human powered transport like walking or cycling works great in dense cities, it's more space efficient so it scales better too.
Its not for everyone in every big city but certainly the Dutch model of transitioning cities from cars to transit and pedestrian/cycle focus is probably the clearest model for sustainable and healthy tansport out there.
Cycling infrastructure is amazing. It is almost always faster to travel by bike than by car.
They did it so long ago and the world still hasn’t caught up. I’m very sad about that.
Also somehow the amount of cars per capita is still very high in NL.
I live in the UK and I probably wouldn't consider getting a bike again, simply because I know it would be nicked within a month.
I personally had 4 bikes stolen in 5 years.
That's OK. We can keep up the consumerist "Everybody needs a car" mentality as long as the amount of driving per capita stays low.
We almost never used the Métro, what was the point? Saved money and no one ever stole my wallet!
I commute with a bike every day in Paris, France. The infrastructure isn't great but it's OK, and it's improving. The thing is: I'm a big, strong guy who can legally outrun most cars and motorbikes in such a big, dense city. I can fight my way in traffic, mostly because the law authorizes bikes to go both ways in most streets, to run red lights https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Idaho_stop, to ride between traffic lanes, etc. Most people are terrified to ride here so you only have the most reckless persons on bikes, including me. Although I'm respect the law (which does not make riding safe because no one wants to be anywhere near a big bus/truck, or between vehicles, or stuck in a diesel tailpipe…), I end up riding dangerously making people think that biking is only for reckless guys.
The worst is that, the more I respect the law, the more drivers get angry at me for taking to much space or slowing traffic down. So you move as quick and close as possible to vehicles and pedestrians. That's absurd but that how it is.
It's an infrastructure problem. The more you give space to bikes, the more reckless bikers can finally ride prudently, or prudent people dare to ride (making reckless bikers a tiny minority). It's the same with cars: what would happen if the infrastructure made car driving dangerous? You would only have road hogs and people would just hate cars.
Being a cyclist, I thought I found a slice of heaven. I thought about being an urban planner when I got back to the States.
I've been a car driver and a cyclist there for ~10 years now. Believe me, being the former is much easier than the latter. If you're on a bike, many assume you're just having a good time (either on vacation or unemployed, as many people says) so the politicians/police/media won't care about your well being and focus instead of the transportation means of "serious people", i.e cars and motorbikes.
It's insulting, because I do have a car (and a parking spot) but everything pushes me to drive it instead of riding my vélo (which makes no noise, does not emit anything, takes very little space, doesn't damage the road, is far less dangerous to others, makes me fit and save health insurance costs...). Go figure.
Additionally, low density US cities are one of the worst places I’ve seen for cycling, because not only is everything spread out, but also the multi-lane roads everywhere make it much more dangerous than equivalently populated towns and cities in Europe. Despite having cycled through central London (UK) and just over 1,000 km along the Rhine, there’s no way you’d see me cycling around Salt Lake City or Sacramento. I’ve cycled around Davis (CA), but Davis has better than US average cycling infrastructure — almost as good as the average level in the UK.
In general, traffic speeds are low in London and there are lots of quiet side routes that are well suited to cycling. We’re no Amsterdam, but cycling is certainly much more popular and visible than it was 5-10 years ago.
A lot more people can pass any point in a biketrack per hour than they can per subwaytrack, and they can often take a more direct path to their destination using bikes than they can by subway. That also means that a bike system is better suited to a city where both the departure and the destination are diverse among all "packets".
That's not even starting to talk about how biketracks scale much better economically since they are much cheaper to build.
Trains coming in each couple minutes - show me lower latency than that :)
>A lot more people can pass any point in a biketrack per hour than they can per subwaytrack
several hundreds (up to a thousand in rush hour packing) people per train each couple of minutes - beat that.
Anyway, the rest of what you're saying about biking is just a theory that doesn't come even close to the reality of any big dense city in Europe/Asia. This is why those cities has highly developed subway system - the low latency high bandwidth and high speed mode of transportation. You put all these people on bikes and they would choke the city.
For it to be too dense for biking to be a viable transport they would have to be much denser than European cities which would by definition not allow for parking in the places where business takes place (in which case nobody would drive).
Most American cities were clearly designed with cars in mind, while most European where not (having grown organically rather than being designed), and while the American decision might have seemed better for the better part of the last 100 years, that might not be the case for the next couple of decades.