I wonder if this is due to a fundamental shift in who commutes to work?
High paid, "white collar" work is shifting to a remote/hybrid structure, or are paid enough that they can move to reduce commute. However, lower paid, service-oriented jobs require physical presence in the workplace. The increasing affordability gap for housing means these people have to live further and further away from their workplace.
That's a distinct possibility, but the wealthy folks you're talking about also had the good sense and economic mobility to move when interest rates were at historic lows, and they aren't likely to be interested in giving up that rate right now.
The effect you described is most certainly real, there's just other pressures to consider.
Right, and those folks you mention are working remote so there is no commute for them. On the other hand, the rent continues to increase for lower income workers who must continue to commute to work.
I think the atrocious housing marking is definitely to blame here. I would love to move closer to work but I'm not giving up my 2% 15y fixed and the housing market is such that I don't feel comfortable financing a 2nd purchase (and rent out the original).
So we stay, I do hybrid/flex and only come in about half the time.
Most of the people I know moved farther away from their job to have more property or a larger home. Or they moved from a more populated region to a less populated region, which in general also means longer distances.
Which would be a problem solved by allowing more remote work, and even giving tax incentives for not living near offices.
Our society had a huge opportunity to make a huge dent in vehicle usage too without waiting for public transit to catch up. We messed it up because commercial RE.
How does that support a janitor? or a school teacher? or a policeman? or a retail clerk... I can go on and on... there are too many jobs where there is no possibility for "remote work" yet may not pay well enough for you to live close to the office/place of employment
I just purchased a home, and my previously leisurely 10-12 minute commute will now turn into a 40 minute commute. I loved the previous location, but I was getting tired of renting.
The thing I'll miss more than the short commute time, I think, was just having stuff within walking distance. I used to have a grocery store, my doctor, my pharmacy, and multiple restaurants just a short walk away from my apartment. But now I'll be firmly in the suburbs, with the nearest grocery store about 2.3 miles away.
I went from a 15min to a 25-30min car commute. But it took me 5 minutes to get my car out of the basement garage so really it's not so bad. I also miss living close to stuff. But there is a different kind of convenience to owning a house over renting an apartment.
In Australia at least, this is partly because those who actually work are forced to live further out. Those who are retired, don't need to work, or have senior remote roles have a stranglehold on the inner suburbs. We have a donut of outer suburbs with young families with retirees in the inner suburbs. Essentially its just poor distribution of resources. Those who would benefit from being in inner suburbs can't have it while those who don't really need to be any specific location, except inner suburbs tend to be pretty nice, take up that space.
I can't see the article so maybe this is explained already.
There are some reasons for older people to be in the inner suburbs. For example, better access to public transport as they get too old to drive. Also, with increased healthcare needs being close to major providers/facilities can be beneficial.
The problem is that the area is attractive to everyone. In theory a better approach would be to start new cities to increase the number of inner suburbs. Instead we see cities expand, increasing demand for the limited supply of "good" areas.
There are a lot of smaller cities with at least somewhat walkable areas. But they're smaller, tend to have much less of a cultural scene, little in the way of public transit, more limited healthcare options, etc.
What makes inner suburbs of many larger cities attractive is that they provide access to major city amenities without the downsides of living in an urban core.
Yes, but instead of growing the smaller cities to create those same amenities, we end up with the complaints about the inner suburbs being inaccessible to younger people.
With such commute time wouldn't rather work arrangements like 4 times a week 10 hours (or even 3 times a week 13-14 hours) make sense as an alternative to 5 times a week 8 hours?
I had about 3 hours total for about 3 days/week at one point. And even given that I could often do most of it by train, it really wouldn't have been sustainable long-term.
Remote work eliminates commutes, is better for the environment and employees, and gives greater flexibility in housing options. I hope employers will embrace remote work more once the baby boomer generation retires.
How can others not see it? I see a bunch of people, even on HN, pushing for lower emissions while rejecting remote work for whatever personal reason. I also see others wanting instead to force everybody into ultra high density living to avoid driving, while remote work cuts down on the biggest source of driving needs.
Ultra High Density Living is just the most eco-friendly way of living for the masses. Why would anyone think otherwise, if the same masses live abroad and spread out over vast land with their own infrastructure?
> Ultra High Density Living is just the most eco-friendly way of living for the masses.
You do not need to go to "ultra high" density, à la Manhattan or Hong Kong.
Once you get to densities of Paris, Stockholm, Amsterdam, Munich, Brussels—in the 50 people per hectare (20 per acre) range—there are diminishing returns:
I don't know where they get that 50/Ha figure. Paris is more dense than Seoul, with just over 200 people per Ha, or ~20k/km².
Figure would actually have been higher at the 1999 date of the cited source, too. The city is (slowly) losing people.
Paris - the city itself - is actually surprisingly high density, almost as high as Manhattan if you do not include the two very large 'Bois' (woods) that are technically part of the city.
Unfortunately America seems to not be able to get its shit together in how it handles larger cities. Mass transit sucks, life threatening noise pollution, rents are too high, and homelessness abounds while many enter some sort of Stockholm syndrome and think these problems are overstated and defend the status quo. I want to keep living in a walkable high density area but greed, complacency, and outright ignorance destroys what could work for more people.
It is possible to be generally for lower emissions but value those "personal reasons" more. I would never voluntarily live in an urban area, dense or otherwise. Not willing to make that much of a sacrifice for the planet, sorry. I'm open to considering other ways to improve my carbon footprint, like working remote and not commuting, but living in a city is not one of them.
I think it is totally fine to live outside of cities. I did this also during corona times bcs of these non-sense rules. Just i do not think its more eco-friendly. Maybe on an individual level, but when all people do this, its not. Well, like with all luxuries.
I have nothing against remote work, but I don’t think it’s particularly eco-friendly in the US setting: the trend in the US has been increased suburbanization (and larger houses to accommodate home offices), both of which are probably worse on net for the environment that a single office building with central heating/cooling. Similarly: workers who move to the suburbs and drive to work only occasionally are still potentially driving more than they would be if they used mass transit in cities.
This doesn’t necessarily apply to other countries with better land use patterns, of course.
Urban densification is definitely more eco-friendly than most suburbanization.
The emissions of cars for the US is much higher than most people expect at 1.7 billion tons, while air conditioning is about 117 million tons. A/C also peak matches solar, which makes the emissions for it easier to cut.
Heat is harder to get numbers on, but I also think most oversized suburban houses are in the sunbelt these days, plus I don't think a home office swings it too much from the baseline heating to keep the pipes from freezing.
While moving to a suburb had an increase in space as one of its boons, the primary driving force by far was housing costs. Reducing housing costs by half or more and locking that cost in by buying (no rent hikes) has dramatic effects on one’s ability to accumulate savings and work towards achieving true financial security.
If I could’ve found a decent apartment in the city for the same price as my house, I likely would’ve opted for the apartment instead because being within walking distance of essentials and things to do is very compelling. Unfortunately there’s not much in US cities that can be had for the same price, and what little can isn’t pleasant to spend extended amounts of time in as one does with remote work.
This doesn’t have to be a problem. In Tokyo for instance there’s plenty of suitable apartments for a decent price, especially if you’re ok with downtown being a 20m train ride away. We don’t build our cities like that, though.
> the trend in the US has been increased suburbanization (and larger houses to accommodate home offices)
My emissions 100% went up with RW.
I moved to Wyoming from New York, bought a roomy house. bought a car for the first time and fly constantly. The quality of life is great. And I still drop into the office every few months. But it’s no environmental panacea.
It would have to be a society wide calculation, and I doubt the vast, vast majority of people are going from zero driving to more driving like a NYC to suburbs migrant. More likely is people going from regularly driving 60min+ per day to sit at a desk no longer doing that drive, which is a net reduction in energy usage.
Hard to say how the numbers ultimately work out. I guess we'll have to see what the net numbers look like for large cities in a few years. Anecdotally I do see a fair number of people I know who were living in cities, in part because it was convenient to their office, who moved out--including to rural locations--once they didn't need to regularly go into an office any longer.
I think the telling metric would be be the hybrid vs full time remote composition.
Even if full time rm is carbon negative, hybrid can be positive. Myself and many I know went from 10 min Daily commutes to 60+ min commutes 2-3 times a week.
> workers who move to the suburbs and drive to work only occasionally are still potentially driving more than they would be if they used mass transit in cities.
I used to live in the middle of Dublin and ride a bike to work.
Then I got a remote job and realized I could save a fortune by moving to a rural house an hour away.
But when I _did_ need to go to Dublin, I was sometimes driving instead of riding a bike (though sometimes I took the train, but I was very careful to make this an option and my neighbours would usually drive to go to Dublin)
There’s a personal anecdote as a direct comment beneath my comment, as an example of this.
To be clear: I’m not faulting people for this. But it’s an intuitive consequence of people moving their working space into their living space: having both means needing more room, which frequently means moving somewhere rural or suburban and driving more.
I think a considerable amount of the anti-remote push is also on managers from GenX as well, and I think we've considerably obviated much of the incentive to retire for the top end of decision-makers since their fortunes are increasingly tied up in their investments anyway and the control they exert can be really abstract and thus not very difficult to keep up
I wouldn't call office workers a minority - they make up more than half of american jobs [1]. Surely some proportion of these jobs require presence / face time, but even if you knock that number down to 40%, that's still a huge chunk.
That link doesn't validate your assertion, unless the stat is deeply hidden.
I did see "professional", which has all sorts of categories, including "manager" and all sorts of sciences, etc. "Manager" can be someone managing a cleanup crew, a job site, scientists can be on boats, or in the woods, architects at construction sites, on and on.
A Walmart has several managers, some of which have no office. A Burger King has a few managers.
I work on a remote-first organisation and have previously done so (in pre-COVID times) and there are wins and loses. You lose the serendipitous meetings in the office, and have to deliberately schedule what could have been done by dropping by someone's desk. You also lose the fancier coffee machine.
> I hope employers will embrace remote work more once the baby boomer generation retires.
How does a janitor do remote work? A teacher? Restaurant workers? Hospital workers?
> However, healthcare workers and others in similar professions often don’t have the ability to work remotely. In fact, Healthcare workers in New York have the worst commute times of any profession at 52 minutes on average.
If certain places are popular to live in, and the prices of residences gets priced up by high-income individuals, low- and mid-income people—who are often the (so-called) 'support workers' in those communities—are pushed out and often have long commutes to their jobs.
Not everything can be done over Zoom or an SSH session.
> How does a janitor do remote work? A teacher? Restaurant workers? Hospital workers?
One thing about these workers is there is a limit on density, and in many cases a strong correlation with the number of people who live nearby. There are only so many janitors you need, even for a large office building. Same with health care workers. The number you need is a function of the number of beds the hospital has, its size, and how busy it is - which has a large correlation with how many people live around it. Same with cooks. How many cooks you need in an area is limited by restaurants and kitchen space and how many people are around.
Not so with workers who could be remote. You can pack them in by the thousands and tens of thousands into cubicles in downtown skyscrapers. They in tern drive demand for cooks who have to come work downtown in an area they could not afford.
If you make the people that could be remote, remote you reduce this pressure. No longer are you packing tens of thousands of people in a very small, expensive part of town. This reduces the number of cooks you need in the very dense expensive part of town. This reduces the cooks who have to commute to a part of town they could never afford to live in.
In addition, with the reduced number of potentially remote workers who are paying extra to cut down their commute, you reduce the price pressure of housing.
Remote work reduces density, lowers price pressure, and increases the correlation of work to where people actually live.
So it benefits even the jobs that can’t be remote.
> Agreed. However, if everyone who is capable to work remote will decide to do so, it would free up lane capacity for those who aren't able to.
Less traffic reduce stress, but you still have distance to deal.
And that assumes you can drive, and you're not too poor or have some other factor which restricts your ability to own/operate a car.
> But when one train recently stopped for a sick passenger, her commute expanded to a mind-boggling three hours and 15 minutes. She was late. To make up the lost time, she stayed longer with her patient instead of picking up her granddaughter from school. She had to enlist a neighbor to do that — for $35.
> It would also reduce land costs in urban centers.
That does not necessarily follow: some folks may prefer to live in an urban area (only) because they work in said urban area, and so want shorter commutes, but I'm sure plenty live in urban areas because (e.g.) like the amenities.
As a sysadmin I can easily do remote work, but would still live in an urban centre.
As per Jane Jacobs: people do not live in cities, they live in neighbourhoods. I think most folks who live in urban centres do so because they like the lifestyle first, and a shorter commute may be just a nice bonus. There are also lots of folks who 'reverse commute': live in the city and work in the suburbs.
That may be true of people just out of school but my experience over a fairly large number of years was that relatively few people lived in the city and commuted out to a suburban office park. For one thing, even reverse commutes can be pretty slow in a city with a lot of traffic. I rarely drive into the city for evening events partly for that reason.
You definitely are not wrong, but remote work can also help the kind of individuals highlighted indirectly.
Perhaps a simple example is through remote work meaning fewer commuters, and so less traffic, less crowded trains, etc.
But also consider that schools and hospitals need to be near centers of population - if people are moving out of cities into smaller towns, then, over time, schools in those towns will need to grow, and those in the cities shrink, thus (one would hope) allowing teachers and hospital workers more affordable accomodation, close to their work too.
But, on the other hand, roles for janitors and restaurant workers may be reduced (if people are WFH and not needing office cleaning, and going out for lunch).
> If certain places are popular to live in, and the prices of residences gets priced up by high-income individuals, low- and mid-income people—who are often the (so-called) 'support workers' in those communities—are pushed out and often have long commutes to their jobs.
And thus wages should increase for "support workers", currently the lifestyles of those living in such high desireable areas are subsidised by those taking terrible commutes.
>How does a janitor do remote work? A teacher? Restaurant workers? Hospital workers?
Janitors and restaurant workers are good examples, however hospital workers can be hybrid; remote classrooms have been a real thing since the 21st century.
Still, imho it is somewhat cruel that society has simply decided that extroverts can and should force introverts into socializing. "You need to attend this meeting in person because I insist" ist perfectly acceptable, while "you need to leave me alone because I insist" is considered rude, antisocial, "not a teamplayer" yadda yadda.
> Some people get more done and have more fun working in an office with other people.
It is not the job of employees to provide extroverts the ability to "have more fun".
> It's not more cruel than introverts forcing extroverts into not socializing.
Well that's the point: Society has made it acceptible for extroverts to force introverts into socialising, but the other way round is somehow inacceptible.
> Having fun at work is no more a right than not having fun at work is a right.
Having or not having fun is no right in itself anyway. Companies that force introverts into situations they are uncomfortable with are eventually going to lose them. The extrovert's fun stops where it is actively harming the introverts. Undermining introverts' feelings by making them feel uncomfortable in order to have fun is harassment.
> Companies that force introverts into situations they are uncomfortable with are eventually going to lose them.
There's nothing inherently wrong with this.
Just like there's nothing wrong with extroverts quitting a job that doesn't provide them with what they want and makes them feel uncomfortable.
The business may be less successful after the introverts quit or they may be more successful after the introverts quit. It's the company's risk/decision.
> The extrovert's fun stops where it is actively harming the introverts
Not liking something and being harmed by it are 2 different things that are sometimes related. That's a very important distinction to make.
Neither the introvert nor the extrovert need to love everything about their job. They may hate some aspects of it! They may choose to stick it out or quit. Both are fine.
I'm not sure that is always the case. When everybody is in the office, you save on shared resources such as lighting, printing and heating.
Also, a certain percentage of remote workers will take the car during the day anyway, to buy lunch or groceries.
I can't imagine an office full of people driving their gas vehicles 50+ miles per day creates less pollution than those people being at home. Lighting costs are extremely marginal these days, so really heating/AC would be the big driver.
I know prices may not be a perfect corollary to pollution but people driving that much to work are pretty likely to spend more money fueling their vehicles than they are on electric + gas for their homes.
The vast majority of people don’t stop all power consumption at home just because they’re not at home. Even modern thermostats like Nest don’t save as much as they claim, usually.
These saving are completely blown away later that night when the lighting has to stay on so the office is not pitch black and the heating has to stay on so the pipes don't freeze. In what world is heating and lighting another building more efficient than not doing that?
epistemic status = lightly tinhat: free time outside work and living close / keeping in touch with coworkers is highly correlated with union activity. I am quite confident in my prediction that time spent commuting is negatively correlated with the same / has a threshold effect. This is an incentive to keep things miserable for some.
Combined with the closing of traditional organizing grounds - in my current employer's case, the company pub and rugby team due to non-parity/inclusivity -, you see a drastic disconnect between white collars+blue collars due to lack of contact during and after work.
My commute is about... let me check... 9 steps. Unless you count the rare occasion that I need to go into the office, in which case it's a 2 hour drive across state lines.
How do we measure commutes? Is my "commute" 9 steps or 2 hours?
That was my first thought; what about hybrid work? Did they account for that? I can't check as I don't have access to the article. But an hour long commute is a lot more palatable if you only have to do it twice a week instead of 5 times.
In other news; better roads, faster cars allows people to live in lower cost areas further away from work.
They recently added a switchable toll lane to the Interstate where I live, into the city in the morning and out in the evening. My house was valued 50% higher that year(pre COVID).
I'm not sure if Germany is the best example for public transport anymore. There are some other European countries that are doing it really well, e.g. Switzerland or the Netherlands.
A little unfair to compare a country 10x the size - I would imagine its a lot easier to run good public transport over a smaller area. That said, Germany does seem to have underinvested in infrastructure a lot in the Merkel era... hopefully something that is being remedied now. The transport network is still amazing overall by global standards, even if it is frustrating for daily commuters.
I think the underinvestment has been going on for much longer than that. It's just really been starting to show more and more throughout the last ten years or so.
I'm not very optimistic with it being remedied any time soon, either. For some reason politicians have been talking about it doesn't return a profit for over a decade now.
I don't know where this reasoning came from, but it's spreading to postal service as well. Suddenly public infrastructure needs to be profitable. Unless it's parking or roads of course.
This is actually the opposite. at 10X the size, we have 30x the commuters (it scales faster than population) and 30x the demand. All of these 'car' cities used to have great streetcar or subway networks, we tore them out when we decided cars are a religion / definition of who we are.
We have it easier as a large country, and we still do the dumbest short-term thinking thing.
The problem isn't so much technical as cultural. The American car lobby was quite powerful, which is why we have historically invested so much in highways and so little in rail. But why should the lobby be so effective? Well, if you look at historical advertising, you can clearly see what they appealed to, namely, the liberal American spirit of wanting to be "independent" and "free", and sex. The automobile is a symbol of unrestrained, do-what-you-want-when-you-want mentality. It's why even modest and sensible restrictions around car traffic are met with such violent opposition. It's perceived as an attack on the liberal American ethos. The sex part associates cars in the minds of men with virility and masculinity, as if having a car is what makes you a man, and that without one, you are weak, a mere boy, and undesirable, irresponsible. And many women believe it, too, especially of a certain ilk. (It is true that refusal to own a car when one is needed can be a sign of immaturity and irresponsibility, concealed behind claims of caring for the environment or whatever. But this is quite different from the blanket, rigid, and irrational belief that you MUST own a car, even when it isn't the better option, for vacuously symbolic reasons.)
Owning a car isn't the problem, of course, but the excess importance attached to the car through decades of conditioning and cultural reinforcement has made the car something of a religious symbol in the American religion.
Similar reasons stand behind gun ownership, something the Left consistently fails to grasp. Some trace this to the myth surrounding the frontiersman Daniel Boone who, interestingly enough, was a Quaker. The firearm is an instrument of self-sufficiency and protection, of being able to face the frontier without fear. It, too, is bound up with American sensibilities regarding masculinity. Restrictions on gun ownership and regulations around gun acquisition, however mild and sensible, are predictably seen as attacks on the aforementioned.
Most people, and that includes most people here, are awful at examining their sense of normality, not to undermine it, but to know what they're standing on, to know how it is justified and if it is justified, and so on. Many political conflicts, especially today, are rooted in a failure to understand the true source of disagreement, which often lies in presuppositions n layers deep.
The car lobby isn't the only problem. One major point us that most people want single family homes, and generally with somewhat low density. The lower density isn't well suited for public transit, especially when our public transit is broken in ways that money can't easily fix (restrictions on schedules, failing to stick to schedules, strikes, political routing, etc).
"It's why even modest and sensible restrictions around car traffic are met with such violent opposition."
It's often not opposition to the restrictions, but the low quality of the alternative being offered.
"Restrictions on gun ownership and regulations around gun acquisition, however mild and sensible, are predictably seen as attacks on the aforementioned."
It might not be as simple as you make it out to be. It's also possible that what one person thinks is sensible is not in fact sensible, but rather a political play. The Overton window is real. It's a well know political play to make an unwanted thing legally risky or burdensome to push people out of doing it. This is used by both sides on a variety of issues - guns, abortions, etc. That's why those sorts of topics have some many roundabout laws trying to make things deemed legal/protected too difficult for a normal person to want to pursue.
To illustrate this one must remember that the US used to have one of the most sophisticated railroad network. Until it was systematically destroyed by joint efforts of the car, oil and plane lobby.
Sitting in traffic is much more inefficient than one would think, though if you're cruising on the interstate at 70 mph you would obviously be correct.
Why not take a bike ride to the train and then ride the train in? People wanting autopilot driving cars....that's literally what a train does, complete with wifi.
Yea, that'll make my commute shorter. Walking and bicycles. What if instead we add some damn lanes so that busses can reduce their transit time without cutting into what's available for the rest of the traffic?
Yes walking and bicycles is what's going to make your commute shorter. If you've ever seen a well used bicycle lane you can run a small experiment. You stand on it, and you count the people going through. Then you go on a well used car lane, and you do the same
The throughput of a single cycle lane is insane
You'll quickly figure out that if they just took one lane away from cars to give it to the bikes, and did so all over your city, that'd equate in throughput 3+ car lanes magically getting added to every road in your city (by removing cars that you wouldn't get stuck behind, and wouldn't occupy your parking spaces)
And you don't even need to add lanes, you just build concrete separators and take lanes from cars
The best thing you can do if you want to drive is to enable others to not drive
And that includes sharing the road and not being a NIMBY about the damn bike lanes.
Throughput of cycles lanes is potentially high but often is not. I have lived in multiple places in the UK that have lots of cycle lanes that are hardly used. Its not magic that will work everywhere for everyone.
On the other hand the throughput of public transport is good almost everywhere I have lived is reasonable, and in many places very high, especially at peak times. One bus carries as many people as a very large number of cars, one train carries far more.
yes, sometimes they run empty, but not at the times the roads are congested.
Bike lanes aren’t magical. They need to be practically everywhere, not just a few roads. They need repair stations on the lane. They need to actually be safe and separate from the car traffic, preferably you shouldn’t be interacting with cars at all in a bike lane. They also need to be relatively shady with trees. They also need to be maintained throughout the year.
I live in a cycling capital of the world and we have repair stations, they're nice but they're a gimmick
We don't care about shading either, and we'll happily bike in the snow
There's 3 things that matter; safety, what mode of transport is the fastest to get me to my destination (where I live, that's mostly cycling), and cost (of owning & using the mode of transport)
You just focus on making as many cycle lanes as you can first, and make sure they're good so that they're used. Cycling should always have the more direct itinerary available. Separate them from cars with bollards and pay attention to how the dutch handle intersections and you'll get 95% of the way there without planting trees for shade or building repair stations
It is very difficult to fit into existing urban areas. If you narrow streets but the alternative does not work, then you worsen pollution by increasing congestion.
Effort matters too - cycling is more viable somewhere flat.
I live off a main road into a town with a wide cycle path separated from cars. The town has slow moving traffic and seems a reasonable place to cycle. The cycle lane is still lightly used.
I usually walk into town. I only use the car for shopping or longer journeys (I do less than 3k miles/year). For me cycling has a very narrow potential use case - if its too far to walk, and close enough to cycle, and I do not need the luggage space of a car.
Adding more lanes didn't decrease congestion so, for once, giving people an alternative to driving sure isn't going to increase it. It's just one lane. Not even a lane if the lane size is currently oversized with respect to the speed limit (which it is on most roads in the united states)
>I live off a main road into a town with a wide cycle path separated from cars. The town has slow moving traffic and seems a reasonable place to cycle. The cycle lane is still lightly used.
I'd have to see a streetview of it but I wouldn't be surprised if it was just a lone bikelane with no real network around it to support its use
It's not enough to have just one lane that's safe, people won't bike unless they can find a whole itinerary where they don't risk getting flattened by an F-150
>Effort matters too - cycling is more viable somewhere flat.
And somewhere sunny, and somewhere dry, the fact is, people cycle in Finland yet they don't in Canada because it's not safe
We have electric bikes now so slopes are even less of an issue than they were previously
>For me cycling has a very narrow potential use case - if its too far to walk, and close enough to cycle, and I do not need the luggage space of a car.
Tell that to all those people in Amsterdam who don't even bother to get a driving license
Nothing except for safety and distance matters actually. Every other factor is minor. You just need to make cycling appear safe to the average person living in a city.
The solution to that is obvious once you realize cars are the source of the unsafety.
London: mostly projections that it will increase. If you look at the graph on page 14 the actual growth and the absolute numbers are small. Tiny compared to the tube:
A little over 5m person kilometres travelled compared to 84m. The proportion of total travel (with car, bus, tram etc.) will be a lot lower. Huge expense (esp taking land use into account, and side effects such as making cars more polluting by increasing congestion) it does not look like a success to me.
> Nothing except for safety and distance matters actually. Every other factor is minor. You just need to make cycling appear safe to the average person living in a city.
Tell that to an unfit or elderly person trying to cycle uphill, or people with kids.
>Tell that to an unfit or elderly person trying to cycle uphill, or people with kids.
Why tell them anything? Having more options is not going to stop them from driving.
They have elderly people and kids in the netherlands.
When you oppose alternative modes of transportation, what do you tell:
* The elderly
* Kids (that half of the sentence when you mentioned "people with kids")
* People with disabilities like spatial awareness, mental disabilities etc
* People with other disabilities who would LOVE a cycle lane for their motorized wheelchairs
* People who just aren't good at the wheel and who (thankfully) can't pass the driving test
For them it's not a small drop in convenience, it's their whole life.
"tell that to..." really doesn't go in the direction you think it goes.
Driving is not an "accessible" form of transportation, and it's most likely one of the first things that could get taken away from you by a life event.
It's not the right approach to start worrying about a slight decrease in convenience for those who somehow got a life event that'll allow them to drive, but not walk, use a wheelchair or bike.
The article is about latency, the GP is about latency, you instead pivoted to throughput. Of course throughput can be made arbitrarily high when you don't measure latency. Doesn't help your case at all, quite the opposite.
I am in the happy medium where I can just as well bike or drive to work. It takes 2x to 3x as long (latency) to bicycle than to drive. Aside of slower speed, numerous latencies add up along the way - I can't time bicycling to hit green wave; I require brief but measurable time to dress into bicycling clothes and then to change at the destination, to park & lock the bicycle - nowhere near as quick as clicking the car's remote!. I know both modes, and while bicycling is better for my health and likely has higher throughput along my route, it certainly has higher latency. Which is the OG subject.
Lastly there's matter of variability: between occasional flat tire, the rare drained headlight battery, and other uncommon issues, my bicycle is significantly less reliable than my car. And that's in spite of heavy, and ongoing, investment into the bicycle - including well known puncture-resistant tires. This unreliability adds non-trivial variability to the latency.
I'll just get the point out there that latency isn't increasing because people are living further from their destination. Latency is increasing because there's traffic (not that you made that point)
Throughput fixes traffic
Plus your point stands for "adding lanes for buses" as well! How would that fix latency?
People only started living further from their destination because they gained the ability to travel faster. In transit, the invariant is how much time people are willing to spend commuting on average
If you increase throughput you will, in time, decrease latency
Looking at your post,
* I live in a very bikeable city in Europe and I've never worn "bicycle clothes"
* Variability in cars are entirely dependent on traffic. I've never been stuck in traffic on a bicycle. Bikes are much more reliable than cars and you can get one for $80 on craigslist literally overnight, meaning you'll never care about getting a spare. Flat tires almost never happen, and bike maintenance is a gimmie. Let's flip. What happens to your day when your car breaks down?
* The "green wave" is an infrastructure problem that can be fixed with infrastructure solutions
Then for the point of speed, cycling is only faster in dense areas and it'll mostly save you time in traffic & parking
If you live 7km away from your workplace, go through suburbs and large roads with single story buildings, the only people who'll benefit from cycling will be the people who are already living close to the center
But that's good for you, because you won't need to fight them for parking nor stand behind them in traffic
Once you have bike lanes though you can densify your city a bit more easily
> The throughput of a single cycle lane is insane.
Both the latency and the throughput of motorcycling with lane splitting is far better.
And, notice, it requires no infrastructure changes. Nor does it take existing lanes away from anyone. And motorcycles work in any weather that bicycles work.
We have the technology and the infrastructure but not the widespread policy. Silly cagers.
Put motorcycles in bicycle lanes! That's crazy though, because motorcycles and bicycles are very different beasts.
But wait! We put bicycles in car lanes all the time. So clearly mixing bicycles and internal combustion engines in the same lane of travel is acceptable despite massive speed and weight differences.
If separating two-wheeled vehicles from cars is safer and more convenient and therefore societally compelling, do it for all 2-wheeled vehicles.
I don’t really understand the theory behind lane splitting.
Legally and practically, cars are allowed to drive to the very edge of their lane. If both cars in adjacent lanes do this, there is no room for a motorcycle. If there is no room for a motorcycle and a motorcycle is there, there will be a collision.
It seems like lane splitting practically forces everyone to drive in the middle of the lane (which again is not legally required anywhere AFAIK), or to watch constantly for motorcycles behind them, or it accepts a certain rate of motorcycle on car collisions even when everyone is following the rules perfectly.
If there is a collision whose fault is it? The motorcyclist for not reading the mind of the driver? The driver for not shoulder checking before they move within the lane?
It doesn’t seem scalable for this reason, and it just drops a useful property of driving seemingly without giving it much thought (i.e. that no one else will be in your lane unless they are violating a rule).
90+ percent of roads have more than sufficient room. That's why it requires no new infrastructure. When lanes are too tight for conditions, motorcycles simply act like cars.
> ...watch constantly for motorcycles behind them...
True, but one should be scanning one's mirrors all the time anyway. Please tell me you scan your mirrors and pay attention to your surroundings all the time when you drive.
I can bike to the office faster than I can drive. Car infrastructure is slow because cars are big and heavy and dangerous.
Door to door, my car trip takes about 20-30 minutes, my bike trip takes 15-20. Not having to deal with parking, stop signs, traffic, etc genuinely does speed things up.
Door-to-door, my car commute is 15-20 minutes. On bicycle it's 40-45 minutes plus time for a shower once I get to work.
Riding a bicycle is more fun though. Something about it triggers daydreaming and I often arrive at work and realize I got there on autopilot. I haven't done it much since the start of COVID, but I recently tuned up my bike, ordered a good floor pump, and plan to resume soon.
Good point! It checks the cardio box for that day.
I don't do it every day though. I only go into the office 3 days a week and for much of the summer it's too hot for me to bike (I'm in Austin, TX). I can manage up until about 101F/38C, but anything after that feels dangerous.
> Not having to deal with parking, stop signs, traffic, etc genuinely does speed things up.
Traffic sure, but you still need a good place to park your bike so it does not get stolen and you should be stopping at stop signs.
I walk basically everywhere and I have to be more vigilant of bicyclists on crosswalks because they always blow through them at full speed regardless of who has the right of way.
In my state, bicyclists can treat stop signs as yields. Yes, that means if there is other traffic it returns to being a stop sign. Yes, there always is right of way for pedestrians.
So no, I definitely shouldn't be stopping at stop signs, but I should be following the rules of the road. Eye contact with peds, sometimes you can quickly negotiate "no, you go ahead". If not, stops for pedestrians.
My work has bike cages, which are right at the entrance and require a badge to access. If not, my bike parks vertically on its own and I could just bring it inside.
Yeah, I (as a biker) also hate dangerous bikers. Especially those weaving onto / off of the sidewalks. The up-side is that the most dangerous bike is 1/100th as damaging as a perfect driver sneezing at the wrong time.
