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Bikes are great, but not very practical … if the infrastructure isn’t there. You know, city planning and stuff. I think the goal is not to get people to drive 50 miles to work, the goal is to make it possible for them to live so close to work (or appropriate public transport infrastructure) that they can bike there (or use public transport).

You are right, bikes wouldn’t work in every case but sometimes they can replace cars just fine.

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Same can be said about cars :) .

The United States is a nationwide experiment in designing car-friendly infrastructure, and it's a complete disaster. No matter how many lanes the freeways have they're still stop-and-go at rush hour.

Bikes already have the infrastructure, they are called "roads".

Roads would be great if it weren't for all the cars on them. Around here, if you're not a car, the roads aren't a safe place for you to be, ever.

It’s mot as simple as that. It’s also not as simple as just adding some bike lines. The city for example needs to be fairly compact to be bike friendly — which means sprawl should be avoided. And sprawl is something you can’t just remove once it’s there. You also want to make sure that there are several big supermarkets at one end of the city and nothing much elsewhere. And so on. Those are all tricky problems.

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