You’re also falling for the same fallacy that cycling advocates fall for by obscuring the impact of cycling spending. It doesn’t matter if hundreds of people want to cycle to work, or if cycling adoption is up 10% if all you’ve done is gone from 3% of commuters to 3.4% of commuters (which is where I believe SF is at after all of the billions they’ve invested in it). It’s the same as the startup that says they’re growing faster than google because they managed to go from 50 customers to 100. We all know it’s bullshit, it’s just a popular self-delusion that people enjoy.
Wrong. Vancouver, for example, built a network of protected bike lanes in a few years, and saw bike rates skyrocket. Bike commute mode share is now 10%, despite having much less than 10% of available road space, making bikes highly land-efficient.
> There are no cases in the world where cycling infrastructure has been successful in having a measurable impact on congestion.
That's because the number of cars increases to fill the amount of road space. But if you look at Amsterdam or Copenhagen, plenty of people are willing to bike when there's good bike lanes and paths for doing so.
In contrast, cities like SF or Seattle have a bare handful of protected bike lanes, a smattering of walk/bike trails, and they hardly connect to each other. It's hardly a surprise that most people don't want to bike in those conditions.
> which is where I believe SF is at after all of the billions they’ve invested in it
If SF had spent "billions" the city would be covered in protected bike lanes. Needless to say, it isn't. This is a made-up figure.
There’s a lot of examples of cities spending huge sums of money on cycling (SF has spent far more than a billion on it), and none of them have been successful in drivingcycling adoption.
Also the only studies that show road building as ineffective are looking at cities that have many years of population growth where road spending didn’t even remotely keep up. People don’t materialize out of thin air to fill up new roads. You’re using neglect of infrastructure to justify further neglect of infrastructure.
This is wrong.
Biking is popular in Copenhagen and Amsterdam, it's popular in Munich, it's recently gained popularity in Vancouver, it's popular in Davis, CA, it's popular in Tokyo. Believe it or not, those cities don't all have the same climate.
Geography is more of an issue, but it's becoming less and less of one over time thanks to the steadily increasing popularity -- and steadily decreasing cost -- of ebikes.
Also, you claimed SF spent many billions on bike infrastructure. Where's the source?
Hills are becoming less of an issue due to ebikes (and electric bikeshare). The other possible solution is installing bike lifts, but, well, most cities still treat biking as a toy, and are unwilling to spend significant sums on it.
What would make me feel confident enough to cycle to work? Protected bike lanes and/or a massive shift in attitude among the drivers I encounter as a pedestrian and watch through the bus window.
I never said building infrastructure would convince everyone to bike. Rather, the government can (and often does) move society as a whole in one direction using money as a lever. Do taxes on gas or alcohol prevent everyone from driving or drinking? No, but they move the needle, just like building cycling infrastructure does.
And I never cited the "10% increase" as an important metric for the success of cycling infrastructure, you did. None of my arguments is about the absolute number of people cycling, although others have pointed out that biking is likely underfunded relative to the number of people who use the infrastructure. I just cited the increasing number of people on bikes as a counterpoint to your claim that "no matter what people say, they don't want to cycle to work".
And I can't see how SF could have invested nearly what you claim in biking infrastructure. Their cycling infrastructure is not particularly good compared to most "bike friendly" cities.
Can you cite any of those figures?
https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2015/may/05/amsterdam-bic...
(Also incorrect is that people "don't want to cycle to work", I see literally hundreds of them every morning in SF, and it's growing every year.)
There are many arguments in favor of cycling infrastructure, but unfortunately I'm versed enough in anti-bike comment threads to recognize someone who won't be convinced :) But here goes...
* bikes do less damage to road than cars, and therefore the maintenance cost of bike lanes is lower than car lanes, which require frequent paving
* bikes are important as a "last mile" transportation option for public transit commuters. densely-placed bike share stations improve the feasibility of public transit for people whose homes or offices are 1-2 miles from a train station.
* bikes are far smaller than cars and so you can push more traffic through a given width of road than with cars. this is especially relevant if you ever get to a downtown stretch where one car turning right at a pedestrian crossing causes an entire green light to be wasted on the rest of the cars (basically every light along Market Street in SF). cars are just wide and clumsy when driving in dense downtowns.
* the government frequently subsidizes behaviors that are considered virtuous (or conversely, imposes "sin taxes"), and also subsidizes services that benefit lower-income citizens. both of those apply here. car parking in downtowns can run $40+ for a day. bike share and bus commutes are $2-5 and keep people active.
I could go on, but again, I don't think your mind will be changed much.