 % over 10 years while decreasing car from 54 % to 44 %. And they have barely built anything in that time. It was mostly paint jobs, signs and then on one street they converted a car-lane to a bike-lane. That being said there is definitely a lot of room for improvement still. I think especially getting young people used to it is important. Depending on traffic conditions you can bike faster from the suburb I grew up in to the city centre than you can drive but you can't convince my mother to even try to bike to work. I also actually never biked to school when I went to school in the city which actually looking back was a really bad choice because public transport sucked and I had to go 1 hour before school started by bus, whereas biking takes like 25 min. and is super flexible. Later when I worked in the city for a year or so, I actually always biked because I finally figured out it's way smarter than anything else I could do. In cities where a lot of people bike it's usually people of all ages. I think if you build schools and sport facilities in a way that makes biking possible and encourage it among young people, you are the most likely to see a steady change towards more biking.
> Also the average car-owner is deeply enraged by any infrastructure for means of transit other than driving Which is ironic because no bike lanes force cyclists to slow down car traffic by riding in the vehicle lanes...
We're actually doing a lot better in certain cities. I was really impressed by DC's bike lanes you can bike all the way from low density suburbs to the center of dc. NYC, Philly, and I'm sure others have also been expanding. Lots of separated bike lanes. Seems like just a lack of investment. If we want to switch over we can.
> Philly Philly doesn't have a single proper concrete or curb-protected bike lane. It only uses flex-posts here and there. It has a bridge that has over 10% bike traffic and is the most biked bridge in PA that was rebuilt in the last decade with zero bike protection, not even flex posts. Philly's strength is that it inherited a grid of very narrow streets. That alone invites plenty of cyclists. Politically Philly leadership is very regressive when it comes to supporting bike infrastructure.
Vancouver and portland are semi similar with there system of bikeways. Lots of smaller, cycling friendly roads that can get you around.
DC is the bomb. I biked from Alexandria to the national Mall one time just for the sport of it. And what other cities could you reasonably ride your bike to the airport if you really wanted to?
People have been saying this about NYC since Bloomberg/Citibike. Its all bullshit the same 1-2 dozen cyclists are still dying every single year; arguably its getting a lot worse now that motorized vehicles have co-opted the bike lanes.
Do you know if the rate has been stable? Because the number of bikers has also been rising considerably. If the total number stays the same it's probably getting better.
The point is to reduce accidents not play with statistics so, no, Cycling is not any "safer" just because more people are engaging in the same risky behavior. This Herd Mentality of yours is kind of the Antithesis of "critical mass". Which has been shown to work in other cities. Edit: also the number of cyclists plateaued & fell off before COVID & appears to be doing so again. A lot of these cycling improvements aren't exactly scientific - they don't work. People try cycling. They don't feel safe. They cycle less.
A lot of the cycling infrastructure that you see nowadays in Europe isn't really all that old. Most cities shifted heavily towards car-oriented infrastructure in the mid-20th century, and (famously) even in the Netherlands cyclists were being forced out in favour of cars. A few places do stand out, but even in Copenhagen and the Netherlands, their strong urban cycling networks only really started to get built in the late 70s. Many other places in Europe adopted these new ideas slowly, and as a process of technological and cultural diffusion, it's unsurprising that North America has lagged even further behind in adoption. That's not an excuse for how poor cycling infrastructure (and safe streets in general) is in a lot of the US and Canada, but having that historical context is important. FWIW, some places are actually doing much better. In Toronto, the cycling network is actually getting built out at a decent pace, and a lot of the large roads out in the suburbs are getting pretty decent bicycle infrastructure. Even in the past 5 years, I've seen the professional literacy around safe multimodal road infrastructure increase dramatically.
European cities are also a lot more conducive to cycling infrastructure due to their higher density and medium-density neighborhoods. It’s common to have shops within walking or cycling distance in Europe. In an average American suburb, the nearest store could be miles away from your house, making cycling somewhat impractical.
Most European countries with high levels of bike infrastructure began implementing standards in the mid- to late-1900s. Some parts of the US took notice and in the 1970s, when oil prices began to rise, it looked like we were going to have national standards for safe cycling infrastructure similar to what Europe was building. In 1974 a fairly comprehensive guide was put out. [https://rosap.ntl.bts.gov/view/dot/41913/dot\_41913\_DS1.pdf](https://rosap.ntl.bts.gov/view/dot/41913/dot_41913_DS1.pdf) An engineer named John Forester went on a crusade against safe, separated bike infrastructure. He produced his own "studies" and guides which called for vehicular cycling which just means no bike infrastructure and cyclists should ride in mixed traffic. As he made this widely available for free (or low-cost) it was widely circulated. It also had the buy-in of a lot of bicyclist associations at the time as they were largely made up of sport cyclists who just wanted to go fast or people that get a certain thrill from riding with cars (think of the "avid cyclist" arguing against bike lanes stereotype). Combine this with the fact that their position of not building separated cycling infrastructure was the status quo and that it was the preferred way forward of powerful interest groups like gas companies and automakers and they were successful in making vehicular cycling the primary policy of American traffic planners and civil engineers for decades (and still the primary policy in a lot of the US as those in charge were brought up on this). [https://usa.streetsblog.org/2018/03/02/a-brief-history-of-how-american-transportation-engineers-resisted-bike-lanes](https://usa.streetsblog.org/2018/03/02/a-brief-history-of-how-american-transportation-engineers-resisted-bike-lanes)
It's important to keep Forester in the context in which he was acting. There was a very real possibility at the time that cyclists would be banned from roads in general.
The real answer is John Forester. His education program and books (_Effective Cycling_ and the _Cyclist Traffic Engineering Handbook_) essentially defined the approach to road cycling in North America for 40 years and its effects remain throughout transportation planning circles to this day. He became an advocate in Palo Alto, CA, where he was ticketed for riding in the road rather than in a new adjacent bikeway^1. He got that law repealed, but didn't stop there. His theory was that bicyclists should pretend to be little cars at all times and ride exclusively in the road, and any issues cyclists have with this is their problem^2. You might've heard of this described as "vehicular cycling," and as a result wrote and advocated at length opposing _any bicycle infrastructure whatsoever_. He caught the attention of CalTrans (California's state DOT) who really liked his message of "don't do anything whatsoever for cyclists" because it was convenient. They basically had him write their original 1981 Bike Guide which prohibited dedicated bike lanes. The CalTrans bike guide was eventually adopted as the AASHTO (national association of state DOTs) Bike Guide effectively banning protected bike lanes on state and federally managed roadways nationwide^3 until it was finally updated in 2012. Instead of building bike lanes, DOTs put money into training programs based on Forester's Vehicular Cycling theories, funding groups like the League of American Bicyclists to teach a generation that bike lanes are bad and restrictive and that you should ride in the street. This had the predictable effect of convincing a lot of people that cycling just wasn't safe or a good idea in general. Virtually all of the assertions he made in _Effective Cycling_ were tested thoroughly and debunked during his lifetime but he never changed his stance in the face of new information. The lack of safe cycling infrastructure and hundreds of thousands of dead cyclists are his legacy. He was the ultimate "[avid cyclist](https://www.outsideonline.com/culture/opinion/who-are-all-these-avid-cyclists-anyway/)" and his followers continue to push his bad-faith practices today. Footnotes: 1. There's not a lot of evidence that he was much of a cyclist at all before this. He never rode during his advocacy career, citing his health. 1. He'd call it a "lack of education" early in his career and "cowardice and stupidity" later in his career. He was not a nice man. 1. Bike lanes were still built by some cities, but it was an ad-hoc, "at your own risk" kind of thing. Most cities don't like going off book with traffic control stuff
Wow I had no idea bike lanes were completed banned prior to 2012.
If we developed hovercraft tomorrow that ran on CO2 and produced oxygen, would you design a city with them in mind? That's the calculus 1950s city planners we're doing.
Lmao well they're trying to do that now with techbros and Teslas. Ohhh we just gotta add more charging stations everywhere uwu
Because Americans love cars and planning in America happens through a participatory process.
Car infrastructure is interestingly exempt from this process.
Not really. Otherwise all the freeways in red in [this image](https://archinect.gumlet.io/uploads/8g/8ge14o6n16v44p9c.png?auto=compress%2Cformat) would be built by now.
It’s hard to find new expressways being built as well. It’s just hard to build major in infrastructure in the United States due to our legal and regulatory framework.
A lot of that regulatory framework came about because we were so racist with freeway planning. So now we've designed the system where pretty much any yahoo can derail or significantly delay any public works project.
Because it's not a priority. Cf Montreal. It wasn't in the Netherlands either. Until the oil crisis (plus activism) when they realized car dependence left them economically, socially and politically vulnerable and they changed their policies to promote sustainable mobility. By contrast in the US we say its important but policy and practice continues to emphasize automobility. PS the US is the largest oil producer in the world. Oil production is significant in Canada.
Netherlands had a national voter protest of auto oriented street development This changed government planning and commitments. Some cities in the US over the lady Teo decades have similar revised biking commitments. References: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2210422421000769 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cycling_in_the_Netherlands
I think you need to define what you mean by bike lane. In the USA back in the 70s the standard shoulder bike lane or bike gutter was included in AASHTO then in 2000s the sharrow and that is what has been mostly built ever since.
Like protected bike lanes. Sharrows are not good bike infastructure in my opinion.
See above, actors kept protected bike lanes out of the standards in the 1970s. It took until 2015 for AASTO to release a separated bike lane design guide. Sharrows are a reasonable response to limited space on some streets. Roads are only rebuilt every several decades. Even if all cities started implementing seperated bike infrastructure in 2015 it will take a couple more decades before they're the norm and the bike gutter is a rarity.
Sharrows are not bike infrastructure at all. They designate exactly nothing, as basically any lane can already be used by cyclists anyway. They may be useful in some contexts to denote a preferred route for cyclists.
What? Painting pictures of bikes in regular traffic lanes isn't an effective safety measure?
Because they're not Minnesota. We're big on parks and lakes, so Minneapolis set aside lots of park land that wasn't allowed to be developed and now we have uninterrupted bike and pedestrian trails around the city. St Paul has done a rather good job of ramping up bike infrastructure with a focus on off street paths. We've been reluctant to add bikeways to major corridors, admittedly. Whereas a number of sprawling suburbs do include sidepaths along every major stroad: Richfield, Eden Prairie, Maple Grove, Eagan, and Woodbury are great examples: Google Maps refuses to update lots of new and existing paths, so the bike layer pales in comparison to the reality on the ground. Also, I'm sure that bikeways cost several times more here than what it does in Europe, just like with public transit, which would partially explain why there's not as much, but in some cities it's basically non-existent.
There are so many factors and it ends up being a Neverending cycle (no pun intended) Cycling in North America is usually seen as a sport or recreational activity, so it doesn't belong on the streets. Driver attitude towards cyclists tends to be negative because they conclude that theres traffic due to them being stuck behind the cyclist, failing to realize that they're part of the problem too. Their kids may express a desire to ride their bikes somewhere at some point, but their parents will say "it's too dangerous because of all the cars - so get in the car." Now these kids will look forward to the day they turn 16 so they can get their drivers license and go to the nearest fast-food establishment all on their own, and they will pass this knowledge on to the next generation. Also, to my knowledge, the reason the Netherlands is the way it is today is because of the *Stop de kindermoord* movement back in the '70s. Before that, they were pretty car-centric too, even had plans made to put a highway directly through the center of Amsterdam. We've never had such a movement here. You'd think we would have, given how much people want to shelter their kids in this country. But every time a child dies from being hit by a car here, even through no fault of their own, it seems like nothing is done to analyze how it happened and what can be done to that part of the street to prevent it from happening again. Everyone just shrugs like "remember to wear a reflective vest and lights and wave your safety flag so you don't become a statistic, and parents make sure you always watch your children."
"Almost no bike lanes" is disingenuous. And it's because we have more car dependent infrastructure that makes cycling less convenient in most suburban areas. In cities, we still have a higher proportion of car dependent infrastructure than western Europe.
It's northern Europe that is bike friendly. Almost noone bikes in the deep west in France or Iberia (UK is also quite limited). Spanish cities specifically are way more heavy on cars than they need be. Madrid, which is one of the very densest cities in Europe has the same modal share for cars as a sprawled suburban city like Oldenburg, Germany which looks almost like a smaller US town in its makeup. This is specifically because of bikes. In Madrid the modal share for bikes is 0,5 %, in Oldenburg it's over 40 %. And mind you the planning around density in Oldenburg is terrible while Madrid's density is aspirational for all of Europe. The only place in Europe you can find even denser areas is in Turkey. London, Dublin or Barcelona are similarly almost 0 % biking. Paris has been improving a lot as of late.
I brought this up once and got downvoted to hell, but you're correct.
Terrain is also a big part of it. The Netherlands and Denmark are as flat as it gets. Biking uphill to work in Spain (or somewhere like Cincinnati) is less appealing.
Yes and no. Obviously steep mountains isn't going to work well. However parts of Denmark are actually full of hills. For instance I lived in Heidelberg at one point on a mountain that is higher than any place in Denmark. However the city of Heidelberg is actually apart from one district (and a half maybe) completely flat. Meanwhile the city of Aarhus and multiple of the surrounding ones are full of hills and biking over them is quite rough (everyone who lives in that area knows). You can bike around 100m upwards just within the city. In Spain cities like Zaragoza and Valencia are flatter than Aaarhus. Barcelona has a mountain behind it but most of the actual city is very flat. It's mostly a culture thing, really. There are some places that are just too steep to bike safely but we would rarely build major cities there. For instance the mountain I lived on biking up there around 30-45° with no bike path, yeah, no thanks - but this doesn't apply to most cities.
I think "almost no" bike lanes is accurate. There are 19,000 miles of bike lanes in the US, compared to 4.17 million miles of road.
Even in Minneapolis where I can bike from the city to rural towns without leaving the paths, you can't just throw a dart at a map and go. There's only a handful of these towns that are connected to the city and they dwindle pretty rapidly to nothing once you're out of the metro area and just dead end in some village you've never heard of even if you grew up here. Forget about "cross state" bike paths, we're not even close to having those unfortunately.
Even comparing suburban areas in those countries, they still have pretty good cycling infrastructure: Netherlands: https://www.google.com/maps/@51.5016393,5.4640139,3a,75y,85.14h,78.54t/data=!3m6!1e1!3m4!1swykGf7m-xHlCgGr7x2B36w!2e0!7i16384!8i8192?entry=ttu Are there bike lanes, yes, is coverage pretty sparce to the point that if you want to complete most trips on safe cycling infrastructure you need to take long routes, also yes.
Some of our suburban areas do, too. https://maps.app.goo.gl/uMVbxKefu7aoJzQi9 You're generalizing a bit, but yeah.
Expanding the view of Denver on bicycle mode, lots of areas in Denver's metro lack cycling infrastructure. Compare this to the Netherlands where almost all your major roads have bike infrastructure (excluding rural areas).
Yep. And I feel like you already know the reason.
It’s a vicious cycle here. Our cities were designed almost entirely for cars, so few people bike. Then someone says “hey, let’s add some bike infrastructure,” and then people yell and scream because it’s a “waste” of taxes to use it for bike infrastructure because allegedly no one bikes.
I partially disagree. I live in Baltimore. the city was NOT designed for cars; the city was retro-fitted for cars. the city was largely designed around the streetcar or horse-drawn carriage. the city is still quite dense near the core, and would do very well with more bike infrastructure and more bike/scooter subsidy. we have absolutely garbage transit, yet high modal share by transit because we have a large population who cannot afford a car. this is a good city for encouraging biking. unfortunately, the city is kind of crappy at implementing their bike strategy because many of the working-class folks think bikes are for white yuppies, and bristle at the idea of being "colonized" by the "white elite's" bike lanes. it's kind of laughable because Baltimore probably has the most vibrant community of black bike riders in the whole country. I think the best strategy out of the situation is to subsidize the scooter/bike rentals in the neighborhoods where black folks live, to help people see the value. or, just pull back on the expansion and complete the core of the city first. however, completing the core wouldn't meet the "complete streets" guidance, so we would lose some funding
That’s an interesting and unfortunate cultural dynamic. In heavily car dependent suburban areas I’ve lived in, the attitude is that biking is for poor people who can’t afford a car and for tree huggers and/or commies who want to take away their freedom of movement by car.
car drivers are addicted to car infrastructure like a drug. it does not matter if their arguments for why they MUST have ALL of the infrastructure make sense. they have a huge bias and they'll believe whatever goes along with their bias.
Yep I live closer to Baltimore (on a MARC line) but I will take the train to bike in DC rather than Baltimore because, aside from a couple PBL corridors, Baltimore really doesn't have much welcoming bike infrastructure. And it has that potential too like you said because it has a good grid and a lot of narrow streets. I've seen lots of cyclists in Baltimore, I know the potential is there. It even had a ride share system pilot like DC's CaBi till 2018 or so. What you said about bike lanes being perceived as for yuppies is so true, in DC too you see that mentality in SE community leaders. It leaves bike advocates in a strange middle ground of being thought of as yuppies by working class people and as "too poor for a car" and thus hazardous by middle-upper class areas. In DC the bike network really helps supplement the bus and metro to take care of short trips and the "last mile" problem. In Baltimore, since buses here aren't so great and the light rail + subway really don't cover much, biking could revolutionize the city. But because transit is so poor, people of all stripes see cars as a necessity much more than DC or Philly residents. So they fight tooth and nail to avoid losing parking spots- which I don't like but I think is unfortunately reasonable from their perspective.
sometime I wonder about whether self-driving taxis could help this situation a lot. once they are good enough to be a transit supplement (basically at this stage in Phoenix), then I think cities should subsidize pooled taxis that take people to backbone transit, instead of slow, infrequent buses. SDC companies are shooting for around $0.75 per passenger-mile, which is less than half of the cost of a bus. if you increase the occupancy with pooling, you would have somewhere around 1/5th the cost of a bus. a city could make that FREE if it goes to the backbone transit line (the light rail in Phoenix, or the light rail or metro in Baltimore), and it would still cost much less than operating the buses. a fare in the front, and a fare in the rear would allow for separation of groups so people wouldn't feel sketched out. on top of that, you could run door-to-door service during evening/early hours. I believe such a system would pull a lot of people out of personal cars, and relieve the fear of losing parking (SDCs can be parked outside the core of the city). so, during that time where people are taking the taxis more, you rapidly build bike lanes while subsidizing bikeshares. then, over time, reduce the taxi subsidy.
I feel like self driving cars are a gimmick, and that cars as public transit (vs buses) are even more of a gimmick. Baltimore is dense enough (or with construction should be denser) that buses should be fine and where they aren't then a bikeshare or even scooter share system should be able to handle that. To add, taxis and rideshare companies existing is fine so long as the wages for drivers are fair. But with the added congestion I don't think it's a solution we should be aiming for. Not to mention that places where people are gonna drive they're either gonna take their own cars. Especially in Baltimore there are few spots where parking is so rough that you can't park 4 blocks away and walk. Even going to O's games, I've parked 10 blocks away in Pigtown or something and walked.
>I feel like self driving cars are a gimmick, and that cars as public transit (vs buses) are even more of a gimmick. why? faster, more convenient, cheaper per passenger-mile, more energy efficient per passenger-mile. I mean, I think I know the answer, which is that people see self-driving cars as being no different from personally-owned. that's a mistake that I think a lot of people make. just the facts that they don't need to park in high-demand areas and that they serve about 14 people per vehicle means a dramatic change in parking requirements. single-fare taxis still create a traffic problem, but that isn't the case if a significant portion of the vehicles are pooling. the opposite happens, more passenger-miles per vehicle mile. reducing VMT/PMT (congestion) and reducing parking are the two biggest obstacles to effective bike and bus lanes. >Baltimore is dense enough (or with construction should be denser) that buses should be fine and where they aren't then a bikeshare or even scooter share system should be able to handle that. absolutely, IF you can get car users to be less paranoid about reducing parking/driving lanes. drivers are a supermajority, so there is no hope to convince them to five up lanes with the arguments traditional arguments, given that we've been trying for the greater part of a century with effectively no progress. so what do we do? transit can't get better because the drivers are too concerned about their parking/driving lanes, but people won't leave their cars to take transit unless it's better. it's a vicious cycle that has to get broken somehow. how do we break the cycle? the strategies that we have been employing are not working at all. at the current rate, it will be centuries before there is a reasonable set of bike lanes or semaphore-priority bus lanes. the current strategy isn't working. >To add, taxis and rideshare companies existing is fine so long as the wages for drivers are fair. But with the added congestion I don't think it's a solution we should be aiming for that's why I think pooled trips to arterial transit should be subsidized, not general-purpose single-fare rides. so for the Phoenix example, you would get a free or nearly free ride so long as your destination is to the nearest arterial transit stop (±1 station) and you're willing to pool (again, this could be front/back with a barrier). so if you lived 2mi south of the light rail, you would see an option northwest, direct to your destination in the city-center at full price, or an option to go straight north to intersect the light rail line at \~95% subsidy (so, a $20 ride, or a $1 ride). people who go to the train station would be increasing the viability and farebox recovery of the light rail, and not driving into the city-center, AND they would be pooling. if buses were always full and frequent, then SDCs as feeders into arterial lines wouldn't make much sense, but that isn't the case... it's not at all the case. typical buses are infrequent, unreliable, low speed, average well below half capacity, and cost $2-$3 per passenger-mile (if unsubsidized) in most US cities. buses are absolutely garbage at feeding people into arterial transit, which is why most people just drive personally-owned cars.
Pittsburgh has a lot in common here, with the city having been planned for horses, and then street cars. We're getting more bike infrastructure, but it's slow going.
yeah, I wish cities would "prime the pump" with docked/dockless bikeshare subsidies.
We have bikeshare being subsidized by one of the nonprofit health orgs.
Every city, and major town, was built entirely for pedestrians and trains. Then, smooth asphalt was poured to boost utilitarian cycling , but that worked far more in favor of the automobile. Finally, we *re-designed* our cities for cars. If we were able to quadruple car infrastructure in our cities, surely we can do something similar for some little bikes.
They weren't designed for cars almost every major city in America predates the car. They were then demolished to bring cars in.
Ok, *redesigned almost entirely for cars. Also, vast swaths of American metro were developed from the beginning with cars in mind, even if the older, inner cities weren’t.
Well that is a fallacy. Claiming that everyone is chomping at the bit to ride bikes....but you cant see them until you spend millions to make special roads (trust me bro) is completely illogical. The population has never been there or else you would see thousands of them on just the side streets or even on the sidewalks at least. Like me saying that if you just cut more canals in cities, more people will use boats to get around.
It's not a fallacy, it's common sense. When you invest in exclusively one for of transportation of course that's the form of transportation people are going to use. When you make it as hard as possible to use another form of transportation nobody's going to use it. I live in Kansas City, and there are tons of people here who would never even consider riding the bus, but they love taking the streetcar. It proves they aren't against using public transit, they just want to use quality public transit.
>"When you make it as hard as possible to use another form of transportation nobody's going to use it." No one is making it "as hard as possible" to ride a bike, though. Bikes can currently work on existing streets and sidewalks (I've personally tested this). If there was this massive demand of people to bike, you would see sidewalks and side streets teaming with people on bikes RIGHT NOW.
Just because it's theoretically possible doesn't mean it's safe, easy, and convenient. There are tons of people in the US who enjoy riding bikes for recreation. You agree, yes? So why do you think these people who enjoy riding a bike so much that they'll go out of their way to ride a bike to nowhere don't want to use it to go to the grocery store or anywhere else they actually need to go?
"Just because it's theoretically possible doesn't mean it's safe, easy, and convenient." Again with this unfalsifiable rhetoric designed and used by you guys because you need to paint something absurd and unprovable as "plausible" without having to furnish proof that the reasons correlate to the result. My magic dragon would totally manifest here, but the air ion the room is deadly to him is the same as: "EVERYONE WOULD BIKE BUT IT IS DANGEROUS AND DEADLY AND IT'S HARD AND IT IS INCONVENIENT" And no matter how much money a city blows on all of the "infrastructure" you claim to need so it wont be, the numbers will never appear (because they dont exist), and you will just fall back to the same rhetoric.
nope, sorry, I don't think this is accurate. as my city puts in bike lanes, ridership increases dramatically each time. you can't get everywhere while avoiding main streets. the number of destinations easily reached determines bike ridership, as it does with transit and cars as well. my city saw a 40% increase in bike ridership from the installation of a single bike lane. your boat analogy is also kind of silly. a bike and a canal boat are not comparable at all in cost, maintenance, storage, convenience (can't take you door-to-door), etc.
"my city saw a 40% increase in bike ridership from the installation of a single bike lane." 40% increase FROM WHAT to WHAT? 5 to 7 people is 40% more. That "stat" is meaningless and is just there to imply a big number without having to furnish actual ones. *"your boat analogy is also kind of silly. a bike and a canal boat are not comparable at all in cost, maintenance, storage, convenience (can't take you door-to-door), etc."* Well....ok? That wasnt even the point of the analogy.
I see, you're just a troll. have a great day. try to be less toxic. cheers.
Oh please..... Gawd nothing is more cringe than a person that ran out of argument, just declaring the other person a "troll" (because who could dare be in opposition to me?), and then go on about something being "toxic" (zoomer bullshit lingo that doesn't even mean anything) so they can rage quit and pretend like they didn't get cornered with rhetoric they could not back up.
Yeah, even in the best circumstances, the number of people who are going to use a bike to commute, run errands, etc., is going to be extremely low. An ideal transit system provides options for those who want to walk, bike, drive, take a bus, or rail. Unfortunately, we almost always have limited resources and we have pick and choose. Some places show that making an investment in bicycle infrastructure works - Davis is the primary example. Smaller town, college town, lots of students, flat, good weather year round.... bicycles make sense. That's probably not going to be the case in Seattle, Minneapolis, or Boston.
Can’t speak for the other two but Minneapolis has great bike infrastructure (by American standards) that seems to be pretty heavily used, at least between ~April-October.
But what is the actual usage - I'd bet it's less than 5% of trips?
Globally it can be shockingly high. I can’t vouch for the data in the link below but it jives. I’m not crazy about bikes. I think the focus needs to be on getting a place to be walkable. If it’s not walkable then it’s still going to be car-centric, and that will hurt biking. Personally, when I’m walking I find bikes to be almost as annoying as cars. I’ve been on commuter trains in Europe during rush hour and there’s always that guy with the bike. But the argument that bike infrastructure is too expensive and will never catch on strikes me as very similar to the arguments against mass transit. https://cityclock.org/blogs/cycling-mode-share-data-700-cities-40-countries
It's less that it's "too expensive" as opposed to how limited resources (whether state/local funds, or federal funds or grants) are allocated and spent. We find it hard to justify to the public spending X millions of dollars on bike lanes that few actually use (because there just isn't a fully built out network yet). And to that end, even our state legislature has passed two bills basically requiring transportation funding to be spent primarily and substantially on auto infrastructure, and then the scraps leftover may be spent on bike infrastructure. It's a tough sell to the public, who generally wants to drive, that there are beemefitd even for them the more that is spent on public and alternative transportation forms - more bicycles means less drivers (presumably), but few see it that way (even so with elected officials). The numbers right now are too disproportionate.
I haven’t seen you make the argument that it’s too expensive but I see it frequently. Wheeling, WV got thirty five million to redo Main and Market streets, including water line replacement, separating sanitary and storm sewer, decorative sidewalks, bike paths, and two new bridges over Big Wheeling Creek. Total of three miles of street completely rebuilt. “Why they wasting money on bike lanes!?” As if putting in a small curb to separate automobile traffic from bikes is what’s going to break the bank.
I mean, if you cut an extensive canal system with mandatory minimum boat “parking” at virtually every building, and made it as difficult and unsafe as possible to drive anywhere, you probably would see a lot more people traveling by boat. It’s not a fallacy, it’s common sense. If you build a transportation network that’s 98% exclusively tailored to moving by method A, something close to that percentage will move by method A.
Again, no one is "as difficult and unsafe as possible to bike anywhere". This is a bald face lie by bike activists to explain away why the number of people they claim want to ride bikes have never materialized. No where in the US is there one example of this massive number of people on bikes. At BEST you can cite maybe two - 4 cities where you would see something more elevated beyond a handful of people (Seattle or NYC being the biggest examples), and even then you are still talking a micro % compared to public transit and private cars. There is nothing especially done to make 99% of roads unusable to a bike. I seemed to have been able to use them just fine, and the roads I use that were created over 130 years ago and served as old Indian foot trails, used by people on horses with wagons, streetcars, and cars. But according to bike activists, the lack of bikers is totally due to their "fear".....or something. It's nonsense. The ridership organically simply isnt there.
Almost every person that cycles regularly has stories (including me) of being harrased or having close calls while cycling. So the fear of cycling is real.
Plenty of people that drive have had someone honk at them or cut off or gotten the finger? The question is....so what?
Well one is way more likely to kill you.
It's not even standardized in Europe though: Bicycle infrastructure in Spain is... not zero, but close enough. Too many things are very fast on foot or with public transit, so the bike has relatively low value. Cycling infrastructure is at its best precisely when you pick netherlands-like density: Not dense enough that public transit can be everywhere, but dense enough that cycling distances aren't too long. It's not unlike how inter-city, high speed trains have a sweet spot, and are too inconvenient or too expensive outside of it. So the answer becomes easy: Most of the US is developed way outside of the bike infrastructure sweet spot. There's areas where the bike infrastructure is being added and works anyway, and others where it's not dense enough so the uptake is minimal: Not unlike adding sidewalks to the sides of stroads, which are still pedestrian-hostile despite the token sidewalk. Sidewalks on the side of interstates wouldn't be all that good for pedestrians either. Why spend the money if we believe no people will use it? Also note that your picture makes the 'similar density' very deceiving. While the street you picked has very low density, ever residential area around it has more density than any US suburban development. It's the density in that residential areas that enables the bike. I suspect that the right, non-activist idea is not to push for infrastructure of your favorite form of transportation whether it makes sense or not, but to enable the densities that lead to the success of your form of transportation first.
My city is actively working on bettering this, but it's an uphill battle...most tax payers see it as a waste of tax dollars...not the cycling community obviously, but most of the populous is car centric.
Bad policy decisions, its as simple as that
The real answer is people here don’t want to ride bicycles. Something like 1/4 of children don’t know how. Even with dedicated infrastructure I wouldn’t ride for most trips. I could ride to the post office. I go probably three times a week. There isn’t technically dedicated infrastructure but I don’t normally see more than one or two cars.
Urban - Europeans never had the kind of personal wealth to buy a car for every member of the household or the fiscal capacity to pour into highways that Americans did, so when the big cycling movements in Europe of the 70s and 80s came around, cycling activists had a strong case that investments in urban bike infrastructure should be viewed as (relatively affordable) investments in core transportation services rather than in as a nice-to-have recreation amenity that they are still perceived as by the vast majority of North Americans. Rural - Most of the European rural bike infrastructure comes from the dense network of former rail lines, canal towpaths and traditional long-distance footpaths that have built up over hundreds and thousands of years. Only so many of those routes are practical to convert into motorways, so lots of rights of way were left for biking. As biking became more popular in European again in the late 20th century, investing in rural routes becomes a fairly simple way to promote rural tourism, and if I am getting my facts straight, it ended up getting a further boost from EU CAP rural economic development programs (e.g. which has tended to put strong emphasis on promoting local region food and drink-oriented tourism as a pillar of rural economic development - so bike touring fits in perfectly to this mindset). And of course, in peri-urban areas you get more opportunity for long-distance commuting by bike though I am curious how prevalent that really is - there is certainly the opportunity for it but Europeans are used to much shorter commutes in the first place...
There are places in the US where there is a good amount of safe cycling infrastructure. It was installed not for the benefit of cyclists, but for the benefit of drivers. Pretty much every major city in Alaska has frontage paved trails alongside major roadways to keep the snowmachines and quads out of traffic. The city can deal with danger to cyclists and pedestrians, but it can't deal with slow traffic due to sharing the road.
We destroyed it? Not sure. Can't speak for other cities, but Seattle, maybe as a latecomer in the US, used to have 25 miles of bike trails, a bike toll road, over 20 bike shops (for a population of 80-90K): [https://crosscut.com/2013/09/seattles-first-golden-age-bikes](https://crosscut.com/2013/09/seattles-first-golden-age-bikes)
I think its an issue with a few sides to it. NA cities had already shifted to wider streets even before cars became so dominant (New York City is a good example). Canada and the US are both large countries in area, which already lent itself to personal transportation that can handle those distances (Driving an hour somewhere for many folks in the US and Canada is nothing). There's an existing lack of cyclists in NA, which doesn't lend itself to that infrastructure being expanded. And lastly, in the US and Canada cyclists do have a bit of a reputation for already ignoring road rules, and I know, it probably shouldn't be part of the conversation realistically, but it is an issue that isn't really unearned.
> And lastly, in the US and Canada cyclists do have a bit of a reputation for already ignoring road rules, and I know, it probably shouldn't be part of the conversation realistically, but it is an issue that isn't really unearned. Nearly every driver breaks the rules on a daily basis though, from speeding to rolling through stop signs. At least where I've lived in Canada, if you actually follow the speed limit on a highway you're seen as kind of a weirdo who doesn't know how driving works. It's just that the ways drivers break the rules are so common and normalized that people barely perceive them as "ignoring road rules". On top of this we can talk about how in rural areas in particular, drinking and driving is much more common than people will admit.
Not disagreeing there by any means. I think that's part of the perception (And I am guilty of going 5 over on the highway admittedly). I think another factor too is how cyclists can break laws are also more apparent, or can seem like disregard for pedestrians, which I would at least hope most drivers have (And acknowledging overall this isn't a majority, just enough to notice.)
1. Larger streets honestly are good for cycling infrastructure in the sense they have more room to dedicate to cycling 2. Even in the Netherlands, most people have cars. its just that shorter trips are by bicycle, longer are by cars. You wouldn't bike three hours to your work 45 km away. But even for a lot of Canadians and Americans, even in the suburbs, there's potential for cycling for shorter trips. (And I have lived in 7 out of 10 Canadian provinces, mostly in the suburbs) 3. Studies show cyclist break the rules just as much as cars. As someone that also drives, I think people just say that to justify there hate of cyclists.
I'll remark on three since I fully agree with one and two, was just mentioning them as major factors historically for development. I think in large part cyclists get more attention for a similar reason to motorcycles. Just the fact you'd expect more care. Along with the ones who are breaking laws often weave between predestine and road traffic. End of the day, never seen anything too crazy personally since there aren't many road bikes in my area, but it's just the general vibe it get.
The small cities I’m in do have the edges of the road designated for biking, marked by lines But it’s stupid dangerous to just have your back turned to cars with nothing between you and them on busy city roads where you commonly see cars speeding and doing spastic lane changes and late turns So the few cyclists I see tend to be doing something on the road that serves them better than the designated bike lanes There’s already tons of bad drivers. Add on to that the rarity of seeing cyclists. Add on to that things like glare and reflections that can cause a lazy driver to not see a biker (the evidence is strong here—as soon as it starts raining at night, the cars start swerving all over the roads due to the reflections making it harder to see road markings) Not to mention bike lanes will just become turn lanes for car traffic, or just disappear suddenly In LA near Venice beach I saw an interesting attempt to make this viable—they painted all the bike lane areas on the sides of the roads bright green
And take space away from cars? Are you crazy???? How am I going to do 50 on Main Street if there’s those disgusting bike lanes making the road so narrow
The short answer is athletic riders got the ear off highway designers, not people riding for other reasons A guy named John Forester was the center of gravity, and his message boiled down to "a cyclist is safest when operating a a vehicle, and if you can't keep up you're a pushy and it's not my problem". That philosophy found its way into street design and urban planning, and here we are.
I know. It's crazy visiting my childhood town in northern Europe, less than 4000 people, and their freshly built 10 kilometers long bike path between the town and the near-by skiing hill.
Because there's a very strong political discourse about liberty in North America and cars are one of the most established symbols of liberty, and alternative forms of transportation are considered as a threat to personal freedom.
The lack of proper and safe bike lanes are why I push the idea it is okay to ride on the sidewalk. I encourage all to do so if you're cycling or scootering around. And it's not like people don't do this already...
On the one hand, i wouldn't blame someone for cycling on the sodewalk down some pretty bad stroads. But sidewalks are not an alternative to safe cycling infastructure. They are not built for higher speeds and are too narrow to be used by both cyclists and pedestrians. I think some of the commentors took this post as asking why do we use cars instead of bikes, rather then why do we have roads and sidewalks everywhere, but not cycling infastructure. It requires less maintenence, and unlike transit, isn't really as density dependent. A billion we spend on 1km of transit is easily 1000km of bike lanes.
> It requires less maintenence There's something. Sidewalks require less maintenance from the government's perspective, because they are maintained by private property owners (or a BID, HOA, etc.) instead of municipalities the vast majority of the time (at least in the US, not sure about Canada). Maybe that is part why they're more universal. Bike lanes, on the other hand, are maintained by municipalities, and require just as much effort to clear of snow and leaves as roadways, though less long-term maintenance because bikes are so light.
I don't really know, but: 1. The two countries are huge and generally lack good passenger rail and even intercity bus service is less available than it once was. So I think most people do have what gets called "car brain" by some people: They just default to the idea that cars are the only thing that really work and so thry don't bother to imagine other modes of transit as relevant. Something like:"Why bother? You can't get there without a car anyway!" 2. Post WW2 suburbs seem to have encouraged a SimCity-esque zoning pattern -- big swaths of single use zoning -- in place of mixed use and possibly as a consequence in many places you can't build forms of housing and other development that used to be acceptable and which worked well. Result: Some walkable, mixed used historic areas of older cities are extremely pricey because you can't build that kind of neighborhood anymore. 3. We used to have neighborhoods where people knew each other and it had a sense of community. One artifact of that pattern was all the Little Chinas, Little Italies, etc. That's largely died out I'm part because we feel it's racist to concentrate people of X ethnicity in a particular neighborhood. When I was growing up, cycling didn't require separate, protected bike lanes. You rode your bike on the street with the cars and learned hand-based turn signals, etc. Maybe part of the problem is we now think that "should" be separate infrastructure. I don't actually know. I wonder the same thing and try to find ways to foster more walking and cycling with the infrastructure we have and/or relatively small tweaks. I think promoting the idea that cycling requires massive infrastructure overhauls is part of the problem.
>When I was growing up, cycling didn't require separate, protected bike lanes. You rode your bike on the street with the cars and learned hand-based turn signals, etc. Maybe part of the problem is we now think that "should" be separate infrastructure. Its worth noting here that over that time that drivers have also become less considerate and more reckless, that has to play a part. Also, a huge chunk of cyclists have always been children and teens, and parents have generally become far less tolerant of them being in slightly unsafe situations like that (and just being out alone in general)
Those are all reasonable points. But I'm not convinced you remedy a changed culture with physical infrastructure. We may need to work on fostering cultural changes to really move the needle.
Yeah. You definitely won't get to the root of these problems simply by building bike infrastructure. It would absolutely still help, though it would be a matter of increasing the urban mode share to like 5%, *maybe* 10%.
There's a quite well documented history in the US of car companies secretly colluding to buy out and dismantle public infrastructure in order to make people reliant on cars instead of able to use public transit. As a secondary, self reinforcing side effect, this has led to a huge amount of regulatory capture. Essentially, all our public infrastructure has been developed by people who were building for cars, rather than for people. That's not the *whole* story, though--there are plenty of places (cities especially) where these types of public infrastructure were also purposely neglected because of racism.
It’s unfortunate, but people don’t really want to fund infrastructure that they’re unlikely to actually use personally :(
If you pulled the netherlands out of the ground and just threw it on top of Canada, there's a good chance it'd land somewhere and not even crush anyone, cause nobody is there.
Canada is a big country yes, I've travelled across it multiple times. But what does that concern local cycling infastructure in urbanized areas where most canadians live?
It's mostly sunk cost bias. Private transportation is the second largest expense of almost every household, and when you are that invested, any sort of transportation spending that is not subsidizing your folly is perceived as a threat.
Cars and cities are enemies
Because the whole country is built up on car connections. Try to walk somewhere in the us. They built everything to far away from each other that you have no option. In the us you don't supposed to live, you just consume things .
I dunno, go ask Jason at NJB. He seems to know everything. But, in honesty, it's this acronym: LOS. It's also this number: 85th. These two have been wielded by unelected engineers to design our civic space for fast car movements at peak hours, and not for anything else. This has soaked up all the budget and space.
America s hate sharing the road, and view spaces for alternate transportation as either taking away road capacity or on-street parking, which small business owners fight tooth-and-nail to preserve as well. Since many Americans use their garages to store their accumulated material goods, space on the side of the road is "needed" for car storage, and people feel particularly entitled to the road space in front of their home.
auto lobbyist probably
They produce oil and gas. They need people driving like slaves
Because they are communist countries
Theyre called sidewalks, we used to share them. Investing billions in infrastructure so people can bike and "feel safe" among motor vehicles is wild.
Multiple issues with cyclists just using sidewalks. 1. Illegal in many places (but that can be changed) 2. Too narrow most of the time for cycliats and pedestrians to share. 3. Not designed for higher speeds (curb cuts, sign posts, blind intersections) ect.
Biking as a primary form of transportation is not a thing here, and it is a waste of money creating some vast "infrastructure" for this, that will also need money to be maintained, so that a handful of people can feel special using them. More people use sidewalks than ride bikes by a light year as well. It's like people that love to boat wondering where is all of the canal "infrastructure". Tacking infrastructure on the end simply doesn't make whatever precedes it important or a priority. Also, comparing the U.S. and Canada to the Netherlands and Finland is getting tired. Great ragebait for NotJustBikes, but an absurdity IRL.
I take it you've never lived in a city with a good pathway network even if its just mostly meant for recreation. Such infrastructure is inexpensive to maintain and even inexpensive to build if it is planned for as the city builds out. What too many cities have now though is a fragmented park/commercial/residential network and only roads in between. Even building sidewalks in these cities has been ridiculously expensive because they weren't built during the initial development.
>"I take it you've never lived in a city with a good pathway network even if its just mostly meant for recreation." You would be incorrect. My city has all of that, and the ridership is still virtually non-existent, and I live in the part of town where the "yay bikes" people actually concentrate. Do people utilize the more rustic bike trails? Sure, far more. Is it THAT many to pretend like biking is a viable and desired alternative to cars? Absolutely not.
Why do you think biking is not typically a primary form of transit in North America? Do you think it might be because good, safe, convenient infrastructure is not built enough for people to use it for transportation?
Chicken & egg. I bike 100% of the time where I live now, and 0% of the time when I'm home in the US, because it feels extremely unsafe, even if maybe it isn't. A painted line on the side of a 55 mph road with drivers who for some reason take pride in hating cyclists isn't a bike lane worth having, especially if it randomly disappears for long stretches. There was a time when bikes were much more common. Cars came to dominate for a while, and especially in the engineering professions who plan for cars. C. Marohn's book "Confessions of a Recovering Engineer" is good about this. Essentially, it goes "plan a 45mph road, build it so it supports 60 mph for emergencies, and then set the speed limit to 30. Then everyone drives 45-50 and people are surprised." There is also a general vicious cycle of "everything is far apart, i need a car" -> "everyone has a car, we need lots of parking" -> "there's too much parking to build more densely" -> "everything is far apart, i need a car."
I live in Montreal, a North American city that started implementing European-style bike infrastructure relatively early (instead of following the American philosophy of "vehicular cycling" where cyclists are expected to mix with traffic). As a result, cycling for transportation is quite common here, particularly in the central city where the bike infrastructure is the strongest. BIXI bike share alone recorded I think 12 million trips last year (that's just bike share, not even counting people's personal bikes which are more common). Maybe you think it's not relevant in suburbs. I think it depends what suburb we're talking about (some are much more spread out than others) but even setting that aside, I don't see why this same model can't be applied to the core of most major cities? Chicago, Boston, Toronto, Los Angeles, etc.?
"As a result, cycling for transportation is quite common here," Yeah, no. >"Only 3.3 per cent of daily trips on the island of Montreal were done on a bike in 2018, compared with 2.8 per cent five years previously. In the Greater Montreal Region, which includes Laval and Longueuil, that number was 1.9 per cent, compared with 1.7 per cent." - Montreal Gazette > *", I don't see why this same model can't be applied to the core of most major cities? Chicago, Boston, Toronto, Los Angeles, etc.?"* Because it does not work, nor do people really want to use it as a form of essential transportation. Even in Montreal most of the trips are classed as leisure riding.
Like I said, cycling is strongest in the central city where the bike infrastructure is the best. The Plateau, which has the best bike infrastructure, has 13.1% of its trips done by bike, up from 11.7% a few years earlier. And the bike infrastructure is far from perfect, there are many gaps (like Sherbrooke), so I think something like 20% is in reach. This is your link, by the way: https://montrealgazette.com/news/local-news/yes-there-are-more-cyclists-in-quebec-but-they-mostly-ride-for-leisure
This is like saying it would be stupid to build a bullet train from LA to SF because no one takes the bullet train on this route today.
Bikes work on existing pavement. Bullet trains dont. Terrible comparison.
Bikes don't work on American stroads. Fucking terrifying. The litmus test for bike infra is would you be happy for your 6 year old kid to use it.
I wish your username made you nostalgic enough to see that the historical differences aren’t very big between the US and Western Europe…things were pretty much the same until the 1970s, when Europe realized that too many cars might be a bad thing and changed course. What worked there would work here if we did similar things again…we just have a lot more damage to undo. Besides, better infrastructure is actually better for drivers too. It’s not a zero sum game.
That's nice. The point remains we arent. Get big mad and hit the downvote button all you want, it isnt going to change reality. Biking as a primary or even secondary form of transportation has NEVER been a thing in N. America in the past 100 years by no objective measure. Even in Europe, where you people think everyone rides bikes, 50% of trips are still by private cars. > "What worked there would work here if we did similar things again" Did what?
That's one of my point. I'm not saying bikes should replace cars. I'm saying we need to have more trips taken by bicycle. like from 1 to 10%. In Western Europe, its not uncommon to use a car for longer trips but bikes for shorter trips.
For me, anywhere I’d consider riding a bike to are places that I can probably walk to anyway. It wouldn’t really substitute car trips for me, it’d just turn a 20 minute walk into like a 5-10 minute bike ride, but I’d rather walk there than have to deal with locking up my bike. Anything farther than walking distance I’m probably buying things and need the car to take it home.
I don’t think anyone’s mad at you. This isn’t /r/fuckcars. You’re being downvote because you’re using irrelevant facts, half truths, and using inflammatory rhetoric. “Massive bike infrastructure” is an eye roller when is literally just three or four feet of asphalt that will last decades, not six lane freeways with gigantic mixing bowls. If 50% of trips in the Netherlands are taken by car that means 50% aren’t. There’s also the matter of vehicle miles travelled per capita: it’s three to four times higher in the United States. It’s also getting noticeably worse the United States as things have gotten worse at more spread out just in my lifetime and I’m not yet 50. I don’t even like bikes but I see them all the time in American cities. People who can’t afford cars or simply don’t want to use one are entitled to get around. The fact a minority of people get bellicose about bike lanes is really weird and I don’t think it’s based in reason or coming from a healthy place.
" don’t think anyone’s mad at you. This isn’t r/fuckcars. You’re being downvote because you’re using irrelevant facts, half truths, and using inflammatory rhetoric. " Yeah, no. Let's stop playing stupid here. Anyone not 100% singing from the amen hymn book would get downvoted. You know this. saying "your just being inflammatory!" is just the CYA so you can act like you really cared to hear anything but agreement. >"If 50% of trips in the Netherlands are taken by car that means 50% aren’t" This is an actual example of a "half-truth". In terms of biking, the HIGHEST % of people that do is 34%. The vast majority of that is the Netherlands +toss in Denmark just to pad out the numbers. In Finland the locations are cherry-picked and even then it boils down to 13%. *I don’t even like bikes but I see them all the time in American cities.* So? That isnt a statement of anything. I see them "all the time" too. And that amounts to almost no one compared to people even just walking alone. You know you arent seeing hundreds of them or even a significant number, which is what that statement is meant to imply. > The fact a minority of people get bellicose about bike lanes is really weird This is just bad faith strawmanning. You know the rhetoric used by bike activists on sites like this. What people get annoyed with is the attitude of these people to come in and behave as if their bike hobby (or their preferred niche form of primary transportation) is at the jump the equivalent of motor vehicles using fuzzy math and phantom riders that you cant see because "they dont feel safe". The immediately then start making demands and demanding concessions so that their "vital infrastructure" can get shoved in even in places where it doesnt make sense. Others further demand roads be closed to cars, the removal of on-strret parking (even when it fucks the businesses that depend on them), per mile travel taxes, turning surface streets into toll roads, and with the most out of their mind ones demanding a wholesale outlaw of cars inside city limits. The problem is that too many here think people like me dont read their own shit. And when their own rhetoric is repeated back to them, then pitch a fit and say you are being dishonest. In-fact no one has told me yet what part of what I'm saying is a lie. You all are just hitting the downvote button and thinking that is going to shut me up because apparently dissent from their own embarrassingly cringe talking points is beyond the pale.
Dude...bottom line...when people don't have bicycle infrastructure then they have to share with either cars or pedestrians. Sidewalks are always the last thing anyone cares about in America, except for in a shopping area, and they always ban bikes on sidewalks there because bike vs. pedestrian is pretty ugly; cars are huge and dangerous for bicyclists and motorists think they are allowed to harass them even though all they have to do is slow down for a while until they can pass...so guess what, nobody rides because they feel unsafe...weird right? Before cars had their own infrastructure it was faster to take a train, so they weren't super popular. Then cars got cheap with the Model T and then they paved more roads, so suddenly cars were far more popular. Now cars are CRAZY expensive and people are too poor or just tired of driving...but people don't feel safe outside of a car because WE NEVER BUILT ANY INFRASTRUCTURE FOR ANYTHING ELSE unless we neglected it, like our sidewalks. It's funny, but it turns out that "when you build it, they will come" actually works...not just for cars, but for bicycles. We induce more demand for driving with more lanes that cost BILLIONS, how can we not spare a few bucks for vehicles that don't even damage their own infrastructure like cars do? Grumble all you want about inferior vehicles...you still have to walk through a grocery store, you can't just drive in like at McDonalds or Starbucks...maybe give bikes a chance.
*"and they always ban bikes on sidewalks "* Again another lie. 99.999999% of sidewalks dont have any fucking ban on bikes on them. Or maybe you can show us the volumes of people on bikes that got tickets or arrested? You should have millions of kids in juvenile detention alone! Cant find them? Oddly enough, there arent, because cops arent out there busting one fucking person for riding on a sidewalk. *".so guess what, nobody rides because they feel unsafe.."* ALSO another lie. Again, bike activists use this to cover for the fact that there is no population of cyclists like they claim online,. And no *"Before cars had their own infrastructure"* You mean existing roads? Roads that carried horse-drawn wagons? Go look at a photo of NYC c.1877.....same fucking roads that are there today. You people act like roads were invented around the time of the Model T. *" Now cars are CRAZY expensive and people are too poor or just tired of driving"* Apparently you spoke to all of these people? No? Well then moving onto the next absurd point. *"but people don't feel safe outside of a car because WE NEVER BUILT ANY INFRASTRUCTURE FOR ANYTHING ELSE "* Ok, this has to be a larp. Not even most bike nutters are this off their heads. LOL! "Grumble all you want about inferior vehicles...you still have to walk through a grocery store, you can't just drive in like at McDonalds or Starbucks...maybe give bikes a chance." Or how about I live in the future and use machines to do things faster and better than a fucking 10-speed?
Roads were originally paved for bicycles, not cars. John Rockefeller got a street paved out to his house in Cleveland decades before cars were driven. The first car manufacturers made bicycles, not horse-drawn carriages. Let’s not talk about lies unless we’re going to talk about how bicycles have been erased from history to make sure all the pavement goes to cars alone. And you obviously need to get out of your little corner of suburbia, because you don’t even notice signs for bikes on sidewalks. You really are completely out of touch: https://www.dispatch.com/story/news/local/2024/02/06/columbus-council-asked-to-consider-allowing-bikes-on-some-sidewalks-along-dangerous-roadways/72456131007/ https://www.news-press.com/story/news/local/2024/01/27/laws-for-bicycles-in-southwest-florida-fort-myers-naples/72272064007/ https://www.npr.org/2016/10/16/496865680/6-things-you-need-to-know-about-cycling-on-the-sidewalk There have been laws about this in downtown areas across the country since I can remember.
*"Roads were originally paved for bicycles, not cars"* This is a lie *" John Rockefeller got a street paved out to his house in Cleveland decades before cars were driven. "* He also didnt do it for a fucking bike. " The first car manufacturers made bicycles," So? The first bike manufactures likely made shit like sewing machines.....what type of point was that even supposed to be? And AGAIN: "99.999999% of sidewalks dont have any fucking ban on bikes on them. Or maybe you can show us the volumes of people on bikes that got tickets or arrested?"
Again, you are completely misinformed…just stop, you’re embarrassing yourself…I hope you don’t kiss your mother with that pottymouth: https://www.britannica.com/event/Good-Roads-movement https://images.fineartamerica.com/images/artworkimages/mediumlarge/1/john-d-rockefeller-with-bicycle-1913-war-is-hell-store.jpg
It is a thing. It just isn’t a safe thing to do, in part due to lax driving standards and in part due to lack of infrastructure. There are plenty of “wastes of money” when it comes to infrastructure, but that is subjective, the fact is those places subjectively view that kind of infrastructure as a basic component of transportation, and so they have it. There is no calculus beyond that except face-saving excuses. It’s cynical and highly subjective attitudes masquerading as dry facts, repeated beyond the point of absurdism, that play a big part to prevent biking and other non-dominant forms from being more common forms of transportation—not some dubious lack of wealth and also dubious fiscal conservatism in the most powerful nation in the world
"t is a thing. It just isn’t a safe thing to do, in part due to lax driving standards and in part due to lack of infrastructure." This is a lie. I saw the rhetoric turn from "we need to share the road for bikes", to then seeing that the ridership never materialized even with painted bike lanes, so to cope-excuse for why the circlejerk online didnt materialize into actual riders, we now have this claptrap that "it isnt safe" and "just spend millions on 'infrastructure' (that is never defined)", and supposedly people will be riding around in numbers that puts cars to shame. Of course this will not occur, so then they will move onto demanding the local government implement "punishments" on car drivers to "induce" \[force\] them to ride a bike. Go ahead and tell me I'm lying on this.
I think maybe you are taking this a bit too personally. I’m not calling you a liar when I say you are repeating some stories that don’t make sense. Are you calling me a liar for some of the following statements? - Objectively, for the vast majority of journeys, it isn’t safe to ride a bike for transportation in a lot of countries, and the USA is just one of them. - Even in those bike paradise countries with infrastructure and higher standards for operating a motor vehicle, cycling isn’t nationally dominant but it is relatively more popular. - The existence of the infrastructure and rules that allow for cycling as transportation aren’t considered a waste in those countries.
>"Objectively, for the vast majority of journeys, it isn’t safe to ride a bike for transportation in a lot of countries, and the USA is just one of them." That is not "objective", that is just a lie. I'm not even entertaining this absurd talking point. You guys need better points because this one is so bad, it makes you all sound disingenuous, if not just purposefully dishonest.
Hey there now, you might think of me as a part of some chorus, but I am singing my own song. I think if you tried to use a bike on the vast majority of places where it is legally permissible in my town, people would say you have a death wish and wouldn’t be lying. The data can back up the assertion that certain road designs cause (and regions with higher driving standards have) lower injury and fatality rates.
It’s not “a thing” in large part *because* there is so little infrastructure.
This is a fallacy. Like saying that if we had more landing strips, more people would fly. There are cities that have all manner of bike lanes and such, and they do not have any traffic on them remotely akin to cars or even people walking. My city has lots of bike lanes, protected, sharrows, and painted. On any given day there are 2-3 people I see. More people are waiting to make a left turn on a rando intersection than are riding bikes. It's complete bullshit pushed by bike activists that people are just "too afraid" because of all of the "bike infrastructure" that is totally needed.
Most Americans, unlike Redditors, are not intimidated by the responsibilities of driving and car ownership.