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Comment by richiebful1 | Hacker News Reader

This doesn't generalize to most cities though. In my Rust Belt city, the government has put a lot of effort into making cycling safer on the road. The people cycling from one neighborhood to the next are a diverse bunch. Kids are using cheap hand-me-down bikes to go to school. College kids are commuting to campus. Adults of all ages are riding to work at a service job or downtown office.

What it took was a focus on good quality bike lanes outside the affluent white neighborhoods, bike accessibility at transit stations/on busses, and expansion of bikeshare to poorer neighborhoods.

The rich lycra-wearing stereotype won't go away until we invest in equitable access to bike infrastructure.

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» What it took was a focus on good quality bike lanes outside the affluent white neighborhoods, bike accessibility at transit stations/on busses, and expansion of bikeshare to poorer neighborhoods.

I've never been to Chattanooga, TN but once I realized I can work from home I've been curious about owning a home somewhere with gigabit fiber but without ridiculously expensive real estate within commuting distance to a Costco or Sam's Club (so clearly not Jersey City, NJ or Longmont, CO).

What I noticed just looking at Google Maps Street View was that any home within my price range lacked a sidewalk. Apparently, only the wealthy people in Chattanooga, TN need sidewalks. How do we talk about bike lanes when places lack sidewalks?

TN is a tax haven state. You're not going to get polished municipal services and infrastructure.

Western New York has cheap housing and older, 150+ year old urbanization that doesn't suffer as much from 20th century shortsightedness.

What are some other tax haven states I should know about?

Alaska, Florida, Nevada, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Washington, New Hampshire, and Wyoming

How are sidewalks "polish"?

In most of the world, they're the default thing - before a roadway suitable for cars, before piped water, before sewers, before electricity.

Because where you gonna walk to? Your gonna walk 5 miles to Target and back?

That'd why sidewalks is polish. Most sidewalks I see outside of tight downtowns are useless and barely used, and they aren't free to build and they don't generate anything if no one uses them...

I've been to and through Chattanooga a bunch of times. It is a city where you almost definitely need a car for basic subsistence.

The poor areas are super poor and semi-distant from goods and services. Biking somewhere from the poor areas, unless you have time and energy to spare, is going to be a big undertaking most of the time, not even accounting for the hills.

They are not a default thing anywhere in America that developed after WW2. Most car centric places dispense with them as an "unnecessary" cost or, where they do exist, they're disconnected decoration with limited utility.

riding a bike in Chattanooga takes some muscle! Sidewalks are pretty optional in most of the south east, even in "wealthy" areas.

Longmonts costco is in superior, not too far. Its pretty nice.

I've lived in Chattanooga long enough to call it home (decade+). First thing about Chattanooga is, it's built on the backbone of the Interstate system, in the valley between some mountains. It's a bigtime car city. Anyone outside our immediate downtown has to hop the highway to even get here, or brave treacherous mountain roads (our W Road is even a tiny bit famous... W not being a compass point, but a shape).

As you've noticed on Google, our downtown and close-lying (expensive) neighborhoods have sidewalks and bike lanes aplenty. They're fantastic. But there's no similar facilities in older, poorer, and outlying neighborhoods (many of which were simply suburbs until the city crept in). Nor any practical connection between neighborhoods for foot+pedal traffic.

But our internet's great.

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