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Comment by AmericanChopper | Hacker News Reader

Why are cyclists <5% of commuters in SF, where the local government has invested many billions of dollars into building a perfectly serviceable cycling infrastructure? A pattern which you can see in a number of different cities around the world who have done the same. It's because no matter what people say, they don't want to cycle to work. I read a headline recently that said cycling in SF was up 10%, celebrating the billions spent on the infrastructure, however nowhere in the article did it mention that the 10% increase amounted to a total of ~3.5% commuters on bikes.

You don't have to be a genius to figure out that only devoting 50% of your transport budget to the mode used by 90% of the population is not a recipe for success.

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As far as I can find out, the SF MTA is spending ~1.5% (under $20*10^6 annually) of its budget on cycling infrastructure [0]. According to the SFMTA, bicycle usage is at around 3.9%[1], up from 2.3% in relative numbers. Up almost 200% in absolute numbers from 2006 (~4000 counted versus >11000 counted).

Shifting even tiny numbers of people from cars to bicycles shaves off peaks of car traffic. Bicycle throughput is several times higher per unit of infrastructure. That has incredible potential to hugely benefit people driving cars by improving car traffic flow. Crazy high ROI potentially!

According to your logic too, one could argue that only devoting 1.5% of the transport budget to the mode used by 3.9% of its population is serious underfunding.

[0] https://blog.sfgate.com/bicycle/2014/04/21/new-sfmta-budget-...

[1] https://www.sfmta.com/bicycle-ridership-data

Do you have a citation for 50% of the SFMTA budget going to cycling infrastructure? This sounds demonstrably incorrect given the fact that they run the bus and LRV systems.

(Also incorrect is that people "don't want to cycle to work", I see literally hundreds of them every morning in SF, and it's growing every year.)

There are many arguments in favor of cycling infrastructure, but unfortunately I'm versed enough in anti-bike comment threads to recognize someone who won't be convinced :) But here goes...

* bikes do less damage to road than cars, and therefore the maintenance cost of bike lanes is lower than car lanes, which require frequent paving

* bikes are important as a "last mile" transportation option for public transit commuters. densely-placed bike share stations improve the feasibility of public transit for people whose homes or offices are 1-2 miles from a train station.

* bikes are far smaller than cars and so you can push more traffic through a given width of road than with cars. this is especially relevant if you ever get to a downtown stretch where one car turning right at a pedestrian crossing causes an entire green light to be wasted on the rest of the cars (basically every light along Market Street in SF). cars are just wide and clumsy when driving in dense downtowns.

* the government frequently subsidizes behaviors that are considered virtuous (or conversely, imposes "sin taxes"), and also subsidizes services that benefit lower-income citizens. both of those apply here. car parking in downtowns can run $40+ for a day. bike share and bus commutes are $2-5 and keep people active.

I could go on, but again, I don't think your mind will be changed much.

Your argument is based on a major logical fallacy. There’s lots of reasons why cycling is far better for society than driving cars. But none of them matter because people do not want to cycle. There are no cases in the world where cycling infrastructure has been successful in having a measurable impact on congestion.

You’re also falling for the same fallacy that cycling advocates fall for by obscuring the impact of cycling spending. It doesn’t matter if hundreds of people want to cycle to work, or if cycling adoption is up 10% if all you’ve done is gone from 3% of commuters to 3.4% of commuters (which is where I believe SF is at after all of the billions they’ve invested in it). It’s the same as the startup that says they’re growing faster than google because they managed to go from 50 customers to 100. We all know it’s bullshit, it’s just a popular self-delusion that people enjoy.

> But none of them matter because people do not want to cycle.

Wrong. Vancouver, for example, built a network of protected bike lanes in a few years, and saw bike rates skyrocket. Bike commute mode share is now 10%, despite having much less than 10% of available road space, making bikes highly land-efficient.

> There are no cases in the world where cycling infrastructure has been successful in having a measurable impact on congestion.

That's because the number of cars increases to fill the amount of road space. But if you look at Amsterdam or Copenhagen, plenty of people are willing to bike when there's good bike lanes and paths for doing so.

In contrast, cities like SF or Seattle have a bare handful of protected bike lanes, a smattering of walk/bike trails, and they hardly connect to each other. It's hardly a surprise that most people don't want to bike in those conditions.

> which is where I believe SF is at after all of the billions they’ve invested in it

If SF had spent "billions" the city would be covered in protected bike lanes. Needless to say, it isn't. This is a made-up figure.

There’s a very small number of cities in the world where cycling is popular, and their success comes down almost entirely to geography and climate. These cities also tend to devote very little infrastructure to cycling-only roadways.

There’s a lot of examples of cities spending huge sums of money on cycling (SF has spent far more than a billion on it), and none of them have been successful in drivingcycling adoption.

Also the only studies that show road building as ineffective are looking at cities that have many years of population growth where road spending didn’t even remotely keep up. People don’t materialize out of thin air to fill up new roads. You’re using neglect of infrastructure to justify further neglect of infrastructure.

> There’s a very small number of cities in the world where cycling is popular, and their success comes down almost entirely to geography and climate.

This is wrong.

Biking is popular in Copenhagen and Amsterdam, it's popular in Munich, it's recently gained popularity in Vancouver, it's popular in Davis, CA, it's popular in Tokyo. Believe it or not, those cities don't all have the same climate.

Geography is more of an issue, but it's becoming less and less of one over time thanks to the steadily increasing popularity -- and steadily decreasing cost -- of ebikes.

Also, you claimed SF spent many billions on bike infrastructure. Where's the source?

While I agree with your analysis in general, you cannot ignore geography and weather. Copenhagen and Amsterdam are pretty optimal for biking since they are basically completely flat and the weather never really gets warm or cold. From what I remember of Seattle at least the entire downtown is on a very steep hill.

The Netherlands also gets a lot of wind, which is not optimal for biking. And even when it rains or snows there, people keep biking.

Hills are becoming less of an issue due to ebikes (and electric bikeshare). The other possible solution is installing bike lifts, but, well, most cities still treat biking as a toy, and are unwilling to spend significant sums on it.

<raises hand> I would absolutely cycle the 3 miles to my office if it felt safe. Not in a crime sense but in an "I'm going to get mangled by an automobile driver who thinks saving a fraction of a second on a 45 min commute is more important than strict adherence to those pesky traffic laws that protect my fragile body from his two tons of 30mph (where the speed limit is 20mph) metal" sense.

What would make me feel confident enough to cycle to work? Protected bike lanes and/or a massive shift in attitude among the drivers I encounter as a pedestrian and watch through the bus window.

While I love reading about logical fallacies, I don't see how I've committed one.

I never said building infrastructure would convince everyone to bike. Rather, the government can (and often does) move society as a whole in one direction using money as a lever. Do taxes on gas or alcohol prevent everyone from driving or drinking? No, but they move the needle, just like building cycling infrastructure does.

And I never cited the "10% increase" as an important metric for the success of cycling infrastructure, you did. None of my arguments is about the absolute number of people cycling, although others have pointed out that biking is likely underfunded relative to the number of people who use the infrastructure. I just cited the increasing number of people on bikes as a counterpoint to your claim that "no matter what people say, they don't want to cycle to work".

I would love to cycle almost everywhere, and in the past I've run a large fraction of my errands on bikes. On the majority of roads, though, I do not feel safe doing so, because I have to mix with fast moving cars piloted by drivers that I would barely feel safe driving near, because they're honestly pretty terrible at driving. I know many others who feel the same way - they want to bike more but not feeling safe keeps them from doing it as much as they'd like.

And I can't see how SF could have invested nearly what you claim in biking infrastructure. Their cycling infrastructure is not particularly good compared to most "bike friendly" cities.

That's demonstrably false. Look to cities in northern Europe like Amsterdam and Copenhagen, where bicycle use has caused a massive decrease in automobile traffic.

Can you cite any of those figures?

Add Beijing to the list. However the success of cycling in those cities comes down entirely to geography. Cycling has been popular in those places for a very long time. They also prove that cycling adoption doesn’t come down to infrastructure spending, a city is either geographically suited to it (very flat with minimal sprawl), or it isn’t, no matter how much money you pour down the drain to build cycle ways.

Amsterdam hasn't been big on cycling for a "very long time". It was a very car heavy city for a while and is now on a better track thanks to changes in policy.

https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2015/may/05/amsterdam-bic...

As a Dutch person, it was great reading this, because I always assumed that the Netherlands had cycling ingrained in its culture. This would of course make the cycling success of Dutch cities hard to replicate elsewhere. To see that activism and political will played a large role in creating the current cycling climate makes me hopeful it can be replicated elsewhere!

Visit London. Cycling is now the majority mode of transport in the City of London rush hour. That’s due to car reduction measures (the Congestion Charge) and new infrastructure both large (Cycle Superhighways) and small (filtered permeability). Your assertion that “people don’t want to cycle to work” is demonstrably false.

(Source: https://www.bikebiz.com/news/traffic-in-the-city-2018 )

The source is about road use, which is more specific than your claim. The top modes of transport are walking, the underground, long-haul rail infrastructure.

I think the source goes against both your claim and its own headline. Diagram 3.11 shows cycling to be a small part of the makeup.

Yes, given the context that AmericanChopper was principally talking about roads (and advocating that cars should be prioritised). If you include non-carriageway provision then the Tube, bus and walking are and have long been dominant in London.

3.11 appears to cover the whole day rather than just the rush hour, and again, the context of AmericanChopper's comments was "commuters". 3.5 in the original report (search for 'Traffic in the City 2018') gives more context as to how modal share varies throughout the day.

>That’s due to car reduction measures

Sounds like people didn't want to cycle to work, but it was the next best thing after the car reduction measures.

In London, cyclists make up less than 5% of commuters. Hardly a vision of success.

Define "London". In inner/central London, where cycling infrastructure is being built and where the Congestion Charge is in place, the cycle commute share is significantly higher than 5%. (Back in 2011, for example, it was 15.4% in Hackney: it will be bigger than that now.) In the outer suburbs, where there's no infrastructure and no Congestion Charge, it isn't above 5%. That should tell you something.

Meanwhile, you talk sneeringly about "invest[ing] billions into poorly designed public transport". Public transport is, of course, something London does very well. Car commuting across the whole of London, inner and outer, is around 25%. Public transport commuting is around 50%. (Source: LTDS. This covers London residents only, so is probably an underestimate given the vast numbers of people from outside London who commute into the city by rail.)

You're right about that. London does public transport much better than most other cities.

It's also been measurably more successful than many other cities in driving cycling adoption. But if your argument in support of that (overall relatively minor) success involves statements such as "define London", and cherry picking particular suburbs, then I think that speaks to the strength of it.

Many suburbs (and inner city London local authorities) have stymied Transport for London efforts to introduce cycle infrastructure. Hardly fair to sneer at cherry picking

Try comparing the numbers of bicycle commuters versus automobile commuters and doing the same for any American city and prepare for your mind to be blown.

$87.9 million. Not billions. Not even one billion. Not even a tenth of a billion.

Less than 2%. Not 50%. Not even 5%.

Maybe you have more up-to-date information to counter these numbers? If so, let's see them, please, as currently it seems like you're making wildly inaccurate unsubstantiated claims as the foundation for all of your comments on this subject.

Thanks.

https://blog.sfgate.com/bicycle/2014/04/21/new-sfmta-budget-...

Source on SF having spent "many billions" on bike infrastructure please.

That number is ludicrous, you made it up.

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