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Comment by shoguning | Hacker News Reader

Nice article, but I fear North Americans just don't care by and large.

I've had some passing involvement with bike advocacy and have been a bike commuter in Los Angeles for the past six years. My impression is that in the early 2000s, there was a flowering of bike advocacy and infrastructure.

But now we've reached the point of resistance where other transport modes are pushing back against any more consideration for bikes. In short, cycling is now big enough to matter but not big enough to win.

I've often wondered if there was an approach other than the incrementalist, go-along-get-along approach that most bike advocacy has taken. The electric scooter startups have changed the transport landscape more quickly than anything else I've seen.

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I think cycling advocacy is alive and well, but the gains aren't as dramatic, because now they are incremental improvements to what has already been won. You are seeing miles and miles of shared bike lanes going up all across the US. I think back in the 2000's even that infrastructure was a pie in the sky dream. The jump to the next level of infrastructure hasn't taken off yet, but you are starting to see some cities actually invest in segregated bike lanes and bike highways. Since those changes require actual work and not just paint on the street I think they will be slower and take a lot more time, but I see them coming.

For instance, inside DC there was a number of dedicated bike lanes, and even a good number of segregated bike lanes. I could get all through the core of the city on a bike with relative safety, once you got out into the north Virginia suburbs the bike infrastructure turned into mostly painted lines, with a few notable trails and then by the time you hit the outer suburbs there was nothing, but they were starting to put painted lines out as far as Reston, VA ( 25mi outside the city )

Bike commuting growth has stopped/reversed in most places in the US in the last couple of years: https://usa.streetsblog.org/2017/09/14/bike-commuting-growth...

My worry is that there actually aren't enough people to use the bike infra to justify continued/increasing costs--or at least makes it easy to argue against. For example, there is a bike path next to a new light rail line in West LA (expo line for the curious). I used it to commute for ~1 year and the traffic I observed on it was very minimal considering the cost it must have taken to put in and maintain (lights at night too).

Yeah there are a couple bike hotspots like Portland and Minneapolis (maybe DC?) but outside that, the demand is minimal unfortunately.

DC was listed in that article as one of the places that didn't experience that trend so my anecdotal evidence is most likely biased. However I would be interested to see a similar survey done for 2017 and 2018 to see how electric bikes and scooters have changed things. I still see mostly normal bikes on my trips to work, but I have been seeing more and more e-bikes making the trip.

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