37% of people commute by bike in Copenhagen thanks to this infrastructure
streetfilms.org
streetfilms.org
Is it wrong for Denmark to impose such a high tax? There's probably better economic means to accomplish the task. But the hating on the bike counter? Now that's just silly.
If you're in SF South Bay, there are plenty of low-traffic roads where you will beat the cars back home and be much, much less stressed out from not needing to jockey in traffic-- at least if you could give up your prejudice for a moment. It also does your burn rate well for those of you doing startups.
Oh, yeah: and hilly. And there are almost no bike lanes.
1. Walking
2. Cycling
3. Transit
4. Driving
Edit it would be nice if HN supported more than a tiny subset of markdown syntax.
Home is where my "life" is. Work is where... well where I work
I now live in Toronto, a few hundred yards from where I work. I really miss the bike commute. :(
However, biking in the rainy, cold, northern Europe is anything but glorious. Yes, it's very nice in the summer, it's the remaining 9 months that are bad. Let's just say that the overwhelming majority of the people I see biking in Copenhagen don't seem to enjoy it very much. I bet the majority of them would really want a car instead, but chose not to get one because of the very high price due to the extra tax.
Let us not exaggerate. Biking in northern Europe is OK -- if the roads are ploughed, you have the right clothes and winter tyres (2 * 60 Euro for my bike, shudder. Damn thieves.)
The "right clothes" is admittedly a bit much this week, when it is below minus 10 Celsius. Sigh, maybe I should look for a job down south, in warm and sunny Copenhagen.
>>I bet the majority of them would really want a car instead
I bike because I need the exercise. I won't get a car until I live so I get enough exercise anyway.
This wouldn't work in Norway. Only 35% of the population live in the larger cities, I know lots of people who have a 60km (~35 miles) commute. Hell, I even know people who get on a plane daily to go to work.
Denmark is also damn flat, at least compared to Norway, which is more "mountainy", like Switzerland.
Maybe it won't work for as many people as in Copenhagen, but that doesn't mean it doesn't work and wouldn't work for a lot more people than presently.
Yes, there are plenty of low-traffic roads in the South Bay, but how many people can bike faster than cars go on said roads?
Yet, if you want top of the line bike $300 is not enough.
Even in the Netherlands where we have a mass market for cheap bicycles they still cost at least €200 (new).
A family with both parents working, living economically ie. not in an urban center, needs to drive a car to make ends meet. You can't do shopping for a family, and definitely not in economical sizes, on a bike or in a bus. They are hit hard by high gas costs, while a well-off urban professional takes his SUV to go skiing in Italy because it's still cheaper than flying+renting a car when he gets there.
I'm 34, Norwegian, have lived most of my life in Norway and England, and have no drivers license. Never learned to drive, because I've never felt the need to.
I do the family shopping for my small family of 3 on my commute home. I rarely need to pick anything up more than 2-3 times a week, and usually I only need one "big" round of shopping per week. It's never so much that I can't take it with me on the train, then walk to the bus stop and take it with me on the bus, in addition to my fairly heavy bag of gym shoes + clothes. If we had another child or two I might end up going to the shops once more a week, or my wife might end up having to help out with the shopping more often.
While I might've saved a little bit here and there on buying larger quantities, not having the cost of car makes up for it many times over.
For that matter, not having a car saves us so much that we can easily afford delivery charger and/or taking a cab back if we ever want to do really large amounts of shopping, and still save money.
In other words: Apart from a really small number of people that live in so rural areas that they are not properly served by public transport (I'm talking about Europe here) and are too far away to walk, it's not about needs but about perceived convenience.
But I don't even want a car. Apart from the cost, there's all the hassle of keeping it in a decent condition. I'd rather just pay for the service on the rare occasions I need it. Though I may consider getting a drivers license to at least have the option of renting a driverless car now and again.
I can easily get behind encouraging people to replace 10 year-old central heating boilers with more efficient models, for cars it seemed more like a bizarre industry specific subsidy.
Anyway, if the US ever wants to see cycling adopted by the average person and not only people who have already made the decision to commit, we need to: reduce the speed-limit in city centers to 20mph; have bicycle-only light timings; and start selling bicycles that are useful, not just "cool looking".
My guess is that this will not happen in my lifetime.
My ER doctor friend says urban cycling is idiotic.
I do it all the time but you're kidding yourself if you don't realize it is extremely dangerous.
The more important issue in the US regarding bikes is the lack of density. It's simply not feasible to bike the kinds of distances most people need to go.
A friend of yours said something, so it must be true...
Most accidents are due to people driving their bicycles unsafely. If you drive safely, urban cycling is not dangerous. If you drive like a maniac and disregard traffic controls (running lights, riding on the sidewalk, going the wrong direction, etc.), then yeah... it's dangerous. Just like it would be as a pedestrian or motorist.
In aggregate, cycling is not significantly more dangerous than any other activity: http://bicycleuniverse.info/transpo/almanac-safety.html
(Despite this, I am in favor of laws and regulations that make the roads less dangerous. Cars should not go faster than bicycles in cities. If you need to get somewhere fast, use rapid transit.)
I have a hard time believing anyone in the US (except maybe New York) could say this with a straight face. Where do you live that rapid transit is so rapid?
Personally, living within a bike-able distance to the office is critical. One employer moved nearly 20 miles from house. I tried doing the commute three times a week, and that extra two hours was just not worth it. Fortunately, the tech sector here is pretty robust, and it didn't take much to find work closer to home.
I wonder how they handle bicycle parking in Copenhagen, because that's a real problem in most Dutch cities. Especially those cargo bikes take a lot of space.
If it's the latter then it seems to have worked; the page is the top organic Google result for those words, at least for me at the moment. I do hope that isn't because of the clunkily repetititititive writing style.
The most frustrating thing about Copenhagen is all the bicycle repair shops take up the business locations that should be small food places. :P
1 taxes, cost of fuel
2 culture (USA views bikes as for kids and tree-huggers)
3 density of urban areas
4 layout/zoning of urban areas (i.e. no ring of suburbia, shopping/strip malls around cities)
5 probably others that I'm not aware of
1) how critical the activity is to people's lives (cycling: low, driving: high)
2) how funny you look with the safety item on (...)
First of all, biking is the only reasonable way to commute in Copenhagen. Car traffic is big, but the most discouraging factor for me is the parking fees. During business hours, paring in the red zone, which is the city centre, is $5.50 per hour. And you have to be lucky to find a spot, and you still have to walk a significant distance to your destination. Whereas when you take your bike, you can leave it just outside the place you're going to (bike parking spots are everywhere).
There is a lot of people who live in Greater Copenhagen (Cph and cities around it) and commute to the centre by S-trains. This creates the problem of having to either pay extra for taking your bike on the train, or having one bike for home - train station and one for train station - work. The attempted solution for that was the city bikes system, free bikes you could rent, in theory everywhere. In practice however, these bikes are nowhere to be found or somehow broken.
So, what Copenhagen really needs is a decent bike sharing system. A friend of mine conducted a survey for a university project, and there is a huge interest in this kind of system. People would gladly pay a monthly fee to be able to get off a train and pick up a bike that's waiting right next to the station.
I see this as a big idea for many cities. More people would use bikes if they didn't have to actually own and maintain them, and care about theft. Someone make this into a startup please? :)
Most of these places have manned bicycle storage facilities where you can rent them, but they also have some in automated lockers in lesser frequented locations. They're now also starting to put these in commuter parking spots at edges of cities.
There's a lot of friction in the beginning (you know how car drivers always think pedestrian and bikes are dangerous, when the kinetic energy computation tell another story) but I think it's efficient.
But you need strong political will, I mean you'll have stories dead bikers in the news, you'll have to cope with the bike-unaware traffic rules and stuff like that.
It's true that it's very nice to be a biker in Copenhagen, but I believe that it's a case of chicken-and-egg: I think most of the amenities are there because Danes enjoy biking in large numbers, and not the other way around.
One of these days I'll get one.. :)
Also, if you watch the video he mentions that it's taken thirty some odd years to build out this infrastructure, and that it used to be a much more car-centric city.
You would make a lot of people mad by doing it though.
Most of the people it would effect are cab drivers/drivers-for-hire and delivery trucks/vans. Everyone else who drives daily in the city is, imho, an asshole ;)
Never seen those, but sounds cool.
> it's taken thirty some odd years to build out this infrastructure
Exactly - but the story is framed like "look, this city built this for a purpose, and it worked, now you do the same in your cities" when I believe the real story is that a bike-happy population worked with a willing city to slowly evolve an infrastructure with mutual benefits.