With Free Bikes, Challenging Car Culture on Campus | Hacker News Reader

With Free Bikes, Challenging Car Culture on Campus

nytimes.com

11 pointsrobg15 comments

The nice thing about cars is that drivers of automobiles don't usually drive on the sidewalk at speeds up to 25mph in crowded areas while talking on the cellphone at the same time. Or if they did, they would at least get fined.

Yeah, some people on bikes are incredibly inconsiderate, but the bike isn't the problem. If more people rode bikes, the social norms about where to ride / not to ride would be better understood, and the social pressures would be clearer. This sort of thing also happened when cars where new, though then people actually got killed instead of just annoyed. See Clay McShane's _Down the Asphalt Path_ (http://books.google.com/books?id=hoFKI-yodUQC&pg=RA1-PA1...)

Similarly, people who don't know about how to ride bikes safely are far more likely to ride against traffic, weaving in and out of parking lanes and sidewalks, etc. Most people in the US have had no education about how to ride a bike in traffic safely, because riding bikes as transportation has never really been a mainstream thing. (Even two or three one-hour classes and showing people how to fix a flat tire would go a long way, I think.)

I agree with you! And I've seen less of the behavior I've mentioned; I'm just wondering if it's because bikers are starting to get ticketed, or if bikers have been in near-accidents and have become more careful. Colleges and large companies should definitely hold sessions on safety.

It's probably both happening in tandem -- it seems to be a gradual social change, in part due to rising gas prices. A noticeable percentage of college students have biked around for years, but it seems to have increased significantly over the last few years, and I see significantly more people biking around downtown Grand Rapids, MI in general.

(oops: when cares were new)

Bikes are over-rated as campus transport.

A large fraction, perhaps even most, trips are in the company of someone else. Often said someone does not have a bike. As a result, the combination is the slowest of both worlds - the bike has to be unlocked and locked at the ends of the trip and the distance is travelled at walking speed.

Note that the unlock/lock time exceeds the time saving from extra speed on short trips.

I need max. 15 seconds to unlock the bike and start riding it. You say you can't be 30s faster on a bike than someone travelling at walking speed, even for short distances? I guess you can't only if it is 30s walking distance.

As a rule of thumb, people travel 4-5x as fast on a bike as on foot. (Hills, ice, etc. complicate this, of course.)

Bikes are probably best suited to trips of about 1/4 - 10 miles, alone, with less than fifty pounds of cargo. (That covers more trips than many people realize.) Riding a bike three blocks is probably not worth the trouble, and riding fifty miles is (while quite possible) going to take a few hours.

Nah, he's saying that trips are usually made in the company of one or more persons, and that those persons are on foot. Thus the total trip time is composed of unlocking, travelling at a walking pace, then re-locking. This is true, in my experience, but isn't a very good argument against making bicycles available to everyone for free. (alternatively, if you're rolling in dough, try something like the Xtracycle which can carry passengers and cargo)

> This is true, in my experience, but isn't a very good argument against making bicycles available to everyone for free.

The majority of college students who walk between classes have bikes, so why would the availability of free bikes change their behavior?

> You say you can't be 30s faster on a bike than someone travelling at walking speed, even for short distances?

If you're more than 2-3x faster than pedestrians, you're a danger unless you're separated from them, and bicyclists are rarely separated enough on a college campus.

1mph is 264ft/minute. Reasonable walking speed is about 3mph, or over 750ft/minute. A safe bicyclist will cover that distance in about 20 sec, saving at most 10 sec.

Meanwhile, the walkers had a conversation.

And, since students have 10 minutes between classes, the time saving of faster transport doesn't buy them anything even if they're going 1,500ft..

That's why students who own bikes don't use them all that much. They're only useful to/from campus and for long-hauls.

Agreed, though the to/from campus trips are worth keeping in mind.

Also, bikes need more maneuvering space than pedestrians. Not as much as rollerbladers, though. (Don't get me started...)

There's a major incentive for the university that the article completely misses -- parking (spaces, security for lots, dealing with on-campus traffic jams, etc.) for the entire student body can be surprisingly expensive. I wonder how that compares over four years to the cost of one $480 bike. Also, if they're buying a bike for every student, they're probably paying quite a bit less than retail.

It gets damn cold in Maine in winter.

So wear a coat (and a scarf and gloves). If you're on a bike, your blood is pumping, and you're probably generating far more heat than the people sitting in cars waiting for the windshield to defrost.

I've biked through four or five Michigan winters so far. It's really not a big deal if you dress sensibly.

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