Bicycle use now exceeds car use in Paris | Hacker News Reader

Bicycle use now exceeds car use in Paris

english.elpais.com

136 pointsgeox52 comments

It becomes such a no brainier if you have a safe option for bicycle commuting.

It's a 2 for 1 of needed exercise and commuting so it's actually a time saver in net compared to driving. If you have a dedicated bicycle path that minimises interactions with cars it's also a zero stress option too. I've never experienced any serious bicycle rage.

I hate days where I have to drive for some reason.

I recently (last quarter) started cycling to work in San Francisco, netting 80-100 miles a week, and your statements ring true.

Looking at my Strava relative effort and resting heart rate, the amount of aggregate exercise I get is far superior to my previous exercise habits. While it may take me a net +30 minutes when using non-ebikes to get around in a day, I get something like 90 minutes of total exercise, something I could never justify if I separated my commute from exercise.

E-bikes are extremely quick, depending on the task, they are often less in trip time vs. cars, public transit, or a taxi. But for exercise reasons I tend to ride classic.

I use a cargo ebike for getting my kid to school, but days when I do not need to do that, I use the city shared bikes, often the unpowered ones. I like them both. The latter I use even the same day when I have my cargo bike: it's wonderful to cycle to lunch on a less unwieldy cycle, walk to a coffee shop, and then pick up a bicycle from a different dock to return to the office. All that I choose to carry is a helmet to do that.

It's also a lot more fun than the train/bus (which I also kind of enjoy, my route is somewhat scenic), or driving [and parking].

Pretty much all of my complaints with cycling come from having to share the roads with cars. I don’t want my commute to work to be a white knuckle adrenaline pumping experience.

If there was a safe and quiet way to ride to work, I’d take that every time.

And if you have proper infrastructure (like in the Netherlands), it's even a time saver just by itself if your trip is within the same city.

Bicycle is the least discriminatory private mode of transport: it caters to all ages, almost-all abilities. It give you free exercise, its good for the environment, for the community, for the local economy: small commercial shops benefit from cycle infra.

Private car is space and energy inefficient, and car infra is hostile to cycling and walking.

Build for what you want (walking,cycling,public transport), not for what you have (private car).

Yes its a massive no-brainer. Amazing how we as a society fail to see this.

Bikes are ridiculously cost efficient especially if you can use them to enable you to own even 1 less car.

2 grand is more than enough to cover commuting for a DECADE. You could get away with 1 grand if you wanted to. Cars aren't getting any cheaper so I only expect the bike to become more and more dominant.

Oh yea and less than a grand is easy if you're happy enough to troll around craigslist and buy used stuff.

Every bicycle I've ever owned has been bought from craigslist and some steel thing built in japan in the 1980s. Most bought between $400-$700. Many of them were quite nice too as Japan was the top builder of this technology at the time. They'll last practically forever.

The great thing about old bikes too is that if they're not too old (ie. 1980s and newer) they all use ISO standardized parts and are remarkably easy to repair and update.

Cycling is absolutely the most cost effective way to transport yourself around a city and incredible how the media so often frames the bicycle as some plaything for rich yuppies instead of the reality of being a critical tool of affordable transportation for regular low income workers.

Doesn't require Craigslist or buying used. You can get a boring but totally functional commuter bike with disk brakes and 1x9 speeds from Specialized for $1k or less (Sirrus or Sirrus X). Similar models from other big bike brands. Then you have $1k for maintenance over a decade to fit within $2k, which is probably plenty.

And the cheaper the bike, the more excercise it will give you - so win-win whatever the price!

I bought my current bike in 2014 for $200, still my daily commuter.

And all it took was to make it viable.

I wonder how quickly other cities would change to preferring bike use if only the infrastructure to use bikes safely existed?

I'm hoping one of the knock-on effects of NYC's congestion tax will be more desireable biking on city streets, especially on those currently without bike lanes

which may snowball into those bikers demanding more bike lanes, and so on. the current bike lanes are alright, but somehow i always find myself needing to cut across two lanes of traffic to make a left or something at some point

In NYC you should also have some law that prohibit's going more than 20mph on bike, as some e-bikers are a bit crazy.

it's the pedestrians hanging out in the bike lanes that are crazy :P

that's not an NYC problem though, in Paris i couldn't walk for more than 15 min without seeing someone on a bike slam into a pedestrian

from the ensuing dialogue though, i was starting to get the feeling they were doing it on purpose (both bikers and walkers)...

How can we do the same in the US? I would love to take bicycle trips but that means having to share the lane with monster pickups and distracted SUV drivers.

As unhelpful as this answer might seem, I think the answer is damn the SUVs, full bike ahead. Nothing will change until there are cyclists on the roads, then it starts to snowball. I’ve seen it happening here in London (UK).

Same way as they did it in Paris: Take roads that are currently exclusively set aside for car use, and reserve a portion for exclusive cyclist use. This means building separated bike lanes (ie. not just some painted pavement).

"Build it and they will come"

The reason that cycling isn't that popular is because being chaotically mixed in with vehicle traffic makes it a dangerous activity, and people unsurprisingly avoid dangerous activities.

Creating separated AAA "All Ages and Abilities" bicycle lanes makes cycling safe and so then people feel encouraged to bicycle for whatever daily chores it makes sense to cycle for.

This has been done in some cities, but those bike lanes are sitting empty, so there's more to it than that.

The bike paths have to be useful of course. You can make a nice bike path to nowhere and no one will use it because there's nowhere to go there. Even if it's Lime scooters or whatever using the bike paths, still an improvement.

Driving a car in Paris is also a nightmare so there's that additional motivator there.

Well the problem is that you need a cycling network and even the most cycling friendly of North American cities often don't have that.

So the common problem that holds back many cities is that you might have one or two AAA bike lanes, but then after that you're thrown back into the dangerous mix of traffic again.

Accordingly cycling growth will be limited outside of the narrow corridors where the best AAA bike lanes exist.

I don't know where you're referring to specifically, but a common thing I've seen is that cities will make some set of roads bikeable (usually roads they were repaving/redesigning anyway) but they're not really connected in a sensible way. It makes biking on the improved roads nicer, but most practical trips will still involve other roads which might be more dangerous, scary, or difficult.

I'm thinking of downtown San Jose, CA, where they do seem to have a full network of bike lanes often totally separated by cones, but maybe I'm wrong.

Having looked at those bike lanes with streetview it appears most of them are simply painted and don't provide any physical separation from traffic. Also, this: https://www.google.com/maps/@37.3428225,-121.8868874,3a,75y,...

Huh, maybe they took them out. And yeah that's the classic, those blocked lanes were a constant danger when I used to bike to work.

Adding scattered bike lanes in a haphazard way is insufficient. You need a network of physically separated bike lanes that connects an entire city. Any gap in the network makes it so the bike lanes might as well not exist, if you go from a nice ride to being in mixed traffic. Physical separation is also critical, because between the lack of enforcement of blocked bike lanes in most locales and the apathy of drivers that have no qualms blocking them, if you don't make it physically impossible to park on them, people will park on them, rendering them useless.

It's not reassuring to say that these lanes only work when they cover the entire city. If they start with a smaller bike-friendly part of town and it actually works, people will want to move there or expand it.

If they are more than just a line on the road and are actually safe to use, they are probably not as empty as they seem. Because bikes take up much less space and don't tend to bunch up as much like cars, it can seem like there must be a lot less bikes than there actually are. 30 cars over the course of 5 minutes are very noticeable and seem like high traffic. 10 bikes over 5 minutes seem like almost nobody, but the bike lane would then be moving a third as much people as all the car lanes combined.

It's so empty anywhere I go that it's an easy comparison. I can drive 15 minutes and see 0 bikes, 200 cars. I used to bike too. If there were anywhere near as many bikes as cars, I'd have sat next to them at traffic lights. Cars might bunch up more, but in any place with mid to heavy traffic, they're everywhere anyway.

You need to provide evidence and context.

This has not been done in a single US city. We only have patchwork networks, and a patchwork network of safe infrastructure is by definition unsafe infrastructure.

Ban street parking in cities, remove parking minimums from planning/zoning, and start enforcing laws against drivers killing people. (Heck, any kind of enforcement of speed limits and driving license requirements will help). Give bicycles priority at junctions and set up bike boxes etc. (don't bother with cycle lanes until you've done this, drivers mostly kill cyclists at junctions). Accept that it'll take time and be an incremental process.

IMO the most realistic way to achieve this in the US is to build up some central no-car area that has ample parking around it. This may be composed of parks, malls, and closed streets that never made much sense to drive on anyway. As it becomes more desirable to go there, more people choose to live within walking or biking distance, and it expands. Meanwhile people from suburbs can still drive to there, park outside, and support those businesses. There are some good examples of this already.

What doesn't work is taking an existing car-centric city and making it more annoying for cars. That doesn't shrink the distances for bikes or encourage growth around a focal point. Paris wasn't built around cars, though.

> What doesn't work is taking an existing car-centric city and making it more annoying for cars.

It may not work alone, but it's an important part of the process. Both the Netherlands and more recently Paris have found that carrot-only approaches don't work, you have to be prepared to make private car use worse, because otherwise most of the time a private car wins for the individual even as it causes a tragedy of the commons in terms of congestion.

The suggestion isn't carrot-only. Instead of making the whole city more annoying for cars, it's making part of it completely unusable by cars and leaving the rest alone, subject to change as the no-car area grows.

It's like a crystal; you need a seed, not just saturation.

> What doesn't work is taking an existing car-centric city and making it more annoying for cars. That doesn't shrink the distances for bikes or encourage growth around a focal point. Paris wasn't built around cars, though.

Amsterdam was very car-centric in the 70s [0][1][2] even if the city was not built for cars. Over the decades it was reclaimed from cars and back into a pedestrian-friendly city, taking space/lanes away from cars to build cycling infrastructure, better separation between traffic (enlarged sidewalks in major streets, separate bike lanes, raised sidewalks for pedestrians on intersections, etc.).

American cities have a lot more space to be taken away from cars, instead of stroads you could have bike lanes with pedestrian boulevards with vegetation/trees as separation from traffic, better public transportation with trams and busses on the same streets as cars to lower the speed, better connection to the transportation network for people coming from suburbs so they could switch to the cities' mass transportation; it's, to me, a very low hanging fruit on how to improve American cities urbanism but it takes political will and a change of culture, unfortunately I feel that the change of culture is the hardest part in the USA with its hyper-individualism.

[0] https://i.pinimg.com/736x/09/d4/9f/09d49fbe98e46797d45e8c177...

[1] https://international.fhwa.dot.gov/pubs/pl18004/index_files/...

[2] https://i.redd.it/vujg495x71l61.jpg

Amsterdam wasn't built around cars, that's the key. Especially an oversized American road converted to big tree-dotted lanes wouldn't be particularly useful for people if everything is still so far apart, like Dearborn, MI.

Also, if you start with a small central area in an already dense city, you will find a lot more political support from residents and business-owners because there's a clear and immediate benefit to them. Rather than telling an entire city you're "fixing" their way of life and it'll take a long time to pay off.

Make people as poor as we are in europe so they cannot afford a car.

A priori you need the right density.

Bikes are just not gonna work for low density suburbs since you’ll need to cycle for hours to get anywhere.

From the article, it looks like bikes outsize cars so much that this claim is robust to different ways of tabulating comparisons: number of trips, time using vehicle, maybe even distance traveled.

yes the Field of Dreams approach to safe street infrastructure does work (if you build it they will come).

Unpopular idea but cycling as the main vehicle to commute is backwards. Interesting how everyone here seems to think the same thing. Not everyone wants to or can bike. Making cars and bicycles rivalries can be an anti-progress idea actually.

> Not everyone wants to or can bike.

Not everyone wants to or can use a car either.

> Making cars and bicycles rivalries can be an anti-progress idea actually.

More people using bicycles is better for everyone, even car users, since congestion is the biggest problem for car users and bicycles make much more efficient use of road space.

We're getting way too fat and put a lot of stress on our environment. Cycling helps with both, through exercise and by lowering overall impact (way less impact making the vehicle, no emissions using it, very little parking space needed, pretty much noise free, way safer in collisions when no cars are involved, etc). Seems to me it's actually a very forwards thinking idea.

Oh and I live in Amsterdam and still own a car. It's even more common for Dutch families outside cities to own a car or two (74% of Dutch households owns at least one). The two are not mutually exclusive, but both serve their purpose. I take my bike for any trips of max ~30 minutes, anything over and I'll usually opt for public transport or car, as that's faster and more convenient.

I think that pushing for as many people to switch to cycling for their daily under 10 miles commute, would benefit everyone, including those who aren't able to cycle because they would have a less congested traffic and a faster trip in a car. If you believe that people who advocate for cycling infrastructure want to remove car infrastructure completely I think you're a little deluded, or they are.

I think it’s not the point that everybody cycles. It would be a great improvement if a lot of people would cycle.

There probably will always be valid reasons that someone wants or has to use a car, but these few valid reasons shoukd not distract from the large number of people who can and in fact want to cycle in many circumstances.

For that though the infrastructure needs to e aimed at the large number of cyclists and not at the small number of valid motor vehicle drivers.

I feel in the moment the priorities are upside down and somehow in a convoluted city where everything has to fight for priority in available space it is somehow acceptable that everyone can use the limited road space for every car travel they want however they want and on the back of that that it is the city planners obligation to provide infrastructure so that car driver can drive in big cities however they want.

I feel that’s not the best use of the available space and not in the best interest of people living in a city centre.

The vast majority of car owners are cyclists and the vast majority of cyclists are car owners.

There's no rivalry except those who don't understand. They are the same people in different situations. I drive today as I'm going somewhere after work that has no cycling lanes. I'll ride tomorrow as I prefer it.

Amazing, and I wish more cities would follow.

Not me. I was fed up of riding bike half of my life. Just 5 year ago I bought my own car.

Luckily for you that's a whole lot fewer cars you'll need to share the road with :)

Bike use used to exceed car use in China too. Maybe it still does?

I highly doubt it's even close. I haven't been to mainland China, but everywhere else in Asia that I have been has had a strong trend over the last decades of bicycles -> motorbikes -> cars.

Great news! :-)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com