Admittedly, it works not so fine in US cities...because they were built to favor driving over every other mode. Drop an American in Munich or Tokyo and suddenly you'll find them driving a whole lot less, even if they still own a car.
You: “well in other settings it works. Of course, those settings have other infrastructure.”
You can see why that doesn’t really add much.
In fact you both seem to ignore the setting from the article, which is major European City
It just so happens that Americans have placed everything to require driving, so all these places need massive surface lots, spreading things out even further and then requiring even more driving and disadvantaging non-driving modes in a vicious cycle.
It would be a lot better to just free up the parking lots as actual developable land.
We used to design cities so that your school, child care, stores, gyms, club meetings, and everything else, were in one neighborhood. Why would you want them anywhere else? Now we build cities so that these things are far from one another.
It's like putting everything up on 20-ft-high-shelves and insisting every house needs a series of ladders.
There's nothing wrong with this, with the understanding that drivers' daily commutes are already subsidized and the article talks about making this salient to commuters. I wouldn't describe taking away a subsidy as a punishment or penalty, though. Also, the article talks about the possibility of giving alternative commuters the carrot rather than lone drivers the stick anyway.
Sure from an idealized economics standpoint we ought to eliminate subsidies and price in externalities. But it's challenging to eliminate them once they exist.
/sarcasm
And that’s before we even look at the negative externalities of cars, around the tens of thousands of deaths caused directly in car accidents, the tens of billions of dollars of GDP wasted in people idling in cars during traffic, the many lives and billions of dollars in GDP due to worse health outcomes due to pollution, and the increasingly apparent climate change related costs.
Your scenario cannot scale by definition (used)
Your scenario has no answer for the externalities.
Essentially, the only reason the scenario has any sort of standing is because it's based on the idea that commuting by personal vehicle is inherently better than public transport. Which is true for most of the US but is not true for most of the places which actually don't a priori assume personal vehicles are inherently significantly better for transport.
(I would say that's a reasonable capsule summary of my commute from Bowling Green to UES via the 4/5/6 unless I decided to stay at work for an extra 90-120 minutes to allow the rush hour crowd to clear out. Naturally all bets are off if the Yankees are playing.)
The vast majority of rail lines that exist or would be reasonable to build in the US would not have this problem.
Listen to music with your phone in your pocket. You don't have to stare at a screen 24/7.
And if you feel alone on the train or at the bus stop, you probably are not an attractive woman. Empirically speaking, most of us under the age of menopause are attractive :(
The only reason I don‘t own one is because outside of house and work there are few good secure locations to park a bike, and the area has a high rate of property crime.
You're pretty much stuck going right to one of the giant dutch cargo bikes to carry kids and all their paraphernalia, and once you drop off your kid now you're riding a very slow very heavy bike that will take much longer to ride to your office and leave you much sweatier, especially since there's no flat easy bike infrastructure like the Netherlands.
I'm a long time cyclist and I've done stuff like take my kid to daycare in a Burley trailer and lock the trailer at the day care and then ride the bike to my office, then go and bike to the daycare and hook the Burley back up but this stuff takes a tremendous amount of time. It's a LOT harder than bike commuting as a single person with a more flexible schedule. Day cares/schools put a lot of requirements on when you drop off and when you pick up which make it much harder to shift your schedule around to make bike commuting work as well.
At what point is it just an electric motorcycle and should move to the road.
There's a wide range of electric bikes from just pedal assist, to some you can just cruise, no pedaling.
Speed difference between the normal bike rider and the electric bike rider introduces risks to using that bike infrastructure.
I've personally had electric bikes fly past me on mixed use trails, and I'm not a slow cyclist. I think it may be too easy to reach unsafe speeds.
It's odd to me that on trails where motorized vehicles aren't permitted, somehow electric bikes get a pass.
A lot of you guys don't understand that not everyone is a wealthy 24 year old knowledge worker and can just live in the downtown and bicycle everywhere. People have cars because they enable you to even find work.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21872976
The easiest way to make cycling work is to pick where you live based on where you work. The default is to pick jobs or where you live that are convenient for driving. That won't lead to a good bike commute, as you've found.
> A lot of you guys don't understand that not everyone is a wealthy 24 year old knowledge worker and can just live in the downtown and bicycle everywhere. People have cars because they enable you to even find work.
I think most cyclists get that. For me specifically: I'm in my 30s and currently a PhD student. While I am rich from a global perspective, few people in the US would consider me wealthy. I usually live a few miles from where I work in a relatively cheap neighborhood.
And, as I pointed out elsewhere here, in my case cycling definitely saves me money. In fact, that's a major reason why I'm a cyclist.
Biking is for childless yuppies and people in third world countries. It’s inconvenient, inflexible, and uncomfortable. We have cars in the first world and they make life immeasurably better. To the extent pollution is a problem, we can and already are addressing those problems with electric vehicles.
https://peopleforbikes.org/blog/best-kept-secret-dutch-bikin...
I've spent multiple summers in Texas cycling and I'd say that was much worse, though still manageable.
If you have frequent winter precipitation that is more of a safety issue. Studded bike tires work well from what I've heard from someone who lives in Minnesota.
As for the comfort, I find the short discomfort spent in cold weather is well worth the more long term comfort of being in better shape. But to each their own.
And I'm not convinced that electric vehicles alone will necessarily solve the pollution problem. I find most people are blind to the issues with the chemicals involved in the production of batteries and solar panels, but I'm hopeful those issues will be resolved with future technologies. (Until recently I worked in a lab that does fire safety tests on batteries, though I was not involved in that project. But it became much harder for me to ignore those problems even only on the sidelines.)
>Biking is for childless yuppies and people in third world countries
In well maintained cities you have metro everywhere. There are many european places where biking is not only the fastest way to work but the most comfortable. Also, lot's of trains allow you to put you bike in. In my dailly commute I see plenty of people doing just that, biking to train and then to work. A monthly pass that costs 30€ usually it's equivalent of 200€ expenses with cars (tolls and parking and fuel), not to mention the stress of dealing with the chaotic traffic that you can avoid with the train.
Children are not a big factor when your area has transport for children.
When my local supermarket, the retail stores, restaurants, etc. have bike parking that is secure enough that I don't have to worry about a $1500 e-bike getting stolen, I'll get one. But they don't offer it, so I don't.
As an aside, in my opinion, electric bikes are probably the most practical form of transportation available right now for most urban communities. They climb hills, go pretty fast, can offset the rolling resistance of fat confidence inspiring tires, are smaller and easier to park than a motorcycle, are easy to charge, and have a manual backup in case of battery depletion. I love two-wheeled transportation in all its forms and think the electric bikes that are on the market now are an awesome middle ground between motorcycle and push bike.
I've participated in bike related web forums, and talked to a lot of people about cycling. I'm trying to be somewhat of a bike evangelist without being too annoying. What I've learned is that like unhappy families, cycling stories are all widely different, and each person has to figure out a way of adapting to their own circumstances. For some, it's bike parking / theft, like you say. For others, it's arriving at work, drenched with sweat. Weather is an issue. Even specific routes have their own peculiarities. Traffic is a huge deal.
I'm seeing a lot more e-bikes.
For a commute: zoning often requires parking for cars. It should be updated to require parking for bikes.