It shows how many more people can efficiently use roads while on bikes than in cars. So, if we define efficiency by that measure (obviously this matters more in cities and congested areas), then yes, it's more efficient.

The efficiency question is: what minimizes the amount of collective time people spend getting where they need to go. Bike infrastructure might actually make that worse, slowing down the majority for the sake of a tiny minority that can use a bike to get where they're going.

I would argue that what we need to discuss more, is how do we make transit more efficient for the different residential patterns. Is driving to a parking lot, and then getting on a bike, scooter, skateboard, a more efficient option? Or transferring to a train/bus? Do we really want people driving into city centers?

> Most people can't use a bike.

I don't think you mean that exactly, I think you're extrapolating from your residential patterns comment. Most people can ride a bike, we just need to make it a better option in different areas.

> what minimizes the amount of collective time people spend getting where they need to go. Bike infrastructure might actually make that worse.

This isn't supported by my personal experience (live in a city), it's faster for me to bike somewhere, than drive and look for parking.

Here's a 538 article specifically on this: https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/bike-lanes-dont-cause-t...

"This is an important point: Bike lanes don’t cause a lot more congestion if you put them on the right streets. If you cut down the size of streets that are already near capacity, you’ll create severe congestion. But if you start with roads that are well under capacity, you’ll only increase the congestion a little bit. And it may not even be noticeable."

Bikes ignoring traffic rules is a 1000x better than cars ignoring traffic rules. Since cars actually kill people. 40,000 a year in the US. Every year. But hey, you don't give a shit about that, right?

Huh? What kind of people are you referring to? In my simple observation, most people can indeed use a bike. And in some countries, like Denmark, or China, it is my impression that most people do use a bike.

Having all your commuters drive their car into the city is not at all a good idea. I lived for years at one heavy intersection in one of Germanys biggest cities and I can tell you, if you watch the traffic for half an hour you will see maybe one or two cars with more than one person in them.

I moved from their because the dust and the noise were having a huge impact on my health.

I don't think it is about banning cars from city centers totally. It is about finding acceptable solutions that work without forcing people. Encourage them. Have a working public transport system. Make it cheap. Make it so cheap that driving a car will cost you. Include all problems cars cause in a urban space in some kind of toll or tax.

Currently there's the commuter rail, which is hard to get to from many areas, is quite expensive, and doesn't run very frequently. It's not good enough to get people to stop driving.

There's many other factors, too, which could influence things in either way: total time spent commuting, whether you hate crowded spaces and prefer to sit alone in your car, whether you can be productive (eg: phone call, working on laptop, doing email on phone etc) or want to be able to read.

And that is the crux of the problem. Cities across the US don't have enough funding to maintain the infrastructure they currently have, let alone try to build anything new. Their only hope is to get a grant from the state or federal government.

None of this is sustainable.

For people who say 'but the disabled need cars', I want to offer some ancedata: I know a retired couple that bought a house in SF years ago because they wanted a working transit system when they can't drive cars anymore.

Disabled: https://bicycledutch.wordpress.com/tag/disabled-people/

Less serious, but still a good demonstration of the inclusiveness of cycling: https://vimeo.com/131968609

This is simply false. Most people absolutely can use a bike. Maybe not for every possible trip, but for many of them, yes. Just look at the bike rate in the Netherlands, if you don't believe me.

There are a variety of possible modes available, and they can be mixed and matched as people need and want. Driving to a suburban park and ride transit station, taking the train into the city, and then using bike share to get to your final destination, is a perfectly sensible thing.

And if Massachusetts had that kind of infrastructure, it would work out fine. But it doesn't, and just making a city more bike-friendly doesn't solve the problem on its own.

In a super-dense city like Cambridge, it's even more true. Less need for long travel, more need for bikes in the congested center.

During peak traffic in both of these cities I've been easily able to walk as fast as traffic, forget how much faster public transit or biking would be.

If you displaced all the cars within a city, then transportation within the city would likely be faster and more efficient for everyone. City buses would be much nicer if there was virtually no traffic in the city. Biking would likewise be a more realistic option if was dramatically safer and had better infrastructure for storage.

of course that's a pipe-dream, but the obsessive car culture in the US is a nightmare so it's nice to have some contrast.

One of the things transit advocates fail to grapple with is that our municipal political systems in the United States are broken. When it costs New York City 5-7 times as much money per mile of subway as it does Paris or London, you can’t build enough subway to meet peoples’ needs. (The debate over transit would be totally different if, for what MTA spends now, it was building five times as much track to meet peoples’ needs.)

Who would run the transit that goes from the edge parking lots to the city in your hypothetical? It would be WMATA. The same organization that, despite ample funding, let DC’s Metro decay to the point that they had to turn off automatic train control—a feature that was designed into the system at inception in the 1970s.

That’s the political reality we have to design our transportation systems against. Looking over the pond at what they do in Amsterdam or Paris is foolish—it’s like designing a plane for earth’s gravity based on what it would take to fly a plane on Mars.

What? How do you figure? My observation is that most people absolutely can (and many would seriously benefit from it).

Maybe not for every situation, but for the rare ones where a bike won't do, a cab will.

I lived IN Boston for a while, and actually rode my bike to work during the summer (didn't own a car) and just let everyone suffer through my sweat. But I couldn't do it in the winter (yes I know some people do). Aside from the physical cold/misery, the snow and ice made many roads extremely dangerous. The last few places I've lived were in the suburbs, commuting to other suburbs (luckily I've been avoiding the worst city traffic). The distances were too great to bike (unless you like a 3+ hour commute). shrug. Its great if you live somewhere that biking works for you, but don't expect everyone everywhere can just give up their car, jump on a bike, and carry on with life...

My main point is that a lot of people assume that biking is the worse choice for them without actually knowing.

I have noticed that most people I know who have tried bicycle commuting and gave it up didn't really give it a fair shake. They used substandard or the wrong type of bikes, didn't use the accessories and clothing that make it feasible (rain gear, panniers, trailers, etc), and so forth. They just grabbed their old bike out of their garage and hopped on. That can work, but it's not usually the best experience.

Yes parking needed for cars would be several times bigger than what cars occupy.

This is a lie, most people can use a bike.

No, that is indeed not the most efficient use of the roads. The most efficient use of the roads would be to rip them out and use the space for vastly more efficient public transport.

(Bus transport is also not slowed down by cyclists, or of all things, skateboarders.)

More efficient for who? The software developer who lives in a condo downtown, or the lady who cleans his office that drives in from the suburbs?

So the choice isn't some faux gentrification debate on optimizing roads for the strawman "cleaning lady from the suburbs" or the "downtown software developer", it's for the cleaning lady to be out of a job in 10 years because the only cars driving downtown will be worth a century of her yearly income - or taking the train...

Using a car in a city is not a human right, it is a luxury. That trunk and the four free seats are there "just in case" you might need it. There is no rational reason why it is that way. It is a whole culture that revolves around owning a car and I say that as somebody who was driving for a living once.

Commuting to a city boils down to using the cities advantages (well paying jobs, infrastructure, etc) while avoiding the disadvantages (noise, pollution, higher rents and criminality) at the cost of those living there (you take jobs people living there could take, you are traffic, space and noise). Could they get a space in the city? Sure. Only it would be tiny and substandard and they don't want that.

Do you think there's a lot of cleaning ladies driving in and parking downtown in expensive major cities?

It's not all, but it's a part. Of course, Austin's no NYC. I assume NYC doesn't have as many empty parking garages at night, and it definitely has better public transit.

Many European cities are nicer places to live as a result of better cycling infrastructure and a culture of road-sharing.

Reducing the number of cars (and therefore traffic) on the roads will benefit everybody, especially if cars and bikes don't get in each other's way (such as in the case of dedicated and protected bike lanes).

> Note that bicyclists and skateboarders also slow down busses, which are what lower income people use to get around

I don't think this is true. Busy streets and traffic jams slow down buses.

  Reducing the number of cars (and therefore traffic) on the
  roads will benefit everybody

  Have you ever had to commute in less-than-ideal 
  conditions? 
  Heavy snow? Sleet? Black ice? 
  Have you ever lived in places that are not 
  perfectly flat? or lived in places that 
  are hot that make bicycling unfeasible?
  Did you have sporting gear / work gear that
  you had to lug? Did you know some people have
  to fetch their own gear to work
  Did you have to take calls during transit?
  Did you know its common practice for employees
  to call into meetings during their commute and/or 
  help assist operations via conference calls?
  Have you had to shop for more than a baguette 
  or a bagel at a store? You know how cumbersome
  that gets for even a family of three? 
  Do you have the slightest clue how much casual 
  violence and crime happen on public transit?[1] 

Ride-sharing, autonomous vehicles and emission-free vehicles should all alleviate the issues we currently face with traffic, parking and accidents.

However doing away with cars or vehicular traffic is just pollyannaish madness.

[1]

Teen robbed at gunpoint at Fruitvale, BART officer says writing a report is a 'waste of resources'

https://www.sfgate.com/local/article/bart-police-refuse-repo...

Routinely. The only weather I have encountered that is really problematic is when it's very windy.

I would also note that the conditions you list are also the conditions under which you shouldn't even be driving.

> Have you ever lived in places that are not perfectly flat? or lived in places that are hot that make bicycling unfeasible?

I live in a very hilly area. I don't know how hot you consider "unfeasible", but we top 100 degrees pretty much every summer.

> Did you have sporting gear / work gear that you had to lug? Did you know some people have to fetch their own gear to work

Yes, I do all of that. An urban bike trailer (easily folds up to briefcase size when needed) solves those problems.

> Have you had to shop for more than a baguette or a bagel at a store? You know how cumbersome that gets for even a family of three?

Again, trailer.

> Do you have the slightest clue how much casual violence and crime happen on public transit?[1]

That's extremely dependent on where you live. Where I live, there is nearly no such problem.

A city is the perfect place for mass transit. Park the cars away from the centre, provide good public transport and municipal bike rentals, and you reduce congestion and free up space for urban development.

This idea of having multilane roads running through prime real estate so people can spend an hour or so driving a few kilometres in stop-and-go traffic is just nuts to me. There's nothing efficient about it, and I expect as we try to bring co2 emissions down to sustainable levels, we'll have to give up on designing cities around private cars anyway.

Bicyclists are substantially faster than downtown buses (due to stop frequency). It seems unlikely that they are slowing down the buses very much. Push skateboarders use the sidewalk; electric skateboarders move at the same speed as bicyclists.

"Without tunnels we'll be in traffic hell forever" - Elon Musk