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Comment by tstrimple | Hacker News Reader

The average commute is 15 miles and the average cycling speed is 9mph which gives you an average of 3 hours per day commuting via bicycle. Can't imagine why riding bikes isn't normal!

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9 mph is awfully slow. Most cyclists who ride on a regular basis would be able to average around 15 mph. An hour each way is still a little long, but not terrible considering it doubles as a workout and obviates the need to visit a gym.

...and crash into cars or trees .

Cycling to work is in no way a replacement for proper full body workout.

It does not obviate the need to visit a gym.

Does help though, you can get away with way less workouts per week if you cycle every day. Most people barely workout anyway so it would definitely be an improvement.

Most people in the US get little or no exercise. __Any__ exercise would be a big improvement over none.

Is a "full body" workout necessary for most people? Obviously you won't have much in the way of upper body strength, say, if all you do is bike commute. But my understanding is that the amount of exercise required to be healthy is much less than what most fitness enthusiasts are committed to. It wouldn't surprise me if simply biking to work were sufficient to net most of the vital benefits of exercise for most people. (And even if it weren't, I'd still doubt that a gym membership is necessary.)

Full body workout becomes much more important as you get older, otherwise you lose mobility much sooner in life.

You don't need to visit a gym to get a workout, a set of free weights is a good (and inexpensive) way to tone up at home -- you really don't need machines. Take the money you would have spent on a gym and spend it on a periodic visit from a personal trainer.

Yea you don't really need a gym, but I'd bet most people simply don't have the space to do many workouts in their home comfortably these days if the stories I read are accurate.

It really doesn't take much room for basic fitness at home - especially if you get your cardio exercise outside -- I have a set of dumbbells, some stretch bands, and a wobble board under the bed and do everything in a 3 foot wide space at the foot of the bed. And in reality, it doesn't take any equipment at all, since there are plenty of good exercises that use your own body weight as resistance:

https://www.webmd.com/fitness-exercise/features/no-gym-requi...

Seems debatable to me. Since the 1960s, Ken Cooper has advocated for workouts based primarily or exclusively on cardiovascular exercise like cycling. In his book "Aerobics" he had an example comparing a cycling commuter to a dedicated weightlifter and (as I recall) he didn't think the weightlifter was improving their fitness in the ways that matter.

Personally I also don't think weightlifting is really the best way to achieve fitness these days either, it is simply the most straight forward for people and the easiest to understand. After lifting weights for over a decade I moved on to calisthenics focused training, which I feel is superior but more complicated to learn at more advanced levels.

If I recall correctly Cooper had a similar problem with calisthenics and discussed it in the book. That training doesn't help your cardiovascular capacity as much as he wants, which is what's most important for your health and longevity. (I don't think calisthenics was given any points in his system.)

He probably would also disagree about what's most straightforward. I recall him recommending running in the book because it doesn't require any special equipment or training, in contrast to cycling, weight lifting, swimming, calisthenics, etc.

To be clear, I do think strength training is important as you age to avoid sarcopenia. But I suspect that running or cycling would provide enough resistance to slow sarcopenia for your lower body, making other exercise more important for your upper body and core.

I love cycling but a two-hour cycling commute is going to be impractical for even people who like to go to the gym.

And if we're talking average American commutes, a lot of them involve routes where you might have only freeways between you and your destination.

if you're driving the bike mentioned in the article, I bet you aren't averaging 15mph

NY is basically flat, so there is no problem averaging 15 mph with that. In general the most time in a bike commute in a city like NY is taken up with stopping at every intersection, and for cargo bikes, not being able to filter past gridlocked cars.

People who use a bike to commute and run errands are different than people who use the bike for exercise.

In the Netherlands, the average biking speed in Amsterdam is 14.9 km/h. "In the popular cycling regions Drenthe and Overijssel the average speed is highest: 15.8 km/h." - http://www.holland-cycling.com/blog/260-amsterdam-has-slowes... [1]

9 mph = 14.5 kph, so nearly 1/2 of the cyclists in Amsterdam cycle "awfully slow" by your scale. The point is, they do bike. Though the average trip length was a bit over 5km, not 24m.

[1] This was by 55,000 cyclists who voluntarily participated in National Bike Counting Week, so may not reflect the general population.

The question should be why a 15 mile commute is normal!

Typically because families in the latter half of the 1900's wanted to move out of the crowded cities to raise their children, forming suburbs. We're left with that infrastructure with no real money to change it.

A lot of the regulatory changes were explicitly racist. By “crowded” what many really meant was “full of those people” (and especially after Brown v. Board “my kids might have to go to school with those kids”). And regulations were intended to prevent poor racial minorities from following. (Starting with explicit rejection of minorities, but when that was found illegal switching to regulations that deliberately made suburban life more exclusive or expensive.)

Edit: For the downvoters, this is not a controversial summary. Start with e.g. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/how-federal-governmen... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_flight https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Residential_segregation_in_the... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exclusionary_zoning

There are ways we can start changing it though: change the zoning laws, change the tax laws, etc. Changes to the built infrastructure will slowly respond over the coming decades.

Lol, I don't think blackophobia is the primary driver for suburbs. Look at Billings, MT. .7% black and it is almost all suburb.

Lots of people just like having a little privacy and a domain of their own.

Montana is 600 miles by 250 miles and has almost no people living in it. It’s entirely unsurprising that people who choose to move or stay there want to take up lots of space. As for racial makeup: Montana was largely settled by people given free land in return for moving there, and then in the late 19th century a mining boom; during that era local laws were quite discriminatory. It hasn’t recently had any booming industry that might attract a wide variety of immigrants.

Billings is the largest city and has only 160k people. Billings is spread out along a federally funded interstate highway, and has plenty of available land. It’s a place with harsh winters that would be rather unfriendly to pedestrians/cyclists anyway. 95% of households own a car, and on average there are about 2 cars per household. (For contrast, in NYC there are about 0.6 cars per household.) As far as I can tell buses are the only public transit in town.

Small FYI - that mining boom meant that laws against races, religions, or otherwise meant remarkably little. The Copper Barons ran the cities, and all they were interested in was your labor, either in the mines or in support of the miners. Of course, this was also a time when the color of your skin mattered less than your place of birth. Irish and Chinese were held in equal contempt.

Even today, some of those mining towns are bigger melting pots of various races, religions, and cultures than the port cities.

I won't dispute that race and class may very well have had influence on zoning laws. However, it's a rather fundamental human desire to own your property which drew people capable of making the move out to the suburbs - especially since it was affordable on a scale unseen before (good middle class wages, large houses selling for next to nothing, cheap transportation).

Hell, my dad was only a telephone lineman for Ma' Bell, and he could afford 5 acres of land and a house in (our city's version of) the burbs.

Regardless of future changes to zoning laws, not everybody wants to live in big cities. There's a strong appeal to live in a house of your own, where your children can play in the grass with their house pet. Where they can go to school with a class size where they have a chance to actually know everybody in their class.

If you really want to increase the density of cities even more, people will either require a) no choice but to move to the big cities, or b) a fundamental shift in thinking about owning their homes and raising their families.

And please remember that you will be working against eons of human nature when attempting to create that fundamental shift.

Speaking as a former child of the suburbs (one of the livelier and more walkable ones, with several nearby colleges), car-centric suburbs are awful for children, especially for those aged ~10–18: there’s nothing to do, and it’s impossible to get places independently. Parents end up constantly on the hook as chauffeurs, and kids end up with very constrained freedom of movement and very regimented schedules. People are so spread out there’s huge overhead meeting up. Kids with niche interests can’t find anyone local to interact with.

Kids in a denser neighborhood with easy access to public transit have much better quality of life on average. Parents who move to the suburbs for the benefit of their children might just be projecting their own desires.

As for “aeons of human nature”: for most of prehistory and then most of history, most people were either living in isolated tribes in the forest, or as rural peasant farmers. Not sure how either of those is relevant to considering parking requirements, building height limits, etc.

There’s no inherent reason for class sizes to be different between urban and suburban schools. Often suburban schools have more resources because the USA spends more money on public services in cities with wealthier residents. That’s unjust public policy, but nothing directly related to population density.

We're left with that infrastructure with no real money to change it.

And with no money maintain it. Also with an "infrastructure of corruption" that soaks up whatever money is spent to change the situation. America has painted itself into a bad corner today.

The average commute in cities with more cycling isn’t 3 hours. People just live closer to work.

The big problem the USA has is that its zoning laws and urban planning are completely screwed up, making it impossible in most places to build bike- and pedestrian-friendly neighborhoods. (Minimum lot sizes, low units per lot, low height limits, large setbacks, wide streets, massive numbers of car parking spaces required everywhere, few mixed-use areas, neighborhoods cut off by highways, lots of disconnected dead-end streets, very high urban speed limits, ...)

The road + trees, plus walking path is x. So carving out a 10-12 feet bike lane (two ways) is a challenge.

If traffic constrains you to 9 mph, you car isn't going to be much faster than 20 - 25mph. Though where I live, a 15 mile car commute is going to be at least 2 hours/day, unless you have enough flexibility to drive outside of typical commute hours.

When I had a city commute (in SF), I was doing around 12mph average to get downtown, and biking was faster than the train (driving wasn't an option due to parking availability, both at home and work).

When I had a longer bike commute mostly on bike trails, I averaged 15mph at a moderate pace - I could go faster if I pushed harder.

Hills used to be an issue for a bike commute, they could really kill your average speed, but with the advent of electric bikes, hills are much less of an issue - electric assist can get you over the hill quickly and without much effort.

9 mph is super fast in NYC. Here is the Mobility Report from 2016:

http://www.nyc.gov/html/dot/downloads/pdf/mobility-report-20...

A bus will be 4-6 mph, a taxi at great expense averages 8-9 mph. Sure, if you're not doing all 15 miles in city center but come in from outside, you can do moderately better than that, but for connections inside the city taking a bike is already the fastest transportation, even if you can only do 9 mph (and most people, in a flat city like NY, can do a lot more).

When I biked to work, I lived close to the downtown of a mid-sized city in the US - with traffic, I often wound up getting to work faster via bike than car.

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