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Comment by jmcphers | Hacker News Reader

I think it'd be interesting to see the distribution of commute distances over the period in question. Anecdotally the #1 reason people tell me they don't commute on their bike is that they're busy and it just takes so much longer than driving because their workplace and home are so far apart.

My suspicion is that a part of the drop is due to the slow shift away from suburbs. Bike commuting from a suburb can be great (I've been a year-round commuter for over half a decade). However, the exurbs are too far away for bicycles, and inside urban areas you often have lots of other choices for getting to the office.

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This doesn't match my experience. I see bikers mainly in the city bikeways, just not in the most crowded and well-transit-served downtown core. In suburds the miles add up too quickly and take up too much time. It may depend on how dense your cities are.

Biking looks time consuming, but if you use it as time for exercise and sunshine-time you would otherwise be doing on your free time, it's almost 0 marginal cost.

And in some cases is actually faster than driving/ride-share/public transit door to door.

It definitely depends. The time of my commute itself is about the same, whether I bike or drive. However, there is about a 10 minute difference from additional activities that are not needed when driving. When I bike (~80% of the time), I need to account extra time for strapping my bag to my bike, attaching/removing easily stolen accessories, donning/removing reflective vest, and changing from biking clothes to business casual after arriving.

Thankfully, my commute is short and summers aren't too hot, so I don't yet need to add an additional 10-15 minutes for showering after arriving.

This is the case for me. I live about 6.5 miles from my office. Congestion is so bad (I'm in the Seattle area) that it can take upwards of half an hour to get to work -- yes, that's an average speed of 13 miles an hour in a car. Miserable.

However, on the bike I can average nearly 15 miles an hour, so I actually save time! In all fairness that time is more than eaten up by the additional steps (don bike gear, load bike, etc.) but it's nearly a wash.

There's definitely a distance correlation for biking in the USA, where e-biking hasn't seen the explosive growth yet that is happening in Europe.

That said - the car is not necessarily faster than biking, especially in the city. Anecdotal example: I live about 1.5 miles from my workplace. Biking is about twice as fast as driving during rush hour because of traffic. So I bike!

That's really close! At that distance, traffic could be bad enough that walking might be faster!

Congratulations on arranging your life well, though. I think back fondly to the times I was 2-4 miles from work. Actually for about six months I was a few blocks away. That was great.

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