Cyclists now outnumber motorists in City of London
forbes.com
forbes.com
Surprisingly, it hasn't been that hard (my GF kept her car, and I have a car-sharing subscription):
Pros:
- Immediately stopped having insomnia. Better feel overall;
- about €300/month in additional disposable income. That's basically a free lunch everyday!
- significantly faster if parking is taken into account for most trips. The bike is faster for any < 10 km / 7 mi trip;
- do not have to worry about car maintenance, parking tickets or theft;
- you will not kill someone if you ride after a night drinking;
- amazing when the weather is great;
- (almost) no emission.
Cons:
- might be impossible depending on work or children;
- weather might make the ride unpleasant;
- somewhat dangerous when the infrastructure is lacking.
I'm pretty sure I'll never own a car, unless absolutely required by work. Improving the infra and the car-sharing network would be awesome.
(other than yourself)
https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/reported-road-casua...
> Chart 4 shows that, again, in terms of absolute numbers, cars are the vehicle type most often involved in fatal collisions when others are killed, followed by HGVs and Light Goods Vehicles (LGVs). Very few other road users are killed in collisions with pedal cyclists or pedestrians (5 and 6 respectively in 2021).
As a cyclist I avoid pavements, the are very seldom the best route anyways. I do understand the fear that make them seem like the best options.
If you run over a child on a bicycle, most cyclists don't have insurance, and there is a reasonable chance you'll have to sell your house to pay compensation to a child who is now in a wheelchair for life.
Even if you assume the the risks outlined in your comment as relatively high likelihood (which I don't), it still makes 0 sense to think it's anywhere near as serious as driving drunk.
Should it be illegal for people to walk around drunk as well?
We live with 1 child and no car and it's been working fine thus far. You have to be careful about where you live and work though, but I'd say the added quality of life of living car-free (in a car-free city) is all worth it.
What exactly are you interested in, about life such cities? I live in Amsterdam, haven't owned a car for over a decade (which doesn't mean that I never drive one), and haven't really missed it (even with a primary school aged child).
As a resident you get a 90% discount on the congestion charge, so driving it will cost you £1.50 per day. I'm not quite sure whether that applies to parked cars as well.
This system discourages schemes that could reduce car ownership, like car sharing, car rentals, etc, because residential parking permits must be linked to a particular plate number.
[1] It's true that some newer housing developments have been approved on a "no parking" basis, which means if you live in that building you can't apply for a parking permit. But these developments are still the exception, not the rule.
This is solved by better bike infrastructure, and by holding drivers accountable for the accidents. The more people cycle, the safer it becomes.
- Planning routes that avoid particularly risky roads or junctions and take advantage of separated bike lanes where possible. This is trivial in a city as there's hundreds of possible routes between two places.
- A cargo bike itself is a much larger and more visible presence on the road than a regular bike. That combined with the visible children on board usually means motorists do a better job of staying clear than they do when I'm on a regular bike.
- Staying well clear of HGVs in ALL circumstances. Once you start cycling in a way where you treat any HGV as imminent death on wheels, you notice how many potentially dangerous situations you avoid.
More generally, I find cycling in London feels quite safe. This is because drivers in London are mostly used to cyclists and generally act appropriately around them. Also traffic speeds are generally 20mph or less.
They display two very distinct and easy to notice behaviour:
1. They deny bike presence on the road: They refuse to yield, don’t check their mirror, and run them over as if the bike is not there. When you point out the discrepancy, they just affirm that cyclists have to yield to more important traffic no matter what the condition.
Another symptom of that is drivers thinking that bikes should not be on the road and harassing them with honks, and revving their engine. When they pass them, or on-line, they loudly claim that bikes are not allowed on the road or have a (non-existent) obligation to move away of a far more important car drivers threatens them. In that process, they speed (which is illegal), pass dangerously (also illegal) and threaten people with bodily harm (again, illegal). Retraining, license ban and jail sentences are easy ways to get dangerous people like that to not put people’s lives in danger.
A third symptom is that they claim that “no one” is using bike infrastructure (in spite of evidence like what we see in London) because they refuse to see it. They see no issue with routinely parking on bike lanes or blocking bike-only passages. This complete denial of another humanity is hard to imagine if you haven’t witnessed it, but it’s very common.
2. They have a cop-out of thinking that bikes are “dangerous” because they project their own dangerous and unhealthy driving habits as “normal” and impossible to modify——denying that those habits mean they break the law in several ways. Crash don’t just happen: drivers choose to not pay attention. Actually supportive drivers are not pretending they care: they are enthusiastic about cycling because when they are around bikes, drivers don’t honk, threaten or put cyclists’ lives in danger. And they can’t imagine that anyone would.
It’s very simple for cyclists to be safe: drivers should look at them and thing “This is a human, going from somewhere to somewhere else, like me. I should not kill them.” If they don’t, the cyclist is not the one in danger: the driver is.
Somewhat more serious: Especially here in Germany there is a strong incentive to give cars as a job benefit instead of a pay rises as there is less social insurance to be paid. Thus there is a strong motivation for anybody in a well paying job to get a car. This directly leads to that class divide.
The cats have servants.
It depends pretty heavily on family situations and all
It's interesting you mention that. When I took up cycling to work in Manchester, I started struggling to fall fully asleep because I'd have short pseudo-dreams about the POV of cycling on wet, dark, busy roads & jerk awake, scared that I was falling asleep at the handlebars.
As the Dutch like to say: there is no such thing as bad cycling weather, only bad cycling clothes.
I would strongly recommond a pair of water/wind proof trousers to go over your regular trousers, if you don't already have some. This has lead to a much more pleasant riding experience, especially in winter. They aren't very practical on a regular bike as they make you uncomfortably hot, but on an e-bike, it's much less of a worry.
It’s not just Oulu, though: any city with students in the North has a lot of bikes, Umeå in Sweden has 40k students almost all on bikes; Vaasa (opposite Umeå, in Finland) also has a lot of bikes. Uppsala, Stockholm, Malmö, Göteborg, Eppo, all have a lot of bikes—and just as many in winter and summer.
How do Europeans keep ice off bike lanes? Salt?
Interestingly Oulu bike roads clearing contract states the company doing the snowplowing can do inspections only on bicycles, not cars :)
Seattle infamously tried the hard packed snow strategy about a decade ago, and it turned it into a dangerous (hilly) ice rink
Salt only works until ten below zero. After that it only makes things worse.
When it works the result can be magical if combined with sweeping. Trashes the drivetrain real bad though.
There's a nice big picture how Oulu does it, halfway down the article.
Convenience is relative. Sure, cycling in winter requires a good pair of mittens, and a warm hat, but all in all, it seems that a lot of people prefer it in Oulu over driving.
And the thing here is that it’s not the weather that’s stopping people from cycling. It’s shitty maintenance of the cycling network. Slush and ice, being forced into the same space as cars.
And that’s the newsworthy part - how does Oulu manage to maintain a cycling network in winter where most other cities fail. The answers include things such as priorities, dedication, investment. Oulu dedicates resources to the problem. Most towns don’t because “no one cycles in winter” - which then becomes a self-reinforcing prophecy.
Easy to say in a country famously flat, small, and with a relatively narrow weather window. I welcome any Dutch person to attempt a 15+km commute during a rocky mountain winter. I know of driveways in US/Canada with more vertical than any Dutch commute.
Also in the US the max ebike power is 850W! More than enough to carry you up the steepest hills.
Having cycled on some of those windy days, it was more challenging than most of the hilly cities I've lived in.
You do tend to warm up when riding a bike (pedal assist bikes might take longer). For me the issue is fingers, but with good gloves and a less than 45 minutes ride for me it was be ok. Ice and wind are issues too. But taking it slow and my glasses help a bit. The snow when plowed makes the roads narrower which can be an issue.
I always wondered why there were so many outdoor stores in the City.
There are places with wintry weather that are good for biking! Oulu comes to mind
https://www.bbc.com/news/av/world-europe-64354089
And as explored in this video, if the weather is too bad to bike safely in, it's probably too bad to drive safely in. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kFkI3eglT1M
Ya, well one still has to get to work. "Safe driving" is slow but unless the roads are actually closed then most of us still have to get to work.
I am sceptical of this assertion. For starters, if you have poor traction in a car you can always slow down, and the risk you face is sliding. In a bike, you need to have a minimum speed to actually bike, otherwise you can't stay upright. And your failure case is no longer sliding, but it's toppling over.
To say nothing of what happens if you throw wind into the mix.
A road bike tire is inflated to 80-120psi which give an aquaplaning speed of about 92mph.
A hybrid tire is inflated to 40-70psi, which gives an aquaplaning speed of about 65mph.
Bikes aren't know for traveling above 60mph, so wet roads don't pose much of a problem for bikes. Their tire pressure is so high compared to their normal speeds, that an unassisted human would really struggle to make a bike aquaplane. Additionally bikes can easily be ridden stably at walking speed. Unless you're riding on ice, going slower simply doesn't pose a problem.
As a result slipping on bike, because you can't cycle slow enough, just isn't a concern. In the only situations where it might be a problem, simply walking would be challenging, and driving would be idiotic.
Wet ice is especially dangerous because it can be pretty much invisible and you can transition directly from normal road surface to essentialy ZERO steering ability (and immediate crash if you initiate a turn or anything). There is pretty much no avoiding occasional crashes from this, the only way is to leave the bike at home when conditions are wet and close to freezing.
My point is that these issues have a bigger impact on the safety of the bike rider than on the car driver.
Your car on the other hand, you lose control of that, and bystanders are in real trouble. Not to mention there’s plenty of incidents everyday of people loosing control of their car because they’re not driving to the condition (presumably because the big metal box makes them feel much safer than they should) and killing themselves and others.
Much less likely that a bike rider is going to ignore the prevailing conditions and injure themselves or others, and if they do, the impact is substantially lower. Adding more mass and speed to an out of control situation never improves the outcomes.
Yes, including sliding over my child who is riding her bike to school, and killing her.
"your failure case is no longer sliding, but it's toppling over."
In which case the primary injury will be to your dignity.
I just came flying off my bike two months ago after hitting some nasty patch of ice.
Broken hand, a good dent in my helmet, many bruises. If it wasn't for the helmet, I might have been taken away in an ambulance.
I've been cycling regularly for 12 years, so this isn't some noob error.
While the fall on the bike hurt me more, I can easily see how much more dangerous the situation in my car was. Blind luck saved me (and the car in front) that day.
I have managed to skid out once and that was with studded tires.
And it rains, a lot. Which is fine if it’s vertical and you have a rain coat, but Dutch people made windmills, the Netherlands and horizontal rain. No coat can protect you from that.
The weather band is indeed narrow, but half of that band is terrible.
The quick takeaways are that there are cities in Finland that are colder than any Canadian city where 50% of the kids rides bikes to school. Also, a test project in Montreal gave a bike path a dedicated snow removal budget and ridership was up 30% in one year.
The electric cargo bike works well there - the hills make electric an absolute necessity, but once you've done that it works very well.
The Dutch also like to drive, with 588 cars per 1000 people, higher than Denmark, Ireland, Sweden etc, and more miles per person than France, Spain, Italy, Poland, and 14% higher than the EU average
What kind of cycling clothes will mitigate a 40 C / 70% humidity afternoon in Memphis?
Wet snow being blown into the face? Compared to 20°C inside a car, commuting between two underground garages? That's going to be a hard to sell.
In the summer bike is fun, but from November, where I live it's just masochism.
My workspace is also fairly well located so that also helps.
Bicycle wheels are unfortunately easily bent by kicks from the side.
>I bought a recently released angle grinder-resistant lock [1]....
We still lock it with a chain but I guess that is a good deterrent as there is always a nicer bike that looks more worth the effort on the same rack.
The last bike I had stolen was from an underground bike store, behind two armoured locked doors and locked to a permanent bike-rack embedded in concrete. Thieves didn't cut a single lock, instead they cut all the bike-racks and emptied the place.
I'm skeptical of any bike lock's security that is not reviewed by LPL.
And if you don’t need it to get to work you don’t need a car in the first place, so I wouldnt see a point in comparing.
Even on a city free of private cars, you’d still share the road with pedestrians, other cyclists, and public transportation.
And even if you really don’t hurt someone else, it’s terribly hard on a bus driver if they kill someone, even when it wasn’t their fault (my wife saw this first hand when someone committed suicide by throwing themselves under a bus).
So no, if you drink, just walk, take public transportation, or get someone else to take you home, but don’t ride a bike.
(edit: typos)
Walking: 5 km/h * 70kg = 97 kgm/s
e-bike: 20 km/h * 90 kg = 500 kgm/s
car: 50 km/h * 2000kg = 28,000 kgm/s
Finally, in case of an inelastic problem (likely with cars, not so likely with bikes or people), you also need to consider the energy loss during momentum transfer. Once again, this energy will become heat (= do damage), so it adds to the aforementioned increase in kinetic energy when we're interested in how much damage will be done.
Walking: 5 km/h * 70kg => 875 (although this is a very slow estimate for a walker) (please ignore the non-canonical units)
e-bike: 20 km/h * 90 kg => 18,000 (I think your estimate for ebike mass might be on the low side at 20kg, but whatever)
car: 50 km/h * 2000kg => 2,500,000 (and that's a fairly low speed for cars! Drunk drivers often drive faster than is wise.)
Everything else is a rounding error compared to the energy of a car.
Walking: 6kph, 70kg => 100J (0.02% of car)
Analog bike: 18kph, 80kg => 2kJ (0.36% of car)
E-bike: 25kph, 100kg => 4.6kJ (0.82% of car)
Car: 50kph, 2000kg => 560kJ (100% of car)
Car, 64 kph => 164% of car at 50 kph
Car, 110 kph => 480% of car at 50 kph
More details: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35233887
In the context of this thread (a walker who’s drunk), I don’t think it’s very slow.
Also, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Preferred_walking_speed:
“The preferred walking speed is the speed at which humans or animals choose to walk. Many people tend to walk at about 1.42 metres per second (5.1 km/h; 3.2 mph; 4.7 ft/s).”
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S209575641...:
“The results show teenagers walk at an average speed of 1.45 m/s, young adults walk at an average speed of 1.55 m/s, middle age pedestrians walk at a speed of 1.45 m/s, older pedestrians walk at speed of 1.09 m/s, and elderly or physically disabled pedestrians walk at a speed of 1.04 m/s.”
5km/hour is about 1.4m/s; the fastest of these speeds is 5.6 km/hour.
With great power comes great responsibility. Whether you take that perspective in Joules, Watts, Newtons, kg.m/s, the conclusions are roughly the same. Drivers needs to be hundreds of times more responsible than cyclists or walkers.
From a harm reduction perspective, Drunk Driving -> Drunk Bicycling feels like it reduces the capacity for damage roughly proportionally to Drunk Bicycling -> Drunk Walking. At a critical level, the speeds you can comfortably achieve are reduced at each step, thereby increasing the amount of reaction time available to avoid an incident, reducing the ramifications of an error, and reducing the amount of damage your body has the capacity to do (by nature of the amount of kinetic energy you are attempting to control).
I don't think you got the memo where everyone seems to think getting blind drunk and then getting on an electric scooter is totally ok "in Sweden".
I've had a few near-misses myself with crazy drunk riders on pedestrian streets in central Stockholm; I once interviewed a job-candidate with a cut-up face who laughingly told us he'd crashed a scooter with two(!) friends on the back after a drink night; a friend of mine smashed their hip after a night drinking and then jumping on a scooter.
The rules may be there. The actual reality is different.
But the "folk wisdom" of drivers completely ignores that threshold and only considers the next stage relevant (BAC 0.5+, used to be 0.8) and this only applies to motor vehicles. For cyclists, the next threshold does not happen before BAC 1.6. I suppose that wouldn't exactly be allowed in the UK either?
Also, you might kill yourself by drunk cycling. And that is likely to have a huge effect on lots of people you care about.
It's just a bad idea all round...
Drinking alone is a bad idea all around.
Not recommended, but cycling is a very substantially less-worse choice, absent getting another ride.
Absolutely. I cannot believe people are actually equivocating on this. A drunk driver is hundreds of times more dangerous than a drunk cyclist, it's a categorical difference.
Have I crashed my bike at the bottom of a hill while drunk? Yes, yes I have.
Injuring yourself due to alcohol is bad. Hurting others is inexcusable.
We a friend do this, they didn't hurt anyone but themselves, and not too badly. And they did hit their head when they fell off , but were wearing a helmet (thus becoming a advocate for helmets..). Still pretty scraped up.
There was no public transport in the area. I'd rather have them getting to rehab on a bike than not going at all.
I live in a student city in the Netherlands (Groningen), where most students go out on the town by bike. It's really not much more dangerous than walking drunk. And it's very much preferable to driving drunk.
Thousands of students park their bikes in the city's central underground bike parking spots every weekend. I have never heard of someone dying because biking drunk. The biggest danger for any bike, drunk or not, remains the car. This is also reflected in the enforcement of laws by the police. Although driving drunk, and being drunk in public is not allowed, fining cyclists for this is rarely enforced. Partially because the consequences are not too bad, and partially to make sure people don't drive home drunk instead to avoid a fine.
According to the Dutch central bureau of statistics in 2021, out of all deaths of cyclists 34% are due to losing consciousness, getting a foot stuck in the wheels, making a wrong movement, or due to bad road conditions and slipperiness. Out of this 34%, 72 % is over the age of 70. https://www.cbs.nl/nl-nl/nieuws/2022/37/meer-fietsdoden-na-e...
It's still illegal in the Netherlands to bike drunk. I'm sure this would be aggressively enforced in cities like Groningen if statistically there were major safety issues Thursdays and Friday nights with drunk cyclists, but this is not the case.
Not to say that your friend shouldn't have walked instead though. Drunkness is also a sliding scale. Luckily with cyclists the chances are way lower of murdering others.
I'm drunk biking and thought about if I should stop.
But I have never hear about anyone having an accident related to drunk biking. In theory I could run head first into oncoming biker. But I never felt being that drunk in a way that would lose control. That would also make it illegal where I live.
While significantly less of a hassle than car maintenance, if you are riding a bike daily, you do now need to consider bike maintenance. And theft remains an issue in many cities for bikes as well.
I've never owned a car, but the cost of replacing a lost bike (mine cost around £600) plus its maintenance (let's say £200 per year to be generous) sounds cheaper than what I'd pay for car insurance, petrol, and maintenance per year in UK/Europe. I also live in London where public transportation, even with its aging infrastructure, is wonderful.
I'd definitely get a car if I was living outside of a big relatively city, especially if it isn't planned for walking and cycling.
I'll note that getting rid of a lot of cars would be nice for safety and pollution reasons, but many proponents underestimate how difficult the kid situation becomes, especially after having more than one. People tend to move their families to the suburbs for a reason.
The newer style of cargo bikes can for many families replace a car. Have two kids seated in the trunk of the bike and drop them off at kindergarten, then continue biking to work and pick them up on the way home.
Those are a bit on the pricier side, though. Still cheap compared to a car, but people often look at them as something "extravagant" or "in addition" to a car. But they can be a replacement for most car use, and then just rent a car for other more seldom occasions.
And to avoid the initial big purchase, not even sure if it's something for you, there's a startup where I live ( https://whee.no/ ) where you also can rent the bike on a monthly basis. Really recommended to see if it suits your lifestyle.
Lastly, I also think this kind of easier movement will change how people live. You can no longer expect to move out of the city and still get a short way to everything by using your car, making life miserable for everyone else (noise, danger, pollution, too much asphalt). So I think we will see a shift in where people settle, where they will no longer base their lives around owning multiple cars.
Okay that being said… our cargo bike has replaced 90% of our “last mile” driving here in the city. We take the kids to school on it, we do grocery runs, we take it to the park, out to dinner, just about anywhere we can. In the first two years we’ve put at least 2k miles on it.
When we first bought it, I thought “okay when my wife rides the ebike with kids, I’ll just ride behind on my road bike.”
It took all but a week for us to go buy a second ebike because of how failed my idea was. The guy at the bike shop, same that we bought the cargo bike from, laughed and said that happened all the time.
While we have always been big into bikes, we’re on another level now. I always feel sorry for the poor suckers at the park who ask me how we like the bike who have to listen to me rave about it for 20 minutes when a “we love it” probably would have been enough.
I value my time and safety, so I live inner city, near a park and river I can ride to almost anywhere along.
Side streets and alleys are great - too slow for cars, but you're probably cycling at 10-15 mph, which is fine. Parks can be great - a shortcut with no cars and beautiful scenery, while the cars have to go the long way. Campuses, plazas, etc. etc. Even sidewalks when empty or nearly-empty can work to bypass traffic or go the 'wrong' way.[0]
[0] Second to riding, cyclists love to lecture others on how to ride. And a favorite outlet for their obsession is sidewalks. They don't discuss or consider the reasons or merits, they just have found an easy outlet for self-righteousness and repeat the same phrases over and over. Just remember that sidewalks are for pedestrians first; you are a visitor. Give them the right of way always, let them know when you're behind them (e.g., 'on your left!'), and give them plenty of space (trying walking when a bike buzzes past in either direction - from behind, you can't even hear it coming). Defer to their safety, real and perceived. It's easy. No problems at all IME, except self-righteous people over-excited at an opportunity to lecture someone.
Not if real estate in cities remains as expensive as it is now. That's one of the main reasons why so many people move out and choose to spend so much time commuting.
Cars are just a means to an end, which is not living in a one-bedroom apartment as a family.
I was priced out of the city where I grew up, so going somewhere more expensive is out of the question.
I posted this after being told it would take me six months to get my 3 year old to a pediatrician. https://np.reddit.com/r/ireland/comments/11luo2b/how_can_i_s... - when she stopped growing.
This country is unacceptably bad. I look forward to leaving.
These 2 things are not the same.
If I had my choice, I'd rather ride horses every day.
If I'm gonna move slowly, might as well do it in style.
I live in a city despite working remotely since the pandemic started, not because of proximity to the offices I might have to go back to, but rather because I can walk a block to buy groceries. I know people that live <.5 mile away from a Safeway in the peninsula that drive there because the streets are not very pedestrian or cyclist friendly.
What's different now is ebikes/related which allows those three minutes to be done via bike. Dean Kamen claimed that cities would be redesigned around the Segway. He was too early, and only half right, but I think his claim was more prescient than we give him credit for. Ebikes, as we're hearing about here in London, really are enabling a new kind of city design that takes advantage of this semi-new technology.
I think the best way to judge the quality of schools by the opportunities the student's have as a result of going through the schools. The Westford, Newton, Wellesley schools are for winners of the birth lottery. Leominster, Townsend, Athol are for us birth lottery losers.
How much of that is the quality of the schools and how much of that is just richer parents who can/will pick up the slack in the event that the school system doesn't do the job as well as they want it done?
If stats on median and per capita income are to be believed then the kid from Wellsley has a huge leg up on the kid from Athol even if you assume they get the same education.
Now, I'll concede that most cities in the US aren't designed this way. I'll go further and say that most cities in the US lack the density to deserve being called cities, they're just large swaths of adjacent suburbia with a tiny downtown district that most people drive to in order to access, which has huge implications on traffic and parking.
What recent changes in society has enabled us to see is just how much we were sold a crock of shit while on our way to buying 5-bedroom McMansions with expansive yards for hosting dinner parties. If the cost is a one hour each way commute, people are starting to see it's not actually worth it.
So I agree/you're right - real estate prices have to fall dramatically in order for things to be accessible to the non-rich households who aren't on dual tech worker salaries, and who can't afford a reasonably sized (2+ bedroom) urban apartment. But for better or worse, HN skews affluent, so there are undoubtedly readers here able to afford a 4-bedroom apartment in one of the nicer neighborhoods of San Francisco where you'd want to raise a family. Pretending otherwise does no body any favors. The only question is how do we get from where we are today, which is that it's unaffordable to all but the upper-middle and upper class, to a place where is affordable on a single wage earners salary? The only answer to that is to build more housing. Stopgap measures like rent control don't work. It may be anathema to some, but part of that may include the government stepping in to make that happen.
Ebikes allow us to get from here to there, as an ebike allows a slightly more sprawling city design, due to the added range enabled by an ebike vs walking+non-existent public transportation, which means we can get a lot of mileage by repainting and modifying existing roads to add bike-safe infrastructure without ripping out and replacing buildings, which is basically impossible.
Unfortunately even commie blocks nowadays are either becoming too expensive or get "densified" - new blocks are built in between them, often without much of a plan.
This appears to be due to induced demand - especially now that so many apartments are bought as investments and never rented out.
This bothers me because I'm in the market for an apartment and it's becoming a race against time due to rising prices.
> This appears to be due to induced demand - especially now that so many apartments are bought as investments and never rented out.
This is always the question. If even half of them are getting rented out, then at least new units are adding to the market and helping to battle rent... but it seems like governments are so crippled in their ability to know for certain how many people live in how many units.
Sadly, I don't think this will last if current trends continue. The town next to mine has a ton of duplexes but it's all zoned single-family now, so you couldn't build those today if you had to.
Real estate in cities being expensive is evidence that people really want to live in environments like that.
Will be interesting to see if other municipalities try to build similar housing and work environments (more walkable, less parking lots) to attract the people looking for a city life style.
Conventional UAS-attached car seats are just too bulky and troublesome to be installing and uninstalling all the time in cars you only rent for a few hours at a time.
But yeah, if your kid is too small, it's a hassle to to carry around that bulky infant seat.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pqQSwQLDIK8
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ynwMN3Z9Og8
In Amsterdam if we see adult cyclists with a helmet we'd guess it's probably a tourist or new expat. For children most parents only bother with helmets until they're six years or so.
(Although he does still say kids should wear them).
If you can go slower like a Dutch commuter, then you can also ride like them, using a step-through frame and a lower saddle. That keeps your center of gravity down and allows scooting starts. All of this adds up to a substantially smaller risk of going head-first in a fall.
Or relatively, you live in a suburban bubble? Different lifestyles, different modes of transport.
We love our farmers. Keep the fields going. But this business with allocating half-acre lots per 4 people (lots which are empty for literally 1/3 of the day) has got to end, or else local utilities should stop servicing those far-flung places. You want to be without the burdens of living in a society -- fine! Figure out water and power for yourself. It's easier than ever and there's still federal- and state-level rebate programs for renewables.
So many people don't seem to realize that without suburbs you don't have farms.
Suburbs and farms produce all the things that cities rely on. You don't see heavy industry in the middle of a city.
So we actually wanted to do your plan then cities should cough up way more money than they currently do.
This strikes me as a bizarre take. What do you consider a "suburb"?
Industrial zones are also a completely different category entirely.
Living in Germany, most German cities do not have anything that is comparable to a U.S. "suburb". Building codes demand a quite high density, even for single family homes for new developments and older developments have the tendency to get denser as the demand for housing in a city rises.
German planning law specifically aims to concentrate development as much as possible, to limit encroachment on agricultural lands and nature. Doesn't always work out, but we have very little of the "urban sprawl" that is so characteristic of U.S. urban planning.
A farm in Germany is how far of a drive from the nearest city?
In the US you could drive 10 hours from a farm to get to the nearest large city. Suburbs and tiny cities are what farms need to survive.
Hmmmmm. And that labor does?
Please think about this a big more - cities do not have industry or agriculture in them. They need those suburbs to provide that. You can't just dismiss it as "cheap labor" - what exactly do you plan to eat or buy?
https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/suburbia - "the outer parts of a town, where there are houses, but no large shops, places of work, or places of entertainment"
And those business are closer to the rural areas than the cities are.
And also, there aren't really any places with just houses and no places of work, that doesn't really exist.
this is exactly what suburbs are.
You live there, nothing else. You wake up then you drive to work somewhere else
The "suburbs" are generally Single Family Home (SFH) zoned areas (the name of the zone differs per-city) defined by a requirement to have a single dwelling, a large minimum lot size, large setbacks, and low maximum FARs. Nothing mandates that SFH zones need to be adjacent to agricultural areas. In fact most zoning codes detail a long list of uses allowed within the zone and a buffer between zones. For example, most zoning codes require a larger buffer between industrial or agricultural zones and residential zones. By definition how much "closer to the rural area" suburbs are is defined purely by how much SFH housing there is, nothing more.
The reason why most US suburbs abut dense inner cities is that historical US city development occurred densely before the automobile and then postwar development happened according to zoning codes which carved most new residential areas into SFH zoned areas. Cities were grandfathered into the new zoning codes. The codes themselves developed slowly and only started mandating huge minimum lot sizes in the last 30 years or so. This is why suburban development tends to form around a city.
They keep ignoring that without those suburbs you won't have rural farms. Without those suburbs those "productive" cities will have nothing to eat, and nothing to buy.
They measure productivity in terms of dollars - but all cities do is services, they don't produce goods. That's left to those places Strong Towns hates.
If people actually implemented what Strong Towns wants, people would starve.
Try the math again, but completely exclude services and let's see where you end up.
The video says that Canada has laws which stop cities paying more than 25% of revenue on debt payments, so they are much less bakrupt than USA cities. Do you think all Canadian cities have starving people with nothing to buy, and failed farms?
What about European cities which aren't suburban car dependent sprawl and still have food?
What about the explanations in the video (and the related ones on the channel) on why the suburbs are so expensive - you can't handwave away thirty six billion dollars of due road maintenance in a single city with "rural farms need it", even if true it's unsustainable.
> "all cities do is services, they don't produce goods."
All that needs is one counterexample: London has the largest diesel engine manufacturing site in the world - [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_London#Manufacturin...
Yes, fintech nonsense has eaten London, and services are its most profitable sectors these days, but that's not /because it's a city/, it was a major manufacturing center and a city.
The North American suburb, which is what we're discussing here unless I misunderstand, more or less came about in the post-war era. It would really be an extraordinary claim that farms and heavy industry couldn't exist in North America until the 1950s...
I'm pretty sure it was discussed long before the Internet.
For me a good life means dark skies, green trees, a chance of dying every time I go for a hike, and a garden in my backyard.
If you are a city person, that's great, fantastic and I hope that you can stay there but if you have to move out to suburban/rural spaces, don't bring the city with you. Leave the light pollution, the noise, and all those urban attributes in the city.
"The noise"... are you advocating for a rural setting without cars here? Most of light pollution and noise in the cities comes from cars and car infrastructure.
While I love cities, I think that's not really the story. Cities would light up their streets with or without cars. Could you imagine if New York, somehow sans cars, with pitch black streets at night? The crime fear is way overdone - cities are very safe these says. But I think I still prefer streetlights.
Sold where did you go
What does that refer to?
That distance is more than the radius of the largest city in Europe -> it's 25km from Heathrow airport to the Buckingham palace.
I don't think having a car is a big problem, I think we could hand out free e-bikes to every family and reduce amount of cars of the roads, because for ~50% of journeys, they make sence.
Now if they mean they go 40km to take the kids to school every day, that's a different matter.
All your usecases could be served with a rental. Where I live I can rent cars on hour basis with an app. Need to haul something big? Rent a van for a few hours. Want to visit family in a remote city? Rent a sedan for a day or two. Need to get a cat to the vet? Rent a small city car for two hours.
Consider the cost of ownership with maintenance, depreciation, loan interest (if applicable), and insurance compared to renting. Depending on the frequency and distance of your long trips you may actually save money by renting.
Daycares vary in size. You can opt for institutions that watch after 30 kids at a time, or ones run out of houses, but one way or another if both you and your spouse work for a living, you need someone to watch your kid, and it will probably require daycare and by extension commuting. If you live in the suburbs, you drive.
There are literally millions of decent analog bike frames bouncing around in various corners of <your city here>. Getting one up and running, and strapping a seat to the front and back as you have done, would be about 10% the cost of a new e-bike, and maintenance would be negligible.
Plus, you get to eat whatever you want guilt-free!
Doubly so if you're doing any hills with a passenger on board.
Sweat/stink is what they're avoiding.
I am dismayed at how much people spend on plastic coffee pods just to avoid making a proper coffee!
Before I got an ebike, I didn't have confidence of riding on the road proper- > now I know I won't be slowing down to 5 MPH on an uphill, with someone behind me honking incessantly or overtaking dangerously.
I installed nice bright lights powered from the central battery, mirrors and a horn. This makes a world of difference.
I'd like to point out that the carbon footprint of a used bike is a negative number and the out-of-pocket cost is laughably low. I love when people can reduce their emissions by replacing a car with something with much less impact like an e-bike, but those are the exceptions statistically speaking, and it also doesn't delete that car from existence but rather brings about more demand for mining and materials. Buying used e-bikes is also a fine option.
No need for ebikes but child seats should be used on reenforced frames such as what the Dutch call "Moederfiets", you can also use a 'Transportfiets' frame.
You are adding an extra 5 Kg to your front steering tube and another 20 kilos to your back cargo loader. That is not what most frames were designed for.
Secondly things like double leg kickstands and steering stem lock are really important to load kids in and out of seats safely, which again don't exist in 'normal' bikes.
My point is you don't need an ebike but you should definitely not be using an off the shelf thin frame to carry kids around everyday.
Yes, you shouldn't use a department store bike. I (mistakenly?) assumed this is obvious to this reading crowd.
You sound like you have never worked on a bike before. It is not difficult to add different kinds of kickstands to existing frames. I believe you are quite under-informed on bicycle capacities.
My point is just that if you're planning on replacing a car with a bycicle there are already solved problems for kids transportation.
[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S259019821...
E-bikes could actually improve rural life as well (the example I read about was Spain). If you live 10km outside a village and can do your normal shopping by bike instead of car, that can really make an impact. Won't work in really sparse areas of course.
My bike is an urban arrow, so one of the bigger two wheelers. ~7500€ new with all possible add-ons and a €150 annual insurance that covers the bike in full if ever stolen or damaged in an accident, so I also feel safe parking in rough areas with it.
60,000 people on a 4 year waiting list for on street bike parking:
https://www.standard.co.uk/news/london/london-cyclists-bike-...
All of this stuff exists but the bike industry can't put 2 and 2 together.
Here is a link to a folding handlebar stem that is sometimes in stock: https://flatbike.com/product/thinstem/
Transport capacity is still great and the bigger version can seat two passengers, but the kids need to be old enough to sit and hold on themselves.
On some brand I quickly googled[1], the bounding box that covers all of their models for electric bakfiet's size is 253cm x 95cm (with no individual bike being both that long and wide). Comparing them with a Fiat 500 and a RAM truck[2] (just for kicks), that bounding box is 1 meter shorter in both dimensions than the Fiat. And their classic model is 228cm x 63cm.
[1]: https://www.bakfiets.com/bestanden/documenten/618-22bakfiets...
[2]: https://www.carsized.com/en/cars/compare/abarth-500-2008-3-d...
I've read that in the Netherlands, they aren't as common as you'd expect, because kids just ride their own bikes almost as soon as they're able to walk, because school, sport etc is nearby and on a safe separated bike path network. While younger babies are carried in those little seats that mount on the handlebars or racks of regular bikes.
I don't think ability to be carried up stairs easily is a good criteria for the practicality of any bike though, or it rules out many ebikes too. Just need secure parking at the ground level.
Magical thinking will not make it so. My partner and I moved further away from the city where she works because we wanted to move in together and we can't afford rent or property where either of us used to live.
I work from home so most the time my car sits charging the driveway. However, all of my doctors are at least a half-hour drive away, my dental clinic is a 50 minute drive, my hobbies are anywhere from 30 minutes to an hour half drive away. The rest of my family is an hour away so no amount of moving will change these things without making the rest of them worse.
But bicycles will work fine for 10% of my travel except for there being no infrastructure supporting bicycling.
In fact I’ve met so many Londoners who never even bothered to learn to drive.
In my experience, it’s generally American cities that require a car rather than European cities. Generally speaking of course, you get good and bad city designs in all countries.
I didn’t learn to drive until I was in my 30s and used to spend my 20s travelling the length and breadth of the U.K. and Europe. I even had a long distance relationship at the time too. A long distance relationship that worked because we are now married.
Sometimes I might have to plan a journey in advance (to figure out the route) but there were plenty of times I just went where the wind took me (proverbially speaking). And frankly even after learning to drive, smart phones weren’t invented yet and satnavs were luxuries, so you’d often still need to plan ahead even if you could drive.
So no, driving needn’t be an essential life skill for everyone. And that doesn’t mean they have a limited perspective either. On the contrary, if you cannot imagine life without driving then it is your perspective which is limited.
Huh?
Other countries might not even allow you to apply for a learners licence unless you have a specific visa.
So if you’re a young adult and travel a lot, it might not even be possible, let alone practical, to earn a license.
Which is precisely why I didn’t learn to drive until I was in my 30s and ready to start a family.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Driving_Permit
That scenario adds up, it just wasn't what I thought when I saw "short periods".
Sure, some of them will drive. But I’ve also known plenty of people who cannot drive because they spend their time backpacking or who work a couple of years in one county then move to another.
But a couple of years is a huge amount of time. If you put in just 4 hours a week you'll be done in no time. Not knowing how to drive in that situation is because of not caring very much, not because of moving around. And the vast majority of what you learn stays relevant when you move.
Sure, if you put 4 hours a week into any activity you’ll soon get good at it. But the crux of the issue is whether that activity is seen as a priority or not.
> Not knowing how to drive in that situation is because of not caring very much, not because of moving around.
They didn’t care because they were moving around a lot.
And frankly it doesn’t really matter what the reason is. Regardless of whether it is a practical or preferential justification, the end result is the same: plenty of people manage just fine without learning to drive.
I find it weird that this concept is so alien to some people. But I guess that’s a good example of the diversity of the readership on here.
This doesn't seem to be about travel at all. It's just that some people don't get a license.
It's not that the concept is alien, it's that the justification you gave isn't really true. It doesn't make it a "whole lot harder to learn to drive". Moving around has almost no effect on getting some driving lessons.
But you’re not going to have a car if you haven’t already learnt to drive.
> This doesn't seem to be about travel at all. It's just that some people don't get a license.
They don’t get licenses because they’re travelling.
Time is finite, not everyone wants to use it learning to drive.
> It's not that the concept is alien, it's that the justification you gave isn't really true.
It was literally the reason I learnt to drive so late in life. It was the reason many of my friends either learnt to drive later in life or still don’t even drive now.
You might not relate to us but that doesn’t make it untrue.
> It doesn't make it a "whole lot harder to learn to drive". Moving around has almost no effect on getting some driving lessons.
It does if you don’t have a fixed residence. What address are you even going to put on your provisional license?
And if you’re going to spend 2 years max in any one place then you’re there to soak up experiences, not spend it learning to drive.
Look, I get some people see driving as a priority. But not everyone is programmed that way and not every place on earth requires a car to get around. You say this isn’t an alien concept to you yet you fail to accept that people like me exist. So I don’t really know what I can say further
Like, come on, if you're somewhere for two years it's not the 25 hours that make the difference.
And sure put the address you've been at for an entire year.
It's not a "whole lot harder". You personally didn't want to, and that is fine.
"be hugely costly and still only result in a license that isn’t immediately transferable to other countries (eg you have to hold a license for x years before you can drive abroad and/or older than x years old)"
So I'm going to ask again, what kind of countries issue you with a licence that isn't immediately transferable to other countries? You can get an international driving permit literally the same day you pick up your regular licence, there is no time limitation on that - or if there is where you live, please educate me so I know better.
So you couldn’t pass your driving test then immediately drive abroad.
Edit: I cannot find any detail on that so maybe this isn’t the case any longer. Learn something new everyday :)
Woodworking and the wiring of houses are also basic life skills, I imagine. I'll try to learn them when I get there. But so far, I've never wanted for the need to drive a car.
Traveled all over the world. Lived in 8 different cities. Never needed a car.
I am confused what you think you need a car for?? It is such a strange stance. Where have you gone that I can not go? Public transport exists. So do private tour buses.
The further away from city suburbs, one might get a lucky 1 bus per hour if at all.
My wife grew up in the suburbs of an even smaller city. It took about 10 minutes to reach that city center by bike, but almost everybody drove because the road connecting the suburb to the city center feels very unsafe on a bike.
Many cities are only city in name, and in practice more towns aspiring to be cities, specially in southern and eastern Europe.
Here is one anecdote, Portalegre might be a nice city, as Northen Alentejo capital in Portugal, yet those 20 km on average from the neighbouring villages aren't that nice to do on bycicle specially during Summertime with temperatures up to 45 degrees celsius. And if you're thinking about taking a bus, better save money for a taxi, unless you're willing to spend the whole day in the city, as there is only one bus into each direction connecting the neighbouring villages to the city.
Besides, your statement was an absolute so the GP only needed one of example to disprove you yet gave you two.
There are plenty of cities in Portugal, Spain, Italy, Greece, Croatia,... where it doesn't hold.
You know, those that people from the cities you listed love to rent cars for their vacations, and enjoy what many locals can't afford.
And no, they weren’t all capital sized cities.
I also don’t understand what vacationing has to do with anything when I was talking about backpackers, nomads and expats. Basically the polar opposite of people who vacation.
Plenty, it shows not wanting to endure the actual pain locals have with local transport system, if one exists at all.
But this conversation is about people who don’t drive. Not people who do.
You’ve warped the discussion so far off it’s original topic that your entire premise here is now just one stupid straw man argument.
To get back on topic: nobody is disputing that there are people out there with driving licenses (well durrr!). It was to explain why some people (ie not all) are content without learning to drive.
I live miles out of from London and get the train in. Almost nobody I work with live in the city and none of them drive in. In fact you wouldnt want to drive in London.
This has been true for so many European cities, Cambridge, Chelmsford, York, Amsterdam, Paris, Berlin, etc. all are very accessible for non-car owners.
Anyone who claims you need a car to live in a European city is someone who hasn’t experienced many European cities ;)
It is no accident you only listed capital sized cities.
I’ve noticed this trend you have of defining things in absolute terms despite the evidence being transparently not. Which I normally make an effort not to reply to your silly comments however on this occasion didn’t check who the commenter was before responding. Which is basically a longwinded way of saying I’m not going to continue on with this absurd exchange any further.
Just don't pick Lisbon, Porto, Madrid, Barcelona, Rom, Napel, Milano, Athens, Zagreb for the actual experience.
Here is a suggestion, country side in the middle of the country, or one of the Mediterrean or Atlantic island.
But I suspect that’s intentional behaviour. You don’t want people to agree, you are actively seeking out an argument. Because if you wanted a sensible discussion you’d see that our two points were complimentary rather than contradictory.
How exactly would you change London to be more like tokyo? As the simplest question - which areas of London would you demolish to make room for high density Japanese housing? Alternatively, if you're going to build wide, how would you connect those areas with the centre, if building new metro lines is pretty much impossible in London for historical reasons?
"London's issue is political will, because too many wealthy and politically connected people currently profit from the current status quo"
That just sounds like saying "it's the elites fault, dude". Like, sure, but please propose any actual solution.
Didn’t they open a new one last year?
You don't need your neighbors permission to build, everything is basically by-right where you follow well a well defined housing code vs. needing special approval for every little thing. Just get out of the way and stop needing a license to do anything and you will see how quickly the market will sort it out in London. The people of London will decide THEMSELVES, what to demolish or not once given permission to do so, no central planning needed.
But it doesn't because the current system benefits those elites. Any time large amounts of special permission is needed to get anything done, creates the space for corruption in which a bureaucrat can benefit through bribes of one form or another.
What your basically acting like is acting like you can't exercise and eat right to lose weight while you have no mental issues, financial issues, health issues, disability or age issues blocking you from doing the basic things. London has the money, ability and ground where all this is possible. It's a form of learned helplessness in front of a system that has given you no way out.
Perhaps the real London elites are the clay underneath the city which makes tall buildings more expensive.
Yeah, maybe some elites will get to renovate their houses. Who cares. Large apartment buildings would get built with huge numbers of units to help drive down rent.
- Ask for 90% of the buildings to be less than 120% of the average price.
- Have lottery system for lot allocation
- Make it easy for groups and communities to buy lots
- Cap the lot prices per sqf
- Evaluate the projects on the community impacts vs $$$
See also this to understand how capitalist architecture makes everyone miserable: https://youtu.be/VoYZlyBHyQM
When buying a car you have to prove you have access to a drive way
that's step one
The problem is that housing in Tokyo is very small, and most Westerners (particular Americans) simply can't fathom living in it, and it would never be allowed to be built there. Westerners need to change their expectations.
40% of the housing problem is whatever the fuck is going on in the banking system -> it enables us to commit all of our life savings for the rest of our productive lives to pay for a roof over our heads. It's like a hostage situation with the highest bidder.
> You would probably have to demolish large areas of London and replace them with high-density housing to match demand - but obviously that's never going to happen.
So true, my friend is not even allowed to raise your roof by 20 cm to create an extra room in the loft.
The planning system here is so crazy, I am confident it's like 40% of the problem.
Not to say that there isn’t something else going on.
How can Berlin, a city with ample free space and free buildings still see a massive increase in housing prices if it was a simple issue of supply and demand? There's undoubtedly something else much fishier going on.
Here in most places it is because supply is suppressed by government policy and the planning and approval process. Want to add a room to your house? That could be 10's of thousands in planning fees if it is even allowed and it still could be denied. Want to turn your laundromat into an apartment complex? Denied: the proposal will cast shadows across a lot where the city is thinking of building a playground for a local school[0].
Overall its very much in the interests of those who own property to keep more from being built and they naturally act for those interests.
[0]Not hyperbole - this is an actual example.
Nah. There's still many areas of fairly low-quality, low-density housing near the centre of London. In fact, just about everywhere you look there are residential towers under construction: there must be hundreds of them going up right now! There is still plenty of scope to greatly improve the quality and efficiency of housing in London without sacrificing open, green spaces.
Live somewhere for at least 35% of a year (more than 1/3rd), then most of that tax goes away since it's a 'primary residence'. (35% to allow for moving as well as possible 'sunbird' / 'winter/summer homes', while still catching anyone who treats housing as an 'investment' (a tax upon the poor))
So the end result, the poor pay more?
Instead, what Vancouver did was simply tax empty housing.
Why is that framing preferred over "landlords, who reduce housing supply by keeping properties off the market"?
If you want to get to the root of the problem, look at the development process. Start with your local zoning laws. It is insane how tightly prescriptive they are, usually, and they generally have lots of density-limiting provisions like mandatory parking, maximum floor to area ratios, maximum heights, minimum setbacks, etc.
And then there's the planning/approval process.
They don't reduce housing supply for living, but they do reduce housing supply for owning. Normal people being able to own the house that they live in seems like a reasonable societal goal to me, but the current economic climate is making that harder and harder as houses move into the hands of landlords (private and commercial).
Yes, the world needs some amount of rented housing, but a huge percentage of people renting now want to own, just to have stability and control over their living environment.
Also, re-property costs. It’s mostly speculative. If we banned foreign non-resident buyers and disincentivised buy-to-let landlords then prices would be much lower.
To answer your point to "live further out" as in actually pay enough for housing that it covers the ticket costs you're talking about Birmingham and beyond hour commutes.
Land cost can be brought down by building furthere away from the center or in the countryside -> have smaller villages or towns outside of london.
As for building costs. How about we talk to developers and ask them what the biggest building costs are? Often times, it's regulation, regulation regulations. Get rid of all the ones that are causing high prices: at least this should be done in certain areas to allow those who want low cost housing some options.
200 years ago, Henry david thoreagh built a cabin for 28$. That's about 3000 dollars in today's cost. and back then the average person was able to pay off their house in just 10 years! The average house cost about 800$ which was about 800 days of unskilled labor (1/5th of what it is today if you include prop taxes) If it could be done then, then why can't it be done now? why has our standard of living dropped so much, that it's actually considerably lower than it was 200 years ago?
Our standard of living had massively increased since Thoreagh's shed, in part because of regulation requiring it. I'd be surprised to learn you can't build a shed for $3000.
I’ve never seen this not be the case.
Are European cities organized differently or something? I’ve never see affordable living within biking distance of a business district, in the US. Prices are usually double.
US cities are built around the car. This means more space dedicated to parking, which means less space for homes and businesses, which means things are farther apart, which means people need cars.
It’s a negative feedback loop.
Of course, failure is subjective: car-based cities have been essential for the car industry because many inhabitants are completely dependent on having a car.
I think that’s more likely “and rebuilt according to the old plan”. Very few German cities escaped with limited bombing damage.
https://bigthink.com/strange-maps/air-war-germany-map/:
“Of the 54 largest cities (>100,000 inhabitants) in Germany, only four survived without significant damage: Lübeck, Wiesbaden, Halle and Erfurt.”
Eg, in many US cities, it is illegal to have a bakery on the ground floor of an apartment building.
Though, bottom line, my point is US and EU cities were designed very similarly from 1940 until 1970
There was and is scarce 'city planning' in Europe because there is scarce planning that can be done. The majority of cities have emerged in the middle ages at the latest, and there is nothing that can be done to 'plan' them. Even for the peripheries (as they are called) this is so: They formed around the villages or remote settlements in the peripheries of the cities, so there was no planning there at all.
The closes that can be said to be built 'around cars' would be the urban construction of gated communities or high rises in the peripheries. But they still were not built around cars - those communities can still perfectly live within their own locale by having access to everything. The only difference that requires a car would be those people having jobs in the city and having to drive 20-30 minutes every day to the city and back.
> Though, bottom line, my point is US and EU cities were designed very similarly from 1940 until 1970
That is patently false.
Though, the reason why 1940 - 1970 is so important is because it is post-war and a lot was rebuilt in Europe while at the same time there was a lot of growth in American cities (the baby boom; federal investment in roads, etc..), and both European and American Urban growth and reconstruction were heavily influenced by "Modernism" [2][3]. "European engineers were sent in flocks to the US to learn from the environments in which these revolutionary ideas were playing out, returning with tabula rasa development plans to realise their own modernist dreams." [4]
Modernist Urban planning ideas started in the 1910's and on, but it wasn't until 1940 that there was the mass of opportunity for rebuilding and the funding to implement those ideas. "Modernist principles have shaped city-building since the beginning of the twentieth century. Numerous authors draw a connection between modernist discourse within planning practice and the rise of the Fordist paradigm (Irving 1993; Calthorpe and Fulton 2001; Sandercock 1998). In following these principles, the North American built environment has taken the form of low-density sprawl. This development pattern is characterized by a dominance of single-family housing, a reliance on automobile transportation and a strict separation of land uses." [5]
A key difference is that US civil engineers still are quite influenced by Modernism. For example, US traffic engineers continue to optimize for the throughput of vehicles on city streets rather than the throughput of people [6].
On the other hand, around the 1970s affluent European urban planners pushed back on "Le Corbesier" style planning and "Modernist planning fell into decline. "By the late 1960s and early 1970s, many planners felt that modernism's clean lines and lack of human scale sapped vitality from the community, blaming them for high crime rates and social problems.[59] ... Modernist planning fell into decline in the 1970s when the construction of cheap, uniform tower blocks ended in most countries" [7]
[1] https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20130722-revolution-in-pa...
[2] https://www.archdaily.com/604056/north-america-s-radiant-cit...
[3] [How a Controversial European Architect Shaped New York](https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/how-controversial-...)
[4] [Story of cities #36: how Copenhagen rejected 1960s modernist 'utopia'](https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2016/may/05/story-cities-...)
[5] http://www.etsav.upc.es/personals/iphs2004/pdf/003_p.pdf (page 3)
[6] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-09-30/a-swiss-l...
[7] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_urban_planning#Mode... - "Reaction against modernism"
-----------------------
Beyond the above, the more extended exerts below I believe make the same point I made. I would find it interesting where these are patently false and do not support the assertion I made earlier:
> "Modernism: In the 1920s, the ideas of modernism began to surface in urban planning. The influential modernist architect Le Corbusier presented his scheme for a "Contemporary City" for three million inhabitants (Ville Contemporaine) in 1922. The centrepiece of this plan was the group of sixty-story cruciform skyscrapers, steel-framed office buildings encased in huge curtain walls of glass. [....] He segregated pedestrian circulation paths from the roadways and glorified the automobile as a means of transportation. "
> "Reaction against modernism: By the late 1960s and early 1970s, many planners felt that modernism's clean lines and lack of human scale sapped vitality from the community, blaming them for high crime rates and social problems.[59]
> Modernist planning fell into decline in the 1970s when the construction of cheap, uniform tower blocks ended in most countries, such as Britain and France. Since then many have been demolished and replaced by other housing types. Rather than attempting to eliminate all disorder, planning now concentrates on individualism and diversity in society and the economy; this is the post-modernist era.[59]"
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_urban_planning#Mode...
"Modernist principles have shaped city-building since the beginning of the twentieth century. Numerous authors draw a connection between modernist discourse within planning practice and the rise of the Fordist paradigm (Irving 1993; Calthorpe and Fulton 2001; Sandercock 1998). In following these principles, the North American built environment has taken the form of low-density sprawl. This development pattern is characterized by a dominance of single-family housing, a reliance on automobile transportation and a strict separation of land uses." (page 3)
"A significant individual embracing these values was the Swiss architect Le Corbusier. Beginning his practice in the late ‘10s, he wanted to correct the ‘chaos’ of the city and create an ideal order. His impact on modernist planning thought is incalculable, and his ideas were widely applied in cities during the 1950s and ‘60s." (Page 4)
"Following a 1926 US Supreme Court decision to safeguard property values from noxious land uses and neighbours, zoning became accepted as the principal planning tool (Hall 1988). The result was the strict separation of work, home, marketplace and social life. This move to create areas dedicated to specific purposes, and to remove uses that conflict produced single-use central business districts, uniform housing tracts, and dispersed shopping centres and recreational facilities." (Page 6)
"Transportation policy during the 1950s and ‘60s focused primarily on increasing vehicle capacity on roads. Analytical tools considered highways and cars only, while ignoring community design and public transit considerations. Instead of deciding where development should go, engineers just looked at projected traffic trends and designed infrastructure in an attempt to accommodate them" (Page 7)
"Inherent in the modernist project was a belief in the ‘tabula rasa.’ As a result, enormous areas were cleared with completely new environments inserted. Again, Le Corbusier led the drive with his unrealized 1925 proposal to demolish historic Paris north of the River Seine (except selected monuments that would be moved), and to replace it with eighteen 700-foot towers (Moe and Wilkie 1997)" (page 12)
Thats not correct. Some noticeable percentage of German cities and some cities of the war-affected regions were rebuilt. And most partially. The re-architecting of Paris does not have any relevance to cars since it happened in 19th century.
> Beyond the above, the more extended exerts below I believe make the same point I made
They actually invalidate your argument - including the earlier excerpts: Modernist architects adopting car-centric ideas and high rises does not mean that they got to implement what they wanted to do in Europe. There is no such case of large-scale reconstruction of any European city around cars except the war-affected ones (and most partially), and all your excerpts just confirm that. They talk about how (the part of) a generation of European architects adopted modernist car-centric ideas - not them actually getting around to implement them. Its Le Corbusier proposing to demolish part of Paris in a furtive attempt, or him planning a high rise somewhere and whatnot.
Aside from that the excerpts explicitly demonstrate that car-centric cities were a US phenomenon. Not European.
Normally so. Because even the mere act of buying any zone in an average European city to demolish it would cost !enormous! amounts of money that nobody would be willing to spend. Leave aside the reconstruction. This is why the 19th century reconstruction of parts of Paris is the sole incident of this.
All of this, before the fact that most European cities do not have space - nobody can imagine demolishing an entire city to rebuild it with less density so that more cars could be used in sparse urbanization. Europe does not have that much space.
> Thats not correct. Some noticeable percentage of German cities and some cities of the war-affected regions were rebuilt. And most partially. The re-architecting of Paris does not have any relevance to cars since it happened in 19th century.
You stated that there was not a lot of urban planning in most European cities as they grew organically. My point is that many (over their _entire_) history were rebuilt many times, and in some of those instances with explicit urban planning. The example of Paris is to simply demonstrate this, not only was the city rebuilt several times, but once for the sheer sake of urban planning. This contradicts your statement: "There was and is scarce 'city planning' in Europe because there is scarce planning that can be done", Paris is _one_ (extremely prominent) counter-example.
>> Beyond the above, the more extended exerts below I believe make the same point I made
> They actually invalidate your argument - including the earlier excerpts: Modernist architects adopting car-centric ideas and high rises does not mean that they got to implement what they wanted to do in Europe.
I don't think that is correct, and hence it does not at all invalidate the argument. I'm not sure if you read all of the important quotes and the references. With the benefit of the doubt, I think proof by contradiction can demonstrate this. If modernist urban planners had no sway, and were not at all influential, then these quotes would make no sense (these are referring to Europe & North America):
- "Modernist principles have shaped city-building since the beginning of the twentieth century."
- "Modernist planning fell into decline in the 1970s when the construction of cheap, uniform tower blocks ended in most countries, such as Britain and France. Since then many have been demolished and replaced by other housing types. "
To further explore this point, (and this article I really encourage you to read in its entirety): https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2016/may/05/story-cities-...
> “There were these big freeway people, and then there were the counter streams that happened between 1960 and 1970 ... One group was pushing cars out of the city, while others were trying to push them in.”
If Copenhagen was _not_ built as a modernist, car centric city (during the 1950's-1960's), then why would there be a group pushing back against car centricism in the 1960's at all? What would they have been pushing back against? Were they pushing back against how cities were built an ocean away in North America? No.. they were pushing back against how Copenhagen was rebuilt with car-centric, modernist urban planning. I mean, the title of the article is: "how Copenhagen rejected 1960s modernist 'utopia'"
> Aside from that the excerpts explicitly demonstrate that car-centric cities were a US phenomenon. Not European.
Not quite, the excerpts show that there was a lot of influence back and forth. European city planners went to the US and were influenced, and vice versa. Corbusier even designed several blocks of NYC, and the influence was reciprocal, see quote:
- "European engineers were sent in flocks to the US to learn from the environments in which these revolutionary ideas were playing out, returning with tabula rasa development plans to realise their own modernist dreams."
> Some noticeable percentage of German cities and some cities of the war-affected regions were rebuilt. And most partially.
Considering the war effected huge regions of Europe.. that would have been: nearly all of Germany, the Netherlands, Poland, a third of France, and countless more as large areas were flattened several times over. Practically every German city alone was carpet and fire bombed many times. Hence, these are very, very large reconstructions, all at a time when Modernist urban planning was the dominant style of urban planning.
> Because even the mere act of buying any zone in an average European city to demolish it would cost !enormous! amounts of money that nobody would be willing to spend.
I agree... to some extent. That is why the post-WWII reconstruction is so significant. Further, there _was_ also significant outward expansion during this time as well. Here is a quick example that Paris saw large expansions: "These large housing projects, known as the "Grand Ensembles," were constructed by the French government from the 1950s through the 1980s to help ease the housing problems that were prevalent throughout the country. Many of these high-rise buildings and communities still exist today" [1]
[1] https://www.businessinsider.com/high-rises-of-the-parisian-s....
In sum: - It's a straw argument to suggest what I'm saying is that every city was rebuilt in a modernist way.
- Though, WWII presented an opportunity for incredibly large reconstruction
- Post-WWII, there was also a lot of new construction for outward expansion
- During this time, the late 1940s to late 1960s, the dominant urban planning style of both NA and Europe was modernist car-centric (and so these constructions were similar from that perspective).
To refute, please give citations of what the dominant Urban planning style was for post-war Europe. I would love specific citations around this, as I have given you to support my claims (and even most of what I have wrote are direct quotes and references)
I think the citations quoted above from multiple sources generously support this. Again, that is not at all saying that all of Europe was rebuilt in the 1950s-1960s willingly and entirely to be car centric. But, the _planning_ of new construction/reconstruction were similar during that period in both the USA & Europe (and Europe by-and-large stopped their new constructions in that style around the early 1970s while the USA by and large did not). There is even a mention in one of the quotes of a lot of that construction having been torn down.
I'd say Warsaw, Prague and Paris are all great examples. Warsaw was completely rebuilt and downtown is car centric (looks very much like an American city). Prague was somewhat unscathed and has a very historic layout, Paris is a mix of reconstruction and historic urban planning. The point remains that there was a pretty specific car-centric urban planning style that dominated in Europe in the late 1940's-1960s.
All that is to say - European urban planning was also, at one time somewhat recently, largely car centric. It is really notable that stopped being the case and is an example for US cities - that they can also transform away from being fully car-centric.
That's where you go wrong. There isnt 'urban planning' in Europe because there isnt any space to plan anything. What could be called 'urban planning' in Europe is laying out subway tracks, maybe demolishing a run-down shanty neighborhood to build apartments. Thats it. Naturally there is no way to plan anything around cars. The most you can do is to eat up a little sidewalk in the biggest avenues in the biggest cities to make one more lane for the main street. And that's what was done for ~80 years.
> I think the citations quoted above from multiple sources generously support this
They dont. You moved on to 'urban planning was like that' argument from 'built like that'.
> European urban planning was also, at one time somewhat recently, largely car centric
Repeating it wont make it so. It wasnt, and still isnt. Aside from some part of Germany that rebuilt its destroyed cities and built autobahns, entire Europe was about tiny cars and tiny streets, leave aside any phenomenon like suburbs.
You cannot extrapolate from 'Le Corbusier and his friends liked cars and wanted to demolish cities' to 'city planning was like that'. If city planning was really like that (if it actually existed that is), then Le Corbusier and his friends would get their way and entire cities would have been rebuilt.
Sprinkle a bit of mixed used zoning, bike infrastructure and public transport on top.
I live in the outskirts of a city of almost 300 000, and can be in city center by bike in 20 minutes. I'm at work in 10 minutes.
Copenhagen: • City 183.20 km2 (70.73 sq mi) • pop 1,366,301 • Density 4,417.65/km2 (11,441.7/sq mi)
Kansas City, Missouri: • City 318.80 sq mi (825.69 km2) • pop 508,090 • Density 623.31/km2 (1,614.38/sq mi )
It blows my mind that people here put Europe as some kind of affordable walkable alternative. Some places are indeed walkable, but affordability is utterly atrocious by US standard.
Absolutely! My wife and I have a 6yo, and we take him everywhere on the back of our Kona Minute.
He's big for his age (65lbs) so we're looking to move to a ebike sometime this year, but up to now it's been great! Literally the only time we need to use a car is when we go out of town.
Let's hope not all will want to live above the supermarket they work at: https://3pod.bandcamp.com/track/triangle-of-happiness
Powered walkways/escalators/elevators everywhere, metro came every 2-3m, shopping/city offices/food courts connected to it all and you did a LOT of walking.
That was the closest to Trantor I'll ever be in my life. Sigh.
My sister lives in Berlin, has a very young child and just bought an electrified cargo bike. She is not a bike rider, never has been, but loves it. Great alternative not only to a car in a crowded city, but also to crowded public transport if you are transporting a small human.
I used to take my kids all the time on my e-bike with a burley bike trailer. Now I have a 13 year old and a 10 year old. I'm pretty sure the middle schooler would get made fun of if his friends saw him showing up to school or soccer practice in the cargo bucket of my bike.
For people that have hit that milestone before me, what do you guys do for your older kids?
You can ride with them on a few practice runs on a weekend and then continue to do so on a weekdays. Once you're both comfortable with the route and their ability to navigate it safely you can cut back on how much of the route you do together or just let them run it on their own. That last bit is a call to be made based on a lot of factors including your kids desire to ride with you.
I used to have a burley before the cargo. I think the cargo upright position makes it feel a bit more grown up. Plus, it is so fun.
The highschooler absolutely refuses to ride the back of the cargo, and insists on being driven by car. It takes so much longer with all the traffic, but he is willing to suffer to avoid looking uncool.
Also, do you really consider 11 and 13 year olds brave for riding a bike? I'd say that is a pretty normal thing to do at that age.
My nephew (12) cycles himself to school, but the infrastructure supports him doing so.
He also has a bike and he’s a pretty strong rider for a kid, but it’s still a bit much for him to keep up on longer trips, so the scooter helps there. I expect in a couple of years or so it will break or he will outgrow it, but by then he should have no trouble keeping up on his own bike.
There's a certain joy in being propelled by your own muscles. But of course it depends on the distance.
This very much feels like "in addition to" rather than replacing a car, at least in the US. My wife and I (without kids) tried living without a car in one of the largest, most walkable cities in the US and it was doable, but it's just soooo much nicer to have a car. Coordinating rentals or even ride shares are a lot more tedious than jumping in a car and driving, and even if ride shares are cheaper than car ownership, I would often find myself not doing things because of the cost of ride share / car rental / etc. Further, I would have occasional ride share drivers blow me off when I really needed to be punctual, and I also had some fraudulent experiences with car share companies (upcharging me for services that I've explicitly declined and not correcting it via customer support channels).
There's also public transit, but that takes wayyyy longer to get around and it's also really dirty, crime-y, and otherwise uncomfortable at least in the cities I've traveled around in.
Lastly, cycling is probably always going to be less safe than getting around by car (we can and should improve cycling safety, but I don't know that we're ever going to get to parity with driving) and I don't know that very many people are going to want to subject their kids to that risk as their primary form of transit. I probably wouldn't, realistically.
I think you're biased towards where you live. Where I live, cycling is definitely not considered risky, there are plenty of bike paths, and many people do indeed let their children bicycle as their primary means of transportation. One of the benefits is that the children can get around on their own and be more independent.
And yes, 30 years ago there were far fewer bike paths here. So things can change.
something like 70% of total distance traveled is by car (https://www.statista.com/statistics/449436/netherlands-modal...) and yet there are fewer annual motorist fatalities than bicycle fatalities (207 cyclist fatalities versus 175 motorist fatalities in 2021: https://www.statista.com/statistics/523310/netherlands-numbe...).
EDIT: cycling in the netherlands is about 685% more dangerous than driving per https://www.cbs.nl/en-gb/news/2020/31/decline-in-road-fatali.... Of course, this isn’t a like-for-like comparison since the distance traveled by car skews more toward the more dangerous highway miles while cycling skews heavily toward the much safer local/city streets—if you account for that, the difference becomes even more pronounced.
In my city, it's not if but when you'll get hit by a car on a bike. Yet I see parents increasingly think it's okay to haul their children on their bikes.
But it isn't. End of story.
Happy to support people who want to make biking safer. Happy to support politicians who want to build protected bike lanes.
But you can't just make up a fairy tale land and pretend it's safe. Bring yourself back to real life, and your children are in danger.
Cars regularly mount pavements/sidewalks as well, and kill pedestrians who are not even in the road.
The correct response to "cars make cities unsafe for everyone" is of course to ban all but the most essential cars from cities. It is not to suggest that the _other_ forms of transport (including walking on the pavement/sidewalk!) are so unsafe as to be irresponsible, in the presence of cars.
The country is on its best way to become Europe's head narco state.
[1] https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal...
I only park it in fairly secure locations if it's for more than a few hours (ie. not in the street), and I put 2 of the most secure bike locks I could find, 1 wheel lock, secure bolts on wheels and saddle, and light locks on big accessories like the child seat. Plus an Airtag hidden somewhere.
The trick is to have a bike which stands out. If you can recognize your individual bike from across the street, people won't steal it. Bonus points if it looks crappy despite being well-maintained. Beyond that it is mainly a matter of parking in bike garages with cameras where possible, and using a chain lock to fix it to an immovable object otherwise.
Bike theft is so rampant. It's just so easy, throw it in a truck, or pedal away with it. Since I live in a redneck place, I ride a step-through woman bike in pastel color now, after two previous ones got stolen, and that genuinely helps. People may make snarky comments, but the bike has remained untouched for a decade now.
The sad thing here is that it's not even triaging by property damage. Your €1000 fifth hand car will get more police attention if stolen than a €3000 ebike.
More on topic - Bikes make a lot of sense in the city but if you add kids to the equation the safety risk just becomes too high to stomach IMO.
https://oxyi.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/08/map-of-berlin-co...
Check out chart 2:
https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/reported-road-casua...
So better to not walk or cycle and just stick to your car /s
You may, especially that ebikes are hella fast. Dont ride after alcohol.
In my country you would lose car license if they caught you driving a bike while drunk
I've had many bikes stolen and everyone I know who rides has at least one bike stolen.
I've never had anything stolen from my car and no issues with car theft, and I don't know anyone who has had their car stolen.
I've met two people in my life who have had items stolen from their car, and in both cases they left their car unlocked.
Looks like they live in Belgium
Maybe there's less bike theft there?
I was at my local bar here in Ontario and a gang of older fellows (boomer/Gen X) roll up on electric stand-up scooters.
Some drunk zoomers started laughing and giving them shit and flexing their trucks but they just ignored them, had their 3-4 beers and said they were going to <fancy uptown bar> which would have been at least 45 minutes to walk.
Please don't take that attitude ...
I have a work colleague who basically had an ankle tendon sliced by just such a person.
The very likely outcome now is that they will never walk or run normally ever again.
I genuinely couldn't give af about points on these kind of websites, but I've noticed the count on this comment vary up and down.
What kind of @sshole would disagree with the sentiment?
I do worry about those who walk among us.
Bakfiets[1][2] FTW!! I lived with my two young (under 10) children in Amsterdam for one year without car relying 90% on Bakfiets and occasional Uber rides. After a brief period of teething issues it worked out perfect, even in winters/rains. I used the non-e-bike version as I didn't want to splurge on Urbanarrow about which I kept hearing raving reviews.
You definitely can still kill someone.
In at least some countries an 'e-bike', depending of exactly which type it is, may be motor vehicle that falls into the exact same laws as drink driving a car. If not it may still be illegal to ride a bike on the road while drunk.
But car commute is still faster. I can get from home to work in ~35 minutes at lower traffic (say 10AM, blessed be flexible work hours) and in MAX hour in more of a rush traffic. Best time by bicycle is around 1h10m. I do park at work building so that's 5-10 minutes of looking for parking saved there. Technically I can get there by 50 min if I get with bike to metro but that's pretty much possible only on off hours.
It's definitely pretty nice way to keep in shape, now with more remote work I just use the time saved to do some cycling. Did it pretty much "from when it stopped snowing to when it started", 20km a day (I went via metro in the morning, came back cycling, just didn't wanted to do all the mess with arriving sweaty and having shower at work every day), including few in pouring rain at near-zero 0C which was.. experience and I have now learned to stop shivering by force of will alone.
Thought I'd get less fat but it didn't work, tho I did get more healthy overall. Diet is the key in the end.
> - somewhat dangerous when the infrastructure is lacking.
Yeah I try to not share any road with cars as much as I could. For 10 years I don't think I had a day where I didn't saw some car doing something sketchy or just driver not paying attention. Not that cyclists were holy here just... much less potential for damage.
> - you will not kill someone if you ride after a night drinking;
please just don't
You just live very far from your job.
Still, would assume 16-18km/h is minimum reasonable speed unless you ride like a pensioner.
You are concerned about car theft but not about e-bike theft. How come? Stealing e-bike is so much easier.
You could have one stolen every year and still end up cheaper than owning a car.
Hell, just price of petrol+insurance for a year is more expensive
One morning I overtook a colleague on an e-bike (max 45km/h) with my motorcycle. A few streets later I overtook him again, since he took a shortcut that I was not allowed to take.
A bit later I overtook him again, since I had a red light and he again took a shortcut.
We arrived at the same time at work. Impressive!
But when going above bicycle speeds, I do tend to wear increased safety gear. My biggest concern is always being t-boned by a car.
[0] https://varlascooter.com/products/varla-eagle-one-dual-motor... [1] https://fluidfreeride.com/pages/nami-burn-e
AFAIK, these are considered "light motorbikes" (or something) and require the same paperwork (aside from an "easier" license) and gear as regular motorbikes.
More importantly, they are specifically not bikes and aren't allowed to ride on bike lanes any more than a fat liter+ bike is.
There is however a grey zone when going on bicycle lanes next to the rivers, because you can go max 30km/h there. But when nobody is there, I'm sure most e-bikes just go max speed.
If it looks like a bike and you ride it like a bike, you're not going to have any problems riding it where bikes are allowed. It sounds like you envision this person riding at absolutely maximum possible speed at all times.
How much harm do you suppose it would do, leading to "massive legal trouble"?
Incidentally, 45kmh is 28mph, which I was just barely able to maintain on level ground on my road bicycle when I was fit. The "speed pedelecs" laws seem a bit silly rather than simply enforcing speed limits and penalizing reckless behavior.
I suppose I should stop paying for car insurance then, since I never had an accident either. Or maybe more accurate example is that I shouldn't worry about the safety of my car, since I never actually hit anyone with it.
>>How much harm do you suppose it would do, leading to "massive legal trouble"?
There was a cyclist in london recently who ran into a woman on his modified bicycle, she tripped, hit her head on the pavement and died - he was subsequently found guilty of manslaughter and sentenced to prison for many years.
You could run into someone at 5mph, they could hit their head on something and die. There is another case exactly like this going on where a person hit their head on a bollard and left him permanently disabled for life.
The entire point is that if you are on a path specifically forbidden for cycles, and an accident happens while you are cycling, you will be found guilty and will have to face consequences, most likely much harsher than if you weren't doing something forbidden.
For example: bike not properly licensed: Lose your car license for 15 days and pay 800 euros.
Ah, yes, because cars and bikes represent totally comparable risks to others.
Now you can go cite some more wildly improbable anecdotes, notable entirely because of how exceptional they are, as a response. I'll be over here looking at the 1.3 million people who die in car accidents around the world and not caring about e-bikes at all.
The point is that "I don't see a point in doing X because X has never happened to me" is not a good argument.
Let's try a better comparison then - maybe I should cancel my cycling liability insurance, because I never hit anyone with my bike then?
>>I'll be over here looking at the 1.3 million people who die in car accidents around the world and not caring about e-bikes at all.
I don't see how that's relevant to what I said - you will be punished more harshly if you cycle where you shouldn't. The number of people who die in car accidents bears no relation.
Cops already had mobile stations to check the max speed of scooters, and they now just added those ebikes to the checks.
This sounds unlikely for the average cycling commuter if parking alone is making the difference- cyclists (as motorcyclists) need to change (at each side) and shower etc; I think that is often forgotten in these calculations.
When your trip is like 3km you don't even have time to work up a sweat, especially if you're limited to just going at the speed of traffic. (Yes, on my own I could probably ride faster, but I'm limited by car/infrastructure speed)
At what point do anecdotes from people who actually live this experience day to day become more useful to listen to than theories from people who don't?
The fact is, short of linking to professional analysis and reporting we are all here relating anecdotes - and that's ok.
Excuse me? I have literally never done that in my life. I just bike in my normal clothes. It's light exercise, you don't have to shower afterwards.
The only downside is that on warmer days if I have something going on in the evening I'll sometimes need to shower again when I get home, but IMO it's still worth it considering that my roundtrip commute is maybe 60 minutes by bike vs 50 minutes by car, and if I commute by car I don't get the free workout
Wow. After a family member of mine being injured by a cyclist crashing into them, reading something like this is quite infuriating.
If you drink, don't drive, even if it's a bicycle.
Also, cycling drunk is illegal in many jurisdictions and can get you a DUI in the same way as drunk driving a car. If you're on an e-bike, it's almost certainly illegal, since you're driving a motorized vehicle.
I'm debating with myself how safe it is. Currently I'm still on "it's fine" side of things. I'm open the change though.
I bike year-round in Warsaw, Poland, even though most people consider winter to be "off-season". Don't really understand why — they do go skiing after all, so cold must not be the problem? The only days I don't bike is when it's raining heavily or when it's really slippery (lots of snow, freshly frozen sleet, etc).
There are days when I don't ride a bike, and on these days I can really tell the difference: I feel much worse.
I found that what I miss when switching to a car is the sense of freedom: on a bike, you can stop pretty much anywhere, while in a car you need to follow the road in the traffic and are generally stuck. No way to stop quickly, take a phone call, or admire the pretty passers-by.
Also, switching to an E-bike was a great idea: it doesn't take away the exercise (as most people tend to think), it just makes biking more pleasant and extends the max distance I can go. And in summertime I can set the assist to max and not worry about arriving all sweaty.
If you live in a city, I'd highly recommend getting a city E-bike. Not a mountain bike. A city bike with proper mudguards, upright posture, and a large basket in front. Don't be that guy in lycra pants on a mountain bike, with a backpack on his (sweaty) back, taking the full additional weight of the backpack on the narrow seat, and with a mud stripe on his back. Enjoy life!
Then I look at NYC and it's $5k to rent a 1 bedroom and everything as soon as you walk out the door is 30-50% more expensive than most other cities.
No one is saving money not having a car in NYC when everything else is so much more expensive.
The public (media) conversation has largely focused on whether people give up cars entirely, but at least in America, the norm is for most families to have two cars, if not more. Walking that back to one car would meaningfully reduce the design constraints on medium-density housing — you can build a neighborhood of small houses with only street parking, for example, which is basically impossible when people need two cars — and therefore it would also reduce housing costs in urban neighborhoods.
Ebikes could significantly help with that even if they don't lead to the car-free future envisioned by some techno-urbanists. For example, your girlfriend has a car.
a dog it's even worse in this regard. I don't think any taxi will refuse a child.
I can only speak for Austria and Germany, two countries that have the Pendlerpauschale, a tax rebate for those with a long commute and motorists far too much from this, it's even worse in Austria where high-income earner profit more from this than lower-income earners. Would that be dropped people would finally move closer to work (or work closer to them) and a lot of traffic into the city I live could be avoided (which would possibly lead to city residents using their car more often...)
> - significantly faster if parking is taken into account for most trips.
Fun fact about this: If a city reduces free/cheap over-ground parking and builds a few more parking houses, traffic can increase because straight driving to a parking house makes parking easier because they stop bothering looking for the few remaining overground parking spots.
For the latter, perhaps see "The Car-Replacement Bicycle (the bakfiets)":
* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rQhzEnWCgHA
> - weather might make the ride unpleasant;
I live in Toronto, Canada, and in the Before Times I cycled everday between ~April and December, rain or shine. The simplest solution is to just always have bad weather gear: it's like and doesn't take up much volume. Having it in a pannier means you always have it and don't have to think about it. The simplest solution for rain is a poncho, though I went with jackets and rain pants.
I found the threat of rain is more of an obstacle that actual rain. If your commute is <40 minutes, odds are pretty good it won't actually rain during your ride. It's the possibility of it that tends discourage people, in which case some gear works to counter it.
That said, if you ride >80% of the time when the weather isn't too bad that's still a good improvement over not riding at all.
I live in a place with fantastic bike-ability, but don't shop because of theft concerns.
Is that different in London?
It actually depends, but chances are better.
> do not have to worry about car maintenance, parking tickets or theft;
Isn't bicycle theft wider than car theft in Europe? Bycicle is easier to steal and easier to sell to black market resellers.
You might however end up at the hospital doing that, or worse.
> do not have to worry about car maintenance, parking tickets or theft;
Not sure where bicycle theft is not a thing, I've not encountered this, even in Vienna, one of the safest cities in the world. You still need to lock your bicycle safely.
> you will not kill someone if you ride after a night drinking;
In London I see plenty of irresponsible cyclists badly harming pedestrians.
> amazing when the weather is great;
Or you end up drenched in sweat wherever you go. Personally I hate cycling for that reason as a way of commute in the city.
Other reasons why I hate cycling and cyclists:
- Uneven roads, pot holes, getting splashed by cars who drive through puddles
- Inflexibility. You go somewhere, meet someone or your group of friends now spontaneously decide to move on to a different place and you'll be the loner who has to split from the group and meet them later again or you have to abandon your bicycle and get back the next day to pick it up. Sod that.
- Helmets. I can't stand helmet hair. Also how fucking annoying is it to have to carry your helmet everywhere even after parking your bicycle.
- Dirty clothes. You always end up with muddy splashes on your trousers. If you cycle then better not wear nice shoes or light trousers, which again limits where/when you can effectively use a bicycle as a way of commute.
- Male genitalia. Cyclists completely kill off their male reproductive parts. If you cycle your whole life for daily commuting to places then you'll certainly end up with fertility issues and probably require assistance to get erected in older age. No thank you lol.
Cycling is hugely overrated and I can't find anything nice about it to be honest. I rather have cities be transformed into amazing public transport systems so that I can go to places without a stupid castration apparatus.
This is mostly an urban legend. I am a amateur cyclist and during my testicles checkup I asked to my andrologist if it's better to stop while I am looking for a son. He replied that there is no any scientific evidence about damage on testicles by bike and that I can continue without worrying about them. Other factors like smoke are a lot more risky
Does your bike not have fenders?
>- might be impossible depending on >work or children; > >- weather might make the ride >unpleasant; > >- somewhat dangerous when the >infrastructure is lacking.
None of those things are so bad once you get used to them, except perhaps the 3rd.
I've used a bike for commuting for years.
Since having kids I now have a seat on the back and one on the front to drop them to childcare.
The city I live in rains a lot! And it is quite hilly, and this is a normal bike, not an ebike.
But I still prefer it much more than driving, I just have the waterproof gear at hand.
The infrastructure and weather was a lot better for cycling in the city I just moved from, but I think even without good cycling lanes etc, if you are vigilant, signal well, and be assertive when needed it can still be fine.
The amount of expensive add-ons I see on the bikers and their bikes suggest to me it's good business. Helmets, clothing, and electronic add-ons are likely adding around £1,000 per annum to the cost of ownership.
Bikes prices are a bit silly though. Expensive bikes (those in the £3,000 range) are ~25% of the price of a new Dacia Sandero.
Bike theft is rampant in London, so the insurance premiums are high, too. It can cost £300 per year.
Cons? Not all offices are equipped with showers.
How do you protect your bike? Isn't it more likely to get your bike wheels stolen than to get your car stolen?
Also, 10eur for just one lunch?? 8D
A pedestrian I know was seriously injured (brain damage, years of therapy) by a cyclist who was going the wrong way down a one-way street.
To be fair, the cyclist wasn't drunk, ... so maybe the drinking bit is completely irrelevant. Carry on then.
You might kill yourself though.
I'm glad you're in a city you don't have to worry about theft, but this is one of my biggest issues with bike ownership. You basically need to get a shitty bike to not worry about it being stolen or hope there's something adequate to firmly lock it to at the destination in my city.
And yet, here we have California (especially LA) with the best cycling weather but barely any safe cycling routes. LA is laughably bad with tons of "bike routes" that are just the rightmost car lane shared with bicycles.
The weather in the Northern Europe really doesn't stop you from being outside any more than the weather elsewhere does (counting forest fires and hurricanes as things that'll keep you indoors).
For ~6 years my wife and I lived in Santa Barbara without owning a car. We'd occasionally rent one to get out of town - there were a couple times I left my bike locked up at the airport for a long weekend.
I used to fantasize about making a documentary called "the disappearing bike" where you would video somebody cycling around town but every time the bike lane disappeared and then reappeared a quarter mile later, you'd show them just gliding across the street without their bicycle.
Even in SB, which has a much more chill attitude on the roads than anything south of Thousand Oaks (as you head into the LA metro area), some drivers would be bizarrely unsympathetic to the fact that you were traversing a short strip with no bike line in order to connect two bike lanes, with reactions ranging from honking, yelling, revving the engine to loudly pass, "buzzing" you by passing much too close, ... but I think it generally follows that rule that most of us are kind and some small constant percentage (5? 10%?) of the world is jerks.
I'd add to your list: No stress of driving in traffic. Imagine your ride home is pleasant personal time and exercise in the fresh air, not cars honking in a standstill in traffic. You feel better after riding.
I've had bike shops apologize for a $20 charge. :D They are thinking in a different context; I'm comparing that to my alternative, a car and its repair bills.
> significantly faster if parking is taken into account for most trips. The bike is faster for any < 10 km / 7 mi trip;
I don't think many people realize it: It's far more practical and efficient to ride. When you start doing it, driving (those distances) becomes frustrating and tedious, an odd choice given one that's faster, cheaper, and much better in all the other ways you listed.
At an easy pace, a bicycle goes ~16 km/hr (10 mi/hr). Especially in a dense city, think what's within 5-10 miles of you. Imagine very little traffic and then parking for free, without looking for a spot, within probably 20m of the door (depending on the city and bike parking rules).
> about €300/month in additional disposable income
And how about the cost of the bicycle? $250-600 for a good one, used or new. I own several for different purposes, guests, etc. That would be pretty expensive if it was a car.
And if it's stolen or damaged, buy another.
> Cons:
Also, not an option for those without the coordination to ride safely or durability to fall safely. Everyone falls. Elderly people can easily break bones.
I imagine you have never cycled across London during peak hours, depending on the day some of the most nerve shredding cycling you can imagine; some of the angriest motorists in the world running people off the road (even squeezing me into the curb in a cycle lane, before threatening to kill me after I knocked on the back of his van) in their metal boxes completely oblivious to safe driving around cyclists and how defensive you have to be to be seen and yes sometimes get in the way of vehicles. Once some moron on the Kings road swings the door of his Lexus into the road (only cars exist right?) and I career into the opposite lane managing to just about stay on my bike and avoid the on rushing car beeping his horn at me as if I was cycling on the wrong side of the road deliberately. A near death experience I'd say.
But yes cycling can be relaxing on occasion, just not on the roads motorists use and not in London during rush hour.
I have to say having cycled across France the motorists there are absolutely amazing and give you loads of space when overtaking.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35241049
And I have done the sort of thing you describe - it's still better than driving. :)
I've marked them in the map, roughly: https://i.imgur.com/GieyqDm.png
Just an example of what a weird anomalous zone it is: the King (or Queen) of England is not legally allowed to enter without explicit permission from the mayor — not the mayor of London, the Lord Mayor of this square mile. It's like if Wall Street could tell the President of the US to take a hike.
https://trashfuturepodcast.podbean.com/e/unlocked-britainolo...
An alternative take:
If it turns out, by some legislative fluke, that a particular square mile of the US is not bound by all of its laws, it won't be long until Wall St companies start moving their headquarters!
But none of them have a rule saying the POTUS cannot visit with the Mayor approving, so there's that. And "City of London" is tiny compared to the rest of the London metro.
Its... amusing.
Either a little unincorporated hamlet to escape taxes, or a little incorporated hamlet to collect taxes from some warehouses.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LrObZ_HZZUc
He also had a video on the mayor of The City of London
I thought that maybe the metric they were using ("the single largest vehicular mode counted during peak times on City streets”) meant they were measuring how many vehicles of a certain type were passing by. And since in gridlock bicycles travel faster than cars, you'd have more bicycles passing by than cars.
It's still not something you'd want to do very often. I think I did it once with a new bicycle that I'd bought from the other side of London, where the route home would have been long and completely new to me.
Map of allowed lines: https://content.tfl.gov.uk/cycles-on-public-transport.pdf
Also worth noting they broke up all other forms of transport i.e cars, buses, vans, etc. So it's more like cyclists make up 25% of road traffic against powered vehicles in a very small area of London, at particular times of day.
I do 40+ miles a day on road across London and would be really surprised if these figures hold up in general.
The local population number have absolutely nothing to do with the existence of corporate votes in The City of London. It's not even the smallest local authority by population, the Isles of Scilly are, and corporations have no votes there.
Given its small area, I doubt anybody would ever be interested enough in fighting with The City to revoke its ancient rights, and independence from the broader UK government. Past monarchs and leaders have attempted to strip The City of its rights, all of them ultimately decided it wasn’t worth it.
If you consider levying a $20-30/day tax to every driver,[1] plus another $12/day if your car is too old,[2] plus $200-600/year to park on public roads,[3] causing people to stop driving as remarkable, then sure.
Edit: why the downvotes?
[1]https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10279911/Sadiq-Khan... [2]https://www.carthrottle.com/post/youll-now-be-charged-extra-... [3]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vehicle_Excise_Duty
Parking is about £7/hour during work times, although it would be optimistic to expect to find an on-street spot every day. The maximum time is 4 hours anyway.
Apart from the mistake, you are probably downvoted for posting a hysterical Daily Mail article. Note the "up to".
Also driving in central London rush hour is kind of tedious - I prefer rail etc.
One of the big problems London has is that each borough decides how much to invest in cycling infrastructure, and a commute is only as good as its worst section. My commute from northern Camden to the City is a pleasure, a commute from west London through Kensington will be more of a pain.
IMO TfL should force the creation of good grade-separate cycle lanes in all of the major streets in London, just like they force standardised bus stops. Currently one single borough is screwing over a quarter of the city.
Examples:
- Cycle-hostile layout changes on Bishopsgate. While I strongly support the number of car lanes being reduced and footpaths being widened, this has been done in a way that is hostile to cyclists - if not downright dangerous. There is no room for cyclists to overtake cars (and vice-versa) and dangerous sharp kerbs that come out of nowhere at a near 90 degree angle to the carriageway. Very poor design.
- Removal of segregated cycle lane on Cannon Street, a street which for much of it's length is much wider than it needs to be for the volumes of traffic it gets. The cycle lane was well-used and really improved conditions for cyclists.
- Removal of the zero-emissions scheme on Beech Street, which restricted the area through and around the Barbican tunnel to pedestrians, cyclists, and zero-emissions vehicles. This was previously very pleasant to cycle through, thanks to reduced traffic volumes and cleaner air. But the change resulted in a rapid return to illegal level of air pollution in the tunnel. The cycle lanes in the tunnel are also in poor condition (potholes, crumbling poorly maintained paving, etc) which besides the stinking air, makes it even more unpleasant to cycle through.
Finally, there has been talk of a proper east-west cycle way across the city of London for many years (in addition to the existing C3), but nothing ever seems to happen with it. TfL's busy C2 (Cycle Superhighway 2) cycle route simply stops at Algate East on the City of London's boundary. After all these years, why hasn't it been extended westwards through the city?
During one of the lockdowns in 2020 when almost all the hotels were closed I was staying near Blackfriars and traveling to the West End on my brompton. It was great, there was barely any traffic on the roads - very few buses, taxis, vans or lorries. It was only about 2 miles, but it was the most relaxed commute I've had in years.
Tried it again recently, not a nice thing at all, mainly because of the buses.
TfL had the good fortune and opportunity to repurpose two lanes of Upper Thames St. and Victoria Embankment (one single road) into cycle lanes, and also Southwark Bridge.
Without that last part, there's pretty much no other major 'through' routes that could be made safe for cyclists in the City. If there aren't any protected bike no one uses them. The vast majority of journeys into the City are along that new cycle 'superhighway'.
North Americans especially might be surprised at how aggressively they are removing motor vehicles from the district (Down over 50% since 1999). New developments are very pedestrian and cycle friendly- eg my large workplace build five—odd years ago had 500+ bike spaces, desks for 5,000 and a single digit number of car parking spaces (for VVIPs and disabled staff only) - they are also converting many streets back to vehicle-free open spaces. This is all quite popular and mostly uncontroversial.
I bike to work every day since 4/5 years, in Switzerland. Since roughly 18 months, I have seen a huge change in the behavior of car drivers: they are much much nicer to interact with. Before COVID, I had dangerous interaction with drivers several time a week, and had to be in constant vigilance for them not considering me as part of the traffic. Now, it has been reduced to maybe once a month. Sometimes I don't even believe how well people respect us now, considering how it was just 3 years ago. And most of the time when I confront people that did something dangerous, they are sorry and feel bad about it (it really wasn't like this a few years ago...)
No, they cannot; in fact, small size is their primary weakness. Compact car-sized EVs currently get about 200-250km of range at best- they're physically unable to carry enough battery power to make them viable. Gas-powered subcompact cars get 2-3 times the range of the comparable electric and have a significantly smaller TCO. They aren't an upgrade, and will never be an upgrade.
Where EVs shine is in the inherently energy-wasteful lifted station wagon (SUV/crossover) market segment that's overwhelmingly popular today (to the point where a significant number of manufacturers have abandoned standard cars entirely), mainly because those vehicles are big enough to hold the number of batteries needed to get a somewhat-competitive range with their similarly-sized gas counterparts. Yes, this means we burn even more natural gas at night to charge those land yachts up to the point it's kicking out more emissions than encouraging subcompact gas cars would, but out of sight, out of mind, right?
What qualifies as compact? A Chevy Bolt will comfortably go 400km. More if it were strictly used at city speeds.
Or my favorite: historical buildings with equally historical distances between them. You could go deaf just from clapping your hands there.
And I've lived across from from an elevated transit line in an otherwise carless city center and it was quieter than any north american subwayless city I've lived in so this isn't even true lol.
Where I live in Germany the passenger trains (not even the tracks) got upgraded a few years ago and all those click-clack and screeching sounds are gone. What is left is a wooshing sound of the wind being pushed aside and the not-so-loud grinding sound of the thingy (collector?) that hits the power cable.
In real tests done in NYC, the mean dbA for subway platforms was 81.1 vs. 76.0 for buses (which, by definition, run on the roads)
For life in the city, it's much more pleasant to be in a foot only or mixed traffic street, even with a train nearby. There's the inherent danger of fast cars operated by non-professionals that you perceive on foot as well as the noise, neither you really need to worry about for trains. In many cities trams can run through pedestrian areas with no barricades or grade separation because they are slower and predictable. You can run cars with no separation too if you slow them down enough, but more often they are set to incompatible speeds and as a pedestrian you have all the downsides of the cars as they pass through what should really be a pedestrian space in most city centers.
The more that pedestrians and cyclists dominate, the faster the shift from ugly, dirty roads to a pleasant human centred urban environment.
I live in Cambridge and have lost count of the number of times I've had to contend with cyclists blowing through pedestrian crossings on a red light (or zebra crossings at any time) when I'm trying to walk over them, or cycling the wrong way down a one-way street - or on the wrong side of the road - or had to dodge people cycling on the pavement.
When driving I've nearly hit several cyclists. Examples include: one leapt off of the pavement out of nowhere in front of me, one blew through a red light at traffic lights with a restricted view, and one was cycling the wrong way around a roundabout. The first two of these aren't one-off scenarios. Fortunately on all occasions I was paying attention so managed to take evasive action. Similar incidents have occurred when I've been on my motorcyle, most of which have been near misses, but on one especially ridiculous occasion a cyclist ran into the back of me at a set of traffic lights.
What you say would only really be true if there weren't a portion of the population - even only a minority - who are, for want of a better word, massive dickheads (or simply very inattentive and situationally unaware). It needs to become socially unacceptable to cycle without due care and attention to the safety of others (the same way drink-driving has become, not just legislated against, but enforced against and socially unacceptable). However, unfortunately, it's not at the moment so I'm not sure that safety - particularly for pedestrians or, indeed, cyclists - is a given.
Overall it constantly shocks me how little responsibility cyclists take for their own safety.
Isn‘t the same statement true for car drivers? But the major difference is that a car turns a dickhead into a mortal danger for other drivers, pedestrians and cyclists alike, while a bike doesn‘t.
Yes. Completely.
Even before you get into discussions of selfishness/malice there are people who are just shitty at understanding how traffic works and how the different classes of traffic interact with each other. These people create problems wherever they go whether they go their on foot, two wheels or four.
In online discussions they're usually the ones screeching loudly about "rules" that get ignored contextually because they don't understand the context(s).
In the defense of bicyclists, I think a lot of this happens because the laws and roads aren't properly taking bicyclists into account. Stuff like bicycle lanes at the end of the block also becoming turn lanes for cars should just be unacceptable and provokes conflict between drivers and bicyclists.
[1]: https://ntlrepository.blob.core.windows.net/lib/63000/63700/...
I don’t see how that squares with your statement at all.
The police don’t care. What mechanism will put him in jail?
Things like running red lights, not stopping at stop signs, and speeding are much easier for laypeople to judge, and it sounds like none of that was happening here.
This isn’t “more aggressively than I like,” this is a man put in hospital because a driver chose to ignore the UK official guidance on how to drive. Official guidance, I might add, that you must learn as part of your driving course.
Attitudes like that are exactly my point.
If you’re going to call for regulation and enforcement, where would you spend money and effort?
I know Cambridge really well and I know people that regularly race their cars on the A14 at night.
Do you really think all the people buying tuning kits are doing so because they like sticking to the speed limit?
When it comes to obeying traffic lights you won't be waiting long to see cars tailgating through amber. That happens every time.
Finally I'd point to the number of drivers still on the road with more than 12 points on their licence. They just plead extenuating circumstances in court and get away with it. They almost never find themselves in gaol. The real kicker is that those that do end up in prison on a Dangerous Driving charge never permanently loose their licenses.
In theory I agree with you, but in practice the behavioural differences are noticeable, at least in Cambridge.
One example (admittedly anecdata from somebody who spends a lot of time on the road using different modes of transport, including foot): lots of cyclists blow through red lights, (relatively speaking) very few car drivers do so. Of course, the stakes of a car driver blowing through a red light are arguably higher, so it's still not great.
What I'm contending against is not cycling as a mode of transport, but the assumption that with greater adoption of cycling comes greater safety. That's not what I see because of cultural issues (behaviour) surrouding cycling in this area. Possibly the accidents would be less severe, but there would still be plenty of accidents if everybody was cycling.
OTOH, and again it's small numbers/anecdata so take with a pinch of salt, but over 20 years in Cambridge I know more people who've been injured in cycling accidents that haven't involved motor vehicles, as those who've been injured in cycling accidents where motor vehicles have been involved. A couple of those people have blacked out even though wearing helmets because, e.g., their head hit the pavement. Causes of accidents are a bit of a mixed bag: road conditions aren't great around here (potholes, gravel on road, etc.)[0], one clipped by another cyclist on a cycle path (other cyclist didn't stop), etc.
I'm very pro-cycling but, as I say, from an empirical standpoint I'm not convinced it's necessarily that much safer. I'm sure there's data that, in some area or other, would prove me "wrong". But so much of it is down to cultural and behavioural issues, as well as cycling infrastructure and road quality, that I don't think it's valid to just forklift figures from one area and say, well, if everybody in Cambridge cycled we'd see X% fewer injuries from collisions on our roads. Unless other factors are taken into account it's very faulty reasoning.
[0] On the road conditions point, you're much more vulnerable on a bike than you would be in a car. If you're a driver and you hit a big pothole, you might damage your car, but you'll probably be OK. If you do the same on a bike you are much more likely to fall off and injure yourself.
Yes.
I know.
If you actually read what I said carefully you'll note that I said some portion of the population: a very general statement which is inclusive of both cyclists and motorists. I am an equal opportunities disparager.
The Netherlands has a massive cycling uptake and has some of the safest roads in Europe. What you say simply doesn’t hold water. Cyclists are simply not killing in the numbers that car drivers are.
For one, The Netherlands has great cycling infrastructure, at least places where I've been: Cambridge, UK doesn't.
Again, from what I've seen, cyclists in The Netherlands tend to behave quite a bit better than they do here in the UK (drivers too, for that matter).
Moreover, what condition is the infrastructure in? I don't know about The Netherlands but I can tell you that in Cambridge, UK, it's littered with potholes, and often to some extent multi-modal.
You can't just forklift an insight about cycling in The Netherlands and expect things to work the same somewhere else without making a whole load of stuff happen beyond just encouraging lots more people to cycle if you want to actually make it safer. In Cambridge, UK, we need both solid investment and cultural change (both cyclists and, yes, motorists too) for cycling to become a safer option.
Am I being clear enough for you now?
And that‘s where the Netherlands differ: Everyone cycles. You get a better cross-section of the population, kids, families. The infrastructure is much better, all around. It’s designed to reduce conflicts. And it‘s very likely that you‘d see similar effects in Cambridge as well. Build safe infrastructure and the normal people will show up.
We've been indoctrinated into motonormative thinking because most of us have lived our entire lives surrounded by cars.
I can stand at my local crossing on Old Kent Road and there'll be non-zero cars jumping the red light (often accelerating from a good ways back) or entering the junction without a safe exit blocking the crossing, a bus lane, and another junction (in peak time this will often get into double figures). Multiply that by all the crossings and you'll absolutely dwarf the amount of cyclists doing similar (and in my 20+yrs experience as a pedestrian + cyclist in London, it's not nearly as bad as motor vehicles.)
> It needs to become socially unacceptable to cycle without due care and attention to the safety of others
Let's start with the heavy motor vehicles first, eh.
So SUVs, Trucks and Electric Vehicles?
Also, once police are no longer occupied ticketing motorists, I hope cyclists are prepared for actually being held accountable to laws. The police budget isn't going to refill itself.
Or maybe we prioritise the class of vehicles responsible for almost 5 fatalities and 75 serious injuries a day[1]?
For comparison, [2] says that 30 pedestrians were killed and 1093 serious injuries involved cyclists in eight (8) years. In 416 weeks, that's less than one (1) week of car deaths (0.2% ratio) and two (2) weeks of serious injuries (0.4% ratio).
Anyone that says "we should prioritise X and 416*X the same" is either not arguing in good faith or should be nowhere near decision making.
[1] https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/reported-road-casua... - 1760 fatalities, 28044 serious injuries.
[2] https://www.nationalworld.com/news/politics/pedestrians-kill...
What percentage of cyclist do you think are breaking the law?
> The police budget isn't going to refill itself.
Ticketing is not the main source of revenue for policing (thank goodness)
Your attempt to classify my post as whataboutism is in incredibly poor faith.
I'm very pro-cycling, but it would be foolish to ignore the very real and observable safety concerns that occur because of factors such as poor behaviour (and also, although I didn't mention them originally, issues like infrastructure and quality of road surfaces).
You cannot simply assume that within a particular context or location that more peope cycling equates to greater safety. There are too many other factors at play, and those need to be addressed in order to ensure that cycling is a safer option for everybody.
You'll no doubt be able to point to the statistics that back up these very real safety concerns.
You could start with the number of KSI caused by cyclists compared with motor vehicles
Cyclist involved KSIs, 2013-2020: 1123 (30 + 1093)
All road KSIs, 2020: 24989 (1460 + 23529) (and this was a quieter than normal year on the roads)
I make that a factor of 8 * (24989 / 1123) or 178x difference.
The rule that I personally follow: always behave like a car (albeit one that rides far over to the side of the road most of the time), and if I really feel an overwhelming urge to act as a pedestrian, time to fully dismount and walk the bike for a bit.
As someone who walks a lot, I find this very frustrating, as a lot of cyclists think it's okay to ride on the sidewalk at road speeds. My ideal world would have the urban core be restricted to pedestrians only. Or at the very least speed restricted to 5 mph. Cyclists could stop, lock up the bike and walk. Or walk the bike.
As a tip for dealing with cyclists: continue your movement as a pedestrian: they'll go around you. Most pedestrians have headphones in/little awareness of their surroundings, and as a cyclist I always assume I'm invisible to them and to cars.
>As a tip for dealing with cyclists: continue your movement as a pedestrian: they'll go around you. Most pedestrians have headphones in/little awareness of their surroundings, and as a cyclist I always assume I'm invisible to them and to cars...
But much worse were the ones who'd wake up enough to spot you at the last minute and then suddenly jump to the side --usually the side I was just about to swerve round them on.
Just keep on walking in your own oblivious bubble. I saw you about 1/2km ago and have already planned to my route round you!
No. Pedestrians don't have a monopoly on obvlivion. But neither do cyclists. Some of the things I saw people doing behind the wheel of their cars or lorries, as I cycled past them would put you off going out on a bike for life.
As a pedestrian (I am not wearing headphones) please ring your bell if you are passing me on a shared path.
It is very frightening to have a cyclist suddenly appear in your field of vision, from behind, terrifying.
Something that worked comparatively well for me it so shout “I’ll pass on your (left/right)”
That will do.
- Ringing the bell
- Asking nicely too quietly
- Asking nicely too loud
- Just passing
You can’t win.
Ultimately people just don’t want you to cycle. This is very much a cultural thing. Anyone cycling past age 15 or so is either poor or dangerously counter cultural. One of the most interesting things about the Netherlands is that is very little bike culture! You don’t see people signalling with messenger bags, cycling caps, bike brand stickers etc. because choosing to cycle is not unusual.
Please, please tell that to my local cyclists. Especially the commuters. The norm here is "ON YOUR LEFT!" about 1.5 seconds before blowing by at 25 mph with two feet of clearance.
How about when you're going to pass a pedestrian, you give them a lot of space and slow down to 5 mph.
When cyclists kill or maim 5 people per day, I’ll be the first calling for regulation. Until that day comes, the focus needs to be on the most dangerous mode of transport: private cars.
That disparity in itself will change the behaviour of motorists: I'm used to checking every single direction for cyclists before I make a move, even as a pedestrian, because there are just so many of them everywhere.
It's also why you see "Think Bike!" signs along routes popular with motorcyclists. Lots of places in the country there just aren't that many of us compared with car drivers, so people become unused to looking out for us, with sadly predictable consequences.
That's not to excuse drivers in Newcastle, by the way. It's just to point out that you probably see more drivers behaving badly compared with cyclists because of the differences [apologies, my bet on the differences] in the numbers (which I did do a search for but couldn't find anything useful or authoritative).
Cyclists violating traffic rules is frequently cited in anti-cycling astroturf, of which you can find current examples and a deep archive at StreetsBlog.
This "Overall it constantly shocks me how little responsibility cyclists take for their own safety." just screams "I'm a dickhead driver likely to hurt someone and I want a defense."
https://www.roadpeace.org/pedestrian-pavement-deaths-2/
> This "Overall it constantly shocks me how little responsibility cyclists take for their own safety." just screams "I'm a dickhead driver likely to hurt someone and I want a defense."
You didn't twig with "When driving I've nearly hit several cyclists"
It is still good news. People need to find better modes of transportation for both the environment and for society. It is just that the title doesn't mean what it suggests.
* Indifference from the Police most of the time * Extreme vitriol from motorists who seem to literally believe that all harm is caused by cyclists * Illogical city planning where cyclists are constantly being moved from safe spaces directly into busy traffic.
We have a sick motor-centric society in the UK and along with the rest of climate problems that are ignored/underplayed, I don't know how long until we can say that we are a cycle-friendly country.
Presumably that means on a nice summers day the numbers are even higher.
This is of course countered by the fact the City of London is becoming increasingly hard to navigate in a motor vehicle. There's a proliferation of camera-enforced road closures and turning restrictions which, along with the congestion charge and very high parking charges make driving anywhere near the City only really possible for the very rich. It's long been the case that the majority of vehicles in the City (or anywhere in central London really) are taxis and commercial vehicles. It's great that cycling is increasing, but it's probably at the expense of train travel rather than driving - I don't think I've ever met anyone who works in central London who drives to work regularly.
One peculiarity of the way the City of London is managed is that it has its own local government. Maybe with this evidence that cycling is important they'll finally invest some money into their cycle infrastructure - you can essentially see the dividing line between the City and Islington just by looking at the quality of the road surface.
I moved to London last year and this turned out to be a fortune timing.
My car, a Honda Civic 2007 diesel, is not ULEZ compliant and I will have to pay £12.50/day to drive it from August 2023 due to the low emission zone expansion. I plan to sell it in July.
Guess what? I've been using my Swytch e-bike happily here in London to get around the suburbs. There are even some Amsterdam style bike lanes to get further into the city.
Pros when I get rid of the car:
* no insurance, tax, ULEZ charge, fuel, trip to fuel station, servicing charges, worries about people scratching it...
* Uber for when I really need a car (eg. I have a group with me)
* able to take short-cuts and bypass unpleasant town centers/sometimes
* feeling of getting fresh air and exercise
* helping a cleaner environment for next generation
Cons:
* weather has a big factor when riding and planning trips, all you really need though is gloves, a waterproof jacket - maybe waterproof over-trousers for when there is heavy rain.
* cold weather waters my eyes and hits me in the face
* have to unlock & lock the bike and carry a D-lock
I doubt I will ever own a car after August 2023.
Hearing my plight, an avid cyclist friend of mine suggested me to try a trick:-
Get a 3 way folding cycle such as the Brompton. Now, play around with hybrid modes of transport.
The biggest tower of babel I have achieved so far is this:-
A barge carried my car accross a river. I was sitting in the car with my Brompton next to me.
Here is a free one month trial.
You can try other apps as well but waking up app was the one I found best.
On my bike it consistently takes an hour. I can take various green ways through parks and try to minimise my exposure to aggressive drivers and get some good exercise even on an ebike. The only issue is picking up a puncture which has been an issue with my new tyres lately. It's important to invest in good equipment if you can.
I know this is fundamentally born of emotion rather than rationalism, but still, it does seem like riding a bike is much more dangerous than driving. Bicycles are somewhere from 3x to 11x more dangerous than cars.
https://bicycleuniverse.com/bicycle-safety-almanac/
When I visited Amsterdam I liked how they often had separated bike lanes, not like in the US where cars can and do just drive through the bike lanes, like an actual physical barrier preventing cars from driving through bike lanes. Maybe that would be a lot safer, but, I won't hold my breath on that coming to the US.
In the US, where there is effectively no bicycle infrastructure. In the Netherlands it seems to be about 1.18x (or 1.1x if you include trucks) [0].
[0]: https://www.statista.com/statistics/523310/netherlands-numbe...
Cars have disadvantages and externalities, but they are much safer than bicycles. This is true even in the most bike-friendly countries on earth.
The additional kicker is that most of the pedestrians and cyclists killed die after a collision with a car. As it is, roughly two million people in the world die in traffic per year, almost all of it involving cars. So much for safety.
Everyone deserves better biking infrastructure, cyclists and car drivers alike (more bikes => less cars => less traffic => happier drivers and happier cyclists).
On the other hand, no one is taught how to safely ride a bike after they figure out how to pedal one the first dozen feet, unlike cars where you have to pass exams or have classes. I hardly see anyone taking a lane when biking. I hardly see anyone with lights. I hardly see any signalling. I see a lot of people riding against the flow of traffic even. I see people riding without helmets. I even see people who are clearly intoxicated on something or another swerving over a 5 lane road. If these people sorts of bikers I see anecdotally are any way representative to your average bike rider, then I'm surprised the number is only 3x higher.
Personally I couldn't live without a car. Not because I need it much in the city right now, but because I need it to reach my relatives and meaningful places in the countryside, far away from any public transport. Cost of living is also something to consider, not everyone can afford a proper house within reach of public transport, and living in a flat sucks.
Japan ran hard with the idea too.
A recent example would be Crossrail being partly funded by Canary Wharf, Heathrow Airport, and a large UK Housebuilder.
This is great news.
The power loom?
The electrical generator?
The steam engine?
The telegraph?
The bicycle is a "nice to have" latecomer that can only exist in a world which is already somewhat industrialized.
I'm so tired of the internet.
Anyway, yes, let me revise, bicycles are the best invention, of ALL TIME!
Power loom: ushered in capitalist mode of production, alienating us from our labor. Electrical generator: it's cool I guess. Steam engine: start of the fetishization of the engineering aesthetic. Awful. Only redeeming quality is that it gave us steam punk fiction 200 years later. Telegraph: instant communication is way overrated.
Sorry for piling on. Long weekend.
https://i.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/original/000/738/025/db0...
Your "hyperbole" was solidly within the fat part of the bell curve of "what people of your bent say unironically". You don't get to say you were just pretending when it's called out for being absurd.
Also, poe's law is very relevant here.
>ower loom: ushered in capitalist mode of production, alienating us from our labor. Electrical generator: it's cool I guess. Steam engine: start of the fetishization of the engineering aesthetic. Awful. Only redeeming quality is that it gave us steam punk fiction 200 years later. Telegraph: instant communication is way overrated.
Once again, it's not whimsical hyperbole when there's no shortage of people saying more or less exactly the same thing unironically.
Fair enough. I am certainly of that bent, and proud (ie. smug if you prefer) about it.
I don't see irony and hyperbole as equivalent though. I am serious that bicycles are an excellent invention, certainly in the context of personal mobility, most certainly contrasted with horrid technology like cars. So unironic in that sense. But certainly hyperbole, as in, "best" invention, that's hard to determine. There's millions of axes on which to judge inventions, can't really put them all on a single line, and find "good, better, best".
> no shortage of people saying more or less exactly the same thing unironically
I was joking, doubling down on the original premise of exaggeration, I thought that was obvious.
On another note, Ran Prieur has some interesting thoughts on bikes as a mode of transport.
Now we'd view a similar scene from any major city in the world as signs of a great environmental advance.
Funny how times change, isn't it?
They went with single use superblocks connected by highways. A terrible system in so many ways.
Thankfully they protected some of the old city centers and those still have the beautiful chinese urbanism.
Thankfully, leadership in China has realized that they really fucked up. Sometimes when building the 5 ring road highway that is clogged you start to rethink the problem. Funny enough by turning to Western New Urbanism:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KqldZhxl86I
https://www.efchina.org/Reports-en/report-lccp-20171214-en
The book is really interesting, a great set of guidelines for city building. I don't agree with everything but its pretty fantastic.
Got any examples of China? Because Koreans follow density principles extremely well.
Many Chinese superblocks are not walkable and have no commercial and offices are also in a different place. But its not everywhere.
I don't know about Korea, no comment on that.
Actually, now that I think about it. Korea is actually migrating towards a more Chinese vibe (I call it Americanisation of their planning) where they build the buildings super far apart and make it all way less walkable but still bikeable.
The city I refer to that recently disappointed me and is brand new in Korea is Dongtan, take a look if you get a chance. I think Korea has slipped down the slippery slope unfortunately. Either that or they just haven't filled in the lines yet, but I doubt that. It's just more car-centric.
Things built 5-10 years ago weren't like this, but then neither was the car status symbol race.
It's the space efficiency of the bicycle that allows London to function at this point.
I would still never cycle in London. It doesn't have proper cycle infrastructure, just some painted lines on roads designed for cars. You're taking your life in your hands there.
The car drivers are absolutely entitled to be pissed off with the city. Where I live (Netherlands) they made cycling the obvious choice, because it's cheaper, faster, and more fun than anything else. In London, it's more like it's being smashed down everyone's throats by force. Cycling isn't _better_ there, it's just the only economically viable option after the greedy money grab that is the "punish all drivers" policy for the last 20 years.
But I usually bike in areas with shared infrastructure with cars. I wonder if I would be less worried about ice if slipping and falling wouldn’t mean I will potentially get driven over by a car.
I don’t know much about the City of London (I do know that it’s not the same thing as the city of London), so I’m curious if others with more knowledge can share some information.
Hopefully this will make the introduction of stricter regulations on motorists easier, particularly safety and noise.
I recently got an e-bike, and I would not want a non-e-bike aftger this.
I have an Orbea Rise and I love it. It is heavy though, and the tires are too wide for some of the bus bike racks...
Also, WRT to lighting - I highly recommend getting these, instead of the expensive lights they sell in places like mikes bikes...
I have these on my bikes - they are awwesome because they are weather-proof, solar charged, motion sensing activation and give a wide throw of light. I have one on the front of my bike and on on the back. They automatically turn on at night and go bright when the bike starts moving.
https://www.amazon.com/Otdair-310-Lighting-Waterproof-Securi...
So with a big enough stick and very little carrot anything is possible? Is that a win? Aren't we hearing that actual residents really don't like these "15 minute" cities?
Yep, so all those complaining that nothing is being done or can be done about climate change are wrong. There are tools, they just need to be used.
> Aren't we hearing that actual residents really don't like these "15 minute" cities?
We're also hearing that Zuckerberg is a lizard and the Earth is flat, so fucking what? London is a major metropolis, rather dense, and with very relaxed and mixed zoning (you can have a 13th century "Church of X Girls School" next to a Tesco store in a glass skyscraper. It already does everything a "15th minute city" is about, apart from being "15 minutes big" - commute times are usually bigger, and somewhat concentrated to City and Canary Wharf, but there's work, leisure, shopping, housing to be found all around. Idiots who rage against a concept they couldn't begin to comprehend because toilet paper quality "journalists" make money that way aren't concerned residents of London, they have nothing to do with the city, and their opinion is best ignored.
In neighborhoods with a traditional urban form (or "15 minute cities"), you wouldn't usually take mass transit to the grocery store, it's within a short walking distance. With groceries close by, it's natural to make frequent, smaller trips.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kYHTzqHIngk
what self-proclaimed "15 minute city" are you living in where this is hard? genuinely curious. wondering if the phrase is getting diluted for marketing reasons. I've lived in totally ordinary neighbourhoods of English cities where all this was possible and easy, I never heard them flaunting their "15 minute city"ness, even though they met and exceeded the technical definition.
like I'm just confused that people are calling "utopian" the rather unremarkable reality I've lived for 25+ years. it makes me suspect ppl are using the same words to mean very different things.
In the last place I lived, there were at least six I could walk to conveniently. And that wasn't a big bustling world-class metropolis either, it was a fairly unspectacular inner suburb of Sheffield[1], a city of 550,000, solidly middle of the pack on most social/economic rankings compared to other UK cities. The closest to "mass transit" was a tram that came three times an hour, but I never took the tram to get food.
I've linked the Streetview of the main high street[2] near where I lived, don't want to dox my exact address but I lived somewhere within a 1 km radius of this point[3]. I could get 98% of my monthly needs from this one street. You can explore the different directions on Streetview to see what I'm talking about. Look at the amenities nearby: cafes, coffee shops, greengrocers, hairdressers, newsagents, liquor shops, nurseries, daycare, schools, a gym, churches, pubs, a bus station, furniture shops, banks, a park, a dentist, pharmacies, several GP practices, a supermarket, hardware store, drycleaners, fast food, probably more that I've forgot, all within a short walk of this point. There's even the start of a pleasant walking trail through the Rivelin valley a bit further to the southwest (a godsend during the lockdowns). And this kind of high street isn't unique, there are plenty such high streets dotted around in the adjoining neighbourhoods: Middlewood, Crookes, Kelham Island, the lot. Most people in the city can walk to one. In fairness it may not meet the "15 minute city" definition since most workplaces are in the city centre so a walking commute takes more than 15 minutes. But hey, the tram is about that quick, and biking doesn't take much longer, 20 minutes maybe. And of course you can drive too; plenty of cars about.
Another example: when I was a student my house was in a 1 km radius of this point[4]. It's clearly suburban, but look at all the amenities. Easy, no "mass transit" needed to buy milk. And now I live within 1 km of this[5] point, exact same thing. It's not even the only such high street I can walk to; there's another about the same distance in the opposite direction from my house. British high streets have overlapping walking-distance radii that jointly cover almost all the suburban parts of a city, on top of the big central shopping district of the city-proper.
Having lots of groceries in walking distance is not a high a bar to clear. The examples I gave are all second- or third-rate cities, unimpressive in most respects; they're not the ones urbanists always talk about like Amsterdam or Copenhagen or Tokyo or anything fancy like that. It takes no particular conscious government policy to make this happen, it just happens on its own, because there's more than enough market demand. Look at the houses, they're almost all 2 storeys, only a few apartments in the 3-4 storey range, and hardly anything taller than that; the places I showed are not very densely populated, yet they support all this business. If your city is big and dense enough to have "mass transit" (I'm assuming a subway or high-frequency surface rail?), it ought to have grocery shops even more densely distributed than where I've lived. If not, it sounds like something has gone very wrong! That just shouldn't happen. What land-use regulations/laws are preventing it?
This is what I meant when I said people use the same words to mean different things ... all kinds of confusion. Best to use Streetview and give examples.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hillsborough,_Sheffield
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_Street
[3] https://goo.gl/maps/6h6qSdFcn2thifM9A
A rucksack will easily carry around 5-6 days of food. Other than that, I would simply pop by the shop on my commute home from work. It would be a 5-10 minute detour max.
Remember that the shops in such cities are directly accessible (no need to walk through a massive shopping centre), there's no time wasted on finding a parking space, there's so many shops that it's extremely likely that there's at least one between your home and the bus/tube stop and they're mostly exclusively filled with food so you're not walking past dozens of aisles filled with non-groceries.
The big bonus of course is that if you wake up in the morning and realise you're out of milk, it's a usually a <5min walk to the closest shop to pick some up and no one will bat an eyelid if you're still wearing your bathing gown. :)
There's also generally less food waste (as you shop for fewer days and can plan better) and you can opt into buying your fruit, veg, meat and fish fresh every day instead of having to hope that your 'big shop' at the megastore will still be fresh at the end of the week.
I just bring a bag or two and ride my bike to the store. Or if I'm downtown, which is a 10 minute train ride away, I'll stop by the grocery store next to the station before hopping on the train and just carry my groceries in a bag or put em in my backpack.
The only times I choose to drive are when I want to get a large quantity of something lightweight, like toilet paper or paper towels.
I typically don't buy a lot at once, I'll plan my meals for the next few days and only buy what I know will definitely get eaten to reduce waste.
Smaller stores within neighborhoods allow for quick trips without much hassle.
But the main benefit is it enables me to not own a car, if I couldn’t get things delivered I might buy a car and then use it for other things I don’t strictly have to but since I’m paying for one anyway.
Second, how else are cities meant to do this? The fundamental problem is that there is a huge and rising level of driving demand[1], and limited supply. There is a scarcity of road space in London and you can't really add more. Basic economics tells you that you can manage that scarcity through some combination of prices, queues, and lotteries. Throughout most of the 20th century, we defaulted to queues, in the form of traffic jams. You can use the road at zero cost, but you'll have to wait a long time. But that became increasingly untenable as car ownership rose -- the number of cars in Britain has doubled over the last few decades. And traffic jams are themselves unpleasant: they're noisy, ugly, emit pollution, etc. So now cities are using prices too, in the form of congestion charges, taxes, and so on. That's not some punitive "stick" done for its own sake, it's just a tool used to cope with an inescapable economic reality. When you have more cars and the same amount of road, you need to deter an increasing fraction of those cars from using those roads. The "carrot" is providing alternate, more space-efficient ways to get around: bike infrastructure, public transport.
[1] "driving demand" is itself a weaselly, meaningless phrase, because "demand" only makes sense in reference to a specific price level. motorists have been conditioned by a century of car-friendly policy to expect to drive and park for free, but there's no real justification for that. just because the roads are publicly owned doesn't give them the right to use them for free, any more than state-owned railways should have free fares.
Reducing motor traffic makes for safer, more aesthetically pleasant streets. You can expand the pavement, have flowers, landscaping, public art, outdoor dining, etc. The air quality is better, the surroundings are quieter, people don't get run over and maimed in collisions.
And when you really want or need to drive, there's less traffic around. Nobody likes sitting in traffic jams! See this video for how these kinds of policies benefit drivers directly[1].
The carrot is having a more pleasant city. Everyone wins from that.
barriers/bollards: they're meant to stop cars from hitting people or driving in bike lanes or parking where they shouldn't. I like having them around. as for cameras, they're to catch people speeding, they mostly wouldn't be necessary if people didn't speed. and people speed mostly because the design of the road doesn't match the legal speed limit. see e.g. this[1]. so if you don't like cameras, you should welcome these redesigns.
but more importantly than any of that, could you please think about the other side of the ledger for a minute? "restrictions" on mobility are novel or hypothetical to you, but they're not for me.
traffic calming, restricted access roads, low-traffic neighourhoods, you think of these small things as restrictions on you because you can't go places quite as fast or quite as directly as you want, but for me they're lifelines. they let me get some places reliably and safely at all. on a road with 40+mph traffic, I can't use it unless there's a protected bike lane, and junctions designed with cyclists in mind (i.e. some degree of physical separation). and if that road is the only connection between A and B, then I can't get from A to B! pedestrians need barriers and refuges and controlled crossings and slowed vehicle speeds to safely get across busy roads. these things aren't luxuries, they're necessities for people who do not drive.
I've told you about getting around without a car in my city is fairly doable, because the local council has improved the infrastructure quite a bit recently. but that doesn't yet extend outside of the city's boundaries, even though there's no practical reason why it couldn't. so here's a story about those difficulties:
the city next to mine is close enough that cycling to it would be, in theory, a completely reasonable journey. a direct-ish route would take about 40 minutes; perfectly doable as a commute. but it's impossible because there is no such route. trust me, I've looked high and low for one, it simply doesn't exist. I've spent hours scouring Google Maps and Streetview, even doing reconnaissance trips to gauge the safety of certain parts myself, taking photographs, testing whether traffic lights detect me, etc. every route has many absolute showstopper segments where I'm exposed to high speed traffic with no physical protection whatsoever, and/or have to risk my life at enormous junctions whose design is completely hostile to my presence. I managed to get all the way there once, on a tangled indirect mess of side streets and unpaved tracks, taking over 3x longer than it had any right to. it was like finding the Northwest Passage. getting there by bus or rail is not quite as hard, but still far more awkward and unpredictable than it should be.
then I heard about govt proposals to alter one of the several motorway routes between the two cities: of the five lanes, make one into a protected bidirectional bikeway, and two others into a dedicated bus lanes. this isn't expensive, it's just paint and concrete barriers, and some alterations to the traffic lights and signage. but predictably, the comments on the news article were full of uproar about this imposition, a "war on motorists", it would supposedly increase congestion, and my favourite, "why would you build a bike lane? who even cycles there anyway?".
pity the poor motorist! I doubt any of them have ever agonized for hours over whether a trip of less than ten miles between two cities was even practically possible. such a failure of transport connectivity would be inconceivable in a modern Western country. yet situations like this are considered normal for non-drivers. we're expected to put up with not being able to practically reach places nearby, and be grateful for the smallest improvements, while billions are spent on motorways each year. and then I see conspiracizing about 15-minute cities, "restrictions on movement", "geofencing" and so on, and I just have to laugh. I've been de-facto "geofenced" by car-first planning for years, and so has everyone else who can't or doesn't drive (and there are a lot of us).
so if you want to halt these reforms, or think things should go back to how they were, what that really means is, you're happy with people like me living with harsh and pointless restrictions on mobility, far worse than cameras and bollards and congestion pricing are for motorists. for my part, I think motorists have simply gotten used to an unwarranted level of convenience, public subsidy, and politician's attention. the mild restrictions for motorists are enormously liberating for everyone else. and they are mild. you might have to take a slightly longer route, or walk the last hundred yards instead of parking exactly at your destination, or pay to use scarce road space that a huge number of other people want to use ... it's not that big a deal. a fairer balance between drivers' convenience and the welfare of other road users shouldn't feel like an attack on you.
[1] https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2022/7/18/how-street-des...
I don't really understand the hate first of all, but more importantly how do you respond to it appropriately and maturely? Is there another way than just ignoring it?
Delivery riders have a tough life. They buy their own gear and pay to keep it in the city. Things like UL-listed batteries are important. But so is expansion of bike infrastructure for all kinds of cyclists.
I don't own one, but I know e-bikes popularize cycling. In some places they are the only practical daily use bike. More would be better.
The only place I can reliably bike to at the moment is my office which has a secured bike parking.
The internal hubs like they used 50+ years ago were a better design for rainy weather than derailleurs.
With that said, I can guess most are using single speed. Hopefully not fixed :)
Their invention is closer to 150 years ago than 50.
I'm more curious as to the makeup of electric-assisted vs human-powered.
Ebikes have also shaken up the drivetrain landscape a bit. Motors can be in the middle of the bike, and those bikes are often being paired with internally geared hubs in the rear. Mid-drive bikes can incorporate a gearbox in the motor, and are built with nothing but a belt drive and a single cog on the rear wheel.
I love pedaling, but I'd have to be blind to not see how ebikes have widened cycling's userbase in my area, and I'm very curious if that's the case everywhere.
Overall bike design makes more difference. Dutch bike >> MTB with comfort fittings > regular MTB > racing bike. By "comfort fittings" I mean things like chain guards and mudguards and a suitable saddle.
These days quite a lot will be e-bikes too.
I feel like you're missing one type, the 80s touring bike. The one that looks like a racing bike but with a longer wheelbase, mudguards, racks and thicker tyres.
It is more comfortable in the city than a racing bike, but also IMO better than a mountain bike with curved handlebars, thinner tyres and a lighter frame. They're also dirt cheap.
(I believe that this is Neil Gaiman's joke, but it could also be Pratchett, or older)
They simply gentrify car ownership in the city due to different taxes and it ends up being something that is only for the wealthier segments.
Everything seems to be about profit in London, while trying to coat it with a nice messaging about environment or some other thing most of us agree on but the implementations usually are simply money making or money saving schemes that very gladly screw over those less socioeconomically able.
What's driving the battery fires with e-bikes and scooters?
https://www.npr.org/2023/03/11/1162732820/e-bike-scooter-lit...
The problems seem to be more with low end Chinese ebikes.
Hopefully LEVA will produce some standards as Light Electric Vehicles are very unregulated right now.
Weather has been very rainy, hoping to bike more for short trips around town. Thought about a cheap e-bike for grocery shopping, etc.
Free bike.
Has this ever worked? Surely the administrator would just sell the debt at a discount (for them, not you).
Not the nicest bike by a long shot, but it gets daily use.
easy solution: compulsory lisencing and insurance
Also please keep in mind that The Telegraph is not a neutral actor with regards to Khan. They recently blamed him for the national strikes, which was totally non sensical.
Should work just fine IF there is biking infrastructure.
You plow the bike roads just like you do with car roads.
City of London is not greater London. It’s a small part of London.
Now fix London's massive crime issues, thanks.
Even if this is true (I'm skeptical without seeing a source), you're more than free to mount whatever style of seat you want on your bike. No one's stopping you.
> Along with the more common city riding hazards like car passangers opening doors, falling over and you breaking bones, getting run over, or even directly breathing in exhaust fumes from trucks.
Great point. Those are all excellent reasons for further reducing the numbers of cars on our streets in lieu of bikes and walking.
However, I have nothing against bikes. I rode one my first year of university, daily; rain and snow. I was a poor student. It had its benefits, but it sucked in many ways.
Separated Bike paths is both a safer and nicer experience. No need to try and get rid of cars.
Because biking in cities is dangerous, I wouldn't go around telling people to do it.
Sure, here are some studies that have investigated the possible association between cycling and the risk of testicular or prostate cancer:
A 2014 study published in the Journal of Men's Health found that cycling was associated with a higher risk of testicular cancer in men who cycled frequently or for long periods of time.
A 2015 study published in the Journal of Sexual Medicine found that cycling was associated with a higher risk of erectile dysfunction and decreased libido in men who cycled frequently or for long periods of time.
A 2017 study published in the Journal of Urology found that cycling was associated with a higher risk of prostate cancer in men who cycled frequently or for long periods of time.
> Conclusion: The lack of internal consistency of the findings within the current study and of findings among prior studies, suggests that PA contributes little, if any, to the risk of TGCC.
Since you didn't link to the others, I can't respond to them, but I would note that the article I linked to noted that cyclists are more likely to be more health conscious, and thus would see a doctor more regularly and naturally be more likely to be diagnosed, among other potentially-confounding factors.
When I was in London over a decade ago they already had restrictions on car traffic into certain parts of the city and additional fees to go there. Tax on a new car is 20% and lots of regulations on their characteristics. Large taxes on petrol which is already much more expensive than in the US.
It’s decisions all the way down. The question is „What is the outcome we want and what‘s the road to get there.“
UK sales tax IS 20 for almost all goods! Why is this a reason? Can't think what other "regulations" there are in their characteristics other than emmissions?
Oil is the most subsidised industry in America. Oil is more expensive pretty much everywhere but Saudi Arabia where you can get it by kicking about the sand.
Despite all the restrictions London has placed, it is still the most gridlocked city in the planet, with the lowest traffic movement. London has too many people, and too many cars despite its incredible public transport options.
On of the main reasons is that it is not a very tall city, low density means sprawl, means lots of cars. Replace a lot of the Zone 1 2 floor flats with a garden for a 10 story multi family house and suddenly car useage would plummet.
Cars are the recent addition, and they are being restricted because they were causing issues. The alternative is bulldozing the city for some highways, which does not really sound very natural to me.
Cars killed those services. Nothing about that was "natural." Cars need to be contained to uses where they are strictly needed in order for such services to come back.
With work-at-home as a new norm there is much less need for commuting. With delivery there is much less need to drive from store to store on shopping trips. The American "geography of nowhere" is a blight to be eradicated.
If you don't, you get the tragedy of the commons.