What a City Would Look Like If It Were Designed for Only Bikes
fastcoexist.com
fastcoexist.com
I'd even suggest that a major reason why cars have supremacy at the moment is that they are more inclusive of people than bikes are. I prefer using my bike any time I possibly can, but I am young, fit, childless and live within 2 minutes of my job. Cars are inclusive of people who have more than one kid, live across an interstate from their job, and may have mobility issues - and bikes are not. This redesigned city needs to make room for people who aren't 25 years old and single.
Families with two kids use bikes all the time [1], and the median bicyclist is a middle-aged office commuter, not a 25-year-old single person. Mobility scooters are also permitted in bike lanes (and you see them fairly often), which further expands the inclusiveness of bicycle infrastructure.
[1] These are popular among families: http://livingcph.dk/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/christiania.j...
This is mostly true because >>we make it true<<. You see plenty of older people, people with kids, kids themselves, etc. biking around in the Netherlands or Denmark. This is because they have good support for biking, such that people 8 - 80 can bike around town.
Plus, it's not like cars universally win at inclusiveness: They're less inclusive of the poor, for example, because they're vastly more expensive to own and operate than a bike. The poor who need a car because there's no good transit or biking options have to spend a huge % of their income on transportation.
> This redesigned city needs to make room for people who aren't 25 years old and single.
Honestly, it sounds like you just haven't been to any city with a high (15%+) bike modal share, because then you'd see how your assumptions are wrong. If you live in America, that's understandable, because we don't have any major cities like that. But they do exist, elsewhere in the world. Visiting Amsterdam or Copenhagen could be eye-opening.
I believe you, for sure, I just don't think the concept in this article does it correctly. You're right that I've never been to Copenhagen or Amsterdam, but honestly, do they have roofs that slope to the ground so they can be bike ramps, and extra wide hallways to permit bike riding indoors, with pedestrians marginalized to the side of the corridor even inside their own homes?
A more bike friendly city is definitely more inclusive. But prioritizing bikes at the expense of pedestrians isn't correct either.
Funnily enough, at Google, their bike commute rate in the Mountain View/Sunnyvale area for people who live within 9 miles of work is 21%, which is obviously extremely high for the states. It's helped along by a reasonably high number of painted bike lanes in the area, a few good bike/ped trails, and the fact that car traffic going to those areas is really, really horrible during rush hour.
In Japan I saw an elderly lady (easily 85+) pull a very nice moving dismount from her bicycle at an intersection.
I mean, they kind of are, but only in the sense that they have a ton of good bike infrastructure. If we built bike infrastructure that well, we also could have elderly cyclists.
Cycling becomes significantly harder in hilly or windy (read coastal) locations.
I live somewhere generally considered "flat" as there are no mountains, however there are a lot of undulations (short, steep hills) and a Mediterranean climate (hot, dry summers) with strong, coastal winds in the morning and afternoon. Cycling any distance in summer will involve sweating. Most people opt to drive in an air-conditioned car, even the 1 km to get some milk/bread.
Better/more bike infrastructure is unlikely to change most peoples behavior.
Having said that, there has been a boom in the number of people cycling to work in the last 10 years. There are two main reasons for this. One is the low availability/high cost of car parking in the city and surrounding suburbs. The other is that we get the Tour de France televised on free to air, during prime time for the entire tour. That has driven a huge increase in road cycling and even non-cyclists like to watch and talk about what is happening in the Tour.
I live in Copenhagen and can't observe any way in which cars here are more inclusive than bikes. A high percentage of bikes have a child seat, there are cargo bikes for multi-child families and the rail network is geared up to take bikes for commuters.
Older people cycle well past retirement, so their lifelong mobility keeps them healthily mobile too.
The big, fast metal box of a car dehumanises people by isolating them from slower and more vulnerable road users. Bikes mix much better with pedestrians when they need too than a looming car.
Cars are inclusive of the most powerful demographic in America (middle-aged wealthy adults living the American Dream in the suburbs) but leave plenty of others behind.
Those privileged scum can live out in the suburbs so that us hipsters can live in peace.
Perhaps it's my impression, but I've rarely seen anything constructive recently. Almost everything in this discussion, for example, is reaction and sniping ("useless", "absurd", "stupid", etc.). It's a way to hang out and socialize online; there's nothing wrong with it. But personally, I've read enough Internet sniping for a lifetime; it's not thoughtful, informative, insightful or constructive; I don't learn anything and leave uninspired.
Perhaps it's just my impression or it's temporary; perhaps it's a bigger change (related to YC and its leadership distancing themselves from HN?). Is there anywhere online where the sniping is eliminated and the discussion more valuable?
EDIT: Sorry, I know it's off-topic, but there's no other place to post it (that I know of).
This has been a discussion on HN for years, though, and even has its own jargon term, the "middlebrow dismissal": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5072224
I think the discussions used to be much better. There was less 'noise' and some truly excellent 'signal', which made the discussions worthwhile. Recently, my impression is that the noise has significantly increased and the excellent signal has almost disappeared. But: That could be simply my mistaken impression, it could be just normal variability, or it could be something else. Certainly I'm not the first to say, in any community, 'it's not like it was in the old days'.
My opinion differs:
1) IME, comments which begin with hyperbole such as "it's useless" rarely improve beyond that. I generally stop reading there (I don't have time to read everything). My theory, anecodotally confirmed, is that if they are careless with their language (i.e., the lazy use of hyperbole), probably they will be careless with their content.
2) It's rude to whomever wrote the article, and it also creates that environment for interactions between commenters.
3) That kind of rant is like a virus; it spreads through discussions and through the community. I believe this concept is well-established among veteran forum maintainers. From Paul Graham, talking about what he learned from running HN: [1]
It's pretty clear now that the broken windows theory applies to community sites as well. The theory is that minor forms of bad behavior encourage worse ones … I was living in New York when Giuliani introduced the reforms that made the broken windows theory famous, and the transformation was miraculous. And I was a Reddit user when the opposite happened there, and the transformation was equally dramatic.
...
Bad comments are like kudzu: they take over rapidly. … If someone submits a lame article, the other submissions don't all become lame. But if someone posts a stupid comment on a thread, that sets the tone for the region around it.
----
Don't forget that many people don't speak English as their first language and it may be difficult to express an adequate degree of nuance (it is for me...).
Overall I agree with you, and I prefer when commenters are respectful of everybody's else feelings. But I don't think it's that bad on hacker news: the ranking system is quite efficient and I often learn something from the comments.
Yeah, as annoying as it is to see hostile comments, it's also kind of annoying to see meta comments. I understand that meta comments are important for making the site better, but it distracts from the discussion on the articles themselves.
Perhaps a good solution would be to have a separate "meta" comments section for each posting. This would be similar to how wikipedia has a separate "discuss" section for each article. This would be a useful place to put comments like yours and mine, and moderators could even move comments over to the meta discussion to keep the main comment section on-topic. It would also be a good place to post title-change requests, and other moderation requests.
This would lower the prevalence of off-topic meta discussion, while also providing an appropriate venue for discussing important topics that make the site better in the long run.
I called the title misleading, so I shortly described the gist of it. I also opined it's absurd because the idea doesn't seem to have been thought through (because of the large amount of space dedicated to bikes, as I wrote). This was just a warning to other readers, so they aren't baited like I was.
Notice that even the submitter (geezsundries) wrote "I'm confused as to why they created bike paths in apartment building hallways." This really isn't a good submission.
In my opinion, you're just picking the wrong article to seek great discussions about bikes and city planning. I'm looking for the same but this thread isn't the place. When the reporting is done by someone who's just trying to grab pageviews cheaply on someone else's bad content, then comments will be mostly negative. If it was a "Show HN" by someone who's poured reasonable effort, then negative comments would be more significant to gauge gratuicious negativity.
To address your points: Whatever someone's reasoning, words like 'absurd' create an atmosephere where ridicule and sniping are acceptable, which I think deters more thoughtful discussion. For one, other commenters follow the example and do the same (see my quotes of PG in my other post, above). But also, who wants to put the effort into a thoughtful comment, sharing what they know, when they see that the response may very well be more thoughtless ridicule? It attracts the worse comments and deters the valuable stuff.
> the reporting is done by someone who's just trying to grab pageviews cheaply on someone else's bad content
I see no basis for this statement. The author could have any number of reasons to post it, including that it's an excellent article in their or in other people's eyes.
I want to say it actually improved after comment scores became private, though it could have easily regressed since then.
Let say, for example, that the interfloor distance in your city residential building is 150". According to ADA codes, the maximum slope for a ramp is 1:12. The maximum rise for a ramp is 30", requiring a landing before and after at least 60" long.
So to climb one story in the ramped building, you need 5 ramps total, plus 6 landings. Each ramp is 360" long, and each landing 60" long. The total horizontal distance, per floor, is 2160", or 180', or 55m. The minimum width of a ramp is 36". Your ramp area is going to be at least 540ft^2 (51m^2). On each floor.
In contrast, each elevator takes up about 27ft^2 (2.5m^2) per floor. You could have 20 elevators operating in the same space as a ramp only wide enough for one person to use at a time.
And if you live on the 11th floor, are you really going to ride your bike around in tight circles for at least a third of a mile just to reach street level? Or are you going to ride to the bike-through elevator and have it move you that vertical distance instead?
So when I imply that the architect that puts bike ramps on the inside of high-rise buildings will eventually be homeless, it is only because that person suffers from a fundamental disconnect from reality that is so much worse than just a simple lack of common sense. New passenger elevators in urban high-rise buildings are probably the most efficient vehicles for moving people between locations that currently exist.
Bikes in shops will not work either. Walking through a shop with a bike seems extremely unwieldy; you would need much larger space between the shelves. A bike in your hand makes it hard to pick up things from the shelves. A bike does not stay upright by itself when you go to pick up something from the shelves, so you have to park it with that thing that I don't know the English name of. Even then, if you load the bike with a bag of groceries it usually falls over. When you are walking on one side of your bike it's hard to reach over your bike while not falling over. Bike parking space is a non-problem compared to car parking space. No cars whatsoever is unrealistic even in bike utopia. How do you move big and heavy things? No ambulance, no fire trucks?
In the places where they came back, it was a trendy sporty thing. Very expensive bikes became normal and when these new age cyclists try to use their bikes for transport they hit the theft and vandalism issue. Part of the solution in (EG) Netherlands is riding fairly inexpensive & simple bikes so that theft is not such a show stopper.
To the sporty newcomers, this seems like a crappy trade-off.
In fairness, The Netherlands is flat & small. You can cycle from the outskirts to centres of major cities in 30-45 minutes and even between some cities (EG Hague & Rotterdam) in an hour. Even with the wonderful infrastructure, it's probably not applicable in places like Sydney. To get from the centre to the western suburbs where most people live would take 3+ hours cycling. On a rickety Amsterdam classic it'd be quite a chore, much hillier and hotter. Even inner city Sydneysiders travel farther that Amsterdam Suburbanites. So, sydney cyclists dreaming of a bike-first world are thinking about maximum speed, the fitness to power up hills, sweat clothes and showers at every destination.
I agree that you need to adapt the approach to the country or area. The real goal should be making the space in cities outside of buildings human friendly rather than only car friendly. This is about pedestrians, bikes, public transport, architecture, atmosphere, etc. In Sydney you could perhaps use public transport for long distances, with bikes for the last mile. This is also common in the netherlands for people who travel between cities. Or you could have electric bikes for hilly terrain and warm weather. Note that the netherlands is rainy and windy, and that's not nice for cycling either yet people still do it.
> "Residential bike parking should have the same space-syntax relationship to the front door and kitchen as car parking does in a contemporary house in the suburbs," Fleming says.
Designing cities around people, not a way to transport them, is missing from this approach.
It's actually a much harder challenge than figuring out funny (and unsustainable) ways to bring "speed" to personal transportation within cities. Creatively, this concept is entirely underwhelming.
Exactly! What a lot of bike activists seem to be missing is that bikes are just one part of this. Bikes are a means to an end. The goal is human friendly cities not bike friendly cities. Facilities for pedestrians are as important as facilities for cyclists. The relationship of cars to bikes is similar to the relationship of bikes to pedestrians. If you look at well designed cities they have a pedestrian focused centre, then around that a bike and car focused area. In Amsterdam you aren't allowed to bike in shopping streets. (I'm using Amsterdam as an example because it's known internationally, but as far as dutch cities go it's not that good, neither for pedestrians nor for cyclists).
Beyond that the atmosphere is important. If you want people to spend time walking and biking around cities you need safety yes, but that's just the start. Would you enjoy walking or biking around a city with massively wide and straight streets that go on for kilometers? I don't think so. You need cosy streets with shops and squares with bars with terraces and trees and parks and nice architecture. The livable space of a city shouldn't just be the inside of its buildings, and what's outside is just a way of getting to those buildings. The outside should itself be a livable space.
That said, there's a ridiculous amount of room for improvement in terms of adding bike paths and protected bike lanes in the US. Getting more of those would result in a huge boom in biking.
So it's a nice thought experiment but not at all practical, on top of that 'bike lanes in apartment building hallways' make you wonder just how much experience the designer has riding bicycles, you park your bike at the interface between inside and outside and you don't run around the apartment hallways on a bicycle because of (1) pedestrians, (2) playing kids, (3) the fact that you now have to elevate your bicycle every time you want to go in or out of your house and (4) storing your bike at streetlevel is simply much more practical.
I think cities existed before cars.
what about ambulances? fireworkers? once your place is on fire, or your dad is having heart attack, you want help to arrive in eco-friendly manner half an hour too late?
even places like Zermatt in Switzerland, which prides itself in banning all cars except electric has medical, technical and police guys routinely cruising the village in... you guessed it, normal cars. and that's a tiny holiday spot, not some vibrant metropolis.
you want more bikes in your town? look at Denmark or Netherland how they achieved it. dedicated bike lanes over WHOLE city, not just here and there. Bikes have dedicated time and dedicated traffic lights. every major road has bike-only side road, no pedestrians allowed.
By the time the officer arrived the thief was probably in his living room counting the money because he himself drove off with the aid of an accomplice waiting outside.
The situation you describe in Zermatt sounds like an interesting compromise, though.
Good delivery trucks could only be allowed between 5 and 6am. If shops need something urgent there are always transport bicyles/tricyles (with or without electric support).
Those that were tended to be built in locations where bikes aren't an option either, usually more for the strategic benefit than because people thought that carrying heavy loads up hills on their back made a pleasant change from roads clogged with horse and carts.
And trash removal. When people design their utopian non-car city where everything is by bike or by train or whatever, they always forget about trash removal.
It seems like a fair design to me.
You're using up an absolutely vast area in your building for bike paths. You also are forced to build everything into a ramp shape so that the bikes can get in.
Oh and alternative solution (put a bike garage on the ground floor). Is cheaper and probably nicer to live in since the people on the top floor can use lifts instead of riding an extra couple of k up hill.
Certainly you could do both: have a good lift to your floor in the evenings that you could ride your bike into and then in the mornings coast your way all the way down as a fun way to start your day. Some people would even appreciate the extra uphill climb every day as an easy way to stay fit in their own home buildings.
Another thing to note here is that the conceptualized buildings are a lot wider than they are tall. The impression being that even if you had an elevator to your floor you might still want to ride your bike to your unit as the floor itself will be long enough to warrant that sort of thing.
Again, the goal here is to question design principles and it is a fair and interesting design because it asks questions about our assumptions. We currently don't build buildings more than a quarter mile wide because once inside them we assume everyone has to walk. Thus we tend to build taller buildings instead. Shorter, wider, ramp-like buildings are an interesting idea and this concept gives us a vocabulary to discuss them.
Do I expect to see these in cities any time soon? Definitely not. But it is still a neat design worth discussing, especially if it allows us to re-question old city design assumptions.
I see the appeal of biking up to your own front door without getting off, but ramps may be the worst possible way to do it.
In the use case where you are carrying heavy items in panniers on your bike, you need some way to get those items from the garage to the apartment. Why not use the bike itself? And if you can put your bike in your apartment, you don't need the garage.
Look at how much hallway space it needs to have a cycle path, plus bike parking. It adds, what, 2-3 meters of hallway width? Plus there's space inside the apartment. Is all that space really justified? A normal apartment bike room can store a much higher density of bicycles. Even more if there are hangers, or multi-level racks.
Using that 'same space-syntax relationship', if the weather outside is horrible so the children play in the hallway, do the cyclists get priority? On a bicycle lane they do. But inside an apartment complex?
With these mega-wide hallways, what if someone wanted to put up planters rather than using the parking space? Would that be okay? Or use it to store something other than a bicycle? (Eg, kick bike, tricycle, recumbent tricycle, stroller, wheelbarrow, luggage cart.) If not, why do bicycles get priority?
In my apartment building the solution is easy - we can't keep anything in the hallway.
Consider more specifically. "The apartment entryway is designed with space for a bike."
Yeah, no. In winter my bike has slush and road gravel on it. Why would I want to bring that inside? Right now I leave it in the bike room, which has a cement floor. Expressed using the same 'space-syntax', I walk in through the front door, not the garage door.
Yes, these hallways you would probably not want to carpet if you expect people to ride in them with dirty bikes. They'd probably be something easy to clean like concrete or tile or plastic.
I think that children playing would probably get priority over bicyclists much as such things happen in neighborhood cul-de-sacs.
Also, if there is some explicit ownership of the "bike parking spaces" in front of/near a unit then I absolutely would expect people to use them as they see fit, including things like planters, assuming such things don't impede the other uses of the hall (biking, walking). Most buildings consider hallways common space that units have no ownership of. There's nothing wrong with maybe giving some ownership to part of a hall. It could add to the sense of community of the building. (In my own condo building our car parking spaces are owned by unit owners, so our spaces will sometimes get used as temporary workspaces or child toy storage zones when our cars are out parked on the street, so long as we don't block other spaces and stick to our area. If I decided to set planters on my space while my car was in the shop, I certainly could.)
I like David Hembrow's blog about cycling infrastructure in the Netherlands. Here is a good post on myths and excuses about cycling infrastructure: http://www.aviewfromthecyclepath.com/2011/02/all-those-myths...
Go up. Elevated bike paths, much like the Vancouver Skyrail, are an option. http://www.railway-technology.com/projects/vancouver/vancouv...
- The elevated structure would only be for cyclists - You could literally ride above all the downtown traffic - Dedicated lanes so you don't get road rage
I like it and I do quite a bit of indulging in this sort of thing myself. But…
I don't think I'm seeing the trends in gadgetry, software, and manufactured goods at work everywhere. The production cost (and often the price) of manufactured goods (used to be "mass produced) has come down tremendously compared with average income. The trend is hundreds of years old. Underpants, sugar bowls, cereal commodities and almost everything else you can fit under a very wide umbrella of "manufactured goods" is heading towards free, or at least extremely cheap. We've seen it happen with a lot of things. Clothes pins & pencils used to be worth something, but I can't remember cost ever being a factor. They're basically free. Software also. I agree that a lot of things are headed towards "abundance." The things that aren't are often things that keep getting better, things where we have an appetite for (qualitative) more, iphones & whatnot.
The bicycles come into it at the points where there isn't a fruitful trend towards more, better everything. Housing & transport are still most people's 2 biggest expenses. These have improved in quality over time and we consume more (bigger house, long commute, overseas holiday…) but there isn't an obvious "trend towards abundance."
The fact that a radical idea (radical because of the radical trade off of eliminating cars) like this is interesting is kind of proof that this thing is not moving and we're frustrated. We still commute a lot, and we don't enjoy it. It pollutes. It's noisy. Expensive. Slow. It's not much different than 1980 or even 1965.
I think housing and transport are the stick in the abundance ideas. In 25 years roads might be full of quite, clean, electric, driverless, parkingless cars but even that amazing achievement will still not match the technology trends that have brought other things up the quality and abundance curve.
Anyone who has ever actually had a bike for more than a week and who actually shops for their own groceries will know this is a terrible idea.
I use panniers for my groceries, however, the grocery store won't allow me to just bring my bike inside, so instead I have to take the panniers off my bike and put them in a cart. Using my bike as the cart would make sense.
Cars, on the whole, occupy a single flat level. Why don't buildings spread out over roads as the norm? rather than the occasional oddity of a road tunneling thru a building, why isn't that the norm? Ventilation etc problems can be solved. There's N stories of unused space over the roads; leave the first 2-3 stories for road tunneling, and fill in the building-sized empty spaces above.
So any bicycle or pedestrian friendly environment needs weather protection as part of its design. It does not need be fully enclosed but that type of protection may be required depending on climate. Perhaps a convertible system where panels retract?
If it's hot I pack my work clothes and change (and shower if needed) at work.
If it's cold I dress warmly. It's amazing how quickly you warm up when pedaling more than a few miles.
If it's raining I wear a rain jacket, and the fenders on my bike keeps water from splashing up on me.
So no, weather is not an automatic fail. It's just a mindset change if you're used to be in the enclosed bubble that car provides.
Nobody forced you to live so far away from your job. You're already catered to by virtue of having those interstates in the first place. Quit complaining that other people, who aren't you, are finally getting some attention.
Actually, there are quite a lot of people who force me to live further away from my job than is strictly necessary. They are the very same people who would almost certainly undermine--and eventually destroy--any bicycle-oriented development. It would be unwise to dismiss those factors as mere whining.
Nobody forced you to live where you do right now. That decision was all you.
If I had unlimited time and unlimited funds, I could certainly shorten my commute down to the distance from my bedroom to my in-home office, all in my palatial mansion in the heart of a culturally vibrant, crime-free, educated, and thriving city. Unfortunately, living in the real world, there are external constraints upon my decisions that I have no individual control over. Those constraints rule out the fantasy that you seem to have invented wherein I can just choose to be Batman in my Batcave, and the local government begs me for my help via a spotlight, instead of constantly demanding that I jump through whatever idiotic regulatory hoops it cares to set up.
In the real world, the amount I am paid for my work is determined by market conditions. The affordability of housing is determined by market conditions. The cost of living is determined by market conditions. Within those bounds, I make the best decisions I can, according to my own priorities. And yes, I do have higher priorities than being able to walk or bicycle to work. I believe those priorities cannot be greatly altered while still remaining a socially responsible person.
There are more variables involved than just home-office distance and pay rate. You have no idea what it would cost for me to halve my commute distance, or to quarter it. It may well be the difference between retiring at age 75 instead of 67, or not retiring ever. Or it may be the difference between helping my all my kids to pay college tuition, or not. Or maybe it's just the difference between eating fresh ground beef or canned Spam.
This is why I suggest it is foolish to blithely discount all those unseen individual reasons people have for following a particular lifestyle. People generally make the best decisions they can, using the resources they have available, according to the priorities they have established for themselves.
So when someone says, "I wish I could live closer to work," your response probably should not be, "You can, but you obviously don't want it enough." Because what you're conveying is that person is not enough of a selfish prick to make their spouse commute further, send their kids to lower-performing schools, spend more money on an apartment, house, or condo with less relative utility independent of its location, spend more money now at the expense of savings or investments, possibly uproot any existing social networks for other members of the household, maybe adapt to an entirely different culture in the new location, and even physically moving a truckload of accumulated property and possessions over some distance. What that person was really saying, without actually saying it, was, "I wish I could live closer to work without changing into a sociopath, ascetic, hermit, or hobo, and without switching to job that I would hate."
So maybe adopt a new priority, and make sure it ranks higher than biking to work: don't be a dick. That's it. Have some care for the daily struggles of your fellow humans. You might just find that redesigning entire cities to make cyclists happier has a side-effect of making all the non-cyclists absolutely miserable. And maybe the current automobile-centric design of cities is overly unfair to bikers. You can't just ignore bikers because you love driving. You have to consider the impact on everyone, not just your paragons, eidolons, and chosen ones.