What our childhood shows taught us about cities (2019)
thomasbardenett.com
thomasbardenett.com
That sort of thing was impossible for me. No sidewalks, no pedestrians, barely any bikers. It was just cars everywhere all the time. One time I decided to make the 6-mile trip to the mall on foot. It was a harrowing experience, but I was a rebellious teenager and I just wanted some independence, even if it meant spending half a day walking just to go to a mall.
The roads where I grew up had no shoulder and people frequently whipped around the windy roads at 35 mph. The only bikers I ever saw were fully lycra-clad race cyclist type of people. I never saw a mother biking with her kid, for example. I was afraid to be on a bike on the streets. At least with walking I could take a step or two off the road when a fast moving car was coming.
This isn't an issue of limiting myself. This is just an issue of safety.
Fair, but my gut reaction was ‘yeah I would’ so I think we just aren’t on the same page. Take care!
I discovered this on a crappy folding bike with 2-speed duo-matic, while being in a hurry and thus angrily overtook a slow Citroen 2CV :-)
Looking at the speedometer from the outside. Showed 50kph, so I must have been faster, or the speedometer slightly wrong.
Whatever, that experience has shown me that I could do that, and from there on it was in my 'muscle memory', ready to be used at will.
Which then went up to 40/41 on road bikes on flat grounds with no headwinds, for about an hour sustained. But I often did 44 to 47, always trying to push the needle of my speedometer as long as possible to the right.
Downhill easily 50 to 55. Highest speed ever(downhill OFC) was 95kph, which is about 59mph. Still doing that sometimes, but less often nowadays. Need to be in the Rockies for loong descents, weather has to be good, streets mostly empty, which they aren't when weather is good, and so on.
No pavement anywhere, dangerous multi lane major roads linking small cul-de-sacs, and oppressive heat half the year.
Some places are just different I think.
I think most Americans don't realize how good it could be.
Towns with good walking paths, public transit, and, yes, safe bike paths are:
1. Cheaper for governments to maintain infrastructure - heavy road use leads to more requirements of maintenance. Road sizes in the US are also huge. Needlessly giant firetrucks keep building standards this way.
2. Cheaper for getting around - no gas/insurance/car required.
3. Cheaper for housing - car storage takes up a ton of space.
4. Much, much quieter - cars are the noisiest thing in any town.
5. Much more social and therefore more community oriented. This fosters a more trusting society - something we are in dire need of.
6. Easier to get around as things like grocery stores are built in walking distance to dwellings.
7. Just much more beautiful.
It's not just big cities that can benefit from these things. Small towns in the Netherlands are much better than Amsterdam in this way, for example.
A very small town can have a town square that you'll see your neighbours in as you buy groceries.
The model we've made for ourselves is extremely expensive and literally dystopic hell.
We don't need anything other than better organization to get to utopia here. We just lack imagination.
Europe could learn a lot from America in economics. But here is where America needs to learn from Europe.
Not just Bikes talks a lot about the subtle differences that make life so much more enjoyable. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ztpcWUqVpIg
Cities aren’t adult-friendly most of the time, not even considering safe for kids.
There's even a rail trolly in there.
Then between 5-6pm it shifts to adult commuters, just as packed.
I’ve always thought that that was cool. There’s these two groups both using the system, separated by a few hours, living parallel lives.
And the kids seem to have a lot of fun here.
My entire life, I have always called the NYC Subway the “great equalizer.” For a tiny sum of money (75 cents when I was a kid, just over $2 now) you could get anywhere you wanted in the city. Transfers were free. The subway goes nearly everywhere.
I used the hell out of it, especially because students (aka anyone under 18) rides the subway M-F for free.
So while I didn’t have bikes or stoops, I did have access to see friends and do things that were otherwise completely inaccessible to me. Sure, I didn’t ride the subway alone until I was a teenager, but before that I had buses.
It’s different, but I don’t regret it. Once I got to high school, I went to a school in lower Manhattan, which opened up my world even more.
Since I was maybe 5 or 6, my daily scheduled involved waking up, going outside with a gang of people of various ages (honestly it was all the way to college level at some points, they were the actual adults in the "room") and just having fun the entire day.
Around mid-day, if we were near our communist blocks you might hear our parents shout from the windows that it's time to eat, we'd sprint up and eat real fast and then go back down to continue mucking about.
We explored old forts, jumped with our bikes in the river, played hide & seek, climbed all sorts of buildings and trees etc. We sometimes hurt ourselves but were back on the street in record time.
The article reminded me of this, and I think it was an awesome way to grow up. And to link it back to the article. I don't get the diverse conclusion. I don't resonate with it at all. We were all relatively poor, of the same race and had very similar upbringings and possible futures. We were similar in more ways than different, and that was great.
You’re not wrong that you likely didn’t have much diversity where you grew up. My parents are Ukrainian and Belarusian and I grew up in Brighton Beach, so I get it.
But: the diversity I got from living in NYC was insane. By the time I got to junior high I had met every race and ethnicity, eaten nearly every possible cuisine, learned a bunch about every religion, and so on.
Contrast that with my wife who grew up in Columbus, GA, where they had one “ethnic” restaurant and it was the “Chinese” spot, and you can imagine there were a massive amount of differences growing up. I didn’t have to learn about other cultures when I got older; I had grown up immersed in them, and it made it so much easier to find common ground with literally anyone.