1. Everyone in the US has to own and maintain a car. (I've saved $85k by not owning a car over the past 10 years.)
2. We have an increase in the number of 2000 lb steel boxes driving around, polluting, being built and trashed.
3. More drivers, more deaths. Driving is already a leading cause of death in the US.
4. Further sprawl, growing infrastructure costs, higher taxes.
5. Further decline of spontaneous interactions in the US.
There are many many other negative externalities of car dependence. Cycling is an opportunity to reduce our car dependence, and is safer than public transportation for COVID.
Yes, sitting in your personal, 40 thousand dollar, 2 ton steel box anytime you leave the house is the best way to avoid COVID transmission. But it also destroys the earth, social ties, lives, etc.
I think there's another point you've missed. You sitting in your personal 2 ton steel box is good for you, but it practically takes up the entire street space, and forces pedestrians to stay on the much narrower sidewalks, breaking the 6 foot social distancing rule-of-thumb. Opening up the streets to bicycles and pedestrians allows people to use the street to maintain safe distances.
I'm talking strictly about streets inside cities. Cars are great tools for traveling great distances. They're a ridiculous tool for traveling inside cities. They should be looked at with a similar level of absurdity as taking a cruise ship out on the lake for a weekend fishing trip.
It's a very American attitude that this is "cute" or "idealistic". In cities like Copenhagen and Amsterdam, bicycles dominate intra-city transportation. And what's funny about these cities is that they have worse cycling weather than most US cities.
1. Nobody's proposing an elimination of streets. What is being suggested is that streets become more open to cycling and even pedestrian use without an implicit serious threat of death.
2. Re-thinking cities, where we design not around personal car ownership and convenience is possible. There are countless solutions that still allow for automobile use. For example, a number of parking garages throughout—or on the edges of—the city. Think about amusement parks, for example. You can't drive your car right up to Space Mountain when you go to Disney World. You park your car in a massive lot, and a shuttle (glorified golf-cart) takes you into the park where there are miraculously no cars, and no threat of being killed as you cross the "street" to get a cotton candy.
As I said in my previous post—there are working examples here. There's no need to pretend these are unsolvable problems—or even difficult-to-solve problems. Would we need to re-shuffle some things in most US cities? Absolutely... but that's exactly what we're talking about doing.
Yes, exactly, all of these. All of the flaws with everyone driving and owning a personal motor vehicle that existed before the pandemic still exist during it and even afterwards. We cannot give back the gains we made in a handful of areas, and were in the process of making in a lot of other places, as a result of this. A virus running rampant is bad, but the economic and social upheaval of our planet becoming even slightly less hospitable due to climate change will beat all of this by multiples.
> Cycling is an opportunity to reduce our car dependence, and is safer than public transportation for COVID.
I agree that cycling reduces car dependence and can be a safe option, but I don't follow that public transit in the era and after COVID will be "unsafe." There's increasing evidence, like this linked Twitter thread[0] from a doctor reports, that it's sustained contact, particularly around activities that increase viral spread, that are the issue. Factors like air flow, air turnover, and fresh-air intake are shaping up to have pretty big influence; these are things that many buses and trains already account for with HEPA filters and air conditioning.
I'm less worried about transit than I am about what's at the other end of the trip. 30 minutes on a bus, I can control what I touch and wear a mask and there's onboard air handling with filtration. In a grocery store? Far less of that.
0 - https://twitter.com/firefoxx66/status/1260905937910587392
>Everyone in the US has to own and maintain a car.
More than 90% of American households already have a car. Many of the rest want them, and just can't afford it (either because of their own income or the scarcity of parking where they live).
>More drivers, more deaths.
True relative to staying home. Used to be true relative to public transit. May not be anymore, since public transit got a lot more dangerous.
>Further sprawl, growing infrastructure costs, higher taxes.
Americans love their sprawl. The only reason it's not infinite is that at some point it gets counterbalanced by commute time. It's not clear that commuting is ever coming back on the scale we had before; remote or mostly-remote workers will, by and large, live even farther from population centers.
>Further decline of spontaneous interactions in the US.
Yes, that is an extremely compelling benefit and the explicit reason most people will seek it in a world newly cognizant of infectious disease risk.
Public transit is still much more safe, even with COVID-19 threat, than driving.
> Americans love their sprawl.
Americans used to love it, when the jobs were right there.
Removing cars boosts local small service economy, as evidenced by multiple cases.
I don't think you understand what this is about. Most of the cycling for transportation is short hops, 0.5 - 2 miles and low key. No sweating or showers involved unless you live in Phoenix (in which case you have my sympathy regardless). I have a 7 mile commute and since it's cool in the morning and I'm not working out hard. I don't need to shower when I get to work.
Also, e-bikes are likely to be a bike part of this which makes the sweatiness even less an issue even if your commute is longer.
It does feel like they are trying to shove this solution in there to some extent. Many large cities have been trying to find ways to increase the amount of cycling and walking regardless. Cars and their infinite demand for resources (parking, wider roads, gas stations) have become a growth dead-end in dense urban areas.
https://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/health/conditions-and-diseas...
I thought the page will talk about scientific advantages to cycling or something like that but it just rambles hope about cycling benefiting from this.