The best-kept secret of Dutch biking: the Dutch hardly bike at all
peopleforbikes.org
peopleforbikes.org
An average of 1.5 miles per person per day sounds huge.
What's the American average? 0.05 miles?
What's the baseline from where the author justifies the "hardly bike" line?
There are 17 million people in Netherlands, and 800.000 in Amsterdam.
If half of the people in Amsterdam go about 5km per day (they wouldn't need much more, it's not a huge city, and they'd mostly go to/from work/school/home) that's 2.5 km per person per day -- the number they post.
Half of the people of a city biking everyday is HUGE, and dwarfs any US town 5x easily.
Heck, merely 10% of the population biking every day would be huge, and that's easily within the number given.
I'd say the same holds for other Dutch cities and villages.
So what are we are comparing with?
2.5km per cyclist per day is tiny.
The difference between those two statements and the specific details and societal implications thereof is the whole point of the article.
Not really. It would be tiny if it was describing hobbyist biking fanatics etc (who are expected to bike much more).
But when the "per cyclist" is used to describe regular people who bike to home/work/etc (because the country has a bike culture), as a per day number it's big. Because then it can be compared to the tons of regular people who don't bike at all in other countries.
In other words 2.5km per day "per capita" and "per cyclist" could be equally huge, when the percentage of cyclists is big in the population, because the "per cyclist" suddenly doesn't mean:
"Bike fans in Netherlands do an average 2.5km per day"
but:
"Shitloads of people in Netherlands have a bike and do an average 2.5km per day on it"
The article already points out that a much higher proportion of people in the Netherlands bike.
"The Dutch hardly bike at all" refers to an individual cyclist compared with an individual cyclist in the states. To someone who does bicycle regularly, 1.5 miles is, indeed, hardly anything at all. I bike 1.5 miles in each direction to my train each day (so twice that average) and don't consider myself to bike far at all.
I guess at worst you can say it's a click-baity title, as it's appearing to go counter to your expectations of a heavy biking culture (which it is) to say that any one cycling individual doesn't actually bike far, but that shift in perspective is the point of the article.
You also cannot compare average biking distance for a whole population with the average biking distance of the biking subset of another population. That is like comparing life expectancy of musical conductors with the life expectancy of the general population.
> I guess at worst you can say it's a click-baity title
That is being extremely generous.
That’s part of it, in the Netherlands you might cycle even more on weekends and holidays to go somewhere, and there is no ‘bad weather’ (it’s already bad most of the time).
If, on average, they only played the piano once a week, just to play a single scale, would it be fair to have an article whose title was "The Dutch barely play at all"?
All three things would be true:
1. The Dutch were famous because most of them played the piano
2. The average Dutch person plays significantly more scales than the average American (who probably play <0.005 scales)
3. The Dutch "barely play at all."
Honestly, I don't see why this title is bothering you so much. Most people's image is of the Dutch biking everywhere.
The Dutch are not insane fitness nuts biking 25 miles to work daily. They just have a built environment where taking a bike actually makes sense because they aren't going terribly far, just far enough that the hassles involved in taking a bike (like locking it up) are worth it.
The point of the title is PR. It's an attempt to rebut the assumption that this is hard, so fat, out of shape Americans have no hope of aspiring to create a bicycle culture like the vaunted Dutch, who must all be super athletic as one of their many godlike virtues.
There's nothing all that special about the Dutch people. They aren't all Olympic athletes. They aren't all brainwashed hyper virtuous types making hyper virtuous choices at enormous personal expense and suffering.
They just have a built environment that helps make it easy for little old grandmas to take their bike somewhere.
If you want to argue that it's a bad title for HN, sure. I totally agree.
But the title wasn't written for HN and it's a perfectly fine title for it's intended purpose for most audiences.
Huh, I missed that in the title.
My first guess was that their other public transit was good enough that not much biking was needed, which isn't far off the mark.
(Banning cars would also be a solution, as 'bike infrastructure' is really infrastructure to protect bikes from cars, but it's not necessary when there's large amounts of street space that could be repurposed from car storage)
US rail stations also generally have less, and less secure, bike parking versus equivalent stations in the Netherlands, reducing their catchment areas to a mile-wide 'walkshed' rather than a few-mile-wide 'bikeshed'.
It does nothing for the fact that the roads are often in a pretty bad state and more importantly that you share the streets with cars.
I already had an asshole bump his car on my legs apparently voluntarily. I know that some riders wear gopro constantly in order to document this kind of occurrences. And even aside from these extreme morons, inattentive drivers are pretty dangerous. I can't wait for the day where there will be a dedicated segregated bike lane on market. That will be a good start.
Well it's not really possible for cars to give a crap. It's the drivers we need to point out here. And drivers are people. People who are literally okay with other humans dying from the one tonne machines they drive around at high momentum and with recklessly little attention (texting, etc.)
This behaviour should be rightfully vilified as psychotic, rather than normalised through statements about "cars". The media almost always uses language that absolves humans of their chosen actions that lead to tragic incidents.
But this piece highlights an oft overlooked piece of the puzzle and it's a critical element. You can willy nilly add all the bike racks and other infrastructure you want, it's not going to result in people flooding out onto the streets on their bikes if there's nothing within a reasonable distance. American policies actively make it outright illegal to build the kind of dense urban fabric crucial to the Dutch success with fostering bike culture.
This is changing. The last three cities I've lived in had strong growth boundaries specifically intended to prevent the cities from sprawling any further.
We require streets to be very wide to accommodate car traffic.
We require homes to be a certain minimum size.
We mandate lots of parking.
We have minimum lot sizes.
We have set backs from the lot line. This means you can't build row houses. We have places where if you buy an empty lot, you can build a row house matching the ones on either side. If you buy an old building, you can't tear it down and build new because it is grandfathered in and a new building would have to conform to a different set of rules.
We do seem to be lightening up on parking requirements in some cities, but many of these other issues are not being aggressively addressed.
You mostly can't build walkable neighborhoods in the US. This has been true a long time. The New Urbanism movement was about trying to do exactly that and they frequently had to do a lot of research and find loopholes to try to create anything akin to their vision. Their plans were usually denied the first time they were submitted and then they would go through zoning codes very carefully and start renaming things on their drawings to a conforming use that largely preserved their intended layout.
I know some things are changing, but we still have a long way to go. We've been building a certain kind of urban fabric a long time and it will take time to remedy the problems that have grown out of that fact.
I agree entirely. What I've seen count as "baby steps".
As I tell myself when something is taking far longer than it should, at least the trend line is pointing the right direction. A small amount of progress is preferable to none at all.
I commute 30 miles a day each way (60 total) from my house to work. Even a crazy fitness nut likely wouldn't cycle that many miles every day. My commute isn't even long compared to some people's...
Trains aren't the answer either. The US is just too spread out on average. Yes, they'll work in dense cities... but not in the suburbs or rural areas - ie, where majority of the country lives.
People living in big, dense cities are too quick to forget most people don't live that life. Out here, a car is pretty necessary.
> Even a crazy fitness nut likely wouldn't cycle that many miles every day
Speaking as a crazy fitness nut, I have to tell you no, sorry, 30 miles is my warm up/recovery distance.
> People living in big, dense cities are too quick to forget most people don't live that life
80% of the US population lives within an urban area.
> Out here, a car is pretty necessary
I live in the suburbs. When I have an early meeting, I ride to the train station. I do have a car, but I still don't have to use it.
To sum up: car dependency is a self-fulfilling prophecy based on a combination of wilful ignorance and unwillingness to change.
> 30 miles is my warm up/recovery distance
That's absurd and you know it. Possibly spoken from someone that doesn't actually cycle, or is greatly exaggerating. You ride 1-2 hours for a warm-up/cool-down? You expect regular people to ride 1-2 hours to work each day?
You expect to maintain 20-30mph pacing with stop signs, street lights, riding on regular city streets? Completely absurd and out of touch with reality. That's insane pacing - that's race pacing.
Most cyclists will do 20-30 miles for an entire ride. Sometimes exceeding that, but certainly not doing 60 miles a day (3-4 hours a day) 5 days a week. That is, unless, you're training for something... which a daily commuter going to an office job isn't.
Not to mention if you're someone doing that kind of mileage, you likely own a bike that costs as much as a car, but is far harder to "park" securely, doesn't work well in the rain, and requires you to carry work clothing, laptops, paperwork, groceries, and more on your back.
> 80% of the US population lives within an urban area.
Source? If you're citing the WaPo article which cites Census data - they're lumping Suburban and Urban together and calling it just Urban - that's super disingenuous.
Most people live in suburban areas. There are certainly dense population areas in true urban areas (SF, NY, Seattle, LA, etc), but that's not 80% of the nation. Not even close.
> I live in the suburbs. When I have an early meeting, I ride to the train station.
You probably work at an area near the train station then - perhaps a Downtown location or similar. What if this commute required multiple trains hops, with distance between the train stations because you're commuting 3 cities over for work each day? Feasible? Sure... but now you've taken an hour long commute and turned it into 3 hours each way. That's not feasible for most people.
This narrative falls flat when faced with actual working circumstances for many people... outside the ideal "just take the train" scenario. What if there's not even a train?
> That's absurd and you know it.
That is wilful rejection of facts. You defined the upper bound of possibility by invoking crazy fitness nuts - well, here I am to tell you how wrong you were.
> You expect regular people to ride 1-2 hours to work each day?
I know many people (who would not describe themselves as "crazy fitness nuts") who do just that. Yes, they do rely on high quality end-of-trip facilities, but many of our urban employers and councils now offer these.
I also know people who commute in a car for longer than that. As commute durations go, measurement in hours is far from unusual.
> Completely absurd and out of touch with reality. That's insane pacing - that's race pacing
It's true. I won at least one nationally sanctioned bike race every year from 2011-2015. Sorry, what was your problem with that? You invoke crazy fitness nuts, we show up like Candyman.
> Most cyclists will do 20-30 miles for an entire ride
Again, I was speaking to your incorrect claim of the upper bound of the possible. But sure, move the goalposts if you like, because:
> You probably work at an area near the train station then - perhaps a Downtown location or similar
I simply live in a country and a state that didn't pathetically lowball its rail infrastructure and intermodal transit options.
> actual working circumstances for many people
You get what you voted for, based on what you believed was possible, and suggesting things are impossible is just wilful, pig-headed rejection of what can be achieved if the people actually want it, with the simple evidence that it's been achieved elsewhere.
Cars are a useful tool, but the claim that they simply are an essential element of a functioning modern society begs the question of why certain societies are so automobile dependent, and wilfully ignores those that aren't.
Why not? In the city I used to live in, my car commute was 5 miles one way, but took 1-2 hours because of traffic. Thousands of others had the same situation, and they all did it too.
Don't know about you, but I have friends who cycled around 30-40 mins to work each day and back (so 1 hour total), and they were regular people (not even particularly young, like 30+).
And my city is anything but bike friendly...
I did pretty close to that for quite a while when I lived in NYC and I'm very, very far from being a fitness nut. I biked from Brooklyn up to Morningside Heights and back every day. 12 miles according to Google Maps and took me about 45 minutes each way. Taking the subway would normally be slightly faster, but not by a lot. And despite the crappy weather, physical exhaustion (really just going over the Williamsburg Bridge,the rest of the ride was pretty flat), hassle of locking up and maintaining a bike, and the distinct feeling that cabbies and truck drivers were actually trying to kill me on a daily basis, it was still much, much more pleasant than cramming myself onto a crowded subway train during rush hour.
I'm no crazy fitness nut or bike fanatic, but I wouldn't have a problem biking that.
And then there's the culture of suburbanism and ages of policies to increase the sprawl. All of that making public mass transit less cost efficient.
It only disappoints people who expect to gain knowlege by skimming over headlines.
https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=reuters.com https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=bbc.co.uk
I feel like the difference in % of people even in the Bay Area that bike 15, 25, and 45 (all the way from SF to MV) is minuscule.
Everyone I talk to either doesn't bike at all, or has something like a .5-3 mile ride as their whole commute or part of their commute.
Is that the whole story though?
The Dutch are much more fit in general than the median US population (regarding obesity, etc). So them biking more is not necessarily only due to better cities.
Also, their cities are also not an accident of nature they had to make do with: they built them that way, like the US cities were built for cars. So their biking more is not a mere accident of how they cities are. Rather both their cities and their biking are intentional.
Third, even in places with similar population density and distances, the US has let bikers as several people have mentioned. So while "it's more convenient to bike" is part of the explanation, it doesn't tell the whole story.
This article has a particular point and I think it's a good point. It actually has two main points:
1. The built environment is a large factor.
2. The high numbers of cyclists in The Netherlands is really a whole lot of people making fairly short trips on a regular basis.
The first is a big problem that will take years to remedy. The second is about an erroneous impression that serves as a psychological barrier to adopting better policies.
A lot of Americans tend to be all "Why bother?! It's hopeless!"
It's not hopeless. Even your average fat American can probably bike a mile or so.
Biking regularly is no doubt a very large part of why the Dutch are healthier, not the other way around. You need biking infrastructure to help foster a healthier lifestyle. You don't need to wait until Americans all magically wake up one day with super athletic physiques before you biking more is viable in the US.
In most of America, a 2.5km round trip gets you almost nowhere useful. It's almost nothing. On an American scale, it's hardly anything at all.
The average American[0] drives more than 59 km per day, so even at the most generous number from the article, that's 4%.
That's the point of the article, the entire point.
[0] https://www.fool.com/investing/general/2015/01/25/the-averag...
I thought that it sounded really small, but my point of comparison is my own personal bicycling habit -- my daily bicycle commute is about 10 miles round trip. Yes, I'm an American.
Of course the US cycles far less, but it's reputation is of being the most car centric country in the world.
The US city I live in is far more bike-friendly than most, and I assume that it has a higher percentage of bike commuters than most (but that's my personal assumption).
The city has automated bike counters scattered around, and annually does a manual bike count where they tally the number of parked bikes that are publicly visible, in an attempt at estimating the percentage of commutes that are done by bike.
The most recent figure they published (last year) put their estimation right around 7%.
I expect these graphs to change in the coming 5 years.
P.s. Our today's issue is having speed pedelecs which are not allowed on our biking lanes in cities/suburbs/villages (big speed difference) but are just about too slow for the regular 50km/h roads :).
P.p.s. Electric bikes are around 2000€ on average. Speed pedelecs start at 3500€ but quickly go to 5000€, and 8000€+ for premium brands is not uncommon. We still love our bikes ;).
When you see Pedelec, it means S-Pedelec, which is more powerful (45km/h), helmet required, basically a moped. Mostly used by older folks and weekend long-distance cycling groups.
Count as mopeds, and controversial because they are more dangerous (partly because they look like normal bicycles and the rider is sitting upright but they're going much faster than normal bikes, other traffic doesn't expect it).
But they do make it feasible to use a bike for longer commutes.
I think the reason is because she was able to take the inside passages that are only for bikes, so her trip was much shorter than mine.
So not only are their buildings close together, but they are built around walking/bikes, such that those modes of transit are actually shorter.
Of course, I haven't got a car, have never had a car and haven't even got a driver's license.
Some drivers might say that counting time to park is "cheating", but I strongly disagree. Time from door-to-door is what matters.
"our city is just as big when you count the suburbs!"
but by that standard you have to count the bigger city's suburbs too
I live in San Jose, a morning car commute on the 101 is ~30mins, return is ~50-60mins. Riding my bike is 45mins (43-48) each way.
It's a complete wash and I get 90mins of exercise per day.
If you don't want exercise, get an e-bike and go faster for less effort!
My sons walked to meet me somewhere midway to where we were going. They arrived about the same time I did.
I would get ahead of them because the bus is faster -- when it's actually moving. Then we would sit at a light or get stuck in traffic, and I would watch my sons pull ahead of the bus.
When we first gave up our car, it took no more time to pick up groceries on foot than by car. The same scenario often took place, where a car would zoom past us, then get stuck trying to turn into the parking lot. We were going into the store while they were looking for a parking space.
Cars on the open highway going long distances are absolutely much faster than someone walking. But for many local trips, they aren't as advantageous as many Americans assume them to be and will vociferously argue they are when presented with such stories.
I currently live about 1.5 miles from work, and I'd love to bike it, but this suburb has no bike lanes, sidewalks, or shoulders, and intersections that are terrifying even in a car. :(
It's certainly true where I live. My daily commute is ~10 minutes faster on a bike compared to driving, even ignoring time needed to park.
I suspect that the bike would win for my old commute (5x longer), where I'd hit congested highways every single day. Slow and steady beats stop and go.
* for shorter urban distances the bike is way faster almost all the time
* for longer suburban distances it marginally slower but not as much as you'd think
* The quality of the time on a bike is much greater up to ~20 minutes, then tapers off rapidly in poor conditions; even riding in the rain or cold snow is preferable to sitting in traffic if you're not out for too long.
* My trip is typically short enough that it takes longer to get ready to ride than to actually complete the ride
I ride a bike for very selfish reasons; the shared benefits are just a nice bonus.
If you gave that sort of space over to the Americans you'd have little towns _everywhere_.
Bikes are well used here and 3-4 km is no problem to bike on flat land, not even if you're untrained. Bike roads are usually straighter to goal and plenty of parking in front of all doors.
Car = 35-40 minutes on average, sometimes more.
eBike = 30-35 minutes consistently.
The reason - bikes can 'filter' up to a set of lights, whereas a car in heavy traffic might take 2 or 3 rotations of the light to make it through a junction.
http://www.aviewfromthecyclepath.com/2010/07/not-really-so-g...
I don't know how other European cities do it.
Right now at 3pm, Google Maps tells me that my 6-mile commute home by car would be 32-39 minutes. By bike it's 39-41 minutes for a 7-mile ride. During rush hour, the bike really wins.
What makes biking uncomfortable here is that you really have to be alert. A lot of roads don't have good space for bikes and cars can be really aggressive, even if they're just racing toward the next light.
Cars just don't move through cities fast when there's traffic. Plus, parking here is just a nightmare.
Also consider that you no longer have to take extra time to exercise, it's now built-in to your commute. At least the cardio side.
Everything is built as small residential cul-de-sacs without any access except the entry from the main street. I can look at my neighbor's house 100ft away but there's no way to get there, even as a pedestrian, except walking out on the busy main street (with no sidewalks), walking half a mile down the road, and then walking half a mile back up their residential street.
It's like they actively try to discourage any mode of transportation except driving.
Cul-de-sacs are fairly popular in current UK estate designs, but usually - not always - include footpaths to link the obvious places. Mostly goes with shopping areas too - if you have walked, you can usually shortcut most of the road routing. That said, UK cycle friendly is mostly tokenism - a few efforts, a few half hearted painted lanes, but it's inconsistent. Pedestrian friendliness is usually pretty good.
By locally, I mean "within Silver Lake" or "within Echo Park" -- shopping, groceries, and especially casual dining. My belief is that pockets of density are slowly emerging.
They wanted less car traffic in the inner city. So now there is a ring road around it, and the center itself is divided into four parts, with one-way streets laid out so that if you want to go from one part to another, you have to go to the ring road. Cars can't travel through the center, they have to go around it. In the center you only get cars that have that as their destination.
But, all these one-way streets are marked "except for bicycles". None of the above applies to bicycles.
So for even quite long trips, say from the north of the city to the south, bicycles beat cars because they can just go straight through the center and cars have to take the long way around.
Bang. In much of America, it is against the law to build dense cities where people are statistically close to work and the grocery store.
Why do we have low density residential zoning in the first place? Preferring a large yard is one thing, but how did it come to be that America legally required houses to have yards?
The rarification of US cities happened in the 1940s and 1950s, when entire neighborhoods were bulldozed to make room for highways and parking lots that idealistic modernists and self-serving auto lobbyists believed were the future.
When I worked in Midtown I saw 3 high rises go up. 1 for GaTech students, another for apartments, and another for condos. Brookhaven was pretty crazy when I lived there but they have tried to combat the problem with better zoning.[1]. Chamblee added a bunch of new high density housing.
[1] https://www.cbs46.com/news/brookhaven-pushes-for-housing-aff...
Also the city added only about half as many new units last year as it did the year before.
And yes Atlanta is cheaper than other much higher density cities, that's why I said we have the same problem just not on the same scale.
If you own a house you wouldn’t want the value to meet inflation every year. You want it to gain value. Atlanta is a very affordable city by any measure.
>If you own a house you wouldn’t want the value to meet inflation every year. You want it to gain value.
Of course. That's a huge part of the of the problem. Housing can't be both a good investment and affordable. You've basically summed up NIMBYism in 2 sentences.
>Atlanta is a very affordable city by any measure
It is currently more affordable than some cities less affordable than others. But if housing prices keep outpacing inflation and more importantly wage growth, it won't be affordable for long.
There’s only one time in the past 30 years where housing prices dropped and people lost money. It wasn’t because of NIMBYism.
[1] https://www.ajc.com/business/real-estate/atlanta-pending-hom...
[2] https://www.ajc.com/business/atlanta-wages-but-not-fast-hous...
And Atlanta added far fewer units in 2018 than 2017 (you can Google the numbers) so we're actually slowing the rate at which we're adding housing.
>There’s only one time in the past 30 years where housing prices dropped and people lost money. It wasn’t because of NIMBYism.
When did I imply that NIMBYism caused housing prices to drop. I said the exact opposite.
Low density is prevalent outside of California. Here is a zoning map of Jacksonville FL: https://imgur.com/K6DbVYj
The yellow is all low density residential. Purple is commercial and grey is industrial.
[1] https://www.bizjournals.com/jacksonville/news/2018/12/20/new...
[0]https://www.realtor.com/realestateandhomes-detail/11136-Oak-...
In my opinion, those constituents have a right to do that (localized decision-making). I see a lot of comments on HN that deride arguments made for neighborhood character or quality of life, but it is a very real thing that is important to lots of people. Not everyone wants to live in a dense city. Most of the consternation against the less-dense areas are from people who want to live in those areas because they are attractive, but they also then demand it change to accommodate them on dimensions like zoning, which I don't think is fair.
Maybe if you're worried about CO2 emissions having those CO2 eating beings in your backyard could be a better option.
Probably not easy to quantify.
Also, grasses can be great CO2 sink as well, depending on the conditions and maintenance routine: https://sustainability.stackexchange.com/questions/4534/is-g...
But OK let's not nitpick, I'm not talking about only regarding CO2, it was just an example of something that is relevant these days for a lot of people.
My point is that would be interesting to study this as matter of what kind of life would be better, given different metrics.
But not everyone wants to live in a sprawling suburb, but we've engineered financial and educational systems and property rights norms that make it difficult for even those who wish to live in a dense city to choose to do so.
On the other extreme, you have people up in arms about gentrification, where they oppose new or better housing because they're worried it'll increase their property values. But in both cases, it's the people who already live there that push back on more and/or denser housing.
"Sure, my house is valuable now, but if I could also walk to a grocery store, a barbershop, a coffee shop, an electronics store, a beer pub, a few restaurants, and a few other kinds of stores, AND get on public transportation that would take me to local hubs and office spaces -- surely my house would drop value like crazy then!".
Greater logic: people looking to rent a small, inexpensive apartment are clearly the same people looking to buy a house with a backyard, so increasing the supply of the former would decrease prices for the latter by the law of supply and demand.
Exploding brain logic: ignoring property values going up every time the subway/local rail starts expansion into an area. Also voting against public transport expansion because nobody is using it anyway. AND also voting against constructing dense housing, because it will increase traffic.
Note that all three are required to block mixed-used dense walkable developments on the premise of "my property value" --- and that all three currently apply to the Bay Area.
In many cities, the logic of opposing transit is pretty explicitly racist. In Atlanta, I would hear MARTA derided as being only for black people, and in Baltimore's suburbs in 2018 there was a stink from suburbanites who live on the light rail route complaining that the train was "bringing in crime".
I live in the plateau neighbourhood of Montreal and as far as I can tell it’s one of the few in north america that doesn’t require any parking. Travel is more like the dutch. You walk, bike, or take a short metro ride and it’s not terribly slower than a car for most of your daily trips, if not faster.
I wonder what other national biking averages are? Probably much lower than the Dutch national average.
The only reason why I would use a car, is to get to family that lives further away. But even that stays within 50km. So the dutch public transport system fully satisfies that need for me as well.
Obviously this is anecdotal, but I am skeptical how useful a focus on bike lanes will be to the general public in American cities as compared to things like buses.
Telecommuting may mitigate this problem, but only for a small sub-set of workers for now, and even long term the fact remains that people still need to go into an office at least occasionally, and a good number of people can't get to work feasibly by bike. Plus, most people want to go somewhere after work, to the store and to church once a week, etc. This is orders of magnitude larger than a mile and a half (apparently the dutch average).
I don't see why electric cars can't accomplish sustainability goals without trying to force a demographic shift of that scale (which is very unlikely to happen).
I live in Berlin, with the population only slightly smaller than Los Angeles, and about 30% of the people regularly use bikes. Almost all trips I take somehow come out to about 4-6km, or 20 to 30min.
L.A. isn't even that much larger (1300km^2 to 900km^2). But anecdotally it seems to me like long commutes across metro regions are far more common?
As for blue-collar workers, I just recently saw a local plumber had switched to one of those cargo bikes. He said he had customers mostly within a 2x2km area, and was spending 20% of his days searching for parking spaces before.
Because anything resembling a personal automobile is
1. Still enormously dangerous to everyone else on the same road;
2. Takes up a ridiculous chunk of space;
3. Doubly so when parked/not used;
4. Does not navigate nimbly in traffic;
5. Rips up tarmac and damages road surfaces;
6. Makes a fair amount of noise still;
I could go on but I think you get the point. It's not only about CO2 emissions, it's also about its place among the humans it shares living spaces with.
I bought a One Wheel, comparable an ebike basically, and it's awesome for the 0.5-4.0 mile range. Plus, it's more fun than the subway or a bus so I'll even take it over the subway when practical.
Like you, if my destination is with a mile or two, I'm probably walking (unless I'm pressed for time or have to carry a bunch of stuff).
I do bike to/from work, though (about 5 miles each way). I sold my car a few years back, and a bicycle is the only transportation I own.
I really enjoy being car-free! I didn't realize how much of a burden and hassle owning a car was until I got rid of mine. It seriously improved my standard of living. When I'm in a situation where I really need a car, I either rent one or (more often) hire a cab. This happens about once per month.
> Either way you count it, the Dutch hardly bike at all.
Whaa???? How is that "hardly bike at all"? That's an enormous average!
I'm guessing the National average for the USA rounds to zero. Honestly, I bet the average for the USA per year rounds to zero.
Right now, I am living in a city and working from home, so the 1.5km / day figure seems to apply to me.
But when I was in school, many many moons ago, the roundtrip to school was 14km and I had a newspaper delivery round adding up to about 20km.
So basically as a teen, I did 20km a day, about 6 days a week.
disclosure: I am Dutch, living in NL
disclosure: Dutch myself
The summary and the graph supporting it are startling. I think in my city you see a very exponential increase in car transportation starting past the average distance we cross the parking lot, about 500 feet.
Sure, there are some places with hills, but the majority lives in the flatter-than-pancake flat part.
Where e-bikes can really shine, is increased speed. If you can do 40 an hour (km's), biking becomes a viable alternative to traffic jams. And that's happening already in NL.
It's a good thing since smaller vehicles are replacing cars in many places, to make it more accessible to people who can't ride a regular bike, but has some safety and regulation issues to iron out.
Would be much more interested in the average bicycle miles per day of only people who take at least, say, 3 or 4 trip a week by bike.
Statista's graph (https://www.statista.com/statistics/620169/average-biking-di...) doesn't show any dip from 2010 to 2011 at all though.
The sources for these graphs are all in Dutch so it's hard to say where the discrepancy lies.
https://opendata.cbs.nl/statline/#/CBS/nl/dataset/83499NED/t...
vervoermiddel = means of transport
fiets = bike
per persoon per dag = per person per day
Verplaatsingen / aantal = Trips / number
Afstand / km = distance / kilometres
Reisduur / uren = Trip duration / hours
(source: I live part time in Amsterdam. My partner and I have 5 bikes there, despite being there a few days a month)
The question is where the black-background graphs came from, as they have data from 2006. Particularly the first as the 1.5 km average is very different from the 2.5 km national average.
What's the lesson here? It seems to be saying that no amount of new infrastructure will make people ride bikes.
Special clothes are entirely unnecessary unless you're racing.