The core of SF is fairly dense and hills are nicely compensated by electric bicycles (which are also very popular in the Netherlands for different reasons).
Ebikes still cost way too much. You can get a really great bike for £500. An ebike is going to set you back £1500 or more.
I think the price will come down but I don't think they're a great solution yet.
Fortunately they don't need to be a great solution. In all but the hilliest places plenty of people will bike if the cycle lanes are there. Loads of people cycle in Bristol despite it being quite hilly and not really cycle friendly (but they are very slowly improving).
Flatness definitely helps but it isn't the only thing that matters. The Netherlands was completely car based until the 70s for example, and it was just as flat then.
The market for ebikes has overtaken that for regular bikes in the Netherlands. It was a billion euro market last year and the average price is around 2K euros. There are a lot of company sponsored programs & tax benefits as well. Cheaper bikes are available but they generally have less range, comfort, and build quality.
I'm currently in Athens for a short vacation and what strikes me here is the insane number of petrol run scooters that are loud, take up lots of space, and pollute the city. Most of these could be replaced e-bikes easily and it would probably transform cities like this (this is a thing all over southern Europe). This is more or less exactly what's already well underway in Asia and these things are being mass produced by the millions already. Of course, Greece is a lot poorer and it will probably take quite long for them to catch up. A lot of the scooters here are obviously very old and I imagine their second hand value is very low. Of course fuel cost is a thing but they run quite far for just a few euros.
Why does the difference cost £1000? The electric assist bike conversion kits I see in the US are $300-500. Are the purpose-built ebikes tons better than the conversion kits?
Because it's not an honest comparison. A £500 bike is still a relatively budget adult bike, and an ebike is a relatively luxury product still and is probably more comparable to a £1,000 normal bike.
Decathlon (giant French sports chain) sell an ebike for £650.
How can you move the offices of a company that has 2 thousands employees near to their homes, when in decades the surroundings have been optimised for that purpose: keeping big offices out of the cities.
It's not so easy to fix, it could be fixed but it would take a lot of time and money but nobody knows if it would improve people lives
Once you have done that, you have to convince people to bike
one approach would be to require landlords to list the cost of parking separately in their lease agreements, and allow renters to opt out of that cost independent of the rest of the lease.
edit: oh, and have city-wide permit parking as well, so that municipal street parking is priced properly too.
I'm saying people are willing to pay the price and the state makes a compromise: discourage its use without making it impossible
Prices can only go up to a point, if they go up too much, you'll get street riots, like in France.
People would perceive them as another social injustice that favours reach people that can pay for the access or parking, while probably not needing it.
Bikes are cool, but are for bikers, and it's better like that
I've seen so many people almost kill themselves just because they thought they were good enough at it, but biking is not really an easy thing to do
Of course without cars there are less incidents between bikes and cars
In Netherlands cycling fatalities make up 30% of all the road deaths, which is a lot
In most cities we should promote public transport, which is not optimal for the single individual, but it's easier to deploy and really makes a difference for the community
It doesn't fix the problem of having to drive 40kms a day to go to work and the fact that many people don't live in the city because it's more expensive.
So now you have two problems: you have to convince them to bike and to live in smaller houses spending more money
> In the city centres where that makes commercial sense. Just allow tall buildings
You have to consider that we in Europe live in very old cities where what you're advocating for is impossible and even if it was possible, it would be crazy.
I live in Italy, Rome, Milan, Florence, Bologna, Naples, can't build taller in the city centre without ruining the city forever.
Turin is not Rotterdam.
Milan does it a little, but a skyscraper can't solve the problem of the literally thousands of people working for the big companies (mainly banks) that are building them.
They can at best concentrate _some_ of the commuters by concentrating the higher level managers in the same place.
That's it! And it took Milan 10 years to get it started by renovating areas of the city close to the stations and not too far from the centre that were once almost abandoned.
With the renovations going on prices have skyrocketed, so more people go to live further away, that's why the larger companies have offices near the highways, where it's easier to gather people scattered on a large territory and build giant parking spots and that's why people in the end need cars.
There is also a large number of people that could use the public transport, but are not using it.
They are not going to bike anyway.
So housing is only part of a larger problem that is not context neutral.
I thought more about adding a few stories on average everywhere, and less a few skyscrapers.
What does temperature have to do with skyscrapers, though? Those Italian cities you mention ain't colder than London, New York or Chicago (or Beijing); and they build tall building just fine.
