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Comment by staticelf | Hacker News Reader

I'm from Sweden and have been biking in NYC as a tourist. I must say, it is one of the most scariest places I have biked in my life.

Huge cars, almost no biking lanes, a lot of people and other traffic. I admit I was also a bit drunk but still, in Stockholm we have biking lanes almost everywhere and you feel a lot safer. Also there is a lot more people that use the bike when you give them a lane to bike on.

Please, create more biking lanes. It's better for the cars, it is better for pedestrians, it's better for the environment and public health.

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You can get to most of Manhattan under 125th st and almost all of northwest Brooklyn without leaving a bike lane: http://www.nyc.gov/html/dot/html/bicyclists/bikemaps.shtml

Even in my neighborhood in Queens I can get into Manhattan with only a 3 block stretch outside of a bike lane.

Obviously there is going to be more traffic than Stockholm, we have almost 8 million more residents.

There is a already a large effort to create bike lanes in the city. The city website lists current bike lane projects: http://www.nyc.gov/html/dot/html/bicyclists/bike-projects.sh...

A bike lane is just paint on a road. Biking in Manhattan is still perilous, because cars and people routinely occupy the parts of the road with that green paint on it. A bike lane is an improvement, I guess, but it's the minimum a city claiming to care about cycling infrastructure can do.

That's not necessarily true either, many of the new bike lanes being put in are protected lanes. That still runs in to the issue of pedestrians but they're a problem for car traffic in Manhattan too. Take this stretch of 7th avenue where they are removing a whole lane of car traffic to add in a new protected bike lane: https://www.dnainfo.com/new-york/20170925/chelsea/seventh-av...

Was mostly biking in Brooklyn, not sure exactly where I went but from my experience at least, I didn't get to bike on a lot of biking lanes.

Of course, there were some and some just painted on the road which cars drove on. So that didn't help much.

> Huge cars, almost no biking lanes, a lot of people and other traffic.

When were you in NYC? We have more bike lanes than Stockholm these days. :)

Proof:

http://www.amny.com/transit/new-york-city-to-reach-1-000-mil... vs http://www.fourteenislands.com/bicycle-paths/

According to Google the Stockholm area is 188km^2 with 760km bike lanes and NY is 789km^2 with 1609km bike lanes.

Looking just at the installed capacity isn't a great way, if you do not control for overall area. Better to compare the relative space dedicated to cars, trains and bikes.

Couldn't find data for Stockholm, but here is a NY-Copenhagen comparison: black lines are the relative NYC allocation spaces, orange bars is Copenhagen. Relatively speaking, Copenhagen has much more biking space: https://whatthestreet.moovellab.com/newyork/results?bike=0.1...

Copenhagen is #1 on the list of bike-friendly cities. Of course it's going to outpace NYC.

Sure, but you're making my point against your original one. Copenhagen has a bit more than 400km of bike lanes [0], which is less than a fourth of what you reported NYC has. Which was my point: NYC should have much much more than 1,000 miles of bike lanes to be even comparable to Stockholm or Copenhagen.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cycling_in_Copenhagen#Infrastr...

I don't know about that. NYC has Staten Island and huge parts of Queens which are effectively a rural village, whereas Copenhagen as well as most of Europe is highly urban. If you mapped population density to bike lane coverage, NYC would come out pretty favorably.

As an avid bicycler and Swedish expat in Taiwan I gotta say I think one of the key things to feeling safe biking in Stockholm and Sweden in general is that Swedes are _fantastic_ at following traffic rules. Very predictable drivers. The Taiwanese bikes and scooters, on the other hand, act like schools of fish. Predictable as a mass but not as units.

That sentiment rings true for most of Europe to be honest. Americans are just not trained to be polite to transport other than cars.

The spring of 2017.

What can I say, there were some but not a lot. And many of these lanes were just painted on the road.

I think this is the big difference, cars drove on the biking lanes but in Stockholm the overwhelming majority of these lanes are protected so cars cannot drive on them.

>I think this is the big difference, cars drove on the biking lanes

Yes, that's the unfortunate reality of NYPD policing. They basically park in bike lanes with little or no consequence. However, with dedicated lanes a lot of progress is being made. Already there is a dedicated bike path that will allow you to drive for hundreds of miles north with little contact with cars.

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