Google Wants to Make Silicon Valley as Bike-Friendly as Copenhagen | Hacker News Reader

Google Wants to Make Silicon Valley as Bike-Friendly as Copenhagen

fastcoexist.com

327 pointsnetrus340 comments

Retrofitting American suburban sprawl to be less car-centric is going to be one of the enduring puzzles of the 21st century.

The suburban model of planning championed in the 50's onwards became so deeply embedded in development projects and just the entire culture of small city planning across the country that a huge chunk of Americans are completely unaware that a less car-centric lifestyle is even possible, let alone desirable.

We're only starting to scratch the surface of understanding how much friggin work it's going to take teasing out the messes that were made by lazy cookie cutter civic planning. And it certainly doesn't help that local governments, planners and many many ordinary car-dependent citizens continue to fight tooth-and-nail to uphold the status quo in this regard.

It's great that Google is at least attempting to transform Silicon Valley, at least a little bit. I just wish that the hundreds of other communities around the country that don't have a progressive mega company in their neighborhood can get a little nudge from this type of work someday...

Here in Minnesota it's common that suburban "subdivision" neighborhoods don't even have pedestrian sidewalks. And the inhabitants think that's a good thing. I cannot even.

It snows quite heavily in Minnesota, so during much of the year those sidewalks would be unusable or hazardous.

As would the roads without the maintenance that everybody always seems to completely forget about.

Ah, but you see, roads are important. Sidewalks are for what, walking? So basically playing around.

Likewise here in Wisconsin, but we're expected to shovel our walks. I once got a ticket for failing to do so. They only ticket people if somebody complains to the city, so I probably deserved it.

Depending on where and when, sidewalks are optional for new subdivisions, and face a couple of dis-incentives: 1) You pay if the sidewalk in front of your house has to be repaired. 2) You have to shovel it.

So, there are seemingly new and nice subdivisions with no sidewalks. In addition, a lot of those neighborhoods are laid out with lots of twisty streets and cul-du-sacs that make it hard to get through by bike or on foot, so that bike commuters have to ride on the busy main roads.

Never lived in American suburbia, so I never though ot this: the cul-de-sacs are made so that a bike or even a pedestrian can not get through?

Over here (Finland), it is very common that a road is cul-de-sac for motor vehicles but you can get through riding bike or on foot.

There is also a common traffic sign to indicate this, for instance here in my neighbourhood:

https://www.google.fi/maps/@60.2285087,24.7129127,3a,15y,347...

The top sign indicates "no parking zone", i.e. you cannot park at curb unless it is marked as a parking space. The next sign is 30 km/h area (maximum speed limit in the area, no need to put a separate speed limit sign on each street) The bottom one indicates that the road splits to cul-de-sacs for motor vehicles on left and right, but you can get through by bike. (Here it is misleading, you can get through also to the left, not just to the right).

Over here (Finland), it is very common that a road is cul-de-sac for motor vehicles but you can get through riding bike or on foot.

This is common in USA if the cul-de-sac is a retrofit to a previously-through road. (If not by design, then in the breach, because someone has knocked a hole in the fence and it hasn't been fixed.) However, in the sorts of housing-only developments that have culs-de-sac designed in, the typical cul-de-sac is completely surrounded by houses with yards backed by other houses with yards, so there's nowhere to go.

Personally, I've never lived in such an environment, and when I've visited those who do it has driven me to distraction. You can't get anywhere directly! My impression is that this sort of development design is growing less popular, although maybe it's just that I more rarely visit people who live in such places.

Right, so the point is that property owners do not want to have anyone walk by on foot, because they fear they could be trespassers or loiterers that are not welcome in the area? And this is why a cul-de-sac stops not only cars but everything, with a fence.

But then that also stops e.g. children from moving about on their own in the neighbourhood.

It's kind of ironic, but regular foot traffic is a bigger deterrent to crime than isolation. After all, no one is home all the time.

Yes. A lot of newer neighborhoods are not laid out on a grid, but are designed with lots of winding streets an cul-de-sacs. Maybe it seems more pleasant that way, and it forces through traffic out onto the main roads, but does the same to bikes.

Cyclists really benefit from a "network" of alternative routes that have low traffic, and what you describe in Finland is a great idea.

Substitute the word "sidewalks" with the word "roads" in that sentence and it makes as much sense. Neighborhoods without sidewalks are places where children cannot organize their own play and rely on being chauffeured to do anything. It's one of the reasons kids grow up to be so helpless and why helicopter parenting is the norm in the US.

On the plus side nobody slips on the sidewalk!

Not at all. I grew up in a classic 1960-style neighborhood (long meandering main road loop with a lot of cul-de-sac and a few connector streets, all most all the the houses were one of a handful of basic designs, no businesses and no sidewalks. We biked all over the place, walked to friends houses (mostly cutting through other peoples yards), played impromptu games in vacant lots that hadn't been built yet, explored the wooded areas at the edges of the neighborhood. We were away from home for hours at a time, organizing what we did all on our own. No cell phones either, but we naturally gravitated back home at around sunset.

Are the roads unusable? I'm guessing not; you can clear sidewalks too - central European countries seem to use a small snowplough for the pavements (ie sidewalks), the snow is ploughed on to the road, the road plough lifts the snow to a truck and it's trucked away.

Here in the US it's typical for every house to be responsible for its own sidewalk. So everybody gets it done somehow, by hand, or with a gas powered snowblower, or they hire a service. The same people who mow lawns in the summer, clear snow in the winter. Where the land is public-owned, e.g., parks, the city brings a little machine that's the same width as the sidewalks. Its main attraction is a heated cabin for the driver.

We share a snowblower with our neighbor, but it takes a pretty good snowfall for the machine to be quicker than my shovel. The city plows the streets.

No. 90% of people get it done somehow. The failure of the other 10%, and inability to ride your bike more than ten or twenty houses of sidewalk down the line, stands as testament to concept of professionalized public infrastructure.

We don't ask people to shovel the roads.

That's true. During the winter, I ride my bike in the street. My route is 100% on "tame" neighborhood streets or dedicated bike paths. The city plows the bike paths with the same priority as main roads.

We rarely had an issue with people not having sidewalks shoveled before they left for work in the very snowy city I grew up in. Perhaps it's a YMMV situation.

Why do you bike on sidewalks?

Such plows are fairly common in larger Canadian cities with heavy snowfall as well (e.g. Toronto, Montreal).

The city of Rochester, NY also plows its sidewalks, I suspect because it would be unreasonable to expect property owners to do it themselves due to the amount of snowfall. Still, it's nice to be able to walk around in the winter. Technically, the law says property owners are still responsible for keeping the sidewalks clear, but that's mostly to encourage people to disperse salt on sidewalk ice after the city plows come by and to shovel what the plows may miss.

There are ways of dealing with snow on sidewalks. Just because they require upkeep some part of the year doesn't excuse not having any.

In my experience, driving is less safe than walking in snow. Granted I am still fairly young and fit so falling over is not a serious or life threatening concern. Road users significantly overestimate their ability to drive on difficult terrain and chances of accidents are greatly increased.

In Minneapolis, sometimes the bike paths are plowed before the roads are.

It snows in Boston and New York too.

Having tried to walk from a business hotel in Roseville Minnesota to the nearest restaurant I discovered just this - and passing motorists looked at me like I was bonkers!

Heck, you couldn't even get from the hotel to the adjacent office block without walking on the road, or cutting across scrub.

Santa Clara is only marginally better. However retrofitting cycle lanes is a much easier prospect than retrofitting sidewalks, and crossings.

I remember some very friendly people in Rohnert Park, CA. We (four middle-aged men) were on a work trip and decided to walk from the Doubletree hotel to the local Walmart, some 500 meters away, just to get some exercise after 16 hours of flight and 8 hours of meetings.

Several people driving by stopped to ask: "Do you need help? Did your car break down?".

I live in a neighborhood in Palo Alto that doesn't have sidewalks, and people here walk (and bike) all the time. The reason why it works is because many of the streets are extremely narrow, and we've worked fairly hard at making certain they aren't striped down the center. For whatever reason this seems to get motorists to drive more slowly and makes it safer for everyone.

>> For whatever reason this seems to get motorists to drive more slowly and makes it safer for everyone.

That's actually a known phenomenon. When drivers experience unusual situations (like roads without stripes down the middle), they're forced to pay much more attention to the actual act of driving.

For more, see here: http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2015/02/to-make-ro...

But then, if you want to make use of these unusual situations to make people drive more slowly, and build more of them, then they come not unusual situations, and everyone gets used to them and drives normally.

Where I live (Finland), we have plenty of separate bike/pedestrian paths, so biking is overall nice, but not like Copenhagen which is a) completely flat and b) in a milder climate.

Bicyclists in Palo Alto kill pedestrians. http://www.paloaltoonline.com/news/2015/04/22/pedestrian-str...

Coconuts in Colombia kill pedestrians: http://archive.mid-day.com/news/2010/aug/280810-falling-coco...

Trucks in Palo Alto kill pedestrians http://sfbay.ca/2015/04/19/bcn57palo-alto-pedestrian-dies-in...

Drivers in Palo Alto kill pedestrians http://abc7news.com/news/driver-arrested-on-suspicion-of-fat...

Pedestrians in Palo Alto kill pedestrians http://www.paloaltoonline.com/news/2015/09/23/man-stabbed-ou...

Pedestrians in New York kill Trucks: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQw4w9WgXcQ

You mean a single bicyclist in Palo Alto killed a single pedestrian, who was crossing without a crosswalk on a blind curve.

I can't find aggregate statistics for Palo Alto, but here's the 2012/2013 statistics for the New York Burroughs.

Cyclists killed 1 pedestrian (in 2013) and injured 560 pedestrians for a mortality rate of .1%.

Drivers killed 326 pedestrians and injured 24411, a mortality rate of 1.3%.

Clearly bikers are killing pedestrians and are very dangerous.

See page 2 for source:

http://www.nyc.gov/html/dot/downloads/pdf/2013-bicycle-crash...

http://www.nyc.gov/html/dot/downloads/pdf/2012-bicycle-crash...

In Amsterdam, bikes and cars are separated from each other wherever possible. That way, bikes can ride as recklessly as they like without endangering cars.

Bikes and pedestrians are harder to separate. Pedestrians can go everywhere, and especially tourists have a tendency to not watch out when they're crossing a bike path, or even stay on the bike path for no good reason.

The worst place is behind Central Station, where a heavy flow of pedestrians from the ferries and the station has to cross a continuous flow of bikes on the bike path, while bikes from the ferries try to merge into the already chaotic traffic. We really need a bridge or tunnel to keep bikes and pedestrians separate there.

But then you'll need a separate path for everyone on roller skates.

Skating isn't a big form of transport here. Most skaters are recreational and stick to the parks. Though I did encounter a (remarkably fast!) skater in bike traffic recently, and people always give them a bit more space. (Actually it was a mixed bike/pedestrian path still in a park, but bikes try to dominate it and use it as their main thoroughfare.) Bikers would probably get annoyed if skaters try to claim their extra wide space in the most crowded bike traffic, though.

  And the inhabitants think that's a good thing.

There have been moments when I could commiserate. Less shoveling.

My parents live in a 7 year old "55 and over" retirement community in the outer suburbs in Pennsylvania. A neighborhood designed entirely for old folks.. and no sidewalks at all. There are elderly pedestrians meandering along at a snails pace in middle of the streets everywhere in their neighborhood. I'm constantly worried about running them over when I visit...

The builder and the township planners made such a blunder with the neighborhood and no one seems to understand that things could have been done differently, or could even be fixed.

They also are miles from the nearest store and have no buses or transit options of any sort, so when a resident can no longer drive a car, they're simply stranded in their house. If a single widow for instance needs groceries and can't drive they're more or less screwed if someone doesn't stop by and help them out.

As someone who lives in the heart of the city I'm just baffled by how people are comfortable with this situation. It's infuriating how everyone just accepts it

There's nothing mysterious about the situation in silicon valley really.

It's about space. Wikipedia tells me Copenhagen is 86.20 km [1] and San Jose is 466.109 km [2] but naturally silicon valley is several times larger than San Jose proper. If it was possible to just rent an apartment near where one worked, that wouldn't be an issue but we know how hard that is today.

When where one's work is twenty miles or more from one's living space, one just isn't going to easily bike to work. There could be bike path with wind-tunnel and it still wouldn't be possible [edit: for most, average office workers, certainly possible for some].

Silicon Valley's permanent, festering housing crisis, now spilling to San Francisco, is pretty much the culprit for the unliveability and unbikeability problem. How could it not be.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copenhagen [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Jose,_California

Was with you until that "twenty miles ... still wouldn't be possible." I ride my bike 20 miles to work frequently; its nowhere near as flat as Silicon Valley (Iowa is hilly). And the weather is often worse here.

So maybe readjust 'not possible' up a notch or two?

Really, I meant say "no easy", in fact I did:

When where one's work is twenty miles or more from one's living space, one just isn't going to easily bike to work.

I slipped and said "not possible" later so jeesh, sorry. I meant "It's possible for it to be easy enough for the average person". I've commuted further distances myself but the average worker isn't going to do it. Sad but there you are.

True its a stretch. But compare an hour on a bike, vs an hour in traffic. It might be a wash.

As for the effort, the average person can do a whole lot more than they think. I ride with 20,000 Iowans in a weeklong 400+ mile ride every summer - aged 6 to 60 - 40 to 100 miles per day, pretty average people.

The only thing that makes the average person unable to do this is, they think they can't.

"As for the effort, the average person can do a whole lot more than they think."

Sure, the average person can do a lot more than they think but most average people won't do that lot-more unless something fairly extreme compels them and that doesn't especially likely in any future moving forward.

"But compare an hour on a bike, vs an hour in traffic. It might be a wash."

One get fit enough to ride two hours/day on a bike everyday, sure. But I don't think one can get fit enough to not be tired after the experience. I recall years ago talking to a professional bike messenger friend - I asked her if she got used to it after a while. Her answer was that she got used to the experience but that she just always felt tired.

Most people wouldn't want that because it would mean life after work wouldn't exist.

It might be 20 miles by car, however most places in SV are only a few miles from Caltrain. Just take your bike onboard.

This is why Caltrain has the highest (I think) number of bikes onboard of a commuter rail line in the nation.

However, please do note that the Copenhagen city proper is geographically just a minor part of the metro area, and only about quarter of the metro population. The metro area is, as mentioned in your link, 2,778.3 km2, five times that of San Jose proper.

If you're going to compare metro areas, you should do the same for San Jose: 6,979 km2.

This is in fact even larger than the Randstad (4,300 km2). I'm not going to bike from Amsterdam to Rotterdam (in fact, I find that too far to commute no matter what method of transport I have). If the housing problem in Silicon Valley is really so big that it's hard to find a house within 10 km of the office, I can see how it's going to be hard to get people to commute by bike.

Yes, of course, but anyway Copenhagen is not really quite as dense as the small area of the city proper would lead you to believe.

(Looking at Wikipedia, the San Jose metro area actually seems to be very concentrated in the city proper, with almost 1.9 million in the city proper and only 56 000 outside it. )

Is it? I thought all of Silicon Valley was pretty densely populated, and that's more than just San Jose.

In any case, biking works best when distances aren't too big. Amsterdam is probably the bike capital of the world (more bikes than people), but biking from a suburb on one side of the city to one on the opposite side is pretty rare (except for the more dedicated biker, obviously). You're a fool if you take a car into the city center (many people don't even own one), but around the edges, cars work fine.

Although my wife, who is not a dedicated cyclist at all and usually commutes by car, has had a time where she regularly cycled 17 km to Schiphol.

Wikipedia is wrong if it means the effective metropolitan area surrounding San Jose is just San Jose. People live and work spread across the entire Silicon Valley area, that is indeed why that term is used most often for the region. Since housing is expensive and difficult to find and expensive, workers wind-up spread out at close to the maximum drivable to distance, putting them at far from an easily bikable distance.

"Geographically, Silicon Valley is generally thought to encompass all of the Santa Clara Valley, the southern half of the Peninsula and southern portions of the East Bay."

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silicon_Valley

To my mind, one of the main issues, in addition to protected bike lanes is the spread. Bike friendly cities are more compact. Commuting to work via bike is not a strenuous fifteen mile commute one way. They tend to be leisurely few mile rides. Now, not to say it's not possible, but a one to five mile bike ride is not the same as a ten to fifteen or more miles bike ride.

Now, I do like Copenhagen's above ground bike roundabout, I've seen. It'd be nice to see those at dangerous or busy intersections.

I'd also like to see "turning boxes" where to make a left you go to a perpendicular boxed out area on the right and wait for your light. They have these in Asia for scooters and bikes.

Sure, you're never going to get people who live 15 or 20 miles out biking the whole way to work, but there's lots of people who live < 10 miles away from Google who'd be willing to do it if there was better infrastructure.

You also have to keep in mind biking as a first-mile/last-mile complement to rail transit. If there's good bike paths to get to a transit station, that effectively extends the usable radius of the station. Already, lots of people bike to Caltrain and then bike from their stop to work (I should know, I do it occasionally but recently have shied away because of how full the bike cars are during rush hour).

Yes, true it can complement mass transit some, but then it's not the same as Copenhagen (their characterization) and becomes more Tokyo --which while they have very many bikes, is not all that bike friendly.

Actually most of the the trains (not the metro for some reason) in Copenhagen have lots of bike space and one can take one's bike for no charge. Lots of people use bikes and mass transit together.

Do mass transit companies charge for bikes? All the ones I've used have had it free.

In the UK many don't even allow them. Especially at peak hours.

The UK is unusual, as bikes are free on trains.

Most of Europe charges a reduced fare (e.g. same as child fare), and often restricts bikes to certain times of day. When trains are busy (often!) bikes take up a lot of space, and increase the time the train has to wait at a station (the "dwell time", usually under a minute).

> Sure, you're never going to get people who live 15 or 20 miles out biking the whole way to work

That's what I do every day in London. Why wouldn't you?

Myself and a lot of my friends choose our housing approx' 45 minutes to an hour away from the centre of London just to ensure we've got a good ride every day.

At a commuter average of 16mph, and an experienced cyclist average of 18/19mph means that 15 to 20 miles is precisely the distance I'd want to cycle.

All I'd want is a good shower, secure bike parking and a safe route to ride by.

> That's what I do every day in London. Why wouldn't you?

Well, I personally might be willing to if the infrastructure was good enough (I'd probably get an eBike to speed things up), and other confident riders might. I just mean most people wouldn't, it's too far.

dude those eBikes are sick, i was going like 22 mph down the street cruising. i would get one if i biked everywhere.

People are underestimating ebikes a lot. They solve problems like hills, distance. They are quiet and a pleasure to ride, just like regular bikes.

A lot of people are also purists saying you should stick to pedaling only, but then keep commuting using cars. To me, ebikes are the most obvious solution to commute problme.

You do realize that most people are not like you, though?

Many, many people:

- do not have showers at work

- do not have safe routes to ride

- are not experienced cyclists

- average more like 10mph

The discussion is not "how do we get hardcore bike nuts to ride to work". That's not hard.

With the exception of showers and possibly safe routes these problems are addressed by experience. Cycling is not something it takes years to be an expert at or gain fitness in. Biking to work once or twice a week for a month and you'll no longer be going 10 mph and you know what to look for in a route and you'll notice more route options as you get a chance to explore.

Experience can even over come the shower issue. As your fitness level increases you won't have to exert yourself so much and you can also figure out creative to freshen up to an acceptable smell level (i.e. a "sinker")

> and you'll no longer be going 10 mph

If we go back to talk about Copenhagen, that's about the speed the bikes there ride: 16 km/h.

I find it hilarious that Americans made it to the moon but think that commuting to work by bike is practically impossible. Meanwhile millions of people all over the rest of the world, from school children to seniors, are doing just that every single day. I moved to southern California last year (from the UK) and of course I ride my bike to work. My colleagues think that this is a really strange thing to do and some regularly lecture me about how dangerous that is. Never mind that there are dedicated bike routes that are super safe and even safer than most bike lanes in European cities (because hardly anyone else is using them).

You're comparing a jackfruit to an entire valley's harvest of grapes there.

A handful of Americans made it to the moon. The rest of us watched it on TV.

You are not giving your fellow Americans enough credit. If Neil Armstrong, Michael Collins, and Buzz Aldrin had been born in another country, they would almost certainly not have made it to the moon. It was a gigantic effort and many many Americans helped directly or indirectly to make it happen.

> some regularly lecture me about how dangerous that is

I think this is a case of the "vivid example" fallacy. People can easily envision the carnage caused by a bike-car collision. Less easily imagined is the health toll wreaked by 500+ hours / year commuting in a car.

And the financial toll of 500+ hours/year in a car that costs real money every operating hour.

On the plus side, you'll never pick up fast food to eat on the way when you're on a bike.

Maybe for you, but I have been run over and otherwise injured while biking. The accident wasn't my fault, but I really don't like anything where my legs (and clothing) will suffer if I miss a single pothole. I do not enjoy it, either, not one iota. It was the only realistic option when I was a kid and even into college so I've done quite a lot of biking, but I got rid of the damn thing as soon as I could.

I'd much rather take public transport.

Cycling in the US really is more dangerous than in Europe. I see two main reasons: 1.) Drivers are not aware of cyclists and don't know how to deal with them. When I cycle on roads with considerable car traffic, it regularly happens that cars drive dangerously close to me or that they cut me off. In Germany, drivers know what distance they should keep and to look for cyclists when turning. 2.) The condition of the streets is incredibly poor in the US. Potholes are a real problem, not just for cyclists. Some ptholes in San Diego are a foot deep and this is of course super dangerous for cyclists. I've never seen potholes like that in Germany.

My accident was in a parking lot, even, rather than on the street. Someone came around a blind corner rather quickly. At least it was a golf-cart type thing, rather than an actual car, or I would've been more seriously injured.

Biking really is dangerous though. Per-mile you are more likely to get injured in an accident on a bike than in a car. Though there are problems with that statistic since cars are also used for long-distance highway driving which inflates the total number of miles. That said, it's absolutely true that biking can be a fairly dangerous activity, though driving itself is also fairly dangerous (one of the most dangerous things people do regularly).

I'm still a huge proponent of biking regularly, but safety is an unfortunate problem, and a lot of people are stuck in situations where there isn't a safe bike route to and from work for them.

And you are absolutely right, there are plenty of cases where there are safe bike routes.

Yes per mile it's worse. However driving is worse for your health in long run. The odds average out in favor of cycling

Also, the statistics can be somewhat misleading because they average over so many details.

For example, there is a huge disparity in the range of safety equipment, level of situational awareness, and caution used by cyclists. Some are very conscientious, use lights, even mirrors, pay close attention to traffic, etc. while others take a cavalier attitude to safety, ignore the laws, are practically invisible on the road, etc. The statistics average both of those extremes into an aggregate risk level (though the same is true for cars as well, which is worth considering). Also, people have the ability to judge which routes they travel and to choose the safest ones.

Overall I would never discourage people from cycling, though there are some routes that I myself would be hesitant to take due to the lack of alternatives for safe places to travel. I commuted to work by bicycle for about a year and a half in Alabama, which is considered the worst state in the US to ride a bike (and I wouldn't disagree). In most cases there are reasonable and safe bike commuting routes, often on less trafficked side streets from main thoroughfares, though there are some cities where it's difficult to travel by bike unless you are a very skilled and aggressive cyclist.

Who said it was impossible? It just has to compete with many other forms of transit. So, put simply, if biking to work means arriving at work late, dripping sweat, and getting grazed by cars doing 60, then people will take other options if they can.

And a lot of the US really is pretty f*cking dangerous to bike during rush hour.

Most people don't want their daily commute to be a workout.

They'd rather be stuck in traffic feeling dead inside.

And some folks don't want to sit in their chair with a sweaty arse all day.

What comes first, the bike commuters or a reasonable way to get clean at the end of a ride? I think the latter is pretty low on the list of priorities for a lot of companies, unfortunately.

You can ask about shower-only memberships if there's a gym nearby.

It's what I've done in Melbourne AU and Canberra AU.

I've also ridden to work in Stockholm and Washington DC.

It's kind of remarkable that people say lots of these cities don't have cycling infrastructure. They all do.

The only place I've lived where I would have wanted to ride is Houston.

People just don't want to ride. I work in Canberra AU now that has great paths and many people don't have big differences to ride to work. I work with so many people who drive 5-10 minutes instead of riding. People who don't have kids to drop off.

I commute in Berlin by bike. I'm reasonably fit and on an open road I can average about 28km/h for a couple of hours. In the city though my average speed is about 18km/h because of traffic lights. There are very few people who overtake me on my commute. I don't see how you would manage 20 miles (32km) in less than 90 minutes without running all the red lights and riding like these madmen here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jhaGzAnEOd8

The local solution is to own two old run-down bikes and lock them at either station. You still run a risk of theft or damage, but the investment is not that big.

the real solution is to have a CHEAP bike share for last mile commute.

Yep. I'm not sure why the closest Bay Area Bike share to Google is at the Caltrain station.

Bike share also helps people get comfortable biking as part of a commute, so they may one day bike the whole commute.

Some people don't understand that they don't need to spend 3000$ in the bike they use to commute. Mine costed me 10.000yen (100$). It works quite OK, and if one day it is stolen or broken, I will not be really sad.

Ah, it also has a basket that is quite convenient when I go to the supermarket.

I guess. But commuting may be the bulk of all bicycling I do. To do most of my bicycling on a crap bike would be very disappointing.

I could also eat sawdust at work for lunch every day, if sawdust was nutritious. I don't need to eat tasty food. Nor wear comfortable clothes that fit - sackcloth will do.

I'm happy to ride a really good bike. I want to be happy more often.

This is a common problem here in the netherlands. We've found some solutions. Buy a bike that doesn't look flashy. Spray paint some stripes of pink paint over it. Buy a big lock. Chances of theft go way down.

Well. Happiness is really a personal thing. In my case, it makes me happy to let my bike without any lock in front of my house, knowing that nobody will touch it. On the other hand, it would make me quite unhappy to get an expensive bike stolen.

A carbon fiber bike would probably be 3 kilos lighter than my bike. But then I would have to carry a really heavy chain in order to lock it. So, I cannot see the gain. Also, the heavier my bike, the more exercise I do, witch is the point, isn't it?

Hm, no the point isn't utilitarian. Its joy, freedom, the feeling of flying down the lane on a beautiful day, stretching muscles.

My bike parks in the hall at work, no lock. So I guess I have the best of both worlds.

Indeed, $100 will get you a used/downmarket bike that will move you around just fine. And if you've got a bit more money and want something sturdier, you can get a brand-new model from a respected manufacturer for $500. I paid an extra $80 or so for a strong cargo rack and deep, low-slung, waterproof saddlebags that can carry more than a week of groceries for one person. So there really is a range of options for every income.

I pay ~$40/week in public transport costs to get to work, I estimate the bike is around $5-10 a week (costs for the occassionally required items: new tires; a pump; some gear; lights etc)

A $100 bike I would have paid off in 2-3 weeks

Therefore I opted for a $900 bike which is an entry level road bike where I am. After 30 weeks I've broken even, everything after that is profit.

So when its raining hard and you have to stop quickly and safely? will that 100$ bike be as good/safe as a sensible entry level MTB say 800/900$ with properly setup brakes?

The cheap ones are usually bought used anyway and might need repairs, you're free to upgrade the brakes. I'm usually limited by road traction, not my brakes, though, and they're as cheap as it gets. Proper maintenance is more important than expensive components.

That is assuming the frame isn't twisted - you woudl also want to replace the wheels with alloys.

Also not every where is SF with its balmy climate try riding where it rains a lot where stopping in the wet safely is probably more important

Twisted frame? Do you mean damaged after accident? And isn't alloy the normal material for wheels?

I live in Germany; there is a lot of rain going on. And snow, occasionally. Icy roads are a serious problem, but I still think a bike is the best way to move about then, just sloooowly.

But seriously, the biggest problem is to react fast enough, and not kill yourself by flying over the handlebars or skidding due to traction problems. Using condition-adequate speed helps a lot, of course. I never heard of any well-maintained bike causing problems by not braking sufficiently around here.

In India, where I live, you can get a good bicycle for about 5000 INR or ~ $76. And for the few years I owned a bicycle, I never had any issues with it. Mine cost ~ $46.

I don't understand why bikes in US are priced so high.

About this:

"but there's lots of people who live < 10 miles away from Google who'd be willing to do it if there was better infrastructure"

Then the headline should be "Google wants to make biking easier in Silicon Valley". The comparison to Copenhagen simply doesn't make sense. Riding a bicycle to work is an activity that is practical in denser areas, not in historically suburban valley.

The only problem to this otherwise ideal solution is how bursting at the seams the Caltrain is. No parking at the stations, no room to sit for the passengers, and no room for the bikes in the bike car. We really need a better rail system on the peninsula.

It's supposed to get somewhat better with electrification, since they'll be able to run more trains so we'll have more frequent service. I agree though that we need good transit on top of Caltrain, and it should be separated-grade.

I'd like to see Bart or similar all the way down the el camino and encourage high density housing and offices. Create a nice long urban canyon with good transit. People could bike a few blocks off the stations.

> I'd like to see Bart or similar all the way down the el camino

Isn't that about 1000 km long?

It is, but I imagined the portion from SF to SJ or even south SJ. Basically the SF SJ conglomeration along the el camino.

I don't have details, but apparently BART was originally drawn up to encircle the South Bay but that was torpedoed by the local communities on the peninsula just like high speed rail to LA. It's sort of crazy making to think about how much better BART would be compared to the apocalyptic, earthquake-inducing rumbling and dinging bells of Caltrain with at-grade crossings and monthly deaths (sometimes intentional, sometimes not).

It's actually pretty easy to bike 15miles to work to Mountain View where google is based. It's super-flat around here.

Been biking to MV for a year now, 15miles each way. Commute times are comparable to car commutes from Santa Clara during heavy traffic

I would like to see a mix of coach and bike - I live about 30 miles outside London in a typical commuter town, and the station is two miles away and the train takes an hour to drop me off in the wrong part of London and I need a 20 minute tube ride afterwards.

Currently the totally commercial and private coach is half the cost of my tax subsidised train per month, and picks me up 40 yards from my door and goes past the office where I work in London.

Soon I shall be moving offices and while I could stay on the coach I can just pedal the last few miles by getting off earlier. In London traffic i will be there faster eight times out of ten.

> Currently the totally commercial and private coach

Your coach drives on a private road? Very nice!

Copenhagen has actually been moving away from the bike box, moving the cyclist into something effectively a second sidewalk, moving at the same time the pedestrians move.

The bike-box is a good fit for on-road bike-lanes, but the second-crosswalk makes sense for separated ones.

> I'd also like to see "turning boxes" where to make a left you go to a perpendicular boxed out area on the right and wait for your light. They have these in Asia for scooters and bikes.

These are popping up all around SF, its very nice. Thanks SF Bike Coalition!

I had never heard of this. Spectacular! https://bicycledutch.wordpress.com/2012/08/23/spectacular-ne...

Based on the photo at the bottom they are going to fail the same way that many other US cities have failed when trying install bike lanes.

You MUST put the parked cars between moving traffic and bikes. If you do not bikers are going to get hit and doored and will obstruct turn lanes.

Pretty much everywhere in Europe gets this right. Traffic -> parking -> bikes -> peds. How did the US get everything completely backward?

I agree with you. To a certain extent there's institutional inertia around it now. Another issue is actually pedestrians not liking the idea of cyclists (who are all reckless scofflaws, of course) being right next to them. What they don't realize is that a) the reckless cyclists are a tiny minority of the people willing to bike in good infrastructure, and b) even a reckless cyclist probably still poses less of a threat to a pedestrian than a car, so moving people out of cars and onto bikes is almost always a win for pedestrian safety.

Although i'm a fairly responsible biker, I'd say the amount of bikers I see totally ignoring traffic laws is very high- stoplights, riding fast on sidewalks, going the wrong way on one way roads, etc. Maybe 30%. Re sidewalks, I think most people feel very unsafe on bikes in demarcated bike lines, and I get that. The other stuff is totally crazy though.

> I'd say the amount of bikers I see totally ignoring traffic laws is very high- stoplights, riding fast on sidewalks, going the wrong way on one way roads, etc. Maybe 30%.

Studies show that cyclists and motorists break the law at about the same rate: http://www.phillymag.com/news/2015/08/06/bikers-drivers-brea...

What's usually happening is that we're so used to motorists breaking the law that it doesn't even register. Tons of drivers, likely the majority, on my bike route to work go over the speed limit. When a light goes from green to yellow to red, do drivers correctly stop entering the intersection before it goes red? Nah, most of the time one or two more sneak in.

But I doubt other drivers even notice these things (heck, a lot of the time I don't even notice it): that law-breaking behavior is normalized. People pick up on it more with bikes, because there aren't nearly as many bikes around, so it's more noticeable.

I get the thing about sidewalks, and whenever I ride on sidewalks (which is when the road is wildly unsafe), I make sure to slow down, and I get off my bike if there are a bunch of pedestrians. The thing is, if we did invest in protected bike lanes, cyclists wouldn't ride on the sidewalk, because they wouldn't have to to feel safe.

I am from Denmark and frequently drive in the largest cities. The main problem is not breaking the law as such, but the tendency to completely disregard the surroundings - in the last 5 years a lot bike with music as well (though this can be compensated for with proper use of your eyes). A lot of bikers doesn't look over their shoulder when biking past a connecting road. The majority does not defensively try to determine if a right turning car has seen them and just assume it has. Some are all over the place and bike on the left side of the cars. There are a ton of other examples I see on a daily basis. They do it simply because it's more convenient to them.

Bikes and cars share the road, yet a great many cyclists act like they have priority. E.g when stopping at the red light, all cars waiting to do a right turn should have the right wheels close the the curb, and cyclists should queue up behind the car. They however almost always try to get past you, even jump off their bike and walk on the sidewalk if they have to and some give you the finger in the process - how dare you be in the way of how they think it should be?

No matter how much motorists break the law, they're not putting themselves in nearly the same danger. Not even close.

> No matter how much motorists break the law, they're not putting themselves in nearly the same danger. Not even close.

But motorists are absolutely putting other people in more danger...

This is happening in Portland, OR in select locations.

Admittedly I haven't seen a lot of progress in the last year, but they converted a few of the streets up by PSU rather quickly, so maybe it's not a huge obstacle to overcome?

Seattle as well. It seems to cause consternation in drivers at first because they don't expect it and end up still parking next to the curb in the bike lanes.

That approach works in cities that have established massive cycling communities - the Montreals and Copenhagens.

The mid-step approach for North American cities is an extra-wide bike-lane clear of the door zone with dotted zones that require drivers to shift into the bike-lane if they want to turn right.

Basically, the bike lane is effectively a "bike lane and right-only-turn-lane". It's less protected than the parking-protected bike lane, but it avoids the right-hook problem.

This way drivers will always see the cyclist when they wish to go right.

In urban areas with established cycling communities where you have enough density that cyclists are expected? There you do the parking-protected lane. In that kind of environment, cyclists are common-enough that drivers expect them and know to look for them.

My city (Hamilton, Ontario) uses both, and I get a lot more right/left hooks from cars on the protected lane than I do on the right-turn-plus-cyclist lane. The protected lane is a great endgame and we need to get there, but step one is "take the whole right lane and make it cycling/right-turn-only". It takes a lot of space but it's a great way to begin.

The problem is the popular approach is completely half-assed: the glorified shoulder in the door-zone, with no information for drivers about pulling over into the lane to turn. That leaves both the right-hook open and the door-prize.

If you require cars to use the bike lane, it's not a dedicated bike lane anymore. You bring cars and bikes together, and risk collisions between the two. It works only if car drivers are very aware of the presence of bikes, and trained to watch out for them. I think this is more likely to work in cities with an established bike culture than in car dominated cities.

When cars dominate, give bikes their own bike path.

You bring them together regardless at every intersection unless you give the bikes their own crossing signal every block.

The bike/turnlane makes turning into a two-step operation - first check for bikes, then second check if your turn is safe. That elevates the normal consideration bikes would get in a turn, which is none at all from most drivers.

That won't feel safe.

It works in Copenhagen, since drivers just wait until the bikes have stopped streaming past — sometimes, only one car turns right through a change of the lights. I don't see that working in the US.

Give the bikes their own traffic light phase, at the same time as parallel pedestrians.

This, a million times (excuse the hyperbole). A low curb between the parking and bike path, and between bike path and pedestrian way is also very important. So is law enforcement that actively cites and tows cars that park on bike lanes, at least while building a culture around it.

Add to that that bike paths in Copenhagen have a totally different, much smoother asphalt. Since it is only used for bikes it lasts a long time. Cars can't drive on it because it is too slick and wouldn't stand up to the use. But it makes biking a lot easier than on rough asphalt covered in repairs, cracks ans potholes.

I wouldn't say pretty much everywhere. Probably only in Amsterdam.

In Berlin it's mostly: cars | bikes | parking | pedestrians (raised sidewalk).

In Warsaw (for example) it's: cars | parking | bikes (part of the sidewalk) | pedestrians (raised sidewalk).

Warsaw is a pretty terrible example to follow. The bike lanes zigzag from road to sidewalk and back with no reason, and do things like deliver you into a huge roundabout where the bike lane ends without warning.

As a fellow Pole you probably know that bike lanes are not a part of well-designed infrastructure here but a political tool for local elections.

Places I've been in the UK get this right, as well as Erlangen and Koln, and from google maps it seems like Munich gets it right as well. A rather small sample, but I suspect that the traffic engineering generalizes.

You're wrong about Berlin. The vast majority of bike lanes are part of the sidewalk.

They're really haphazard and frequently blocked (Amsterdam is probably the ideal, IMO), but cars are parked between them and the road.

That's a bold statement.

Probably it depends on the district. Most of my commute the paths are a part of the car lane.

Yeah it really depends to be honest. Born n raised in Amsterdam and if I look out the window, there's parking separated lanes, but if I cycle down my street and take a right, I get merely curb-separated lanes, and if I take another right I'd be sharing (without even dotted lines) the street with cars (although for these streets there are lots of speed bumps and speed limits and one-direction traffic, mostly for people living there to park their cars rather than actual travel). So it's far from 'everywhere' in Amsterdam.

It's hard to say how much of the cycle lanes are parking separated. I feel like it's quite a bit but then I also look at streets like the marathonweg or stadionweg (check google maps street view) which have been peds | parking | bikes -dottedlines- cars, since forever and still are to this day, despite there being room to switch the middle two around.

But it's quite clear that wherever possible, this is what streets are being modified to all the time, construction just finished infront of my dad's house to modify the street for improved safety for example. I wouldn't be surprised if say the marathonweg and stadionweg would look more like the apollolaan before 2020. In the case of the stadionweg it's a little tricky as it's often used to drive through, past the olympic stadium onto the highway, it's pretty damn packed during rushhour so construction isn't a bit tricky to plan.

There are two distinct things here:

1. Bike lanes, which are part of the road; and 2. Bike paths, which are often adjacent to the pedestrian sidewalk (and are often not structurally separated)

There’s movement in Europe toward the former, though I think historically the latter has been the case. It has its own problems—especially when not structurally separated—because in the city, bikes are much closer in speed to cars than pedestrians.

Also, people occasionally get out from the other side of the car too.

The solution is merely to put the bikes far enough from parked cars, not a specific side per se.

I lived for ten years in a street that had that design for historical reasons (rue de Rivoli, designed by Napoleon to fck over the aristocracy from the previous regime, and has an odd half-private status).

For bikes, the result is that I got right-hooked into daily, got my bike crushed weekly (I used rentals), and ended up twice in the hospital. Unless you physically crush every car that tries to turn right, they will* T-bone every bike there is. This is, without exaggeration a way to kill a significant portion of your riders. Once again, the alternative is making turning right physically impossible to cars.

> Pretty much everywhere in Europe gets this right. Traffic -> parking -> bikes -> peds.

Unless you also limit the length of the street that can be used for parking to keep it farther back from the corners, this would seem to substantially reduce the visibility of bikers to drivers (and vice versa), increasing the number of bike vs. moving car collisions.

This seems intuitively likely to outweigh any benefit from reducing the number of bike vs. car door collisions.

In Honolulu I commute on a recently opened bike lane with this design, and have two or three near-misses every week from cars turning into driveways without checking the bike lane. It's exacerbated by the sometimes steep curb, so driver will turn left into the bike path at full speed, come to a complete stop perpendicular to bike traffic, and then slowly move into their parking lot or McDonald's drive through too avoid scraping their undercarriage. It's maddening how drivers seem to prioritize potential damage to their vehicles over the risk of killing someone.

The bike path is still new, though, so hopefully people learn to slow down and check their mirrors.

I'm in Sydney, we do not put parked cars between our bikes and roads but it works just fine with a gutter.

https://www.google.com.au/maps/place/Wynyard/@-33.8687896,15...

I think this is what people are citing as an ideal scenario (where possible).

I appreciate the effort, although I'm annoyed that FastCoExist mentions Mountain View and Santa Clara, while avoiding mentioning Sunnyvale, the actual 'heart' of Silicon valley and right there on the map between Mountain View and Santa Clara. But hometown prejudices aside, the challenges are in connecting existing stuff. For example, once you get to the Stevens Creek Trail you are good to go right up to Goole's campus. Sunnyvale has been adding protected bike lanes that cross it east/west to aid that effort.

I suggested to the Sunnyvale city council rather than remove a couple of lanes from El Camino they add an elevated bike pathway right down the center. You can ride on El Camino from Gilroy to Milbrae and if it had an out of traffic bike lane on it then you could open up a lot of the bay area to bikes.

> Sunnyvale has been adding protected bike lanes that cross it east/west to aid that effort.

Have they? Where? I'd love to see some on Evelyn.

Really anywhere there isn't street parking, changing painted bike lanes into protected bike lanes seems like a no-brainer. Much more (perceptual, at least) safety, without any significant change to how the road space is divvied up.

> Have they? Where? I'd love to see some on Evelyn.

Me too. I was actually hit on Evelyn a few months back.

Remington has full size bike lanes, Mary and Bernardo are in the works to get them, and I don't know where the proposal for Homestead is these days.

Two things:

Remington & Homestead don't connect to Stevens Creek Trail, and Mary & Bernardo aren't East-West streets.

You said they were adding protected bike lanes, are any of those protected? Off the top of my head, I can't think of any protected bike lanes I've seen in Sunnyvale.

Wolfe has protected lanes all through, I used to bike on that. Same with Fremont/Sunnyvale-Saratoga, etc.

When I rode a bike to work because I had to bike 500m on El Camino, which is 500m more than what I want to on that road. The alternate was quite longer.

Edit: first para incorrect, I had "protected bike lanes" and "dedicated bike lanes" confused.

> Wolfe has protected lanes all through, I used to bike on that.

I have no idea what you're talking about. I bike across Wolfe on Evelyn all the time and have seen no protected bike lanes on it. I just checked Street View on a handful of different parts of Wolfe and I see zero protected bike lanes, and it says the data is from this year. You're talking about Wolfe Rd that crosses Caltrain and goes next to Vallco right?

> Same with Fremont/Sunnyvale-Saratoga, etc.

Checked these on Street View since I don't drive on them that often, same deal, zero protected bike lanes. Unless they've done some very recent construction, I think you may be confused about what protected bike lanes are: http://www.peopleforbikes.org/green-lane-project/pages/prote...

Very sorry, I had "protected bike lanes" and "dedicated bike lanes" confused. Thanks!

No problem, protected bike lanes are a relatively recent innovation in the states, and up until recently they usually went by the term "cycle tracks", but turns out that "protected bike lane" is a much easier-to-understand name.

Fair enough, I would ride Remington to Bernardo, up to Heatherstone and then along Heatherstone to the trail entrance.

We may have a different definition of protected, I think of the lanes on Remington as protected but they are created by striping, not curb work, so it isn't like there is a lane all to itself.

If you want to get involved, you can talk to the council at the BPAC meetings : http://sunnyvale.ca.gov/CityGovernment/BoardsandCommissions/... And see the current map: http://sunnyvale.ca.gov/Portals/0/Sunnyvale/DPW/Transportati... (from 2007, they are updating it)

In general, the city is very supportive of creating a bike friendly environment.

> We may have a different definition of protected, I think of the lanes on Remington as protected but they are created by striping, not curb work, so it isn't like there is a lane all to itself.

Ah, that explains it.

So, you're talking about painted bike lanes (regular single stripe of paint to separate). There are also buffered bike lanes (extended painted area that separates bike lanes) and protected bike lanes (some kind of physical barrier between cars and bike lanes). There are many different options for separating bikes from cars, but if you're just using paint it's not considered protected; the ones in this link all are protected except for the first: http://www.peopleforbikes.org/blog/entry/14-ways-to-make-bik...

The reason why this distinction is important is that average people are vastly more likely to feel comfortable riding in a protected lane than an unprotected one (note: sometimes protected bike lanes are referred to as 'physically separated'): http://www.peopleforbikes.org/blog/entry/selling-biking-perc...

A good way to accomplish this (not mentioned in the article) would be to build more housing close to Mountain View's campus. Office space has been outstripping housing growth in Mountain View for a very long time. See for example https://www.jwz.org/blog/2015/01/stop-being-bullied-lets-sue....

They tried, multiple times, and were explicitly rebuked

http://www.mv-voice.com/print/story/2012/07/13/google-housin...

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/26/technology/google-plans-ne... etc

It comes up every few years.

While I think the situation is ridiculous, I also can't help thinking that if you're one of the most successful companies in the world and you can't get this done. It's either not that great of priority for you or you're doing something wrong.

Nope, it's something Google would really love to see. You have to remember that as the Goliath in the room, Google has to be somewhat careful about how hard they try to persuade local governments, as many residents already dislike how quickly they've grown and how that's contributed to rents going up and traffic getting worse.

And Google has made a bunch of improvements themselves, like, I believe, the buffered bike lanes on Shorebird and the multi-use path that extends west from Shorebird. But they can't just do whatever they want, no matter how rich they are. Just look at how their plans for development in North Bayshore got shot down by the city.

I was more thinking of compromising. Making deals is, at least to some extent, what business is about and I don't see the differences as insurmountable. Maybe Google don't play nice with others, but there's firms that do that too in exchange for money.

From what I can tell, Google plays as nice as humanly possible, there were just a lot of NIMBYs in the Mountain View city council until recently who hated the idea of getting housing in that area. But the NIMBYs lost badly last fall, and now the city actually is moving forward with housing in North Bayshore. I just wish they were moving forward with more (I think right now the plan is like ~5,000 units).

See: http://www.bizjournals.com/sanjose/news/2015/04/15/heres-whe...

My observation would be that relationships are not Google strong suit. They don't really do customers or enterprise. Support has been lacking for a long time. They are not even that good at managing their brand considering their popularity. Maybe they will get their way eventually, but I think people are going to be disappointing in a decade or so. It's supposedly the technology capital of the world and deserves a greater outcome then what a few companies can push through a dysfunctional process.

as many residents already dislike...rents going up and traffic getting worse

Those sound like good reasons for local residents to support more nearby housing.

Yup, and thankfully the outgoing NIMBY city council members got replaced last fall with ones that have a more urbanist leaning, and they're moving ahead of housing in North Bayshore now. I just wish it was more than ~5,000 units; that's not very much compared to how many people work there.

... or an example of the strength of NIMBYism and the empowerment of the vocal few in California politics to roadblock progress.

I'm going to have to ask you to file an environmental impact statement and a report with the coastal commission of california before i'll give you the permits to comment further on this thread :)

When you can't persuade a small town city council, it is because you aren't doing enough bribery. Maybe that is wrong.

Mountain View and most of the other SV cities want to maintain their quiet suburban image, nevermind that they are home to some of the biggest tech companies in the world. Until residents start voting the other way, housing will continue to be in very short supply.

until people learn how and, more importantly, willing to build good urban space, as a resident of MV (or of SV in general as i lived in other near by cities before) i am even against current 3 story "barracks" being actively built all over the place.

For example, one can build 30 story (plus 10 underground for parking/storage/etc...) towers with enough green space around it instead of covering all available space with the 3 story-s.

Towers surrounded by green space has been tried, with mostly negative results.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Le_Corbusier#Criticism

Good urban space is mostly about how nice it feels to be on a street. You want a comfortable amount of walking space, destinations that are close together, and that's pretty much it. Surrounding buildings with parks makes walking harder and less pleasant.

There's probably enough demand for taller buildings, but it's illegal.

>Towers surrounded by green space has been tried, with mostly negative results.

on 2D surface the density can be done only by growing into the 3rd dimension. The only issue is how to do it. The ratio between height, footprint and total capacity i think reaches its worst value in the current style of development in the Valley (as a result of developers ripping best value in profit possible inside the municipally imposed limits)

>Surrounding buildings with parks makes walking harder and less pleasant.

as if walking on a concrete sidewalk between 3-story wall and the traffic lanes in the open under CA midday Sun beats it :)

It does beat it. Those walls are full of people. Those people shop. That means there's more demand for nearby destinations. Walking in places where there's stuff nearby is better: it's more interesting, and you'll have a shorter walk to your destination since it's more likely to be close. Spreading people out—even with parks—is a negative. Parks belong in the middle of people, not surrounding them.

The "3-story barracks" you speak of - they're actually the most humane compromise we have. Something that is relatively cost-effective to throw up, but accommodates a decent number of people, and when built throughout a neighborhood will easily pass the critical thresholds for future services. Much of San Francisco is also built to 3 stories, and it's one of the most dense areas in the country. It's a geometry problem, as you point out - but also a cost problem. It's cheaper to have mid-rises everywhere than a few high rises, and people find shorter constructions more humane on average. But the construction height isn't the _only_ thing to worry about.

Land use in suburban areas is mostly premised on maximizing car traffic. That's why we have the big six-lane streets and the huge parking lots with sad, small strips of grass separating everything. If we optimize for maximizing people movement over car movement, the streets get smaller and so do the parking lots; transit and bikes get more accommodation. Room opens up for more destinations, and you get more access at a lower average speed and energy consumption, further improving the land value - all just by changing the design requirements. Traditional cities are very energy-efficient.

The Wikipedia article refers to parks surrounding offices ("on the scale he imagined there was no motive during the business day for pedestrian circulation in the office quarter"), and is unclear about what scale the parks are.

For apartment complexes, the towers surrounded by park concept is the standard way to build new apartments in Korea for over a decade now. It works well because the density of residents attract businesses to the outskirts of the park, and in the parks I've seen, they always contain multiple playgrounds, rest areas, sculptures, and exercise equipment for public use. Children play there after school, families gather on weekends, and street markets and street fairs are held in the parks on a regular basis. It is a very efficient use of land to provide both urban density and public space. (Here is a typical apartment complex design: http://image.apt.joinsland.com/contents.upload/1501/1945/bir...)

The problem isn't Mountain View alone, it's balkanization. You can't just build housing in Mountain View unless you really believe "Alphabet" will be there forever -- that's different from believing that tech will last a long time, because one company does not an industry make. It makes more sense to build 2000 units in each of Mountain View, Palo Alto, Sunnyvale, Santa Clara, Redwood City, San Mateo, East Palo Alto, Cupertino, San Jose, and Los Altos, than to force any one of those to build 20000 units. But coordinating this is easier said than done, and it took a long time to type, at that.

Annexing the suburbs has been mentioned as a possibility for SF, but the real balkanization is worse further south, and it would actually be easier for San Jose to annex most of Silicon Valley -- for one thing, it doesn't cross county lines -- than for San Francisco to reach all the way down the peninsula. The end result is the same, if SJ city authorities recognize both the problem and the opportunity it represents.

But hopefully some useful public transit pops up in the area, too.

Facebook took over Sun's old campus, and I imagine some corp would take over Google's campus if they left. Ultimately office space is office space, and planning for a mass regional exodus seems unwarranted. Most or all of the cities mentioned can accommodate new housing developments as easily as office parks now...it seems like a reasonable means of allocation.

I don't even think crazy annexation schemes are needed...what would really change the region is a unified school system.

San Jose tried this in the 60s. Most of the little towns surrounding San Jose used to be San Jose. They were rebuked over and over again as town re-incorporated. I think you'd at least have to wait longer before trying that again.

I applaude this effort. I think many people discount how capable they are of making the switch to commuting via bike to work. Almost any commute less then 10 miles can easily be done via bike, and making a "safe" route to connect the metro area is a great first step.

The unfortunate situation is that if you are over 10 miles to your office ( which many are ) you will have a hard time making that commute in a acceptable amount of time, unless you actually make an effort at going fast.

I don't want to show up to work sweaty. And I want the utility of a vehicle if my plans change. So I'll drive regardless.

That really depends on your speed. Like dhenry says, if you're going at a moderate pace, a 5 mile commute ends up being about 30 minutes door to door, and you don't really work up a sweat, definitely not in the winter, maybe sometimes in the summer. If you're going full-tilt you can get that down to 20 minutes door-to-door and then you sweat and you have to take a shower. So really it's a question of if you're trying to get some aerobic exercise during your commute or not.

I am of course speaking for Seattle where it's usually cool but not cold and damp but not really raining.

Honestly it's a great way to wake up to get some exercise in, then drop by a gym for a shower (if your office doesn't have one).

Showers at the office are probably one of the most underrated perks ever.

As a sidenote, the whole point is that "the utility of a vehicle" shouldn't far exceed the utility of a bicycle/public transit in an area as developed as Silicon Valley.

I travel ~ 5 miles to work (takes about 30 minutes). I dont push myself to hard and I keep a spare t-shirt in the office. Arrive, swap t-shirt. Done.

If my plans change I leave my bike at work and arrive on mass transit the next day.

You're welcome to your opinion. I bike 8 miles each way in Silicon Valley with a backpack on my back. I ride in a t-shirt and jeans (unless it's really hot, in which case I wear shorts).

I ride moderately hard, so I arrive with a bit of sweat on my body and on my face. Sometimes I wipe the sweat off my face with a paper towel.

10 mins in my air-conditioned cube and I'm back to normal temp, all dried off, and merino t-shirts don't smell.

Driving a car is convenient, sure. My bike commute to work takes about twice as long as driving on 101, though my commute home is often about the same, time-wise due to traffic.

I enjoy the bike ride more, for the most part. Occasionally I wish I had a car. Once I had vertigo so I called an Uber to take me to the urgent care. If I had a car, I would have driven, but that's probably not the best shape to be in while driving a motor vehicle.

So I suppose you'll trade sitting in traffic for the convenience of having a car on the rare occasion you need one. You're welcome to the choice.

I welcome the addition of more bike infrastructure.

Just curious, why do you prefer a backpack to a pannier (or backpack-inside-pannier)?

I like the backpack better as I can bring it with me on the last 100 ft and into my building where I shower and change, where if its pannier's I either need a backpack inside of it, or I need to carry my stuff around.

Also people steal stuff, so I don't like leaving things on my bike.

Try choosing "Office bags" from https://www.ortlieb.com/en/produkte/radtasche/

There are pannier backs with backpack straps, or shoulder straps, etc.

Although I have the more basic "back roller" standard detachable panniers. They take a second to attach/detach, nothing remains to be stolen. Best £50 I ever spent! They still look new after 2 years of daily use.

I like having the mass attached to my body, as opposed to having an awkwardly-weighted bike. Reduced unsprung weight for more maneuverability :) Much easier to hop speedbumps and the like, which is pretty useful for urban cycling. I have a light 20L pack with an internal frame and mesh for my back so I still get decent ventilation.

Even in Copenhagen, 10km (6 miles) tends to be about the furthest most people bike. A few do bike further, but it really drops off past that. For the longer commutes, people do a hybrid bike/rail trip. If you're 5km from work, often it's easiest and fastest to just bike directly. If you're 20km, it's more common to bike to the S-train. Depending on your job location, you either take the bike with you on the S-train and continue biking from the other side, or you park it at the station and just take the train in.

Absolutely, same here. Amsterdam for example, most distances are about 4-5km. Inside the 'ring', which is a highway running in a circle around the centre of Amsterdam, is considered to be Amsterdam the city, outside is mostly considered Amsterdam the suburban area, and the ring has a diameter of about 8km, which is probably a good measure for what people are willing to bike. Up to 10km still makes sense, too, but beyond that it tapers off really quickly.

It really depends how long that takes though on a few factors. For example, in the Netherlands you can separate two distinct groups.

One are those who cycle between cities, usually these are either old people for recreation, or much bigger, teenagers (12-18) who cycle from a small village to a nearby larger village or town to go to secondary school. Those people have two things in common, 1) they have nice bikes with gears and 2) they have very long stretches of fully separated cycling paths without any traffic or stop lights. They can pretty easily get speeds of 20 km/h and do a 10km trip in half an hour.

The other group of people are mostly inner-city people who don't take their bicycle outside of the city and use it for shopping, seeing friends, cycling to work, to a station etc. They usually have what are called 'opa' and 'oma' bikes without any gears. And their trips consist of mixed traffic (quite a lot of separate lanes, but not everywhere) with a lot of traffic stops every minute or so. They get speeds around 14 km/h or so, and with the constant stops some effectively get more like 12 km/h. Their 10km trip suddenly takes 50 minutes, and that's just not really acceptable for a lot of people, particularly when you're in your suit for a morning meeting and it either rains or gets really warm.

So it really depends. In big cities though, you'll rarely see 10km trips, 8km is the reasonable limit for most, 1-5km is typical (for example 1km for shopping, 2km for sports, 2-5km for friends or work or a station).

> The unfortunate situation is that if you are over 10 miles to your office ( which many are ) you will have a hard time making that commute in a acceptable amount of time, unless you actually make an effort at going fast.

OR, unless you get an eBike. Which, while more expensive than a regular bike, are still vastly cheaper to purchase and operate than a car. A good pre-built eBike will probably sell in the $1000-2000 range and uses a negligible amount of electricity.

I think it's tragic that ebikes have become the domain of drunks and losers. We have the perfect solution to global warming and urban intensification right there, and no self-respecting person will use it because it's a tool of the underclass.

I've never heard of this stigma in the US. Where is this coming from?

edit: I see in your other comments you mention Ontario, interesting. Seems so strange that a mode of transportation could carry such a stigma.

Must be local. I live in Hamilton, Ontario, and you'll see e-bikes frequently in the rougher parts of town.

Several of my friends are bike shop workers in Chicago, I can confirm this is quickly becoming the preferred "DUI Bike" for those with the means.

I think ebikes are just seen as cripplingly uncool, and there is a bit of a feeling that it's the lazy way out.

Coming from a cyclists perspective, I always assumed that eBike riders were laypeople who just wanted to pay for the convenience to make the daunting task of pedaling seem like less of a deal.

It's truly tragic that bikes as a form of transport has been regulated to the domains of college kids, hipsters, fitness buffs, and enthusiasts.

< 15 miles is manageable for most people if they don't give up the first day they're sore.

What you are missing from your perspective is mountainous regions, long distances or fact that some people do not want to arrive too sweaty, but still wish to enjoy the ride.

If you arrive sweaty it's because you bike too fast.

Having used one for a while, the extra weight and general clumsiness compared to a normal bike becomes a huge discouragement to casual riding.

I haven't had the opportunity to ride one myself, but my understanding is that they're steadily getting better on that front. Mid-drive improves balance, for example: https://www.electricbike.com/mid-drive-kits/

And if the infrastructure is good enough, a lot of people will deal with some clumsiness. Lots of people in Denmark and the Netherlands use bike trailers or cargo bikes, and having had a chance to use them, believe me, those are DEFINITELY clumsy.

The prices on ebikes are still ridiculous. They cost more than a lightly used 300cc motorcycle that can go 100 mph and sips gasoline.

But ebikes ride quietly and do not produce smoke. And you can pedal them. Speed is not the only factor here.

Nothing compensates for the absurdity of spending over $3K for one.

And if you're over 30 miles from work, forget it unless you're in fairly good shape. My 45+ mile commute to Silicon Valley laughs at any attempt to get me on a bike. Better to support improved mass transit.

There's no single policy that solves the problem. It's a combination.

Building public transit extends the longer commute. Building out local cycling options extends the area that the public transit options can serve. It also relieves congestion on those same public transit options since some of those living 5 or 10m away are more likely to bike.

I just biked last evening from downtown San Jose to the southern vicinity of the Google campus. There are two main options: Central Expressway or something close and parallel to it, which I've declined. Or trails near the bay shore, which is what I chose.

Bad choice. The trails are for the most part unpaved. Riding my sleek, rigid road bike on those things was torture. Never again. If those trails were paved, that would be a pretty awesome route.

So start with paving the lesser-known trails.

I know its not an option for everyone, but a good cyclecross bike will do wonders for that kind of commute. I picked up a hybrid bike and got a set of tires with some tread on them and I can now handle gravel fairly well, and still get good rolling resistance on the rest of my ride

I had a hybrid with fat tires, which I used to ride on trails like that. It makes the ride somewhat more bearable, yes.

But the point is - no pavement, no speed, regardless of what kind of bike your using. Pave those things, and your average speed on a bike would double at least.

Double? I doubt that. Typically, I ride ~20km/h on gravel and ~23km/h on well-paved roads at commute speeds (i.e., no sweating). Maybe the gravel roads are terrible in SV, but around here, it hardly makes a difference in speed as gravel roads are well-maintained.

The trail right along the shore is hard dirt, not quite asphalt, but passable. So that one is okay-ish.

But the connecting trail from SJ downtown along the creek towards the bay at some point changes from asphalt to literally a trough full of gravel. You'll lose a lot of speed there, no matter what kind of tires you're using.

you should give cyclocross bike a go

This sounds like it could be easily solved by you riding a more suitable bike for commuting. It seems people in the US fetishize road bikes with drop bars and skinny tires as the 'best and fastest' kind of bike and then complain about how uncomfortable biking is. Even in the tour de france they don't use 23mm tires anymore. Going to a wider tire won't affect your speed adversely and to an extent will actually speed you up.

https://janheine.wordpress.com/2014/01/01/tires-how-wide-is-...

The width of the tyre might not affect your speed - but the fact the path is unpaved will :)

I only ride hybrids, I've ridden my hybrid on steep mountain highways and gravel roads, although mostly thousands of miles in the city. I agree that wider tires are best. However, having a durable bike with durable tires doesn't "solve" the problem of riding on gravel, it just makes it less painful. If Silicon Valley actually built a decent bike network I might consider moving there from Seattle.

As it is I'd feel like I'm paying a premium to put up with worse infrastructure.

I've commuted a few times from NE San Jose (near Milpitas) to Google MTV campus via the (mostly-gravel) Bay Trail on a hybrid bike. It's telling when the commute makes your arms are more tired than your legs... I agree w/ GP: Pave that section of the Bay Trail.

"It seems people in the US fetishize road bikes with drop bars and skinny tires as the 'best and fastest' kind of bike" I don't think that true. The general opinion I've seen where I live is that bikes are toys and paying above a few hundred for one is ridiculous.

I do agree that you probably don't want a race oriented road bike if your goal is to commute to work a few miles but if you enjoy the sport and know what you are getting into then go for it get as awesome a bike as you can afford. It's better than wasting it on some huge car. Bike value should be > car value ;p

Outside the Bay Area in the US, I see a lot of hybrid and mountain bikes. In Silicon Valley, there's definitely a preference for multi-thousand $ road bikes -- and people ride them, hard.

Still, riding your carbon race bike to the office is akin to driving your Ferrari to the grocery store -- uncomfortable on rough roads, no storage space, and when you get there, where do you park?

Parking can be an issue but I would hope that most large tech companies now offer interior protected bike storage. Seems like a cheap perk that keep employee healthy.

When I bought my road bike, I tried to optimize the hell out of the performance/price ratio. You could get a pretty good road bike for less than $2k, or quite a bit less than that with some effort. Choose a store with good prices, and use all the discounts and sales you could get your hands on.

This was a few years back, but I got mine for $1200. Granted, this was in the middle of a massive sale, but still. It's even got a carbon fiber fork (but aluminum frame).

Frankly, not being Lance Armstrong, I don't care about the last few percentage points of performance. All I care is how much I get for the buck I pay, and whether I get a decent bike or not. Keep the chain lubed and the tires rock-hard, and the thing flies on most roads.

I think it is a young, hipster-ish thing. Usually people ride a mountain bike as a kid and think of road bikes as "bikes for grownups."

My perspective as a European is there seem to be two types. Whenever I bring up bike commutes with Americans, either the reaction is negative (with all the typical excuses), or their eyes light up and they start going on about that fixie they've had their eye on for so long. The "middle-class" of "bikes are fine tools for travel" just doesn't seem to be there - either you're dismissive or you're a "bike nut2.

Yeah that's pretty accurate from my experience too. It changes from city to city. Pacific north west cities like Portland and Seattle have a much more balanced view of cycling but on the east coast where I am now it's pretty much like you describe.

Yep get a hard tail MTB and let the suspension take the strain.

I used to take the trails by the bay from the Googleplex to North San Jose - most is unpaved gravel, and then you pass by a smelly waste treatment plant and get on some paved trails. Even on a hybrid, it was not the most pleasant cycling.

Those were at least dedicated bike trails, which is more than I can say about a lot of other areas in South Bay. I would never attempt to take Shoreline over 101 and compete with all the drivers trying to get on the highway on-ramp.

Some lights would also be nice. Car roads get lights, why not bike roads?

I've commuted between the Google campus and Santa Clara by bike, via the Bay Trail, before. I didn't mind the unpaved nature of the trails, I was using a mountain bike. It was fast enough. On the way home after dark though, a little scary. I was quite surprised that I was not eaten by a Mountain Lion. I was more surprised by bikes going the other direction with no lights whatsoever.

Man! You guys are a bunch of complainers! I second the get-an appropriate bike line of thinking. I have a basic CX bike with a steel fork and wider tires. Riding on gravel or dirt roads isn't as fast as paved roads, but I'd hardly call it torture.

Growing up in Oregon, at a certain point I'd ridden all the roads what seemed like a million times, so my friends and I started seeking out gravel roads that were relatively smooth. We put together some epic rides on those, on our road bikes.

This was always one of my favorite climbs when going on rides from Padova:

https://www.google.com/maps/@45.4724563,11.5982143,3a,75y,18...

A bit rough to go down, though.

Why shouldn't we spend some money to pave a bike path that could be well used. When I rode on the bayshore pathway, there were parts of the path that had been partially washed out, leaving about 3 feet of 2-5 inch ruts. Elsewhere there were infrequent, but pretty much constant 1 inch ruts in hard packed dirt. Elsewhere they had filled the path with a softpacked pea-gravel. You shouldn't have to break out a mountainbike and deal with drastically changing road surfaces to commute to work.

> Man! You guys are a bunch of complainers! I second the get-an appropriate bike line of thinking.

This line of thinking got us fleets of gas guzzling SUVs and crumbling infrastructure because people didn't want to pay their road taxes after buying too much car.

Silicon Valley is a car-centric urban area, and this Google initiative strikes a cord with this talk "The Importance of Designing Streets Instead of Engineering Them", well worth watching:

http://www.architecture.io/talks/mikael-colville-andersen-th...

If you look at the history of South SF Bay, it has always been a string of commuter communities.

It started with the train to take workers into SF and the rich out to their mansions on the weekends. It exploded in the 1950's with affordable automobiles, and houses went up everywhere.

Now the workers are going the other way and the South SF Bay infrastructure is being crushed by it.

It would be nice if the Valley was more pedestrian friendly - all too often bikers ignore the rules. One example is near the Palo Alto Caltrain station tunnel between Stanford and downtown Palo Alto, and too many times pedestrians come close to getting hit by their recklessness :( .

One time I got yelled at by a biker on El Camino when trying to board a bus...the biker tried to pass to the right of the bus.

It is frustrating how often bikers don't care about co-existing with the other modes of transportation & following the rules - I feel like this needs to change first before the area becomes bike friendly.

> I feel like this needs to change first before the area becomes bike friendly.

As in people should stop work making the area bike friendly until the issue of dangerous driving of bikes is ended?

While I agree that cyclists should be better behaved, I feel that it may be an (over)reaction to hostility from drivers. There's a saying motorcyclists have: ride like they (the car drivers) can't see you. I like to extend that for cyclists as "ride like they can see you and they're trying to hit you." The sad truth is that America is bike hostile, and even apart from that, many who shouldn't be driving are still issued drivers licenses (one cyclist was killed by an old lady near where I live, but no one's going to tangle with the AARP, and most people thought she'd have lived had she been in a "safe" car).

It would be nice if the Valley was more pedestrian friendly - all too often cars ignore the rules. One example is near the Palo Alto Caltrain station tunnel between Stanford and downtown Palo Alto, and too many times pedestrians come close to getting hit by their recklessness :( .

[Eh, pick any time you've seen a car shoot through a crosswalk and narrowly miss pedestrians... I observe this at least weekly]

It is frustrating how often drivers don't care about co-existing with the other modes of transportation & following the rules - I feel like this needs to change first before the area becomes car friendly.

I love this comment because it illustrates perfectly the cognitive dissonance going on. People everywhere talk about how drivers in their area are like, so, so bad, but nobody ever suggests that we halt investing in car infrastructure until they get better.

And that's a good thing: you don't stop investing in a vital public good just because it's sometimes abused. That applies to bikes as much as cars.

I have far more problems with bikers in the area than cars - the close encounter rate is quite high, largely because a lot of bikers don't have good control over their bikes or because they don't care at all about pedestrians and are willing to run them over to force them out of the way. I'm quite amazed I haven't been hit by a biker yet to be honest, some even talking on their cellphones held in one hand while driving pedestrians running out of the way.

I'd be more sympathetic towards bikers if they didn't decrease the quality of getting from one place to another for pedestrians & harass when they decided to not follow laws & rules there for good reason.

You act like being pedestrian friendly isn't a vital public good - I'd argue it is more important than being bike friendly, and if being bike friendly has a logical result in making it much more perilous for a pedestrian (and I'd fear for those with babies in baby carriages), one needs to consider that the current system does not work, and this problem needs to be solved either before or alongside the bike friendly problem.

> I'd be more sympathetic towards bikers if they didn't decrease the quality of getting from one place to another for pedestrians & harass when they decided to not follow laws & rules there for good reason.

Fine, but do you know how you get nice, polite cyclists like in Denmark or the Netherlands? You give them good infrastructure so it doesn't feel like they have to break the rules!

If there were no pedestrian signals and no sidewalks, do you think pedestrians would be as well-behaved as they are today?

> You act like being pedestrian friendly isn't a vital public good - I'd argue it is more important than being bike friendly, and if being bike friendly has a logical result in making it much more perilous for a pedestrian (and I'd fear for those with babies in baby carriages), one needs to consider that the current system does not work, and this problem needs to be solved either before or alongside the bike friendly problem.

Again, you have it backwards: Most people on bikes will gladly stay off the sidewalk if there is equivalently safe-feeling infrastructure available. But a painted bike lane does not feel safe, not unless it's a traffic-calmed street. Making better bike lanes means fewer collisions between pedestrians and cyclists, not more.

I know you're speaking more of bike/pedestrian conflicts, but that's not an issue on my commute, so I can't speak to it.

Every single law I break as a cyclist benefits drivers as well as myself. It's the lack of infrastructure that makes it safer for me to hop from bike lane to sidewalk rather than follow the bike lane which magically reappears on the OTHER SIDE OF A LANE OF TRAFFIC on a 40mph arterial. It's the lack of infrastructure that makes me prefer to go from road to crosswalk (or cut across an entire road when it looks safe) instead of forcing all of the motorists and their precious steeds to have to accordion up and slow for me as I try to make my way across the 3 lanes of traffic to the left turn lane when I need to turn.

Additionally, every single law I break exposes me to 100% of the legal risk, and anything a driver might consider "unsafe" is putting 100% of the risk of bodily harm on myself, not on the observer in the car.

I say all of this as a car and motorcycle enthusiast with an avowed need for speed. But the reality is that the car-centric view of the roads has to change.

Cars don't drive on the sidewalks or to the right of buses picking up passengers.

No, but they do kill tens of thousands of people each year in the US. How many people do bikes kill again?

Your sentiment is perfectly understandable, but also wrong. Here's a comment from a Dutch guy about biking in the bay area that sums it up:

> I think the expectations thing is a big problem, especially combined with bikers being (having to be) more obnoxious in the US. When I just arrived, I was shocked with how much all the bikers broke the rules (skipped lights, biked on the curbs etc.) and just were general assholes in traffic. Two weeks later I was one of them.

Cyclists break the rules because the system doesn't care about them. Cyclists aren't second-class citizens (that would be pedestrians), they're more like third-class. At least pedestrian gets a lot of protected, separated infrastructure in the form of sidewalks; cyclists usually have to make do with a strip of paint on the road right next to cars that could kill them in an eye-blink.

Or look at intersections: they're clearly designed to prioritize cars first, right? And then pedestrians are second, you can't turn left in one go like cars and there's no protection, but you at least have your own signalling. Intersections often ignore bikes completely, you basically have to wait until a car comes along, or awkwardly waddle over to the walk button.

Looking at it another way: motorists go above the speed limit and through red lights constantly. Should we stop investing in freeways until 'they' start obeying the law? Of course not.

>Your sentiment is perfectly understandable, but also wrong.

What do you mean it's wrong? The poster said bikers were behaving like assholes, and you refute it with a quote saying a biker from Europe acted like an asshole here?

Sorry, I meant this specific part here, which felt like the conclusion:

> I feel like this needs to change first before the area becomes bike friendly.

He's got it backwards: you don't wait until cyclists behave well before you invest in good infrastructure. You invest in good infrastructure, which causes cyclists to start behaving well.

The difference between the Dutch cyclists and American ones isn't that Americans are just all huge jerks in comparison, it's that only one of those two groups feels like they have to break the law to get around on bikes.

I have been cycling since I was a kid — both in a silly spandex suit and as a commuter. I've commuted on a bike in cities around the US and in Europe. I hate to say it: but Bay Area commuter cyclists are without a doubt the worst.

I'm more worried about another cyclist hitting me or doing something dangerous than I am about traffic most of the time. I recently had someone nearly hit me by passing me on the right without saying something. When I suggested that they should either pass on the left or call out "on your right" he yelled at me. Baffling.

I think part of the problem is that you have to have brass balls to bike in certain routes anyway, which leads to a higher distribution of assholes than you get in other groups.

But after being a cycle commuter in the best (Minneapolis), worst (Albuquerque), and middle of the road (SF/Peninsula/East Bay) cities in America and then also London (which I guess is sort of middle of the road for Europe), I think the real problem is American urban planning and the entitlement of the American driver. Basically, average city streets in the US are like highways in Europe, they are wider, faster, and drivers don't give two shits about pedestrians, cyclists or anyone else (except in Berkeley, Berkeley is like a weird parallel universe of pedestrian etiquette); a disturbingly large proportion of otherwise decent Americans get behind the wheel and turn into Mr Hyde.

Contrasting with London where congestion is every bit as bad, not only on the roads, but also the sidewalks, and you find a sort of emergent cooperative effort for everyone to pay attention to everyone else and attempt to make the least nuisance of themselves. This is necessary because often the sidewalks (pavements) are overcroweded and pedestrians spill into the streets, but the cars and the bicycles watch out for this. Similarly, cyclists will reach critical mass and sometimes block traffic, but then filter themselves down to single file to let cars go by. Lanes are much more fluid in general, with oncoming traffic making room for buses to pass each other by utilizing part of their lane.

To sum it up, America lacks an attitude of public cooperation when it comes to transportation infrastructure and utilization. I suppose this is the cultural legacy of a century of being able to simply move west and be granted 160 acres of land to oneself.

Odd to see this in the middle of the article, without context before or after,

> Google plans to give $5 million in matching grants to cities in the area that want to start building out a better bike network. But even the matching grants don't come free: The money is offered as a community benefit, contingent on Mountain View's approval of Google's North Bayshore redevelopment.

Without describing what Google's proposed North Bayshore redevelopment is, it's hard to know how to interpret that paragraph.

This, maybe? Agreed that context would be nice.

http://www.mv-voice.com/print/story/2015/05/08/linkedin-wins...

Not sure how they generated that stress-level map, but it seems to be an unreasonably simplistic approximation. For example, there is a dedicated bike path along the 101 from the region marked "North Bayshore" all the way past the top-left corner of the map. That entire stretch is less stressful than any place south of El Camino. By extension, most of northern Palo Alto should be dark green instead of yellow and pale green. There's also a dedicated bike trail from very close to the San Antonio Caltrain station all the way to Google, but that path is not evident from the map.

I'm mainly saying that the situation is actually much better than depicted for most of Palo Alto. By contrast, the situation is worse than depicted everywhere south of El Camino except very close to bike crossings.

I'm speaking from personal experience here. I've biked from Crescent Park to Google every day for over a year. I also don't own a car and bike throughout Palo Alto most weekends with no stress.

EDIT: There is a second stress map in the full plan (Figure 5) that shows "average" stress as opposed to "total" stress and represents much more accurately, in my opinion and apparently the opinion of the plan's authors, the true stress associated with riding to Google from each point in the South Bay. In that map you can clearly see the positive effects of the trail to Palo Alto (green blob at top left) and the trail through central Mountain View (green blob center right), as well as the negative effect of El Camino and the 101 (red blobs across those roads).

As a planner and a person with a quantitative orientation, I think you've just illustrated some of the wickedness of many problems in planning. You've talked about stress, which will be dependent on the user--one user's stress is another user's expedient route. Then there's the hyper-local urban form characteristics that you allude to.

That isn't to say we shouldn't apply quantitative analysis to such problems. It just should illustrate how easy it can be to oversimply problems involving highly stochastic human behavior and preferences. And, since there is no complete theory of Urban planning, we should be prepared to exist in an uncomfortable state where neither the ends or means are universally agreed on.

I used to bike commute on rare occasions from near Levi stadium up to around where Oracle is in Redwood Shores. I don't remember a dedicated bike path along 101 at North Bayshore. I'd usually leave Moffet, cross under 101, go up Middlefield to Rengstorff, then ride past Google, turn left, past Intuit, then follow East Bayshore (the road) the entire way until I cut through EPA towards what is now Facebook HQ (used to be Sun).

Has something changed?

Also, the trails they show up by the bay are all super-optimstic. First of all, I think they're pretty much all gravel, they meander all over the place, and they don't GO ANYWHERE.

I live off of Marsh now and my commute involves more East Bayshore, cutting through Pete's Harbor, saying hi to the homeless people under 101, riding over the pedestrian bridge by the VW dealer, etc. I'm actually fairly lucky in that I have little traffic on my commute, but it's not exactly low-stress with a few high-traffic crossings. The worst is crossing 101 at Marsh. There's a hidden crosswalk to cross 3 lanes of the highway 84 onramp onto 101. I hate that traffic engineers decided to use the shortest-distance method and hide EVERY crosswalk behind a blind corner.. especially those on FREEWAYS, for god's sake. And then, it's pitch black at night...

I was referring to the Baylands trails, specifically the Adobe Creek Loop Trail and those that lead to EPA.

Ah. Yeah, I consider those trails to be far too circuitous to be useful for commuting.

When I did my on-site interview with Google in Mountain View, it was very obvious to me I would almost certainly be car commuting every day, for (at least) two reasons:

1) Cost of houses close to Google was ridiculous.

2) The city is very car centric.

Fixing the second may be possible, but the first seems like a more insurmountable (and more important) problem. Where I currently live, I can bike commute to and from work on a daily basis because I can afford to live four miles away, and it only takes 18-20 minutes. It's one of the reasons I still live where I do, and I haven't accepted further interview offers from Google.

Also relevant: http://www.mrmoneymustache.com/2011/10/06/the-true-cost-of-c...

Keep in mind big companies like Google have buses that run pretty far and you can just count the ride on the bus as part of your work schedule because you can work on your laptop.

Yup. I live in Saratoga, about a 13 mile bike ride to where I work at Google West Campus (still part of North Bayshore). I typically ride my bike in every morning (takes just under an hour) and take the bus home - there's a bus stop a mile from my house, plus another one 2.5 miles away. I usually end up taking the bus to the farther stop because I forget to leave my desk on time. :D

I started biking every day partly to try to get in shape, but also because my kids' school schedule is such that I can't catch the bus at the time I'd prefer. (During the summer I took the 7:30 bus near my house, which got me in to work in 20 minutes.)

It typically takes me about 25-30 minutes on the bus to get home, plus 5-15 minutes biking home from the bus stop. I had a 13-mile commute to my old job in Cleveland, and I find I'm significantly less stressed commuting this way, even if it takes slightly longer.

The locations of the bus stops are not publicized to non-employees, but there are lots of them, and some are pretty far out - as far as Santa Cruz. I can't imagine working on the bus to/from SC, though - you'd better bring some dramamine or barf bags!

How about they fix the public transport system first ? The bay area (united states in general, except for a few places) has the worst public transportation system.

The VTA light rails and buses are nothing compared to new york or even boston for that matter!

> The bay area (united states in general, except for a few places) has the worst public transportation system.

Living in small tech enclaves in the South (e.g. Atlanta, Chattanooga, Raleigh) would make you eat those words. You might be surprised to find these areas are attractive because there is lots of room for leasing out data centers.

MUNI, BART, CalTrain are (albeit, sadly) leagues ahead of anything these cities have to offer.

False choice much?

SV isn't even remotely close to being in the same universe in terms of density, which is needed to make transit really work.

I live in Mountain View and work in Redwood City. I don't have a car. It's not a big deal. For all the innovation in SV, it always surprises me how close-minded the area is when it comes to transportation options beyond the car.

It might make more sense to make the area boat friendly, if we're planning for the long term and take elevation into account.

I've biked in Copenhagen and in Mountain View, and I'd say both are head and shoulders above my hometown of Los Angeles which is in turn lightyears ahead of most American cities. Between the great weather, bike boulevards, bike lanes, dedicated bike trails, and wide shoulders, Mountain View can hardly get any better. The difference to Copenhagen is in the cost of owning a car and the population density (i.e. average distance from home to work). I don't think adding more bike infrastructure is going to move the needle on ridership in silicon valley.

For masses, bikes work great if the daily operating radius where you go about is something like five kilometers. But in Silicon Valley, except for some minor villages in between, 5 kilometers is only a couple of blocks. And instead of snaking through traffic in a city for five kilometers at slower speeds with your working clothes on, you would be sweating on your bike beside fast-going cars in a very much grueling environment of noise, heat, and an endless stretch of road. And then you would need to take a turn and do another five kilometers along another road.

I could see it working somewhat if you diverted all the bike traffic through the residential areas and punched the isolated culs-de-sac via bike paths so that bikes, not cars, could take a shortcut through the whole block instead of going along by the car routes. This kind of approach is very common in Finland: you can't always drive from one suburb to another but there's always a bike/pedestrian path that cuts through all that extra distance; here's a typical traffic sign denoting that: http://savepic.ru/7576556.png

But in general it's hard to see bikes becoming the popular vehicle for masses in Silicon Valley until there are enough towns the size of Copenhagen downtown and built with similar density, and where people commute locally.

> Google is also hoping that other areas copy their data-driven approach of mapping out stress on bike routes, and finding the best places to invest.

Previous week, we had the Fiets Tel Week [0] (Bicycle count week) in The Netherlands. You could download and install an app, which gathers data about cycling behavior. Connected organisations can now start to use this data to optimize bicycle routes.

[0]: http://www.fietstelweek.nl/

Palo Alto is also building a bike only bridge over 101 which will make it easier and safer for bike commuters to go over US-101

http://www.cityofpaloalto.org/gov/topics/projects/facilities...

Good for them, it looks like a really nice project. Thanks for the link, I hadn't heard about this at all.

There's actually a lot of low-hanging fruit that could make Silicon Valley a lot more bike-friendly with virtually no real-estate investment:

Put up better lighting on the Stevens Creek Trail, enough so that you can see the full trail and surrounding woods after dark. This alone would've doubled the amount of trips I spent biking to work when I was at Google: the limiting factor was that after daily savings time ended, I'd usually finish up work when it was dark out, and my bike's lights aren't really sufficient on that trail. I also know a number of female cyclists who won't ride the trail after dusk because they don't know who might be lurking in the shadows.

Pave the Bay Trails. There's a section by Palo Alto and another by Shoreline that get good use because they're paved. The connecting paths between them and over by Moffett and San Jose are unpaved, and only the most dedicated mountain bikers tend to brave them because it's a very bumpy ride. If you paved over the rest of the existing trails, you could bike from downtown San Jose all the way to the Googleplex via Guadalupe Trail and the Bay Trails.

Add more bike cars to Caltrain. The existing bike car can get really full during good weather. Adding more trains may not be possible, but adding another car to existing trains should be reasonably inexpensive.

Set apart the bike lane on Central Expressway. Central Expressway has a bike lane. You'd have to be crazy to ride on it, because cars whiz by you at 60 mph, they're not expecting to see you, they're often exiting or entering on cloverleafs, and there is nothing separating you from them. A concrete barrier & fence together with a few tunnels under the onramps would do a lot to improve safety, and make Central a viable North/South bike corridor. The real estate already exists for this.

Build more pedestrian/bike-only connections between streets that almost line up but don't quite. For example, a pedestrian bridge across Caltrain between Sunset & Pajaro Ave would let cyclists bike from South Sunnyvale to North Sunnyvale while avoiding busy Mary & Matilda Aves, putting their whole trip through quiet residential neighborhoods. A similar connection between Escuela and Farley (where there's already a traffic light) would connect the dense apartment complexes on California with the Googleplex via the Permanente Creek Trail, though I suspect it'd be bitterly resisted by people on the Farley side because the demographics of those neighborhoods are very different. A pedestrian crosswalk (with a light) between Sleeper and Cuesta Park and then a cut-through on the edge of Cuesta Park via Gantry Way to Rose Ave would link the Stevens Creek Trail and everything that feeds into it with very low-traffic, residential streets that go all the way to downtown Los Altos.

The section of the Bay Trail behind Moffett Field apparently can't be paved for environmental reason (the legendary "burrowing owls"?) There is a plan to improve the quality, though (hard-packed/sealed dirt instead of loose gravel)

The problem with bike in US is that everybody drives, the roads were initially designed for cars, not bikes. Simply converting part of a drive lane to a bike lane makes cars and bikes still share the road, which is very unsafe. Blind spots can easily cause accidents because of the shared-road bike lane design.

Some downtown streets are already narrow enough, still the stupid city planning squeeze a bike lane into them and put more risk to bikers.

The safe way to make bike lane is separating drive lanes and bike lanes with strip traffic island that can't be crossed. I used to work at Madison, WI for a while. Their bike lanes are completely separated and isolated by grass or tree traffic island from drive lanes. No wonder Madison claims itself the most bike-friendly city in US.

If you live on the peninsula and care about these issues:

(1) Look at getting involved in a local group advocating a vision beyond car-centric suburbia. Palo Alto Forward is one example.

(2) At the very least, vote in the local elections, especially (and carefully) for the city council positions!

The future of the Bay Area is ultimately in the hands of town governments, not Google, and the only way to genuinely improve it is for residents to get politically involved who have a different and positive vision of the region's future.

Good luck, SV is what 4-5 times (if not more) larger than Copenhagen and consists of spotty urban, suburban, industrial areas, connected by high speed motorways and highways.

I think Google is one of a handful of firms that has the resources to make this happen

Suburban Copenhagen has very good bike lanes. Actually separate roads for bikes. [1] Granted, this took years to build.

[1] E.g. https://www.google.co.uk/maps/place/Sjælsø,+Denmark/@55.8628... (yes, that thing on the left is a bike lane!)

We are still talking about an area much smaller than SV with a much lower population density.

Rural areas in Denmark have awesome cycling infrastructure and a much lower population density than Silicon Valley. Urban areas have awesome cycling infrastructure and a much higher population density.

Lower population density areas are easier to make bike friendly, less people which means that taking off road lanes or making sidewalks slightly narrower has a smaller impact. It also means that other bike infrastructure like parking is easier to build (need less of it). Construction is also easier when you either do need to move buildings at all, or you are moving 2-3 story buildings instead of huge complexes.

Fixing public transportation is more important than fixing biking at this moment, especially in California. When more people move with cars than with public transportation it's harder to allocate the needed resources for bikes, the impact of public transportation improvement is also quicker and bigger than improving bike lanes. Not saying that having a bike / walk to work alternatives isn't important, but jumping straight to it when everything else isn't even remotely close to being right is a foolish mission in my book.

You're posing a false choice between biking and public transit. Biking and public transit can be improved together since, when properly designed, biking to public transit is a very easy way to extend the effective "bikeable" commute distance. Why do you think creating bike infrastructure would be more expensive than improving public transit?

How about public transport you can take the bikes with you on, and nice bike paths in the denser areas?

This. Just putting down bike paths is useless when everything else is missing. You need bike parking too!

Google, at least, has tons of bike parking.

The denser areas, especially the bay side belt are quite are quite bike friendly. Public transportation is a completely different question, bikes on buses do not work, some train services can be adopted with special carriages to carry bikes on board.

The main issue isn't just roads its and entire infrastructure, e.g. giving bikes priority over motor vehicles like in some European countries which might not work well, In many cases bike lanes tend to also have a negative impact as they are often take spaces from public side walks, you can see that being a very big issue in some European cities that went bike crazy.

London is trying to do that and it's infuriating bikes seem to do what ever the fuck they want they'll go in the bike land but on a red signal they'll decide to go over the cross walk and onto the side walk to get a head, they often go into red signals even on the road when there is no (or they think there isn't) incoming traffic, and they clog bus lanes.

You can't just go from 0 to 60, turning SV into a bike friendly zone will take as much time as it took to turn Copenhagen or Amsterdam into one.

Why do bikes on busses not work? They have this already, as well as bike storage on the regional trains.

Do you have a citation for bike lanes digging into sidewalk? I've literally never heard of that, especially in the US where sidewalks are never near bike lanes and separated by a curb/parking/grass.

The usual way to carry bikes on a bus is on a shared horizontal rack at the front. The problem is when someone gets off, their bike is invariably at the back, and so they have to remove all the bikes stored later, get their bike off, and put all the others back on. This takes many minutes, which makes it infeasibly slow for commuters.

A better rack design (hanging vertically on the rear?) could solve this.

London has a long-standing culture issue because, for decades, the only way to get across the city safely by bike has been to ride aggressively.

You say "you can't just go from 0 to 60". That applies to bike culture too. As the segregated lanes are put in, London's cycling culture will become calmer, just as it is in Copenhagen or the best Netherlands cities.

Downtown Mountain View (like the Caltrain/VTA station) to Google is quite bikeable distance-wise, except for a few poorly-designed sections. You basically have to go over the freeway somehow, and to do that, you have to merge with traffic cutting over the bike lane to get on or off the freeway. I did this exactly once, people are not looking for bikes so you just have to stand and wait for a break. Good luck during commuting hours. (I think Shoreline actually has a button to press to give you a "walk signal", but I don't see a light to actually stop traffic. I've only tried Rengstorff. )

That said you can detour a bit and take the Steven's Creek trail, which is quite alright. Though very very very dark at night. You'll want a super-powerful light for that ride. Even then it's still scary. (My aforementioned trip on Rengstorff was to go to REI to buy a bike light for that purpose :)

Anyway, safe bicycle infrastructure would make Mountain View wonderful for bike commuting. The distances are bicycle friendly, and the weather is almost always perfect for biking. If Mountain View had housing prices and bike infrastructure that was comparable to New York City, I would be happy to move there.

Note that SCT is technically closed after sunset, although the rangers have said they're lenient on enforcing it due to all the commuters.

Yeah, I kind of figured. This goes to show you how unfriendly Mountain View is currently with respect to biking, "if you want to commute legally you can only commute when the sun is up". Imagine if roads closed after dark. There would be 0 tech companies in Mountain View.

Minneapolis-St. Paul, which is as sprawl-y as it gets has done a pretty good job of connecting most of the area with paved bike-only paths. I am not sure how bad the situation in Bay Area is, but it is not easy to get too many people to bike to work 20 miles each way, every day. So I don't know how this helps unless most people live within a 10 mile radius of the work place.

I wouldn't mind all cities doing that. And, more sidewalks! It's horrible that some places almost don't have them at all.

I evaluated moving to MTV last fall to take a job with GOOG; bayshore drive certainly is the most direct and dicey route. I'm in a position to move there this fall and knowing that Palo Alto, MTV etc would be connected via safe bikeways would be a huge plus to living in the fairly bland suburbs.

That's nice! Seems like the first thing to do is ensure that workers live in a bikable distance from their workplace.

Hint hint. Either scale up in SF, or elsewhere where there's a hope of people NOT using cars or busses to get to work.

Dane here.

The thing to remember here is that in order connect copenhagen like that, they basically decreased the size of the car lanes many places and Copenhagen, no matter how much I love it, isn't a big city more like a province.

Good luck. I'm an avid bike-commuter, but I live in a dense old industrial city, not a sprawling suburb. Modern transit infrastructure like bike-lanes and LRT lines and the like are very challenging in suburbia.

I wouldn't necessarily argue with you, but what's funny is that exactly the opposite argument is used in London. Oh, people say, we can't put protected bike lanes in, it's a dense historic city and there isn't enough room.

Turns out (hooray) there is room, and the first major ones are going in as we speak. Where there's a will there's a way.

I do laugh at the image of society at large switching from cars to bikes. At the moment biking is dominated by young fit and generally healthy people. That may be silicon valley but it isn't the general population. I see lots of young parents going to work by bike, but do they take their kids to school on bikes? Does grandma get to the doctor on a tricycle?

And what about the growing number of people who need to be brought places, who cannot drive themselves? There are a great many people with special needs/requirements who will never be able to move themselves safely by bike or any other vehicle. They and their carers should not be cut out of city planning, nor should they be confined to special communities.

I see lots of young parents going to work by bike, but do they take their kids to school on bikes?

In bike-friendly places, yes. http://www.workcycles.nl/workcycles-bakfietsen-images/bakfie...

Do you think people in Copenhagen who can't drive themselves are confined to special communities? Do you think they don't have roads and cars?

If anything, less cars on the roads makes it easier and safer for them to move around.

No, but Copenhagen is a tiny little place and still has lots of private cars. Either they aren't living in the bike-only core, or they have use of a car. A total switch to bikes, away from private motor vehicles by all, is a very different scenario than current copenhagen.

A total switch to bikes, away from private motor vehicles by all, is a very different scenario than current copenhagen.

And it's also a scenario that no one is proposing.

This is not about replacing cars with bikes, but making biking a viable alternative, such that it is actually possible to get from point A to point B by bike without taking a substantial risk of being killed by substantially faster car traffic.

No one actually expects to replace all cars with bikes. But replacing 20% of them would substantially cut down on congestion and emissions; and avoiding further growth in automotive traffic is likewise important.

And yes, I do see parents taking their kids to school by bike; in fact, my father used to do it with my younger brother some 25 years ago, and just yesterday I passed one of my neighbors heading up our very steep hill with her child on the back of her cargo bike.

There isn't a zero-sum game to be played between cars and bikes. Improving bike infrastructure can lead to reduced congestion for cars, fewer bad interactions between drivers and cyclists, etc.

>but making biking a viable alternative

I think the (well-founded) concern is that this expenditure of political capital means mass transit may not get the attention it deserves. Public transit can be ridden by anyone; bicycles are only useful to the able-bodied.

Bikes also alleviate congestion on public transit and roads.

That is situation-dependant. I have seen slow bikes cause backups on roads. I've also seen heavily-used bridge lanes turned into empty bike lanes. Even when fully used, the carrying capacity (people moved / time) of a bike lane can be far less than a lane dedicated to buses or even cars. (It depends on slope and traffic speed.)

> That is situation-dependant.

So let's do it where it makes sense

> I have seen slow bikes cause backups on roads.

Build bike lanes.

> I've also seen heavily-used bridge lanes turned into empty bike lanes.

Why didn't bikers feel safe on these lanes? Why weren't they used, or are they used, you just don't see it because you aren't looking during the right hours?

> Even when fully used, the carrying capacity (people moved / time) of a bike lane can be far less than a lane dedicated to buses or even cars. (It depends on slope and traffic speed.)

I've never been in a bike traffic jam, but I've been in more than my fair share of car traffic jams in high density areas. This is because cars take up more space per person than bikes, bikes are a very viable alternative to single person random access transport over short to medium distances while busses are not if the routes don't line up well. Obviously, for traveling 50 miles, there isn't a substitute for a car, but the point of this is to make urban areas bike and pedestrian friendly for the people that live in those areas, not necessarily to make it easier to drive through them.

http://www.seattlebikeblog.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/2n...

> bicycles are only useful to the able-bodied

Maybe if they biked to and from work, they wouldn't be "disabled" (ie, burdened by fat). The truly disabled make up a miniscule portion of the population, and while accomodating them is important, encouraging more people to bike would solve not just societal problems, but personal health ones as well.

> This is not about replacing cars with bikes, but making biking a viable alternative...

That isn't the rhetoric from bikers in my neighbourhood. They actively campaign for the dismantlement of motorvehicle-related infrastructure. Whether it is turning car lanes into bike lanes, reducing available parking in new constructions, or new road taxes, their avowed goal seems to be to make driving more painful.

> dismantlement of motorvehicle-related infrastructure. Whether it is turning car lanes into bike lanes,

Yes, it turns out we overbuilt streets and under-built bike infrastructure so now we have to reclaim some car lanes to create bike lanes instead. This is not the end of the world.

> reducing available parking in new constructions

Reducing the required parking in construction doesn't eliminate parking in new constructions if parking is actually important, it just allows the free market to actually price parking instead of forcing non-drivers to subsidize parking spots.

> or new road taxes

Are you talking about congestion pricing here? If so, you chose to drive in an area which doesn't have the throughput to handle the cars, and yes, you should have to pay a fair price to use the road.

> their avowed goal seems to be to make driving more painful.

No, the goal is to make biking safe and possible. Driving has too long been the default, so you look at every attempt to claw back some semblance of balance for bikers as an affront to your right to drive.

The infrastructure issue isn't so simple. In my local we are in a real estate boom. There are many groups claiming that cars will not be so prominent in the near future. That view is taken onboard by zoning people when deciding on new buildings. Rather than demand sufficient parking spots and upgrades to roads and mass transit, developers are allowed pretend that a large number of residents will bike to work. That means larger condo blocks with poorer connections, harming bikes, cars and transit. There are a few "green" office blocks around here without any parking spots. So employees park on the street, annoying local business who want those spots used by customers.

This is similar to the "elder housing" theory that assumes that the old people buying the condos will not commute and so do not need parking or transit services. In fact, old people go to lots of appointments, have carers that don't live with them, and are often visited by large numbers of family members. It's just a scam by developers to squeeze more condos into a given space without upgrading infrastructure.

For below: Try actually running a building without parking. Repair people drive vans full of tools. 24/7 employees need to get home at 2am after the bus system has stopped. Tenant businesses need deliveries. A city isn't going to reinvent itself overnight just to accommodate some architect's vision of bike utopia. I responded to a trouble call at one of these buildings ... to great laughter, I parked my motorcycle in the lobby. Art.

Above ground or street-level parking is literally the worst use of space possible in an urban setting.. This is fairly established by this point.

http://usa.streetsblog.org/2013/05/22/americas-absurdis-park...

The answer to people parking in street parking and annoying local businesses is to charge for street parking. The amount of space wasted so that cars can sit empty on expensive infrastructure in prime locations is staggering;

http://www.bloomberg.com/bw/articles/2014-04-01/american-cit...

> The infrastructure issue isn't so simple.

It's really not that complicated though

> In my local we are in a real estate boom.

Congrats.

> There are many groups claiming that cars will not be so prominent in the near future.

So say we all.

> That view is taken onboard by zoning people when deciding on new buildings.

Good

> Rather than demand sufficient parking spots and upgrades to roads and mass transit,

Define sufficient? Many municipalities have historically had rules requiring 1 parking spot per 2 bedrooms, minimum 1 per unit. This adds a strange externality which changes the types of developments that are built. Upgrading roads isn't under the purview of the developer. Upgrading mass transit is similarly under the purview of the local government, not the developer.

> developers are allowed pretend that a large number of residents will bike to work. That means larger condo blocks with poorer connections, harming bikes, cars and transit.

Again, this really isn't the developers fault.

> There are a few "green" office blocks around here without any parking spots. So employees park on the street, annoying local business who want those spots used by customers.

The local governments should start charging more for parking then. Clearly parking is under-priced if people can park their all day.

> This is similar to the "elder housing" theory

It's really not like that at all. The "theory" here is that people won't buy a car because owning a car will be unnecessary or too expensive.

> In fact, old people go to lots of appointments,

Appointments that they probably shouldn't be driving to

>have carers that don't live with them,

Which if scheduled correctly shouldn't require 1 parking space per resident.

> are often visited by large numbers of family members.

Again, this is more a scheduling problem. Every resident's family doesn't need a dedicated parking spot every day.

> It's just a scam by developers to squeeze more condos into a given space without upgrading infrastructure.

I'd say that drivers and car companies have been running a scam for the past 50 years. Everyone got so used to their underutilized highways and ample parking that everyone bought a car. Unfortunately, as the population grew and got more dense that's not a reasonable status quo anymore, so either, we have to figure out how to fit more cars into less space, or we have to accept that the heyday of cars cars cars is over and learn to live without them.

Upgrades to roads/transit are part of zoning decisions. Where a developer wants to go beyond the current zoning and increase density (most all situations) they are often forced to contribute to infrastructure improvements. Even where they aren't, well-run cities do not allow development ahead of the infrastructure to support those new residents.

One parking spot per unit is no longer a norm. I know of developments with perhaps one per five, with most not coming with any assigned spots. But it isn't really just the parking. It's the lack of buss stops and adequate foot crossing and the increased traffic of all forms on local bridges. Pretending that everyone will just use bikes, or that they are old and won't go out much, is a convenient excuse to bypass good city planning.

Interestingly, closing roads and reducing the number of cars would improve the number and availability of foot crossings. It's funny you mention good city planning, since a lack of good city planning is actually why we are in this situation in the first place.

> So employees park on the street, annoying local business who want those spots used by customers.

The logical thing to do is to then price those street parking spots at a market rate. If there aren't enough, some enterprising developer will build off-street parking to make a profit. If that doesn't happen, it's likely because people in cars aren't actually willing to pay for a parking spot based on how valuable the land is.

> At the moment biking is dominated by young fit and generally healthy people.

This is because our infrastructure sucks, so only young and fit people feel confident enough to bike around. In cities with high biking rates, that's not the case. Biking around for leisure is actually a stereotypical 'old person thing' in the Netherlands.

> I see lots of young parents going to work by bike, but do they take their kids to school on bikes? Does grandma get to the doctor on a tricycle?

If you go to a place with better infrastructure like Denmark, this is, in fact, exactly what you see. I visited Copenhagen this last summer and pretty much everyone there got around on bikes. I saw something similar, albeit to a somewhat lesser extent, in Munich and Lübeck, which aren't as good at biking as Copenhagen but still have lots of protected bike lanes.

I already take my son to daycare on my bike in Sunnyvale, but I'm a relatively confident rider. Confident enough to continue doing so even after we got hit by a car yesterday morning.

Here's a comment about biking in the bay area from a Dutch guy on the somethingawful forums:

People in the US think lots of things are impossible on a bike, when really they're only impossible when the infrastructure is bad. Which, to be fair, is true almost everywhere in the US. If we made it good instead, those things would become possible.

It's more than the infrastructure, especially when it comes to schools. North America has a culture of selecting a child's schools from amongst many in a wide area. Not everyone sends their kids to a school a mile down the road, nor do all of their kids attend the same school at once.

The getting hit is a problem. I don't know of any long-term riders in my city who haven't had violent confrontations with cars. There is even a movement towards fitbits not for fitness but to use as evidence after the inevitable accident, evidence of how long it takes to recover.

> It's more than the infrastructure, especially when it comes to schools. North America has a culture of selecting a child's schools from amongst many in a wide area. Not everyone sends their kids to a school a mile down the road,

Most people send their kids to public schools that are at least somewhat close by. A lot of what you're describing occurs when they select their housing: they explicitly pick an area that has good schools.

> nor do all of their kids attend the same school at once.

Well, most people don't have that many kids these days, plus with sufficiently good infrastructure, kids as young as 8 can bike themselves to school.

> The getting hit is a problem. I don't know of any long-term riders in my city who haven't had violent confrontations with cars. There is even a movement towards fitbits not for fitness but to use as evidence after the inevitable accident, evidence of how long it takes to recover.

Yeah, I'm thinking about getting a helmet cam. Would help for evidence, and I've also heard anecdotes that if drivers see the camera they drive more cautiously.

> had violent confrontations with cars.

If this happened between a motorist and pedestrian or even other motorist, what would happen? That's right, they'd take away their drivers license, which should be happening more often. This isn't a bike problem, not even sure why you brought it up.

Again, what Copenhagen seems to have realized – what you haven’t, yet – is that neither type of transportation solves all cases.

That’s why we need a healthy mix of cars, bikes, transit, etc. And which is why none of the mentioned European cities actually wants to ban cars – but instead use cars as supplement to a transportation system based on walking, biking and transit.

Also, the idea is not to switch ALL driving to biking. That would be silly. The idea is to support and encourage biking where it makes sense. If you're doing short or medium-distance trips where you have limited cargo, biking can work very well, better than cars, both for the individual and for society at large. But only if we build our transportation infrastructure such that biking isn't dangerous.

But if the promotion of biking comes at the expensive of those who cannot bike (via transit/driving taxes etc) then the situation may occur where the disabled and elderly are in fact financing the biking lifestyle of the able-bodied. We are nowhere near this now, but if say 75% of people started commuting via bike the other 25 might wind up paying for the infrastructure. So there is both an infrastructure and taxbase problem to deal with before society at large can take up biking.

I don't disagree, but even the bike capitals of the world of Amsterdam and Copenhagen don't have bike rates that high. They're more in the 33-50% range depending on which area you're looking at.

I agree that we also need strong transit. I wish we could get a real subway around these parts.

I'd also like to reiterate that in these bike-friendly countries, many elderly actually still bike. In fact, instead of looking at it as something that doesn't account for their hypothetical bad health, you can look at biking as something that supports their health being good as long as possible. Part of why America is so fat is likely because of how car-dominant we are.

Most local road infrastructure is already largely covered by general fund taxes, so if anything bikers should be able to use the roads they've already paid for.

http://taxfoundation.org/article/gasoline-taxes-and-tolls-pa...

> At the moment biking is dominated by young fit and generally healthy people.

That's a cultural difference, not a physical limitation. Cultures change.

> I see lots of young parents going to work by bike, but do they take their kids to school on bikes?

I see this quite a bit. I plan on taking my daughter to school on my bike. I bike to work every day. I'm neither young, nor particularly fit. I see a very fair representation of 60+ commuters on my route.

> Does grandma get to the doctor on a tricycle?

I doubt many sick people ride too much. Fortunately, this use case is relatively rare. The overwhelming majority on the road are on the way to work, school, or run errands, not doctor visits.

> And what about the growing number of people who need to be brought places, who cannot drive themselves?

They would be very grateful that the roads are not congested with people making a 5 or 10m commute to work.

> There are a great many people with special needs/requirements who will never be able to move themselves safely by bike or any other vehicle. They and their carers should not be cut out of city planning, nor should they be confined to special communities.

I'm not sure where you're going with this line of reasoning. There's a growing number of people who cannot drive due to failing eye sight or injury. Does this mean we should eliminate all funding for roads all together? Is there some city design policy you're advocating?

It seems like you're somehow equivocating the creation of more options for short distance travel with elimination of highways all together.

More commuter options, e.g. bike, train, bus, etc. Only serve to alleviate congestion and make existing travel options more efficient.

Yes we ride our kids to school often. They love it. The school recently also built a skateboard/scooter shelter for those who ride them to school.

I rode to school for most of my childhood, up until graduation. At the time it involved riding on the main road through town, which I odd for about ten years. All without a helmet as well. There were three major crashes in that time, and perhaps a couple of minor ones I have forgotten.

People these days are far too risk averse but forget the risks of growing up as a candy-ass softie who is afraid of putting in a little exertion. The difference is that, if you refuse to walk or ride anywhere, you're pretty much guaranteeing that you'll end up with obesity/heart/diabetes problems later in life.

What population dominates biking depends where you are. I share my mixed train/bike commute mostly with middle-aged commuters, but that's just the demographic of where I live (Boston North Shore).

>Does grandma get to the doctor on a tricycle?

Yes they do actually.[0] Disabled and weak elderly can get allocated tri- or quadbikes by the Ministry of Social Affairs in Denmark.

[0] http://www.hmi-basen.dk/blobs/orig/45500.jpg

Actually, here in the netherlands most children bike to school by age 5, and continue to bike until they are no longer able to. My grandmother biked until 80, she never had a drivers license. Before age 5 children sit on their parents' bikes. Handicapped people do use tricycles. I know a guy who lost one of his legs, and he rides on a bike with 3 wheels. There are also bikes that are powered by your arms instead of legs for people who cannot use any of their legs.

But what I see in the linked article in the photo as an example of a good bike lane, no way in hell parents are going to let their 5 year olds bike there. It's a death trap from moving cars on the left and car doors on the right. The road is massive (at least 5x wider than the average road here), so there is plenty of space there for proper infrastructure.

> At the moment biking is dominated by young fit and generally healthy people. That may be silicon valley but it isn't the general population. I see lots of young parents going to work by bike, but do they take their kids to school on bikes? Does grandma get to the doctor on a tricycle?

Where I live kids, young adults and old people are the most prevelant cyclists. Grandmas who have riddden bikes their whole lives, they don't own a car, and it takes less effort and is faster than walking. They're not particulary fit, usually overweight and they ride easy and slow as hell. You don't need to be young athelete to cycle. And kids cycle to school on their own. Obviously there are exceptions, nobody's suggesting banning cars altogether, but the average old person can cycle just fine and so can a school aged kid.

How about a bike lane with a small barrier along the Caltrain tracks? You already have the land, you can build some overpasses at major street intersections.

This makes sense technically, but not psychologically, if you're talking about a bike lane that's very close to the tracks. The trains are very large and very loud with their horns. It's already intimidating when I'm biking on Evelyn, pretty close to the tracks. Intellectually, I realize the chance of the train derailing is pretty much zero, but it doesn't feel that way.

Adding such a bike lane would be better than what we have now, but I think a lot of the 'interested but concerned' group would be unwilling to be very close to the train.

How about an elevated bike lane that sits above the train tracks like 20 ft. above but with the train running below it?

10-lane freeways and speeding cars? I wish. I live in Silicon Valley and the traffic here is unbearable.

Silicon Valley is not exactly a dense city.. It's more a suburb.

True, but even suburbs in the Netherlands have high cycling rates, thanks to their good bike infrastructure.

And while SV is not a dense city, it's not that sprawled out. Almost everyone in the area has plenty of services and attractions within a good biking range (~3-5 miles depending on confidence), and lots of people live within a half-decent biking range (< 10 miles) of their work.

So you can bike from giant parking lot to giant parking lot?

Self driving cars will make biking safer too.

teaching people traffic laws would be a welcomed start

Blunt out the complexity of the road for self-driving, I see.

Hey that might actually convince me to take a job in SV

Including San Francisco? Please? :)

but who was amsterdam?

Checkmate, Tesla

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