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Comment by jgamman | Hacker News Reader

i read stories about Uber/Lyft and i'm convinced that the authors just don't even consider bicycles - is this a US-Valley blind spot or something? i mean seriously - the problem of getting 3-4 km without a car? quelle horror... i'll grant you until recently it was annoying and having a train do the heavy lifting was a great combo but e-bikes are changing the way this stuff works. even in Auckland we're seeing them and the hills in this city are everywhere (we built it on a volcano field...) but e-bikes and some bikepath friendly investments are changing the 5-km radius of the isthmus. Uber in NZ will probably do just as well as Starbucks - I think there's one at the airport...

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Once, in St. Paul, I was biking on a road as close to the curb as I could, so cars could pass me. A car stopped to yell "I HOPE YOU DIE" because it was slightly inconvenient to pass me (it was a one-lane road).

Unfortunately, I had nowhere else to be; there was no shoulder, no bike lane, and biking on the sidewalk is illegal there.

Anyway, what I'm saying is, biking in the US kind of sucks.

I don't understand why biking on sidewalks is illegal. Its much safer. I can understand why not in NYC, but in most US cities?

It's actually much less safe in most places. The speed differential between bikes and pedestrians is too high, and drivers can't see cyclists as easily when making turns or pulling into/out of driveways.

Writing as a cyclist who rides in the street, and used to ride on the sidewalk occasionally.

As a casual and unfit cyclist who doesn't break 10mph i think there should just be a "you can ride on the footpath if you're going at less than running speed" rule.

Fine, but people that bike as a principal mode of transport are not going to stay under 10 mph.

Can't really agree. You need to have your head on a swivel when cycling in any event, and since walking in the US is as unpopular as cycling for commuting, sidewalks in my suburban area are generally empty as far as the eye can see. But even in the case of a bicycle vs. pedestrian accident, both parties will generally survive. Car vs. cyclist, I lose.

It's not about you seeing the car, but the car seeing you. Consider, for example, cars turning right across a crosswalk while a cyclist continues straight through the intersection on the crosswalk. The driver's visual scan will catch pedestrians but not you, since you are nowhere near the intersection at the time they look but in front of them by the time they start accelerating. If you were in the street, you would appear in the right side mirror.

That's a cultural thing that needs to change. because it can work and works very well elsewhere.

I think most people just don't want to get sweaty at all costs :(

To be fair, this is a definitely a cultural thing, not "people are bad thing". I personally tend to walk a hurried pace when alone even when in no rush, but I think that's atypical.

This is what e-bikes solve. You can pedal at a very gentle pace and still cover a big city with no congestion and no parking. It's really a game changer.

I'm sure it's got better in the UK since cycling has become more popular. Twenty years ago I would get some abuse on every ride, now although people still drive too close I can't remember the last time I got any abuse.

Er...have you tried biking around America's cities? Some are decent. New York and Chicago have a couple of dedicated paths along their respective bodies of water, and biking can be faster than taking the train. And both cities are big enough to support well-paved/painted cross-town roads.

But going off of those designated streets can be dicey. In New York I feel relatively safe because traffic is such a crawl anyway that, aside from getting doored by a inattentive taxi passenger, you probably won't get run over at a high speed.

And then you have many of the other cities in America. Dallas in particularly strikes me as a city especially un-optimized for bicyclists despite the huge amount of land there. I mean, there's plenty of lanes for cars, and just about nothing for bikes.

An initiative to change America's non-car culture would probably take as long as it would take to make self-driving electric vehicles mainstream. And automated vehicles are probably more viable when thinking of the future, as America's population continues to age and fewer people can physically bike (or even walk).

yeah agree - and i'd have said the same about Auckland until about 2-3 years ago. i guess the wider point is that it is weird that so much time/effort/treasure is being devoted to eliminating an entry level job and not investing in some pretty basic infrastructure. Auckland has just about had a heart attack trying to push through some planning rules that allow 3 story apartments and bike paths/PT in the city... i think that's the blind spot. check out the US civil engineers report card on infrastructure - seems to be a thing around the world. maybe if fewer deciders flew on private jets we'd have bridges that stay up? still disagree on future viability - sounds like tech for tech sake.

Small or midsize towns don't generally have the political will - or budget - to massively rework lots of basic infrastructure. Larger ones definitely don't, and the political history of ramming through such projects is often pretty ugly.

So time, effort, and treasure is spent on changes that can be politically accomplished instead.

When they launched a bikeshare program in LA, the local weekly welcomed it with a cartoon where the aspiring biker is welcomed with "Here's your metro card, here's your bike, and here's 50 pounds of protective gear you better have on you when biking in LA".

It's not just that the distances are larger (My shortest commute ever, which people saw as luxuriously short, was 9km!), but also weather: We have an average of 90 days a year below freezing, and 40 over 32C. I don't know about you, but I don't call either one of those to be nice biking weather. So we have bikes, but they are for recreational purposes, in the times and days of the year you want: Heck, most people put the bicycles IN THE CAR, go to the place where they want to ride, typically a very large park and then they do the riding!

San Francisco actually has some decent support for bikes, and a lot of my coworkers that in the SF office go by bike, but that's because they are both dense enough and have such nice weather.

Any bad weather argument is likely to apply to Copenhagen, which doesn't prevent it from being a paragon of bike-friendliness, bike usage per capita, etc.

No, I just looked up Copenhagen's climate, and it's less extreme than many US Midwest cities. Thank the Gulf Steam.

>is this a US-Valley blind spot or something?

As a Wisconsinite: bikes are great. They are a seasonal and recreation activity. There are a handful of people willing to bike their 6-7 mile commute year round, rain or shine, snow or sleet. They are the elite badass club. This is not a trait urban planning can expect from the masses.

It's certainly a Bay Area blindspot to forget that most people in most of this country experience extremely unpleasant heat, cold, rain, snow, etc. a majority of the time, and see dry temperate days like our daily reality here as a rare treat.

Someone needs to solve bike theft... I watch as friends routinely get bikes stolen in SF. There's no way I'd take my bike (from SouthBay) up into the city, because I just don't want to have it stolen. So I just rely on Uber once I'm in the city.

There are some robust bike-attached immobilizer locks [1][2], but I'm not sure as to their efficacy.

Some of the same properties that make bicycles easy to power and easy to carry (say, up to your apartment) make them easy to steal; and there's little defense against crude and destructive methods like detaching the secured wheel or worse.

We could have full-bike lockers or other bike-parking corrals or contraptions that physically move them into an inaccessible space: bicycle goes into a slot, only comes out when verified by some means (physical or digital); but this requires space, delicate moving parts, and maintenance. But when compared to a single car parking space, the space requirement doesn't seem insurmountable.

[1] http://linkalock.com [2] http://www.ilockit.bike

Yeah, that's not really going to solve bike theft. I'm not sure what kind of theft we're talking about in SF, but in Denmark, bikes go into the back of a truck heading for eastern Europe, for the most part.

I worked for a company that had the entire bike rack stolen. A truck just pulled up an few guy threw the entire rack, including all the bikes locked to the rack into a large truck.

Again, I don't know about SF, but Danish police don't really deal with bike thefts. That's an insurance problem, not something you waste police resources on. Of cause this makes it extremely frustrating to get your bike stolen. If you have GPS tracker in your bike you get track your bike leaving the country, the police is only rarely going to attempt to stop the thieves.

We're not really talking 3-4km here. We're talking 20-30km, perhaps each way, for a daily commute.

The level of density required for a bike to be a good daily commuter isn't the way a great many Americans live.

> even in Auckland

I just went and looked into Auckland's climate[0]. The record high is 87F/30.5C; the record low is 25F/-3.9C. The most-heavily populated parts of the US regularly experience summer weeks where every high is higher than that record high, and winter weeks where every low is lower than that record low. Hell, there are heavily-populated parts of the US that have weeks where every high is lower than that record low.

If anything, Uber/Lyft will increase bicycle usage, by providing a backup when the weather doesn't allow for riding.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Auckland#Climate

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