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Comment by mattmaroon | Hacker News Reader

Umm no they’re not. And the ones that are just have the opposite problem half the year. Very few cities are in a climate where all but the most hardcore people will want to bike more than half the time.

Go down the list of American cities by population. NYC, Chicago, Philly, etc. Not biking in the cold months. Megacities in Texas, Cali, Florida, AZ: not biking in hot months.

This might work for Honolulu or San Diego and that’s about it, even if you completely disregard the 50% of the population that couldn’t ride a bike in any weather due to being old, injured, obese, etc.

It’s preposterous to think this is an actual solution.

Getting rid of cars necessitates some other motorized form of transport from which you can’t easily fall and get injured.

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I lived for a couple of years in Amsterdam. Cycled fine in the rain, snow or sunshine. Then again, the infra was amazing and supportive. Can’t speak for the cities you mention though but in Phoenix where I live now, cycling in Summer is impossible.

It's worth noting that the nearby city of Tucson is a cycling mecca for pros during the offseason and many avid cyclists continue riding throughout summer. If Phoenix were better designed for the climate it's in (e.g. dense, narrow streets between high thermal mass buildings and lots of shade), the summers would be far less intense.

How many days does it snow and how much?

Compare https://www.weather-atlas.com/en/netherlands/amsterdam-clima... and https://www.weather-atlas.com/en/illinois-usa/chicago-climat...

If you get less than an inch of snow a month and it doesn't stay long enough to go through thawing and freezing cycles, then bike infrastructure can handle it reasonably well. If you get a foot of snow at times and the snow you get in November hasn't melted by March, then bike infrastructure and the safety of riding bikes on segments of road that are difficult to plow, biking in the winter may be more problematic.

I'd suggest a trip up to Minneapolis, Madison, or Chicago in January and consider how bikeable those areas are and if it would be reasonable to do a commute.

(And as an aside, I don't consider those areas to be AI drivable in the winter either)

Deeply freezing temperatures, ice, snow, all of those are completely ridable on bicycles, but you have to ride with very fat tires, often called "fatbikes"[0]. You can ride those bicycles in just about anything; I've ridden them across frozen lakes and up chunks of frozen glacier in the dead of the Alaskan winter, so cold roads don't sound particularly scary. If you want to have a single bike that you can ride in any weather very easily, an electric "fatbike"[1] makes for a super versatile single-person car replacement.

[0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fatbike

[1] - https://www.radpowerbikes.com/products/radrover-plus-electri...

Winter cycling is really not anything like as hardcore as people imagine it to be, especially in the pretty mild winter cities you mention of NYC and Philly. NotJustBikes has a great episode featuring Oulu Finland which has harsh winters but still has a way higher modeshare of cycling in the Winter than cities in North America do in the Summer https://youtu.be/Uhx-26GfCBU

With well maintained/shoveled/prioritized bike infrastructure, cycling in the Winter is actually quite pleasant and no big deal at all. There's an argument if we're talking about Winnipeg or Saskatoon, for the couple of months that it goes down to -30 celsius, a lot of people might call it quits, but those extreme temperatures are only around for 2 months, not the whole Winter.

Hallelujah.

I wish there were a lot more good biking infra. in the US. But the fact of the matter is that a lot of these "bikes can take over the future" are total pipe dreams if you just try to ignore the fact that they are bad modes of transportation for a lot of people a lot of the time.

Austin TX has made huge strides in the past few years making bikes a better option - a ton more bike lanes, more and more of those are protected, and related options like tons of electric scooters and MetroBike bike share. Still, the city is fundamentally laid out for car transportation, and so far this year it has hit 100F on 68 days.

Bikes may be a good addition, but the idea they can totally replace cars in a lot of American cities is ludicrous.

Literally nobody is saying that bikes can "totally replace cars" in ANY American city. That is such a straw man argument. The mode share for cycling in Austin is something like 1%. We are only saying that a lot more trips could be done by bike. Even if we multiplied the number of people cycling by 10 it would still be a small portion of the number of people driving.

I think it's a fallacy to just say that bikes are bad modes of transportation for a lot of people a lot of the time, based on experience in one location.

Trains won't work without rails, airplanes don't work without airports, ships won't sail without water, cars don't work quite so well without roads (4WD notwithstanding), and bicycles are a lot less useful without bicycle paths.

Put in the relevant infrastructure, and many kinds of transport become very good modes of transportation for a lot of people a lot of the time.

Biking in Austin around the lake is totally fine weather wise. Keep your commutes to the mornings and use an eBike at a leisurely pace when it’s peak summer. Come Fall, the weather is absolute bliss for riding!

Minneapolis famously has a strong year-round cycling culture, despite being one of the coldest and snowiest cities in the US. It's all about the infrastructure (e.g., good paths) that's proactively maintained (e.g., clearing snow quickly).

In the meantime cities in Finland experience multiple inches of snow a day and still manage to have high cycling numbers during Winter.

The number one predictor of cycling participation is decent infrastructure that is maintained. Hills, winter, rain are all a distant third place to having decent infrastructure and then maintaining that infrastructure. Cycle paths regularly plowed? High cycling activity. No cycling infrastructure and a habit of plowing snow onto the sidewalk? No cycling activity.

Make it safe to ride, people will ride.

Lowest temperature in NYC last year was 15F. Its cold, but it's not that cold. Tons of people still bike in winter. And if they don't, we have trains and busses. The nice part about orientating transit around bikes is that people tend to live reasonable distances from the places they need to go.

> Umm no they’re not. And the ones that are just have the opposite problem half the year. Very few cities are in a climate where all but the most hardcore people will want to bike more than half the time.

I am surprised that you city NYC as an example. Especially in cities as dense as New York, pretty much every car owned by a private individual represents a policy failure. With a car ownership in NYC of ~45% [0] these are quite a few failures. Even with temperatures like in Chicago or Los Angeles, riding a bike would be very well possible for large parts of the year, regardless of heat or freeing temps, as long as the infrastructure is there.

People tend to over-estimate the actual need for their car incredibly. Even in the US, probably the most car-dependent place in the world (so I have been told), 60% of vehicle trips are less than 6 miles (9.6km) [1], that is very well within (e)biking distance. In dense urban centers the average trip length is likely even shorter, thus an even better fit for biking. But even in sprawling cities or suburbs, car dependency could likely be dramatically reduced with relatively little investment.

Everybody here keeps talking about bikes (so do I), but there is more to it. People completely ignore that especially in cities, space is at a premium. So usually the most efficient form of transportation should win, but that did not happen in most of the western world. Instead, everybody built rows like crazy. As a matter of fact, bringing people out of their cars and onto bikes or public transit, you free up a whole lot of space in crowded cities. That would be a very good opportunity to invest in improving transit, creating living spaces, public spaces or for businesses to expand.

> Getting rid of cars necessitates some other motorized form of transport from which you can’t easily fall and get injured.

Absolutely true, cities should be accessible regardless of age or disability. Current city designs aren't really doing well in that regard. As I pointed out, removing vehicles that shouldn't be in cities frees a lot of space for vehicles that must be there. Also, good that you mention obesity considering city design and thus car-dependency has been linked to an increased risk of obesity for years now [2].

But a necessary addition to the falling/injury statement: if you have proper infrastructure in place (enough capacity, safe separation from car traffic, continuous pathways) the risk of getting injured while cycling can be significantly lowered compared to the status quo.

[0] https://edc.nyc/article/new-yorkers-and-their-cars [1] https://www.energy.gov/eere/vehicles/articles/fotw-1042-augu... [2] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/15261894/

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