I don't think it's a question of either or. It's a question of prioritizing both bikes, and public transportation, and electric cars and scooters.

Sadly, even in Copenhagen, where there are dedicated bike highways, elevated bike bridges, and generally very good biking conditions (mostly flat city), the amount of people who use cars every day far exceeds the amount of people who bike.

1: Page 11: https://www.regionh.dk/til-fagfolk/trafik/Analyser-og-rappor...

The suggestion that cycling is a fair-weather activity is hogwash.

There are huge demographic clusters (particularly late-middle-age to old, middle-aged-to-older women) who, statistically speaking, don't. I'm sure that we're off to the Proof By Anecdote races again about all the spry old folks who cycle everywhere. But in practice weekly cycling rates in places like NSW and VIC for the middle-aged are about 10%, tops, and this declines faster as people get older.

I would hazard a guess that on bad weather days, this skew gets even more extreme i.e. fewer people cycle total, and even fewer proportionally out of the demographics that don't ride much.

I don't know about Melbourne, but the idea that we should splash out Serious Cash on cycling infrastructure in Sydney (vs filling out our shithouse transit network) is just laughable. I'm pro bike lanes and better infrastructure (particularly at the expense of cars), but this 'think big' stuff is really on the nose in terms of equity of access.

The demographic that bikes are young, fit adults. Can't bike much of anywhere without struggling with hills.

If only young/fit people use the infrastructure then the infrastructure is really poor! Note than I'm from the Netherlands and comparing countries is a bit weird. Why not aim for a better infrastructure than the Netherlands?

Anyway, for hilly areas I expect a large share of people to use electric bikes. And way more care for safety. In Netherlands they think about possible safety issues. Meaning, someone on a bicycle going down a huge bridge is probably going fast and doesn't want to stop. You could argue that a bicyclist shouldn't do that, but that's pretty pointless. What's better to engineer the infrastructure in a way that deals with that. Hillier areas would require a lot of thought.

Electric bikes come at a large cost premium over that.

Low participation from a particular group != low latent demand.

I've ridden in every Australian state capital bar Darwin, and rate Sydney drivers as the most aggressively incompetent of the lot - which, combined with the spectacular hostility of the state government to cycling, is a clear recipe for low participation.

Notwithstanding which, I agree that mass transit infrastructure should be built up to the level where it is an easy choice for every commuter, and not the unhappy choice for those within reach of a station.

Yet the bike infrastructure is mostly bike lanes painted on the road and used as additional parking.

Then there are real economic and social trade offs that need to be seriously discussed. Historically the beautiful, walkable, lovely human scaled cities we all love before the automobile had large inequalities in land ownership. A small number of landlords owned most of the living units and everyone else rented from them. This was because the jobs were in the cities, so landlords could effectively tax people for having access to the high paying jobs. Once they got 1/3 of everyone's income, they could roll that over to purchasing more units faster than the renters could both pay rent and save to buy their own house. This creates a situation where a small number of families own most of the beautiful historical buildings that renters occupy in those lovely downtown cities.

It was the introduction of the car that created a real middle class and increased home ownership allowing people to escape the thumb of their landlords and buy cheaper land surrounding the cities while keeping their jobs in the city. This shifted the economic rents captured by urban landlords and transferred it to auto manufacturers and other producers, shifting resources away from rent extraction and towards production, which spurred economic growth, home ownership, and family formation all together. The growth of suburbs was merely a byproduct of this economic geography.

As transportation technology improves, cities become less dense over time. All cities, the world over, are slowly getting less dense. Living units are growing a few percent each year size, so what used to house a family over time becomes a studio apartment, and in this way, even as the buildings remain the same, urban density declines. Even builder taller buildings doesn't overcome the inexorable decline of density, a process uninterrupted since the early 20th century.

Global populations are diffusing, spread out constantly trying to stay one step ahead of the urban landlords and take better advantage of new transportation to buy units farther away where land is cheap enough for them to buy their own small lot.

When you start reversing this, you also start rolling back homeownership rates. Those lovely, dense walkable cities in the US are majority renter populations. They are also demographic sinks -- people don't reproduce at anywhere near replacement levels compared to more rural environments where homeownership rates are higher as are fertility rates.

In other words, there are real inequality and social sustainability problems with dense living. It's not even something that is demographically sustainable. These cities require a constant inflow of people from more rural areas or immigrants from other countries to prevent demographic collapse.

That doesn't mean that there aren't solutions -- perhaps there are! You can adopt public policies that disincentivize renting and subsidize homeownership in cities. You may (or may not) address the demographic collapse of urban areas. Spain (and the Netherlands) have massive problems with demographic collapse but have achieved high home ownership rates, but it addressing transportation promotion with homeownership and family formation all together, because all of these are intimately related.

This is something that the anti-car crowd has never done, nor is it even on their radar.

That people leave the city because they want to buy their own house and have kids, and once they are in the suburbs you really need a car -- that doesn't seem to register. Instead, it's all talk about building more infrastructure and this will suddenly reverse these trends. This isn't a serious engagement of the issues.

As others have pointed out it's definitely a combined approach to increasing both public transport as well as cycle infrastructure. Electric bikes give you quite the range, which may compare with the average car commuting distance in many cities. Taking public transport from the suburbs and then getting on a bike within the city centre is also very common here in Copenhagen. Heck, even driving to a train station, to take the train/bus, to take the bike, can often by faster than driving with bad traffic.

So while I agree that the car gave people the freedom to keep their job and buy a home, I don't think that argument holds given a decent public transport network and cycle infrastructure.

If you imagine an urban core in the center and a disk of suburbs around it, the availability of housing rises with the square of the radius from the core, and the cost of providing a rail/bus line to the core will grow with the square of the radius, but the cost of giving each person an individual vehicle grows with the population. So there is a density in which personal vehicles make sense and a density in which rail lines make sense, and this trade off is determined by the relative cost of providing individual cars versus rail lines. But because of this squaring effect, it's always the case that at some distance from the radius you need personal transportation.

While Holland is notable for its bike usage, it has 440 cars per 1000 people, or more than 80% of households own 1 car even in Holland, and 30% of Dutch households own 2 or more cars (See Figure 15, https://repository.tudelft.nl/islandora/object/uuid:a33eb3a5...)

Now maybe in the future there will be a fleet of self driving cars that you can call up -- who knows? Maybe electric bikes. There are many options, but density remains key in this trade off, and it's important to realize that different households have different circumstances.

I don't own a car, I live in San Francisco, but I realize this is because I am rich enough to live in the more expensive urban core, and that I am wealthy enough to be able to walk to stores staffed by people who are earning less money than I am and have to drive into the city in order to serve me coffee, food, alcohol so that I can just walk to their business. I am also dependent on goods being trucked in from far away so that I can walk up and buy them. So, it would be a bit inconsiderate for me to tell those people who can't afford to live in the dense core that they need to do without their cars and share my lifestyle. They are doing the best they can under the circumstances.

BTW how many people use a bike is a useless metric, how far they travel and for how much time is more important.

Copenhagen is not a good example, it's very small, very flat and public transport is very expensive and it doesn't have to handle the same number of commuters many other cities have to. For example in Milan everyday a million people come to work from cities around it, in Rome it grows up to a staggering 1.5 millions.

Bike is not favourite because it's better, but because politics made it preferable (less expensive)

Things are changing, Copenhagen had it's first subway only in 2002, decades later other major cities and people will start using it more and more, because the city has invested a lot of money on it and can't handle people not using it or, as it is now, prices have to be very high, which kinda defeat the purpose of a public transport.

Subway it's a good rival for bikes, because they use different paths.

If you increment surface transport in cities with a large number of bikers, they start to compete for road space and it create tensions that need to be resolved.

Bikes in Copenhagen and many other small/medium northern city are the effect of inertia (historically they usesd bikes because it's what they always used), much as the ridiculous number of cars in cities like Rome.

As reference, the Copenhagen subway is run by ATM, the public transport company of Milan (Italy), where prices are an half even though the city is much bigger city, but there are public bikes as well, bike lanes everywhere and lots of car sharing companies.

But the best feature of Milan is still walkability + public transport (subway it's much better than buses and very good on average) because much of the population cannot ride a bike for more than a few kms at a time.

As a Dutch person: what you're forgetting is that often the entire design of a city accommodates using bikes. Meaning: everything you might need is close by.

Further, the more people use a bike, the more people are aware of people on a bike. The same people who use a car also use a bike (at least in Netherlands and Denmark).

For Rome, the city is designed in a weird way. Cycling there is awful. Further, the traffic lights are utterly terrible. You're waiting way too long (though this is the case in pretty much most countries in the world).

When infrastructure is designed in The Netherlands the impact is assessed on public transports, roads, cycling infrastructure, etc. That determines where office space is put, etc.

Now for Netherlands there's millions using public transportation, also e.g. using a train. The bike storage areas around the big train stations are massive.

Notice how I mentioned that Dutch people are using bikes, cars, public transport? There's not 1 solution or something that's bad/good as you make it out to be.

The reality is that many people in North American live far from their workplaces and some of us live in areas of extreme cold. This is where 15m of exposed skin can result in frostbite. We bundle up, but by cycling we’ve turned the commute into an unnecessarily dangerous adventure.

The same applies to cities further south: a non trivial amount of days are extremely hot and you’re risking heat strokes.

Edit: don’t get me wrong. Bike infrastructure is awesome and I wish there were less cars on the roads, etc. We just have very different variables to play with so we need to come up with different distributions of mass transit vs personal transportation. Comfort is important!

I've never had frostbite. I've still got all my fingers and toes. Although it isn't enough fingers and toes to count all the people I've known personally who've been killed or crippled in car accidents.

My point is that we default to easy and comfortable when given a choice, and cycling in -42 is neither. We won’t see mass adoption of cycling in these areas, regardless of infrastructure, unless we forced people to do it... and I don’t think pushing the majority of people towards enduring that kind of weather is something we should do, when there are alternatives.

You bike in during the dead of winter, and that’s amazing. But how long is your bike ride in? How far out of the city do you live? Would you still do it if your commute was double?

Additionally, in Ottawa, many people live far out of the city and commute in via the highway for 30-40 minutes by car because it’s more affordable than living in the city. The bike ride is well over two hours. They will need other solutions as well.

I don't think I've met a bicycle commuting advocate who doesn't also advocate for improved mass transit and walkable development. We stopped building neighbourhoods that way and razed many of the ones we had in the second half of the 20th century, so there's a huge supply and demand imbalance for walkable neighbourhoods in North America.

Yes and that's exactly where 90% of our pollution/climate issues are coming from: convenience.

The thought of hopping on a bike in the Pittsburgh winter, with hilly, iced-over roads sounds at best something for the young and extremely able, or possibly the suicidal.

Cycling infrastructure is almost ludicrously cheap. You can build pretty good bike infrastructure for a decent-sized city with O(€100m). A single metro line normally costs O(€1bn). The reason that bike infrastructure doesn't get built isn't cost - it's political. Car users don't like having lanes and parking spaces taken away from them.

> startlingly good weather year-round

Not _everywhere_ has weather suitable for cycling. However, a lot of places do have suitable weather and yet no infrastructure. That leaves plenty of room for improvement. Many cities could be suitable for cycling with some effort - e.g. clearing snow from bike lanes (see Copenhagen) or adding shade.

> disabled people

Cycling infrastructure is actually great for many disabled people. It makes safe space available for specially-adapted bicycles and mobility scooters.[1]

> spry Euro-oldsters

As far as I know, there's not much of an inherent genetic difference between the Dutch and the rest of the world. Perhaps having an active lifestyle is what _causes_ you to age into a 'spry Euro-oldster' - and is something everyone should aspire to.

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2018/jan/02/cambridge-dis...

As I said, I'm pro-cycling. Good for you, all you hardy souls. But it is a seriously boneheaded point of view to imagine that cycling is going to be more important as a mode of transport than public transport in most of the world under the conditions that exist now.

There's a large plurality - even in the totally cycle-happy countries - of people that don't ride, and that's a majority past a certain age. These people will get a small benefit (aside from cleaner air and fewer cars on the road, which is nice) from cycling infrastructure. Conversely, a drastic improvement in public transit infrastructure benefits almost everyone - cyclists are pedestrians and transit users some of the time, and they will also benefit from getting cars off the road.

Frankly a lot of folks are confusing their hobby with good public policy.

Ah, come on. You asked for it, didn't you? You wrote "I'm guessing it's a special magic planet with startlingly good weather year-round, without disabled people, where everyone gets to age into spry Euro-oldsters". Of course, such an extreme statement will trigger a reaction from people who actually experience every day what you claim to be impossible. It's not possible in every city and it's not possible for everybody, but it's possible in more places than we think once we accept the idea. One quarter of the Dutch population cycles every day and the number of cycling people (obviously lower than the average) over 65 is actually increasing thanks to better a infrastructure and, of course, e-bikes.

And talking about hot climates: You remember the pictures from South China in the 1970s or 1980s where everybody was cycling because cars were too expensive and public transport was bad? Now everybody has a car and nobody with a sane mind would cycle in China.

If only the world was flat and below the sea level as Holland...

There's various reasons not to use a bike, e.g. the mentioned way too humid/hot weather. However, the high usage is not due to "flat". Netherlands used to have a very high car usage and pretty much no bike usage.

together they represent almost a billion people and the world's biggest cities. Should we ignore them because they're not snowy North American/European cities?

Here in Toronto, Canada, we are building out bike lanes, they are heavily used and it's pretty cheap to dedicate some lanes to bike traffic. They are used ALL year long, even in the snow. Yes, more people use them in the spring, summer, and fall, than in Dec-Feb, but they are used all year long.

Your complaints are not based in reality, either in cost or in usage patterns.

As a European myself this made me laugh hard. Yes, people here have a tendency to see everything in black and white and be really religious about their way of life.

The article specifically talks about switching our mindset away from a strictly bike lane oriented world view to one that emphasizes diversity in micromobility solutions. That's why it wants the reader to "Dream Bigger Than Bike Lanes". Public transport and especially walkability do not contrast with this viewpoint.

Improving bicycling also improves public transit and walkability usually because bicycles take up so much less room than cars so buses have more space, and it's extremely rare for a bicycle to injure a pedestrian, but it happens hundreds of times a day just in the US alone with cars.

Also bicycle infrastructure is way cheaper to build and maintain than car infrastructure. And even when bicycle infrastructure is totally busted for awhile, people find a way around, where as with cars if there is any blockage it becomes an incredibly high priority emergency.

Cars respect pedestrian much more than bikers do

As a walker I hate walking in Belgium or Berlin, where you have to share the sidewalks with bikes that usually go high speed, faster than the average car, don't look too much around them and treat pedestrian as obstacles (try to walk on a bike lane in Bruxelles or Berlin and wait for the biker to start a fight with you, it's not gonna take long)

If you optimize you infrastructures for basically unregulated means of transport, you're just moving assholes from cars to bikes.

At least when they are on a car they can be policed and fined.

Bikes should share roads with cars, they have wheels, they are not pedestrian friends.

> Bikes should share roads with cars, they have wheels, they are not pedestrian friends.

Biking is its own thing. You have walking speed, cycling speed, moped speed (or quick electric bikes), car speed. There are different speeds between them. They should NOT share the same space!

Further, the bike lane should NOT be some crappy paint on the pedestrian path. It should be an obvious difference to any other form of transport.

Having bikes which go 10-15 km/h share the same infrastructure as 45-55km/h just makes the accidents and the severity of the accidents go up like crazy.

Most bike-car accidents are the fault of the cyclist, at least in Mountain View.

What's entirely strange is to blame one person and blame all the fault on the other. Accidents happen. What's great is to find ways to minimize them. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swiss_cheese_model

However I think when citylab is writing about the balance between cars and bicycles, they are refering to cities, where you (A) wouldn’t ban cars completely because of delivery and people with mobility problems and (B) the usage of cars by everybody has very tangible problems attached to it (space, noise, pollution, air quality).

And when we are talking about balance we are usually talking about one that is extremely on the side of the car anyways. Even in european cities there is are often two 1 meter bicycle lanes for six 3 meter car lanes and as a cyclist who often rides on crowded bicycle lanes while the streets next to me are empty, I can just dream of the things that could be done with the space of one car lane.

I have also lived for some time in Denmark and the Netherlands, where cycling is extremely widespread and I know what difference the infrastructure makes. When you cycle in a big german city you have to be constantly on the watch to not get overlooked by motorists, in the Netherlands nearly everbody cycles and the infrastructure is so much better, that cycling feels (and probably is) much less dangerous. This is also why it is more popular there.

That beeing said, I don’t believe that cycling alone will be the solution of the cities of the future. Cheap and good public transport systems and a clever network of delivery routes will also be needed.

And those who really need a car will certainly be granted permissions to use them (as they are now when it comes to all european historical city centers/pedestrian areas). The spry Euro-oldsters you mentioned seem to swear on E-bikes, because they can use electricity when they have to go up steep hills or just feel like it. Gives them the security they will make it even if their powers are running out. They would probably say sth. like: “There’s no such thing as bad weather, only bad clothes”

https://www.newyorker.com/culture/personal-history/how-i-lea...

I'm faster with my bike no matter the weather. Especially when it's snowing outside. Gosh, snow slows cars down massively. I love this time of the year: no one tends to speed any more since drivers are afraid of crashing their cars.

I guess that you've never been on a bike on a very hot day. It's much, much more pleasant to be ventilated by your self-created airflow on a bike than it is to to have sweat pouring down your back as you walk around.

The 'self-created airflow' INCREASES the rate at which you gain temperature. Windchill is only 'chill' when the ambient air temperature is lower than your core temp.

To cycle on a summer day, you need to slather yourself in SPF-40 sunscreen including underneath clothing, wear SPF clothing, and make sure to be constantly drinking water. And when you get to your destination you're definitely going to need a shower. I'll take public transport over that, thanks. So does the majority of people.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evaporative_cooler#Physical_pr...

Funnily enough I was thinking that about you, because on 40+ days we've got people out riding, overcrowding beaches, walking and some even sunbaking, many will be doing that without shirts on in the open sun and they're not going up in flames. Some poor buggers even have to work outside doing physical labor on such glorious beach days. Personally on days like that I like to go for a quick swim and spend the afternoon with a beer on a bowling green if I can. We've been doing this for generations, my great grandma was doing it before cars, sunscreen and aircon were invented and kids had to walk to school, indigenous people were doing it much longer. We aren't scared of the sun as our skin cancer rates will testify.

Of course these days there's people that take the doona off in the morning and enjoy their air conditioned house, run to their air conditioned car to work in their air conditioned office for 8 hours then do it all in reverse and never see the sun. Of course they don't climatise because they're living in a different climate.

The more wind you experience (or the faster you ride your bike) in those conditions, the more work your body needs to do for maintaining homeostasis via sweating. You will certainly not perceive a >39c wind as a 'cooling' wind in any conditions, and the faster that wind is the hotter it will feel.

The efficiency of sweating depends on rel. humidity. Not what's being discussed here.

The fact that increasing airflow will increase the rate at which you heat up (and how much heat your body must shed) if that airflow is hotter than your core body temperature is just physics 101. Why do you think fan-forced ovens have lower cooking times or temperatures in recipes?

And then you have most populated regions in Asia with 40 degree summers with air so humid that taking a deep breath makes you cough. People still ride bikes, but there are days where it’s deadly to do so for long distance commuting. That’s not including typhoon periods where you’re liable to be whacked with debris and die (because work isn’t canceled for any reason).

Skin cancer is estimated to kill 1,725 in Australia in 2019 [1].

During 2018 there were 1,135 road deaths [2].

I think we could reduce the number of road deaths far faster than the number of skin cancer deaths would increase.

[1]: https://melanoma.canceraustralia.gov.au/statistics [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_motor_vehicle_deaths_i...

Which would become closer to 18% if the number of individuals exposed to prolonged sun time doubled (e.g. by promoting Cycling). We literally run public awareness TV campaigns telling people to stay out of direct sunlight as much as possible regardless of what protection they're wearing.

I don't think you realise it but you're proving the point.

Bikes are fine when the weather is favourable, but a lot of the people commenting here just don't grasp the fact that in some parts of the world, unfavourable weather doesn't mean you might sweat a bit, it means that the weather will make you sick and kill you in short order. The same people that dismiss warnings when visiting countries like AU and then leave with their skin peeling off.

edit: Or bicycles with roofs, similar to the car solution?

As someone with very fair skin I check the UV index meticulously: there is no day in the year that I would be riding to or back from work with a UV index higher than 3 in Sydney.

Now if I was cycling at 2pm on a summer's day I would use SPF50 sun cream or wear a UV shirt, just like I do when I walk outside at 2pm.

Doesn't 'Tour down under' happen during Australian summer months? Somehow they manage, too.

I am not sure how that translates to everyday commute for tens of millions of people of all fitness levels and ages.

This 'if I can do it then surely everyone can do it' attitude is incredibly myopic given the scale of the issue. You represent less than 1% of the population (A total of 1% of Aussies report cycling to work once a month or more). Your views don't matter or don't apply for the other 99%.

The article is about giving space to -all- participants. Currently we highly prioritize cars due to arguments like the weather. As pointed out, weather is not an issue for many folks out there.

In turn this partly explains Australia's high emissions.

You can see a lot of people in the bike lanes with mobility problems, in their electric wheelchairs, scooters, etc. Completely impossible in my car oriented city, specially because these people often cannot afford a car in their situation. It's so nice to see an old lady going in her electric vehicle in the bike line.

Honestly, I feel like a broken record bringing again countries and cities where it's working, they're not magical countries but real countries where different choices have been made.

Also MMT.

Earth, today, in Denmark / Netherlands.

Kneejerk reactions like yours, without looking into the issue at all, are the main hurdle.

It also helps that Copenhagen and Amsterdam are really flat cities.

No one is not having diabetes because is biking...

In Sweden people take the bike even when it's minus 20 degrees and snow everywhere.