....so after all of that effort to create walkable cities, remove car lanes for bike lanes etc. this is where we end up? Not sure if trying to create more walkways, removing traffic lanes for bike etc. are the answer if this is the net result.
When I lived in Germany, I'd see little towns of a few hundred people that were more dense and walkable than US cities 100x their size.
And bikability is even worse, sub-garbage level. People don't do it because it appears to be insanely dangerous because our infrastructure is generally shit tier, like painted bike lanes (though off street trails are often okay, where they exist).
People are mostly rational when choosing day to day transportation options. If biking was supported well they'd do it. But it's not, so they don't.
All the "Vision Zero" announcements were mostly politicians doing politician things with no real oomph behind them. There are things that can be done quickly and effectively, but the political will usually isn't there due to our horrible cultural momentum.
In Atlanta, for example, many parts have been removing car lanes for bike lanes and parking has become a real problem in some neighborhoods. Places that used to be free to park in charge a small fortune at times and there are not as many options to park your car in these areas.
Instead of doing development with adequate parking, they don't provide enough and charge a fortune for what we have. Between the climate and the poor mass transit it is the worst of both worlds but hey.
When I was visiting downtown Austin recently it seemed like a similar story from what I observed.
- You cannot make public transport a feasible option because
- Most places do not have the population density required because
- Places are designed in a car-centric manner, with strict zoning laws that enforce low-density suburbia because
- Everyone has a car because
- Public transport sucks because
- You cannot make public transport a feasible option because
1. That's an entirely intentional choice. A big country means you'll inevitably have lots of space between cities, not within them. Our metro areas are low density due to zoning regulations that we intentionally chose. Most residential areas in the US, building densely is literally illegal.
2. You could still have decent biking in many suburban and urban areas even with current density levels. Just takes protected bike lanes and intersections (and the occasional off street trail) but we don't do that. Instead you get painted bike lanes in the door zone as drivers buzz you two feet away. Of course hardly anybody bikes in those circumstances, they don't have a death wish.
In my native bay area, I'd see painted, unprotected bike lanes on goddamn expressways where cars are going 50+ mph, it's completely insane! Who the hell thought this was a good idea?? That's how dumb and bad bike infrastructure commonly is in the US, it's one step away from Futurama-style suicide booths.
Specifically, in the context of retail, what a retailer stocks (e.g. in a supermarket) or produces (e.g. a sandwich shop) is a function of how much space they have to pay for and how many customers they can get through the door.
For example, our expectation of a supermarket is one that carries everything we may possibly want on our grocery list. Whereas our expectation of a regular market, is the limited selection that covers most of what we need. Apologies for the contrived example but the point I’m trying to make is those of us who live in denser areas are used to walking to one of these locations, or making more frequent trips, or both, but it’s not the same feeling for the other.
Putting a bike lane next to a supermarket isn’t going to dramatically increase the number of cyclists nor customer foot traffic in relation to what the store already receives. The people coming to a large supermarket are potentially buying a large weight of items across different categories.
Even if there was a targeted approach that was marketed towards cyclists (“50% off your entire order if you show up in a helmet and racing attire”, or something extreme of that nature), I don’t think that would move the needle meaningfully because the resulting transactions wouldn’t achieve a hypothetical ideal kg-per-customer ratio (or even a repeat customer multiplier).
This would create a situation in which the store has too much product or if you go in the opposite direction of purchasing less product: unappealing empty shelves.
So as long as retail density remains low due to limits on how small a landlord is willing to subdivide available space for a tenant, the retailers will continue to engage in business activity that potentially encourages driving via loading up bulk/heavy items, or casting a very large advertising net to attract people outside of walking/biking distance to pack a place. Both of which the end goal is to at least cover their overhead.
When you examine dense European cities, I’m not sure you find retail shops that have the same square footage compared to American retail shops. They’re sized (and configured) to cover their overhead by servicing a small amount of customers at a time. If you were to offer an American-sized lease to a European retailer, my guess is they would turn it down unless they were already a very, very popular spot with lines out of the door.
In these conversations, I think the general focus should be on what’s occupying the physical destination (and its size) rather than availability/quality of public transit. Since in some places, the transit exists but the impetus to actually use it is minimal.
Although you do see some smaller grocery stores in the US: Aldi, Lidl, and Trader Joe's come to mind. I live close enough to a Safeway, Trader Joe's and a Whole Foods for biking to be viable, and I have an ebike, but I don't bike there. Why not? The bike infrastructure is shit to get there, and parking lot/front of store area is not designed for bikes at all. Fix those two things and I'd start biking.
Biking to local grocery stores and getting through them when I lived in Munich was generally much faster than doing the same now that I'm in a typical US suburb using a car. Getting onto and off a bike, parking it, and getting from there into the store is much faster than the equivalent for a car. Finding things and getting through the store is also much faster than in the US because it's smaller. In total, grocery trips for basics tended to go significantly faster there.
> there’s a noticeable rise in biking trips while pedestrian activity is dwindling as a portion of overall trips.
Beyond that, this seems highly relevant:
> Alarmingly, pedestrian fatalities rose during this period
Maybe we haven't actually made any walkable cities
> Despite this, there’s a noticeable rise in biking trips while pedestrian activity is dwindling as a portion of overall trips.
They cite StreetLight Data as their source. Per GCN (which cites the same source)
> bicycle trips in the US have increased by 37% from 2019 to 2022
GCN is obviously also going to have some kind of bias, but the TTI article clearly does as well.
https://www.globalcyclingnetwork.com/general/news/in-the-us-...
However, compared to 2021, 18 metros observed an increase in walking activity in 2022, with California metros dominating nine out of the top ten spots. New York City ranked 10th