
We Need to Dream Bigger Than Bike Lanes - jseliger
https://www.citylab.com/perspective/2019/10/micromobility-urban-design-car-free-infrastruture-futurama/600163/
======
rapnie
What I see a lot in this thread is people's either/or opinions. Love cars /
hate bycicles or vice versa.

No. It is a balancing act, where cars, bycicles and public transport co-exist,
and infrastructure is developed strategically in smart ways and in a prolonged
effort.

When I was young in The Netherlands for the most part the cars still dominated
the streets. Over time I've seen cities and road networks gradually being
transformed to what I now consider a Walhalla for cyclists. Public transport
plays a big role in that too, and the Dutch still love their cars.

I highly recommend reading this article: "No helmets, no problem: how the
Dutch created a casual biking culture" [0] which interviews the American
Bruntlett family that wrote the book "Building the Cycling City: The Dutch
Blueprint for Urban Vitality" [1]

See also the great discussion on HN at the time [2].

[0] [https://www.vox.com/science-and-
health/2018/8/28/17789510/bi...](https://www.vox.com/science-and-
health/2018/8/28/17789510/bike-cycling-netherlands-dutch-infrastructure)

[1] [https://islandpress.org/books/building-cycling-
city](https://islandpress.org/books/building-cycling-city)

[2]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17861803](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17861803)

~~~
brnt
As a Dutchman who's lived in a few places abroad, the cycling 'problem' is
quite simple: it needs to be the norm. No helmet, because neither do you
require them for pedestrians. You can cycle in all weather, just as you would
walking (a hard mental one, my non-Dutch partner can't get over the idea
cycling is for sunshine). Public space design must start with safe (no sharp
turns, looking at you France!) and separate cycling lanes. Perhaps the fact
that urban cycling infra is a much cheaper/efficient use of public land could
be more emphasized. In urban areas, cycling is faster, and electric biking is
expanding your reach a few times over. There are people who bike a 30km
commute without breaking a sweat (see bike highways).

Sure, there will always be situations where it will be difficult, such as
steep areas (electric bikes can do a lot here, as well as accepting a little
sweating which is normal in NL) or heat that exceeds body temperatures which
in turn makes expiration impossible (no easy solutions for this one). But that
leaves most of the urban areas on this globe perfectly suitable for cycling,
which would be in everybody's favor, and their own first and foremost.

~~~
aidenn0
I live in a very mild clime, but still don't bike when it's rainy. What do you
suggest gear-wise for bicycling in say 5-10C but wet? I have a 30 minute
bicycle commute that I'd like to do more often. A typical waist-length jacket
leaves most of my body wet, but a longer jacket is awkward to bike in. If it's
over 10C, I can just wear shorts that don't absorb water, but under 10, it
gets quite uncomfortable.

~~~
adrianN
5-10C but wet is easy mode. Use a rain jacket, rain pants, and rain spats
(optional). It's harder when it's warm and wet, as you can choose between
getting wet from the rain, or sweating under your waterproof gear.

~~~
aidenn0
Warm and wet is easy because I just change clothes at work. There's a shower
at my office.

------
cgrealy
I live in Christchurch, NZ. After a massive earthquake in 2011, I had high
hopes that we might redesign the city for the next 100 years instead of the
previous 50 (i.e. for people, not cars).

Instead the city council built a few bike lanes and even then people lost
their goddamn minds.

"You're taking away parking space!" "All these bike lanes are slowing traffic"
"No one wants to bike into the city"

Meanwhile, cyclists are steadily increasing in numbers and the centre of town
is actually seeing some signs of life for the first time in decades.

But heaven forfend we actually do something radical and pedestrianise the
city.

~~~
dcolkitt
The biggest counterpoint here is what about families? A mom with three young
kids in tow pretty much needs a car to get around. Or elderly people? I can't
really take my 90-year old grandma out to dinner if it requires her to bike
her way to the restaurant.

Thinking about non-car based transportation methods is great. But the reality
is that large segments of society are always going to need some sort of car-
based option. You can't just ban cars from a city center without totally
excluding a lot of young people.

~~~
deanCommie
Ask the Dutch. How do they do it? Or do you assume they do not have young kids
or grandmas?

Why is it that whenever people talk about designing cities for pedestrians and
bikes, someone on hackernews thinks it means eliminating all cars entirely
forever. For a forum ostensibly designed for entrepreneurs, it shows a
tremendous lack of imagination.

Answer: * Public transportation inside cities such as buses and trams

* Trains to rural areas

* Park-and-ride garages for people to drive in, and park next to transportation hubs

* Underground parking garages at the edges of pedestrian zones, or even underneath them, coming up directly above them

* Ubiquitous bike storage and bike attachments such that yes, in fact, a mom with 3 young kids can tow them from a single bike - moms in Amsterdam and Berlin do it all the time.

~~~
dcolkitt
The difference is that Holland is entirely flat, has an average high of 71 in
the summer, and rarely if ever gets icy.

The Dutch experience simply doesn't translate to most of America because of
the terrain and climate. Elderly people people will die if you make them walk
in the Florida summer. 7 year old children lack the leg-strength to bike up
California hills. Both groups are likely to slip and crack their heads open in
the icy Boston winter.

~~~
DoreenMichele
I actually appreciate you pointing this out. I get rather tired of smug
assertions that America can just do everything like it's done in Europe or
something when the landscape and population density are so very different.

But I don't think that means we can't borrow any lessons at all from them. The
biggest lesson we can borrow from the Dutch seems to be that they set out to
intentionally make their cities more pedestrian friendly and bicycle friendly
starting in the 1970s when people became extremely fed up with children dying
due to being hit by cars.

~~~
richthegeek
From the reverse argument: it's really very tiring that the ultimate defense
from any American on any topic ultimately boils down to American
Exceptionalism.

Yes you have a wide variety of population densities and climates. So does
Europe. So does everywhere else in the world.

It's the most boring and lazy argument to make, and it never actually answers
anything. Exactly what is so different about LA compared to Paris that it
can't have good cheap internet and cyclists must die at 5 times the rate?

~~~
DoreenMichele
What's far more tiresome to me is someone picking a completely pointless fight
with some detail of some comment as if the rest of the comment did not exist.

I've lived without a car in the US for over a decade. I no longer have a
driver's license. I would like to see America become more pedestrian friendly
and bicycle friendly.

I don't think you accomplish that by arguing that "Well, you just do
everything exactly like the Dutch!" I think that's a lazy, unhelpful and
disrespectful answer that actively ignores real and meaningful differences
between the literal and figurative landscapes of the two countries.

It's not good communication to say "Just do everything exactly like the
Dutch." If you want real solutions in the US, you need to think in a more
nuanced way about what pieces of the Dutch experience you can reasonably use
in the US, taking into account real differences between the two places.

Ignoring the differences between Europe and America very often comes across as
open contempt for Americans and their presumed stupidity and laziness. It's
not an effective means to promote actionable ideas.

No one is likely to take advice that they are just wrong and stupid and lazy
and should wholesale copy a system that works well elsewhere without bothering
to examine differences between the two places and trying to make some
alterations that will hopefully result in a better fit.

Based on the comment I replied to, I feel like San Diego, California could try
to borrow ideas from the Netherlands without a lot of critique beforehand. But
LA has vastly different weather from Paris and a very different landscape and
history of development. So, no, you aren't realistically going to replicate
Paris in LA.

I will also note that they have been rioting in Paris. Paris is not some
perfect paradise that has figured everything out and never has any problems.

Claims of European superiority are frequently overblown.

------
samcheng
I really think the concept of bike boulevards is one that needs more attention
than bike lanes. Take a network of side roads and make them inconvenient for
large vehicle through-traffic via bollards and other obstacles.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bicycle_boulevard](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bicycle_boulevard)

The result is a quiet, safe setting for 'micro-mobility' bicycles and scooters
with decreased bike-car interaction. You don't even need bike lanes, because
almost all of the traffic on those roads is bike traffic.

The article talks about bus + bike roads, sort of like Market St. in San
Francisco, but I don't think that's optimal. For one thing, buses should be
able to go much faster than bikes, especially Bus Rapid Transit, and as such
pose collision danger. Also, BRT should be upgradeable to light rail, and
rails are very dangerous for micro-mobility devices with small tires. Buses
and cars coexist easily on the road. Buses should have their own lane, next to
the cars.

~~~
IshKebab
I don't think this would solve much. In the UK at least, side roads are plenty
safe enough for bikes. The issue is the big roads that people want to actually
cycle on (because they are the fastest route).

~~~
TulliusCicero
Yeah, here in Munich the side roads are generally safe for bikes because
they're narrow, much narrower than side roads in the US. But that by itself
wouldn't make for a ton of biking if we didn't also have many protected bike
lanes on arterial roads, as well as off-street walk/bike paths.

------
jka
It's excellent to see momentum building like this. Cycling:

\- Has lower cost-of-entry in terms of purchase/rental

\- Keeps you healthier, which can also contribute to remaining active and
mobile in older age

\- Provides easier self-maintenance for most common faults

\- Requires less fuel (particularly combustible/fossil)

\- Can be just as fast, or faster, for transit from A to B in urban
environments (especially with e-bikes)

\- Is more social and human - cyclists can chat to each other while commuting
or in transit, rather than being isolated in glass bubbles (which sometimes
leads to misunderstanding and road rage when a simple conversation - even if a
little confrontational - might resolve things)

\- Requires less physical space - which eventually will make it _easier_ to
park cars, once we reclaim this inefficient use of our environments

\- Pollutes less

\- Is more easily portable within other modes of transport (trains, aircraft,
or cars)

\- Is, in the presence of good bicycle infrastructure, simply a much more
pleasant, enjoyable, and self-directed way to travel

One remaining issue perhaps is large load-carrying; and that's certainly
somewhere where cargo bikes and cargo e-bikes are innovating. And also a
situation where the physical distribution of goods is changing (for example,
via on-demand delivery services, some of which themselves use bicycle
couriers).

It's really time to get people shifting towards bicycles in a big way. The
arguments against it broadly do not stand, especially in the presence of
e-bikes. Cars aren't going to go away, but they're way overused currently.

~~~
Dumblydorr
So many great points. Bikes are the number one carbon cutting technology we
need to scale up.

~~~
efa
And working from home. Just no commute at all!

------
glangdale
I'm curious as to what planet you'd have to be living on to think that if we
have billions of dollars to spare on huge transport infrastructure projects
that aren't cars, that it should go to bikes and not public transport +
walkability.

I'm guessing it's a special magic planet with startlingly good weather year-
round, without disabled people, where everyone gets to age into spry Euro-
oldsters.

Not wanting to kick off a unproductive circular firing squad vibe - in an
ideal world, we'd do both, and more public transit frees up existing roads for
cyclists. But public transport _has_ to come first.

~~~
hannob
This "good weather" argument against biking is so bizarre and disconnected
from reality... Have you ever noticed that the most biking friendly places in
the world are in middle-to-northern europe? Copenhagen isn't a particularly
sunny place. Many people don't care, if you give them good infrastructure
they'll cycle with every weather.

~~~
fourneau
It’s a regional statement, not disconnected.

The reality is that many people in North American live far from their
workplaces and some of us live in areas of extreme cold. This is where 15m of
exposed skin can result in frostbite. We bundle up, but by cycling we’ve
turned the commute into an unnecessarily dangerous adventure.

The same applies to cities further south: a non trivial amount of days are
extremely hot and you’re risking heat strokes.

Edit: don’t get me wrong. Bike infrastructure is awesome and I wish there were
less cars on the roads, etc. We just have very different variables to play
with so we need to come up with different distributions of mass transit vs
personal transportation. Comfort is important!

~~~
Fricken
I live in Edmonton, North America's northernmost major city. I've been cycling
year round for about 15 years. It went down to -42 in February, and I was out
riding.

I've never had frostbite. I've still got all my fingers and toes. Although it
isn't enough fingers and toes to count all the people I've known personally
who've been killed or crippled in car accidents.

~~~
fourneau
It’s definitely not impossible, but it’s riskier.

My point is that we default to easy and comfortable when given a choice, and
cycling in -42 is neither. We won’t see mass adoption of cycling in these
areas, regardless of infrastructure, unless we forced people to do it... and I
don’t think pushing the majority of people towards enduring that kind of
weather is something we should do, when there are alternatives.

~~~
Fricken
Learning to read isn't easy or comfortable, so we force everyone to do it,
because most would default to illiteracy if we didn't. Not destroying the
planet is even more important than literacy.

~~~
fourneau
Sure, no disagreement there. I’m not arguing against bikes but we should also
be heavily investing in other forms of mass transit.

You bike in during the dead of winter, and that’s amazing. But how long is
your bike ride in? How far out of the city do you live? Would you still do it
if your commute was double?

Additionally, in Ottawa, many people live far out of the city and commute in
via the highway for 30-40 minutes by car because it’s more affordable than
living in the city. The bike ride is well over two hours. They will need other
solutions as well.

~~~
Fricken
My commute for a long time was 16 km each way, now it's 1/3rd of that. I've
been hearing about climate change since I was a kid, so I've had my whole life
to set my life up accordingly. I didn't make decisions that made commuting by
bike unfeasible.

I don't think I've met a bicycle commuting advocate who doesn't also advocate
for improved mass transit and walkable development. We stopped building
neighbourhoods that way and razed many of the ones we had in the second half
of the 20th century, so there's a huge supply and demand imbalance for
walkable neighbourhoods in North America.

------
sunstone
While it sounds preposterous right now this problem will soon solve itself
with already built "bike lanes". And bicycles are not the solution.

The solution, as this article touches on, is light weight electric transport
using the existing road structure. There's a strong indication of this future
in the fact that last year the Dutch bought more electric bikes than normal
bikes in total. And they paid twice as much for their electric bikes ($2000)
than they did for their pedal bikes. Let that sink in: The Dutch are already
starting to abandon their pedal bikes. This is the future of urban transport:
lightweight electrics.

One underappreciated, but critical aspect of electrics is their lack of
exhaust fumes. This will allow much more of city roads to be covered or even
inside. With electrics you could park inside almost everywhere.

Electrics will soon start to invade the "slow lane" of cities with bikes and
mopeds. Even a cheap electric bike already feels much safer in urban car
traffic than a pedal bike because it has super fast acceleration from a dead
stop and therefore can ride in regular traffic without being an impediment or
needing its own lane.

If you want to lead this revolution forget about city council; buy yourself an
electric bike and ride it in regular traffic with a hi-viz vest. The more
people that do this the sooner the transition will happen. The current urban
roads are the 'bike' lanes of tomorrow.

(One thing city councils could usefully do right away is to immediately ban
any fossil fuel motors under 125 cc from their roads.)

~~~
anyzen
Even electric bikes are not the solution, at least not in many parts of the
world. What happens when it rains / snows? I don't know what the solution is
though, maybe small electric cars, self driven, as part of public
transportation service?

~~~
ido
I regularly ride my "normal" bicycle (including 2 little kids in a trailer) in
the rain in Berlin (where it rains for 167 days per year on average, which is
~45% of the year).

You just need the appropriate clothes & gear.

~~~
stinos
_where it rains for 167 days per year on average, which is ~45% of the year_

Well, neighbouring country in which it rained on 199 days on average in the
past 20 years or so, but since it doesn't rain all 24hrs of those days, a more
interesting figure would be that it apparently only rains about 10% of the
time here. Meaning about 90% of the whole time there is no rain.

~~~
ido
my point was that rain is not unusual here.

------
gwbas1c
I lived in Palo Alto, CA, (heart of Silicon Valley) and commuted by bike to
work. (I even took my bike on the train for a few weeks.) Once I met my wife,
we were able to bike to each other's homes and also bike to work.

It was great!

Then we moved in together, and because she had a dog, Palo Alto became
prohibitively expensive, and we had to move a few miles away. I only used my
bike three times after that. Even worse, my job then moved in the opposite
direction, so I ended up with a commute that was only possible by car.

This is why I laugh at these kinds of articles. There's a lot we can do to
encourage many forms of transportation, but the nature of a large world is
that a car lets you drive 20 miles from point A to point B in a manner that's
prohibitive by foot, bike, or train.

IMO, I think extremely large, subsidized, easy-in, easy-out parking lots on
the edge of population centers makes sense. Within the population center,
vehicles should only be for public transportation, deliveries, and people with
physical disabilities. It's a great compromise that works for people who just
can't bike 60 miles a day, or for people who live in areas where trains don't
make sense.

~~~
bluGill
If more people used them trains and buses would be able to run much larger
networks thus making the 20 mile commute via train reasonable. However until
people use them the network cannot be that large.

If the transit network was that large the freeway network in cities would not
be worth it, thus further biasing trips to the train. However there is no easy
way to get there from here.

~~~
WhompingWindows
Build it and they will come - you can't expect everyone to get out of their
cars and start using public transport, then somehow use the slight increase in
ridership revenue to sponsor huge infrastructure projects. Simply put: the
government needs to throw down SERIOUS capital and political will to build out
20 miles of trains all around a metropolitan area.

We need to get away from the myth of single people and their small steps
changing the world...we need our governments to actually invest in their own
society's well-being and structure.

~~~
bluGill
Be careful, reality gets in the way.

Right now transit construction costs are out of control in the US. (Road is
only slightly better). Spain is able to build subways for about 1/5th the cost
of New York city. Nobody knows why - we can find people doing nothing, high
wages, and more harder rock, but all these together are just a fraction of the
cost difference. Until this problem is solved we are better off building roads
because we can afford them.

Thus if you want to advocate for build more, you should first advocate for
figuring out how to build cheaper. (whatever this means - though if you
sacrifice safety I'll oppose you)

~~~
volkl48
A substantial part of the problem in the US regarding transit projects is also
lack of practice and atrophy of experience and capability.

In the past 50 years, we didn't build those sorts of projects frequently. When
we did, they were often one off projects in one city not repeated until
another 10 or 20 years passed, and there have rarely been these sorts of
projects going on in many places around the country at once.

As such, you've got:

\- A very small number of suppliers for anything, especially with any track
record of succeeding at contracts in North America, because the market has
been unable to sustain more. Competitive bidding isn't when you get 3 bids and
only 1 or maybe 2 of them fully meet your needs/requirements.

\- Very few people with any real depth of expertise on building these projects
on your management side, so running them effectively is unlikely at best.
International hires may have more experience building a subway in the
abstract, but that doesn't help them navigate very different
regulatory/permitting/planning/contracting environments.

\--------

I'm not necessarily saying "just throw money at it and eventually they'll
figure out how to do it better", but to some extent we're never going to get
to faster/cheaper construction until we're actually doing it consistently.

------
chrisco255
This article paints the interstate highway system as some sort of evil
incarnation without even giving so much as a breath to the idea that the
Interstate highway system is one of the largest and most successful civil
works projects of all time. The Romans had their aquaducts. The Americans have
their highways. Prior to the Interstate system, it would take as much as two
months to travel coast to coast. Eisenhower was part of an Army convoy in 1919
that did just that. It took them 62 days. With the interstate system, it can
be traversed in just a few days. You have no idea how blessed you are to live
in an age where transportation is so freely available. While our passenger
train network may suck in the U.S. and rush hour traffic is awful, we have a
phenomenal road and air travel network.

Meanwhile, I support bike/scooter lanes in dense urban core areas. They're not
a solution for most people though, unless you can afford to live in the
densest and usually most expensive parts of a city.

Autonomous buses should be within reach this decade. I can't think of a better
mass transit solution more easily fitted into the existing systems than
autonomous buses or micro buses that could fill more niches and provide
reliable service 24/7.

~~~
TulliusCicero
But Eisenhower wanted the interstate system to go _between_ cities, not
_through_ cities. And it's the latter that's the real problem.

That we have freeways between cities is no real issue for bikes, in Germany
they have the Autobahn system and they still have reasonably bike friendly
cities like Munich. Similar situation for Dutch cities IIRC.

But the autobahn system doesn't cut through the middle of cities in Germany
nearly to the same extent as it does in the US. Actual high speed parts of the
Autobahn basically stop a certain part of the way into Munich, and you have to
get off onto surface streets.

But anyway, that's just one problem among many for car dominance in the US.

~~~
chrisco255
Germany has a fraction of our population. In 1950 the U.S. had 150 million
people. Today it has 320 million. The interstates were largely built outside
of urban cores but sprawl often took them over. Most European cities were
built before the car. Their grid and design is totally different than U.S.
cities.

Autonomous buses are an ambitious but realistic solution to people's
transportation needs based on the reality of American real estate, roads, and
commuter needs.

You won't get there with bikes in the U.S.

~~~
TulliusCicero
It's a fixable problem, long term. Bikes aren't super dependent on high
density like a subway, even the relatively low density of many US suburbs can
work okay if the infrastructure is good, and you allow POI (like
shops/restaurants) within a reasonable distance. That would necessitate zoning
changes, but it's easier to achieve than overall density changes.

If you look at cities that DO have good infrastructure, they have relatively
high bike rates even without being particularly high density, like Davis, CA,
or Portland. The idea that it just can't happen in US cities is not borne out
by the facts.

------
danielecook
I’ve thought about this a lot having lived in Chicago and now London and seen
two very different types of infrastructure.

Chicago arguably has a true “cycle superhighway” with its 23 miles of
continuous bike lane on the lakefront I was able to commute 10 miles to work
very fast and with little exposure to cars.

London is a work in progress, with lots of infrastructure slotted in.

What I’ve come away with being a pretty committed bike commuter is that a good
bike network should incorporate routes that are disassociated with the road
network where possible. Like the lake path in Chicago, these routes are much
safer, accessible to new cyclists, And fast (with few intersections). Also see
Chicago’s elevated bike path the 606 for another example.

London could develop something similar along the river Thames (it does exist
in parts, but it needs to be continuous, wider, and better developed), and
improve routes along its canals. London could also develop and allow more
routes through its parks. This in particular is low hanging fruit as routes
through many parks are limited and have just been added to roads that cut
through parks in many cases (another issue worth debating is whether roads
should be cutting through parks to begin with).

------
knolan
I cycle 24km to work across the city each way on an ebike. It’s the fastest
mode of transport available to me, even limited to 25km/h.

The bike takes an hour, the bus 90 minutes because of its indirect route, and
the car about the same with morning gridlock. You could do it in 35 minutes
with no traffic.

When I take the bus I arrive to work tired and groggy. When I cycle I arrive
energised. I don’t drive because parking on campus is usually impossible.

The problem is that there are limited shower facilities and the ones in my
building are extremely grotty, so much so that some colleagues have stopped
cycling. Appeals to facilities has only resulted in them locking one of the
showers permanently. If more people cycle that’s great but it’ll have knock on
effects on other infrastructure and organisations need to pull their finger
out and make changes to encourage cycling.

~~~
scrollaway
24km? What's your bike's range? Over here ebikes are just about limited to
25-30km on full charge. Do you charge it at work?

~~~
koyote
So I don't own an ebike but I've rented an MTB ebike a short while ago and was
able to comfortably do 70km while still having over 1/4 battery left. That
being said, I did not have it set to the max the whole way. Mostly spent in
eco mode which is more than enough

~~~
scrollaway
Wow, 70km! Where I live that's crossing almost half the country. I didn't know
some ebikes had such a range.

~~~
lm28469
Some are pretty good, I think the last one I rented had 80 to 160km range
depending on the power setting/terrain. I used it to visit around my home
town, climbed hills (paved and in the woods), visited small towns 35km away,
climbed the steepest road (7km, 600m height difference) in the area on full
power, &c. and never worried about the battery. If I ever move back to the
country side I'll get one for sure. You can even remove the 25kph limit and
make it go up to 50kph if you get a license plate / insurance.

------
smt88
> _Cars are the slowest, lowest-bandwidth forms of urban transportation._

This is the kind of thing I read a lot in micromobility advocacy articles, but
it seems like it can't be true. How can a bike, scooter, or moped be either
faster or higher-bandwidth than a car?

Also, serious question: if electric SDCs became widespread, would it still
make sense to advocate things like bikes?

You can't transport a family of three or a baby as safely in a vehicle smaller
than a car (as they lack things like walls and air bags), and the many obese,
elderly, and disabled people in the US can't use micromobility easily.

~~~
scarejunba
I’m faster than a car in downtown SF on my jump bike. Even on market I’m even
because no one makes a green from one green.

~~~
scarejunba
Honestly didn't think I said anything weird. I imagine throughput is high
because lots of us can do this. I'm not a hater, I actually have an SUV. I
just also ride electric downtown.

------
11235813213455
Rarely I take bike lanes, they are less fast and irregular

The road should be used by bikes in my opinion (lower
infrastructure/maintenance cost, and the separation between road and bike
lanes is actually how I broke my right clavicle), and bikes should have
priority against individual cars (not urgency and shared transports of course)

~~~
TulliusCicero
This will never work except for the tiny percentage of people who are
extremely confident riding with cars. You're never going to get grandmas and
grandpas and 8-year-olds comfortably riding in car traffic on regular roads.

I don't understand why people keep suggesting this when bikes generally
already _can_ use the road, and this is clearly a failure as far as getting
more people biking.

Meanwhile, basically everywhere that implements protected bike lanes and off-
street bike paths aplenty gets tons of people biking. But we shouldn't do the
thing that's proven successful, because...?

~~~
chrismatheson
A "simple" change could affect the way cars and bikes interact on the roads.

It's always the cars fault.

If the law were to change to favour the smallest, lest protected vehicle at
all times then those driving cars would take much greater care when driving
around them.

~~~
TulliusCicero
That would be a good, but insufficient change. People _will_ drive fast on the
wide, straight roads common in the states, for example, the road geography
itself encourages it. Enforcement changes alone are not enough.

Parents are never gonna feel safe letting their kids bike just because hey, if
they get hit by a car it'll be the driver's fault!

------
blhack
Wr tried. People threw them in the ocean and got cities to ban them.

It’s going to take me a long time to get over how broken hearted I am about
people’s reactions to various bike and scooter share programs. I understand
not using the services, but people were openly hostile to them.

~~~
0xcase
the problem here with these services were that there have been just too many
and around popular spots/bars/etc these share bikes just piled up to a point
where it was nearly impossible to use the sidewalk especially for people with
impaired vision

------
IgorPartola
Might as well ask here, but why do bicyclists always seem to blow past stop
signs and red lights? Whenever I am on a motorcycle, I always feel more
endangered by a bicyclist coming out of nowhere than a car. Can anyone give me
insight into this behavior?

~~~
granshaw
The common refrain I’ve heard is that it takes quite abit of effort to
completely stop and then get back up to speed on a bike

------
gorgoiler
Dreaming bigger than bicycles would be helpful as well. Electrification, and
having more than two wheels is a big step up in terms of practicality.

There’s a real sweet spot somewhere around where electrified pedal tricycles,
electric three wheel mopeds, and small electric cars like the Renault Twizy,
that has huge potential.

I cycle everywhere but I’m realistic about the issues with mass adoption.
Bicycles are fundamentally unstable and they are too narrow to expect road
discipline by cyclists to be an emergent property. There is also a very narrow
band of weather conditions, especially as a function of how hilly it is, where
most people can cycle without overheating.

Electrification is a game changer but there’s no two ways about it: these are
now literally motorbikes, with all the same potential for antisocial behavior
(pavement riding, traffic weaving, shortcuts through pedestrian only areas.)
Not being quite so efficient with the amount of road space used might benefit
cyclist behavior _and_ force the authorities hand into providing first class
infrastructure for non-car travel.

My personal solution is a bit of a hack: ride a cargo bike with a large front
bucket. Keeps me slow and riding safely :)

------
sornaensis
We need to build bike lanes as their own adjacent network of lanes on our
streets, with stop light integration within the city- meaning separation of
cyclist and motorist, but adjacent -and bike lanes that run parallel to but
removed from major thoroughfares.

Aka the copenhagen model.

Nobody is gonna ride a bike if it’s unsafe or difficult or if the bike paths
are disconnected.

So yes, we should be dreaming beyond bike lanes, because we ought to be
building proper ones right now!

------
peterwwillis
I love micromobility. I think it's the future of human transportation, in
combination with better, more efficient, more _convenient_ , mass-transit.

But this "let's dream big about bikes" is like saying "we should feed the
planet". Well that's a great notion, and we can totally do that. But who the
fuck is going to pay for it?

The car lobby had lots of money, and was able to seize on an abundance of
necessity and want: the military needed to be able to move things, cities
needed to be able to expand housing out to suburbs, the country needed work,
and politicians needed an answer to these problems and a big win. Interstates
were a _godsend_ to all these various issues, and the car lobby's funding made
that an easy argument to make.

What the hell does the bike lobby have? Chump change. A _lack_ of necessity.
Hopes and dreams. Nobody's going to build a Futurama world based on that. You
need more than dreams; you need a _cause_. And you need to be able to provide
real value for everyone, not just people who like to bike. That means
businesses, politicians, etc

------
Kaiyou
I'm always wondering why it is the environment that has to change. I'm also
living in a city and I neither own a car, nor a bike nor am I using public
transport. I just walk everywhere I have to go.

Think about why you can't just walk everywhere and if the answer is that you
don't have the time, maybe you should consider just taking that time or
reconsider life choices. Why can't you live near the things you need to
regularly visit? There's nothing really preventing you. You just don't want
to, right?

So maybe everyone should think hard about themselves first, before dreaming
about remodelling the environment.

~~~
zimbatm
There are a lot of different types of cities. European cities tend to be more
dense and walk-able for historical reasons. Not everyone has the luxury of
living in such nice environment or even moving places.

Even as a walker, cities would be so much nicer to walk into without the
threat of cars and the pollution that they generate. Imagine walking in the
middle of the road, fresh air, you have the space to cross people, some space
could be reclaimed for plants and benches. Why not create the ideal
environment if we can?

~~~
Kaiyou
Personally, I wouldn't want to live in a city without cars. And that comes
from someone not even owning a car. Simply because I enjoy walking while not
meeting many people. So if as many people as possible can just drive to where
they want to go that leaves me with more leisure while walking.

------
carapace
Make several separate but interconnected transportation networks.

Peds; Bikes; Light EVs (scooters, kick and seated, small cargo movers, narrow
(1 seater) cars); Buses & Cargo Trucks; Trains;

Take advantage of grade (slope). Roads should have short ups followed by long
downs (in both directions, it's possible) to let people take advantage of
gravity. I once saw a fascinating pamphlet advocating for graded runways:
planes taking off head downhill, landing, uphill. The idea was that you would
save a ton of fuel.

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

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

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

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

~~~
carapace
Build a mound and put the airport on top with the runways radiating?

I'm certainly not knowledgeable enough to argue the point.

~~~
magduf
Ok, but now you have an airport that takes 2-4 times as much space as normal
ones. Airports already consume an incredible amount of space; most places
don't have that much space to spare.

This reminds me of someone's crazy proposal not too long ago (I think it
showed up on this site) to make an airport with a big circular runway around
it, with the idea that planes could be continuously taking off and landing. It
didn't take long for some pilots to chime and and call the whole idea utterly
insane and stupid because it's incredibly dangerous to take off or land while
turning.

~~~
carapace
Fair enough. It was just a pamphlet I found on the ground in Boulder CO one
day.

Circular runway made me LOL. Cheers!

------
eMSF
>As if that weren’t enough, they also stole our primary public spaces in
cities: the streets.

The irony of this feelgood narrative is that cyclists don't want pedestrians
on their ways, either.

~~~
brnt
And for good reason: safe travel means separating speeds. Here in NL, the
average cycling speed is about 20kph. Walking is about 5kph, 3 for the
elderly. It's not a very good idea to share spaces. If space is the problem,
it would be better to merge car and bike traffic [1][2].

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bicycle_boulevard#Netherlands](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bicycle_boulevard#Netherlands)
[2]
[https://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fietsstraat](https://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fietsstraat)

------
leecarraher
I think there is a bit of a catch-22 in regard to ridership and using already
limited city roadway resources. I am privileged to have a protected bike lane
for a about 50% of my commute to work, but can't deny the argument that it is
vastly underutilized in comparison to roadways. Unfortunately this seems to
further polarize cyclists and non-cyclists when I do need to share the
roadway. It is a difficult problem that large scale public works cannot solve
alone.

------
zimbatm
> Too ambitious?

Not nearly enough. What we need are breathing cities. Cities that are more
friendly to humans and that function well.

The problem with cars is that they are dangerous. On top of that they also
create air and noise pollution and take a lot of space. Is it really worth
living in a hostile environment when we have better alternatives available?

The article is too focused on bikes. There are a lot of different aspects to a
breathing city and bike lanes are an implementation detail.

------
bb101
Interesting how the author seems to think that cycling advocates have only a
marginal impact on our built environment because they "ask for twigs".

I would have assumed that the lack of cycling infrastructure in cities is more
influenced by the people who have power over our town councils and planners --
wealthy developers and transport lobbyists. How likely are these people to use
bicycles over cars themselves?

------
jalgos_eminator
It seems like we need a cultural shift here in America, but I just don't see
it happening. People here expect to be able to drive their car anywhere and
get there in a reasonable amount of time and be able to find parking nearby.
That's been our reality since post-WWII, but I think people need to come to
grips with the fact that the gravy train is over for personal cars.

------
maerF0x0
Part of the picture of why bike lanes lose is because those same cyclists
frequently turn to cars/public transport during inclement weather, rendering
those bike lines useless and the system inflexible to repurpose the space for
the additional automotive load.

------
AtlasBarfed
Cities should build elevated bike "superhighway" loops. The weight and
material requirements must be a miniscule fraction of an elevated road, and
they can probably be mounted to multistory buildings or other tall
infrastructure, or even suspended.

------
choeger
> Now, almost anybody can go for miles fairly quickly without breaking a
> sweat.

Yeah. Cars do that. Congratulations, you understand why people prefer
motorized, individual over public or non-motorized, individual transportation.
And btw, elevated freeways were one of the solutions for car traffic in the
past...

In a dense city, if you want to "reclaim" your space, you have to invest
massively. And I'd say the inhabitants need to pay. So tax everyone close to a
city center by 50% of their current rent/mortgage and you can build the
infrastructure of your dreams. It's not the commuters that profit from that
investment, so they should not pay. If you merely want to protect the air
quality, just forbid ICEs inside the city limits after, say, ten years. But
please be consequent and apply that to your buses, taxis, delivery vans etc.
as well.

------
xchaotic
I happen to live in an area where roads have been slightly overbuilt and
there’s plenty of roads and hardly any traffic on them. I’d say the existing
infrastructure is perfect for bicycles we just need to get rid of the cars.

------
jl2718
I love bikes. Obsessed bike commuter for many years. Anyway...

Maybe the big engineering project he's looking for is parking garages to get
the parked cars off the street. Maybe also block side streets to reduce
intersections.

------
netcan
Renegotiating the basics so that bicycles (and other light vehicles) get
similar status to cars and buses was always going to be an uphill battle.

It's possible that a shift to driverless cars is an opportunity to do it. If
driverless cars do succeed, there could be a shift away from private
ownership.

At that point, there's an opportunity to be encourage much narrower, slower,
lighter vehicles in cities. You don't a 2 ton car to transport one person 9km
@ 25kmph. The cars we have are so big because they occasionally need to
transport a whole family long distance on a highway. With self driving taxis
this could (plausibly) be handled by a different car.

The conflicting road needs of bikes and lightweight vehicles (say <25kmph &
<200kg) are much more manageable than bikes and pickup trucks (or buses).

------
baxtr
A bit off topic: but what I’ve asked myself since I’m biking through town
daily. Is there an increased lung cancer risk for city bikers with all the car
traffic out there?

~~~
kwohlfahrt
The BBC did a video a few weeks back showing that you're exposed to more
pollution in a car: [https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/av/uk-england-south-
yorkshire-499...](https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/av/uk-england-south-
yorkshire-49960950/how-do-you-breathe-less-pollution-on-school-run)

Not sure how that translates to cancer risk but came as a surprise to me.

------
Merrill
When I see pictures of cities with lots of bikes, they are usually cities in
South and East Asia.

How did they become so successful? Is there anything to learn from their
experience?

------
tempodox
Not just bike lanes. Ban private car traffic from cities completely. Only
allow private cars between cities.

------
z3t4
An idea i have is bike tubes.

~~~
boxcardavin
You joke, but I’ve kicked around the idea of bike tunnels with collimated air
blowing down them at 20mph to make riding at that speed more comfortable, and
make loitering uncomfortable. Microautonomy might make that feasible.

~~~
z3t4
Yeh, it's basically science fiction. But they can be light-weight, and thus
less expensive then highways.

------
basicplus2
Travellators everywhere....

------
reilly3000
US Federal highways were built for homeland defense first, then commercial
traffic, then individual automobiles. The infrastructure is built on
government credit and maintained via gasoline taxes. A 50 mile segment of
freeway might move more than $50 million worth of cargo and labor each hour.
The same is true for city streets, on a smaller scale.

Bikes, by their nature, are rather terrible at moving things around like cows,
refrigerated goods, building supplies and such. They are excellent at moving
around people, and providing them healthy exercise in the process.

The demonstrable economic impact of a road closure in terms of real wages,
purchases, freight, and more is analyzed with incredible depth here:
[https://www.purdue.edu/discoverypark/nextrans/assets/pdfs/Fi...](https://www.purdue.edu/discoverypark/nextrans/assets/pdfs/Final%20Report%20053PY03%20Estimating%20the%20Economic%20Impacts%20of%20Disruptions%20to%20Intermodal%20Freight%20Systems%20Traffic.pdf)

From an economic standpoint, the value that bike transportation facilitates is
the aggregate value of the wages, production, and consumption of its riders.
They represent 0.6% of urban commuters, with 86% in automobiles and 5% in mass
transit. Even in Portland, OR only 3.5% of the workforce commutes via bicycle,
and certainly less on the rare snow day.

Many would argue that our transportation infrastructure is the cause of this
disparity. I think that they are in fact a reflection of economic reality. In
places where bicycles carry lots of economic value, such as a highly
compensated workforce, they have more infrastructure. In places where they
convey relatively little economic value, they receive virtually no
accommodation. In agricultural areas, roads have special accommodations for
tractors, and rail is extremely valuable.

I could imagine, as many have and the article suggests, a vision for urbanism
that is centered around human-first transportation networks. In a place where
knowledge work dominates, this is entirely possible. Its happening now, in NYC
where roads are being closed off to cars block by block. The roads themselves
still exist because people still need things that are most efficiently moved
by trucks, such as refrigerated goods, construction equipment, and so on.

A pedal-powered utopia would need to have a robust solution for moving
kilotons of things like food if people want to eat, building materials if
people want shelter, stuff if people want stuff to put in their shelters, and
raw materials if people want to make things instead of just consuming stuff.

Bicycling provides plenty of recreational value, which is in itself economic
value, and that should not be discounted.

If we're envisioning things, I'd like to see integrated networks of airborne,
ground-level, and subterranean conveyance, each with macro, micro, and
intermodal transit solutions that have maximal economic bandwidth and minimal
environmental impact. Better yet, technology that eliminates the need for
transit, like localized manufacturing and recycling... ie, instead of a garage
sheltering a car, it could hold waste materials, shredders, extruders, 3d
printers/fabbers, etc for anything from plastics to proteins. If everything we
needed to transport could be transported via bike or drone at the last
mile(s), if everything we needed came in small packages, if labor happened in
place, if everything we made came from commodity components and openly shared
designs... roads would vanish rather quickly.

Until then, bikes will get the infrastructure budget commensurate with the
value they transport, and the same goes for each other mode. At least cyclists
don't have to pay gas tax.

~~~
TulliusCicero
Nobody's suggesting getting rid of roads for cars entirely. Munich is
radically more bike friendly than any big US city, but they still have trucks
and stuff. Even in the city center portion that's off limits to regular cars,
businesses can get deliveries.

And you can do some deliveries with bikes, I do see people doing it for DHL
here on electric cargo bikes for that last mile. Doesn't work for everything
of course, but I don't think the goal is literally zero cars ever, it's
reducing the unnecessary usage.

------
waxsonbrutus
Binatesatjvoj

------
waxsonbrutus
Hgiok

------
SllX
You know what? Fine. I think the increased trend in cycling in day, San
Francisco is neat. I have questioned the sanity of those who thought plastic
pylons were adequate “protection” wherever I’ve seen them.

Streets are typically city-owned and managed though, and if you’re in a place
with a tax regime like California’s, then you’re in a place that relies
heavily on things like sales taxes and capital gains taxes which tend to go
down the gutter, because good old fashioned property taxes, while extant, are
not nearly adequate enough when 1. the assessed value of a property is
completely disconnected from the market value which 2. leads to an illiquid
property market which artificially inflates prices and 3. the actual property
tax rate is largely outside the hands of the people who need to draw up a
budget(supervisors, councilors, legislators).

So you want more and better bike infrastructure? I want more and better bike
infrastructure. I know! Let’s pay for it! But how are we going to? We could
tax and spend, but now you need to see if voters would like more and better
bike infrastructure. Oh I know! We can tax the future taxpayers! Sell bonds.
Kick the can down the road. I’m sure there is nothing wrong with that.

So now we know how we’re going to pay for it, how much are we going to pay?
Well, how much do you like unions. If you’re a union guy, you have no
incentive to get the job done any faster than on time, and plenty of
incentives to not get it done on time. Well what about contractors? Small
business owners have every incentive to get the job done on time because after
this, they’ve got their next job to move onto. The more projects they can work
in a calendar year, the more money they can make.

Ah, but you don’t want them to just go in wily nilly, make a mess of things
and disrupt the flow of traffic and business, wake up the neighborhood and
just make things generally unpleasant! You’ve gotta have rules! Sure, you’ve
gotta have rules. In fact, you’ve gotta have an environmental impact report,
confine portions of the project to certain days, confine actual work to
certain hours, have adequate signage posted everywhere, and marketing fluff
posted all over about how all this “stuff” is going to make life worth living
(here) even better! All of which costs time and costs money. And quite a lot
of this really just extends the time it takes a project to complete.

Like Irving Street, San Francisco. An extensive project to kick two or three
bus stops down the road and extend the sidewalk a few feet on a couple of
street corners which has taken, I don’t have a number on this, but well over a
calendar year and has either just wrapped up or is about to wrap up. Actually
I take that back, I just remembered part of the project is to move a couple of
stops to 5th or 6th Avenue, the ones at 4th and 7th precisely are to be
consolidated in the middle, and last I checked _that_ ain’t finished. To say
nothing of the numerous public meetings that must have gone into this project.

It was even a good plan, it just took too damn long. But hopefully we can
repeat this process block by block, and create dedicated bike infrastructure
of the kind that would make a Dutchman feel right at home, and if it takes 30
years and enough money to fund a train between San Francisco and Los Angeles,
then who cares because we’re rich and therefore time and money don’t mean
anything at all! Even if you only have the same 80 or so years to love and
live as everyone else.

So let’s dream big, and maybe tackle the crisis or more like tragedy that is
well, every single part of a modern day public project from start to finish so
we can maybe build some bike superhighways from here to six blocks down the
road within one human lifetime and only a little bit over budget.

~~~
geofft
None of this extended, anti-American rant has anything to do with bikes in
particular. You're just complaining about doing anything at all with the
government and with unions.

So, build some private bike infrastructure. If Elon Musk wants to make
Hyperbike, sure, let's see if it gets built and forms part of a functioning
network.

Also - how come your arguments don't apply to building roads themselves? How
did Central Freeway get built? How did the Bay Bridge get built and rebuilt?

~~~
SllX
I was too young for the Central Freeway, so no comment on that one. Feel free
to pull in the relevant data yourself though.

The Bay Bridge was built in a different time under a different regulatory
regime and with fewer rules. The Eastern Span, because the Western Span hasn’t
been “rebuilt”, much like the Central Subway (Not Freeway, I’m intentionally
switching gears here) was built in a more modern regulatory regime, over
budget, in more time than planned, and with defects which will limit the
effective life of the new span (near as I’m aware the Subway doesn’t suffer
this particular deficiency).

Let me be clear, I _support_ building more bike infrastructure, but if we
start tomorrow without addressing the regulatory and public budgetary issues
of _today_ , it will take more time than necessary and cost more than
necessary and not by small amounts. I don’t want to privatize our bloody
Streets, I want a sane taxation and budgetary regime that doesn’t depend on
the will of finicky voters, worse: a supermajority of them in the case of
California under certain conditions.

Oh and my friend, not _all_ criticisms are inherently Anti-American. This is
just that regular kind, the kind or a dissatisfied taxpayer dissatisfied with
the level of service provided by the State and Local government, and the
conditions which ensure that ain’t changing anytime soon. It’s the thing that
guarantees that if you dream big and imagine every City an Amsterdam, you’re
going to be disappointed. The more friction there is to _doing stuff_ , the
less stuff that voters have the stomach for to have done.

tl;dr Ballot box budgeting (to say only the least!) is insane, and ballot box
budgeting for bikeways will net you more twigs than bridges.

------
ddiq
Urban sprawl and planned cities are a pox on humanity. Look at this thread and
tell me that these layouts don't look eminently more livable than the modern
grid layout city.

[https://twitter.com/wrathofgnon/status/1186129107408392194](https://twitter.com/wrathofgnon/status/1186129107408392194)

------
irrational
I feel like this person is an optimist, envisioning a future that is never
going to happen. I envision a future of rapidly decreasing revenues as the
boomers die off and the population size plummets, while simultaneously climate
change starts to wreak havoc, resulting in city infrastructure not being
maintained at all, much less being improved to the extent the author is
recommending.

