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Comment by lvl102 | Hacker News Reader

Bike lanes in the US are useless outside of perhaps 3-4 cities (all with exceptional public transportation systems) And they’re really green vanity projects that do not deliver value to urban areas. Utilization is piss poor especially during winter months.

Edit: I am not against bike lanes but they’re really the cheapest way for city planners and politicians to pull a publicity stunt. A proper way to increase bike utilization is to invest in public transportation and actually drive down car ownership. But, this is a very expensive (and might even be impossible) feat in the US. WFH is not helping the trend because it’s facilitating people further out of cities which, you guessed it, increases car ownership.

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Montréaler here. A surprising amount of people cycle all winter long; the days where you see no one cycling about are typically days where you wouldn't even want to be outside in a car due to the inclement weather.

Winter cycling is actually popular enough that our bike-share system has started to leave a portion of the sharing infrastructure out during the colder months. They put studded tires on the bikes, put the stations in locations where they aren't in the way of snow plows and the like, and people use them quite a bit! Something like 1,500-5,000 rides per day, just in the shared infrastructure. That doesn't count the even larger number of people here who have their own dedicated winter bike.

Montreal might be an exception because they actually remove the snow from the streets and they have an incredible logistics behind that process.

Bold statement with no evidence. I can assure you that they're well used in Boston/Cambridge/Somerville during the winter months as well as summer.

I ride bikes in Cambridge. This is not true at all. Bike lane utilization during winter months goes down quite a bit in Cambridge. In many parts, they don’t even build bike lanes with snow removal in mind. It’s not even safe/practical to bike in snow.

If anyone else was wondering, the 4 biggest cities in the USA are

  New York City: ~8.4 million
  Los Angeles: ~3.9 million
  Chicago: ~2.7 million
  Houston: ~2.3 million

And they account for ~ 5% of the total USA population

(17.3 million / 331 million) * 100 = 5.23%

And these aren’t even the cities with great bike infrastructure.

Sounds like we have a long way to go.

With this argument no modal change can ever Happen.

Finland and Northern Europe prove this to be false

Keep in mind that winter in the most-populated areas of Scandinavia and surrounding regions can be quite mild compared to cities in North America that are much farther south.

Consider the climates of cities like Ottawa and Montreal in Canada, or Minneapolis in the US, for example. They're at roughly the same latitude as Venice, Italy, yet get rather harsh winters:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ottawa#Climate

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Montreal#Climate

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minneapolis#Climate

Compare their climates to those of Helsinki, Oslo, Stockholm, and Saint Petersburg:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helsinki#Climate

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oslo#Climate

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stockholm#Climate

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saint_Petersburg#Climate

Ottawa, Montreal, and Minneapolis can experience noticeably lower temperatures, more snowfall, and so on.

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