Not to mention the people who are exercising by using their bicycles will have health benefits as well.
25% more of a small number is still a small number.
I'm one of them, and many of my friends are just waiting for the infrastructure to be further improved to make the switch. More space, better markings (…), just more reasons to drop the expensive, polluting, stressing space-taking cars and take a breath of fresh air while commuting.
Most people aren't going to find cycling more pleasant than driving in inclement weather, cold weather, hot weather, low traction conditions, uphill, or carrying cargo.
Funny enough, the total amount of physical stuff churning through the US economy has declined since the 1930s (or so?) just in terms of sheer mass.
Btw, your observation sounds much less surprising when you say 'transistors got cheaper since the 1970, yet we are spending more in total on transistors than ever'.
Secondly the price of a good is made up of more than its base resource, it's people's time, arketing, opportunity cost etc. So a 2x increase in resource efficiency of shoes manufacturing does not result in shoe price dropping 2x.
That’s an extraordinary claim to me, especially given population growth, and I would need some rigorous evidence to believe it. Cars are bigger, homes are bigger, people live further apart, and people travel more. How can the sheer mass not be more simply because of the mass of all the extra fuel?
I remembered reading about a comparison with 1930 as the peak. The Wikipedia article just mentions:
> Between 1977 and 2001, the amount of material required to meet all needs of Americans fell from 1.18 trillion pounds to 1.08 trillion pounds, even though the country's population increased by 55 million people. Al Gore similarly noted in 1999 that since 1949, while the economy tripled, the weight of goods produced did not change.
If you follow the references, or Google some more, you can find more.
The US is today consuming less energy than it was in 1970.
Edit: Perhaps the actual total energy usage is lower. However, the article doesn't give the impression that this is obviously true.
The more of a slog it become is stop-and-go traffic, the more people will have your (and my) sentiment that driving to work sucks.
You are right, that for individuals 5 minutes more or less is not making much of a difference in their choices---most of the time. People have thresholds where it gets too annoying, so they stop completely if they can at all (like you suggest).
Average over lots of people, those discrete thresholds look much smoother.
I don't know what the overall daily ride count is now. About 5 years ago it was something like 90K trips/day, and had been on a more or less linear growth path.
According to MUNI, cyclists peaked at 650/hour before the change. That's in contrast to 400 cars per hour. https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/article/Car-free-Market-...
It doesn't follow though
More people using bikes is not a direct consequence of less people using cars
It could be, but there is no cause-effect relationship
For example in Milan where I live more people are using bikes because many people moved in recently and owning a car is expensive here and the weather has improved since climate change started showing its effects
But they are people that weren't driving before, they used public transport
Most of them don't even hold a driving license
Maybe true in Milan, but not anywhere in the US. Driving is near imperative in all areas of the country, unfortunately even in big cities, meaning everyone who can get a license, does.
In other cities--and there are other cities that have better transit options than SF which is actually fairly poor--you can get by without a car. But Uber, Zipcar, rentals, etc. only take you so far for weekend activities and visiting the friends who probably don't live on transit lines. You can manage but you adjust activities accordingly. [ADDED: Also, lots of jobs are actually outside the city and you mostly need a car to get to them.]
FWIW, I know a couple who live in SF who don't own a car. But they make heavy use of Uber and car rentals of various types. Short-term rental and rideshares make not owning a car more practical for a certain class of urban dweller than it used to be. But not even having a license reduces your options, including both work and recreational options, a lot.
I use Zipcar maybe once a month. I rent a car overnight maybe once every 2 months. All in, I pay less than $1500/year on on transport. I don't have to worry about parking, parking tickets, broken windows, or street cleaning.
I lived in Brooklyn for about a decade, too, and yes, NYC has better public transport, it isn't close. And to some extent, transport does effect where I go regularly. But I don't consider this a bad thing.
Kids would change the equation, but I don't need those in my life, either.
There's no way I would want to feel restricted to a city especially somewhere that there are as many natural possibilities as the Bay Area.
Maybe short-term and standard car rentals would suffice but that starts adding overhead whenever you want to go somewhere.
Here in DC, the figure is something like 40% of residents not owning cars in a city with well above average transit options by U.S. standards. That leaves a lot of people driving and if you follow the local news there are perennially tons of complaints about any change which removes even a handful of parking spaces because so many people are used to driving being the only mode of transportation which is taken seriously.
Number of parking spaces means nothing without the number of residential units. Two lanes (one on each side) of street parking in a neighborhood that's all six apartment triple deckers is very different than two lanes of street parking in a neighborhood that's all single family homes.
Some of the most walk-able and bike-able places (at least in the US) still have street parking in their residential neighborhoods, there's just not much of it relative to the number of people so people use other options.
To me it's stunning how powerful that presumption is, that suburban teenagers will forgo the independence that a car would give them because they perceive it as a relic of an age when people didn't know better. It gives me a lot of hope that in the future there will be political support for more radical changes than we've seen up to now. I love where these kids' idea of normal is at. However, it also makes me afraid of the degree of political and cultural polarization we're headed towards.
If the car incentivises continued population of sparse suburbs, making them even more dependent on car travel, is it truly independence?
It's not just about owning a car. A lot of even white collar jobs depend on driving. (Think just about any sales job for example [that involves meeting with customers].) Leaving aside for a moment all the recreational and social activities I would have missed out over my life by not driving, I've had jobs where I absolutely needed to drive.
That what the whole planning process is for.
This is absolutely not true in the UK, and probably not in most major cities. The overwhelming proportion of cyclists here are adults, and many have decided to take up cycling after already going through the normal rite-of-passage of learning to drive.
Base on data from the national travel survey, it's estimated that 83% of cyclists hold a driving license in the UK[1]. Given that figure, an increase in cycling traffic will definitely cause a proportional decrease in motorised traffic.
My fiance is an adult and she doesn't have a driving license.
Because public transport allowed her to move without driving
I do not hold a driving license either, aged 29, but I am in the minority. I am also learning to drive this year, to stop burdening my friends and family members.
I have a driving license, I've been driving for 20 years, but I gave up on cars 3 years ago.
Now I use other means of transport, mainly the subway and my feet. I walk a lot, but I don't use a bike because
- I don't like biking when it rains and in Milan it rains a lot
- I don't mind the cars, but I avoid sharing the road with trams and their rails, and Milan has a lot of them
- I mostly go out at night and I think biking at night it's too dangerous, even if there were no cars around
- Milan is very flat, it makes it good for biking, but also for walking, which I prefer
There are a lot more bikes in Milan then in Rome, but the people that are biking to replace the car entirely are a small minority, they either live a few minutes away from their workplace, are students or use it as a way to do sports, not to commute
Finally, air quality is bad and biking make it much worse
One thing I noticed is electric scooters are having a boom because they are easier to drive, transport and are less messy (if you're a woman in a dress or a man in a suite biking can be very challenging)