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Comment by l4u532 | Hacker News Reader

Having lived in Copenhagen I can only attest the surge in living quality when a city adopts a no-compromise bicycle strategy. Back in car-loving Munich I feel set back a century. With city council members putting forward arguments like that bike lanes will “destroy retail businesses”. It’s frustrating.

Ps: here’s the short film the article talks about. Shows the fantastic transformation of Utrecht. https://youtu.be/Boi0XEm9-4E

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Yeah the business destruction argument is the most perplexing. It's like shop owners thing that people prefer shopping on noisy dirty streets to quiet pedestrian areas. I don't know how you can come to that conclusion.

I think the argument is that shops won't be able to get stock in without lots of road access for delivery trucks etc.

Living dead center in Utrecht it's actually quite easy to do so. In the mornings you can simply drive through the pedestrian zone at a walking pace as long as you have business there like unloading or going to your house. Outside of the pedestrian zone of the centre you can still drive your car, but it's just not something a lot of people do. Given the medieval street pattern it's still pretty convenient.

The real hard thing is that Google & Co don't mark every street as reachable by car or truck and you also need to drive over a bus / taxi lane to get there. So people that are used to just set up Google Maps and drive will never get there as the roads are not accessible according to the map they use. Which is a huge pain in the ass anything larger than a parcel needs to be delivered to my house.

Unfortunately, usually it’s more about the (unfounded) assumption that car users are proper money-spending shoppers and cyclists and pedestrians are unemployed hippie communists.

You hear this argument all the time so I’m not sure whence the downvotes. Whatever the exact phrasing, the gist of the argument is that car users are assumed to have more purchasing power and should thus be given priority.

Besides, on a bicycle it's easier to stop and park your bike if you see an interesting shop. When driving there is much more friction as you need to find a parking spot and park there first.

Is it though? Bikes are stolen far more often than cars and you can't carry as much on a bicycle either. Furthermore, you can't really go shopping with the family as a group unless you have specific gear to allow you to do that, because kids aren't going to travel these distances.

I like bicycles, but actually going to a store with a bike is an annoying experience. One that I wish could be improved.

I don't know where you live, but a lot of time this argument is given by people who live in car-centric cities or neighbourhoods. If you live in a walking/biking friendly neighbourhood (like I did for a few years), then the grocery store/community center/other family centric shops are within a 15 minute walk for everyone living in the neighbourhood, a distance pretty much any healthy person age 6-60 can cover via walking/biking. Whether you are walking or biking you can take a rolling cart with you, which is easy to push (walking or in front/behind your bike) and which will hold as much grocery as you need for a family.

Like you have to understand that a city designed from scratch for cars and one designed for walking/biking look very very different. Biking in one is hard and driving in the other is just as hard.

But sometimes you want to go shopping with the family to shops that you normally don't/can't visit. Everything that's within 15 minutes walking distance isn't going to be those shops. Regardless how you design a city, most shops even in a small city are going to be outside of that 15 minute walking distance too. The main problem I think is that there isn't always somewhere to put your bike safely when you go into the shops.

That kind of thinking stems from having the car as a first choice, it's easy to go 50km with a car instead of 7km. If bicycle and walking become the first choice for short travels under 7 km then you will see that you can reach most things by bike, and are still able to take the car to do those far away shopping sprees.

Yes bicycle parking is important, but it's relatively cheap, mostly because it does not need that much infrastructure.

You can carry a lot on a bicycle. https://www.urbanarrow.com/en

The difference between bikes and cars is in the mean/variance of time to park.

For a bike it takes about 1 minute or more to stop, detach/unlock your lock from the frame and lock your bike to a bike stand, then take off your helmet. You reverse this when you get back on the bike. The variance is also not that high on this number.

For a car, the mean time varies greatly from location to location and the variance is much higher. You might get stuck several minutes searching or waiting for a parking spot or you might get a spot immediately and be walking to the shop in under 15 seconds.

These differences have some effect on how much people want to bike/drive. I think one way of encouraging biking more would be to work on lock designs and bike stand design so it takes less time to park your bike.

I have both a fast electric bike and a normal bike. For the electric bike it indeed takes a minute or three to unlock, enter pin code on bike, put on helmet etc. That's why I prefer my normal bike for short distances, takes me 10 seconds to lock, and I can usually park it within 10m of where I want to be. There is really no faster way to get around in any Dutch city for say <2km, than a plain old bike. If I would go to the local supermarket it would take me longer to find a parking spot that the entire bike ride there.

It sounds like you're describing a much different biking culture than is the one in the Netherlands. For a minor stop here it will take less than 10 seconds to park a bike. Usually there's bike parking or a stand on the street right in front of the shop, no need to look for anything, nobody wears helmets when biking in the Netherlands, and if you're not parking for a long time you just lock the back wheel by pulling out the key- no chain involved at all. So what this looks like in practice is hopping off your bike right in front of the shop/cafe/bar/restaurant and pulling out the key- that's it.

I don't know if it's generic, but in my town (Eindhoven, also NL), the argument is that a less car friendly city centre makes the shops harder to reach, encouraging people from neighbouring towns to go elsewhere where it's faster to get to and cheaper to park.

It's a reasonable argument that the city is now trying to address by making free parking on the city border plus a free bus into town.

There's a lot of wrong-headed antipathy towards improving cycling infrastructure, which is really frustrating, given that it's a low-cost way of making a big difference to quality of life.

I recently read a nice article laying out some of the misconceptions: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/bike-blog/2019/jul/0...

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