Which I think is misguided pushback btw (which I think you agree with based on the context).
I see it as a chicken and egg thing. The roads are unsafe for bikers, so the only people who bike are those who are super dedicated to it. Then when people ask for the roads to be safer, it gets pushed back as "only biking enthusiasts use the roads now".
Safer roads means more people will bike, which means biking will stop being seen as an elitist thing.
Edit: to add on, bikes are like 1-2 orders of magnitude cheaper than cars too, both in upfront and ongoing costs also. It’s super unfortunate that it still gets the stereotype as a “rich white people” activity when it’s really so much more financially accessible than a car.
It's true that a bicycle is itself cheaper than a car, but housing within biking distance to job centers sure isn't. In my view this is the primary reason bicycle commuters are stereotypically rich folks. The bicycle itself isn't the expensive part; you need proximity, extra commute time, and infrastructure. That stuff just isn't accessible to many people.
What it took was a focus on good quality bike lanes outside the affluent white neighborhoods, bike accessibility at transit stations/on busses, and expansion of bikeshare to poorer neighborhoods.
The rich lycra-wearing stereotype won't go away until we invest in equitable access to bike infrastructure.
I've never been to Chattanooga, TN but once I realized I can work from home I've been curious about owning a home somewhere with gigabit fiber but without ridiculously expensive real estate within commuting distance to a Costco or Sam's Club (so clearly not Jersey City, NJ or Longmont, CO).
What I noticed just looking at Google Maps Street View was that any home within my price range lacked a sidewalk. Apparently, only the wealthy people in Chattanooga, TN need sidewalks. How do we talk about bike lanes when places lack sidewalks?
Western New York has cheap housing and older, 150+ year old urbanization that doesn't suffer as much from 20th century shortsightedness.
In most of the world, they're the default thing - before a roadway suitable for cars, before piped water, before sewers, before electricity.
That'd why sidewalks is polish. Most sidewalks I see outside of tight downtowns are useless and barely used, and they aren't free to build and they don't generate anything if no one uses them...
The poor areas are super poor and semi-distant from goods and services. Biking somewhere from the poor areas, unless you have time and energy to spare, is going to be a big undertaking most of the time, not even accounting for the hills.
As you've noticed on Google, our downtown and close-lying (expensive) neighborhoods have sidewalks and bike lanes aplenty. They're fantastic. But there's no similar facilities in older, poorer, and outlying neighborhoods (many of which were simply suburbs until the city crept in). Nor any practical connection between neighborhoods for foot+pedal traffic.
But our internet's great.
Basically, if you can be all-in on not driving, you save a lot. But once you even want to drive a little bit, the savings to driving only sometimes instead of all the time is not very large (and can in fact be negative, as you pointed out with needing closer housing with parking). Unless it allows you to go from a two to one car family.
https://www.aaa.com/autorepair/articles/average-annual-cost-...
It probably says more about how expensive taxis were pre-Uber. I'm sure ride shares are a nontrivial part of living without a car today.
Housing isn’t abundant within 50 miles of London and other similar major cities, let alone 5.
Ok but now we’ve moved from ‘bicycling is relatively practical’ to ‘it’d be relatively practical if only everything about our politics and built environment was instantly completely different.’
The amount of on street car parking in zones 2-3 is insane. Now that actually IS a subsidy to rich people.
Interestingly, the average distance the Dutch ride is about 1.2 miles per day:
https://www.peopleforbikes.org/news/best-kept-secret-dutch-b...
Having done a similar distance in the cycling capital of the world for about a year I wouldn't exactly call it "easy". I was happy to exchange it for a bus + tram combination even though it added ~15 minutes. Though I'll admit it's nice to be able to commute that distance by bike once or twice a week; but to do it day in and day out gets tiring.
Can confirm this: I'm doing a 14 km commute and yes, for the first few weeks it's really tiring. Wanted to go to sleep as soon as I got home every afternoon. However, after say 2 or 3 months, your metabolism sort of adapts to it and you do it "naturally", without thinking too much about it. The idea of taking the bus again makes me anxious, though.
General population would struggle. I used to bike commute twice that distance regularly and think that'd take me more like 25, maybe 30 now that I haven't done it for almost 2 years.
I live in a city with mediocre to poor bike infrastructure at best, and I see plenty of 50-70 year old women doing 25km/h on ebikes or 10-15km/h on regular bikes.
Granted I wasn't overweight when I started, but after 5 years of largely being a couch potato and doing office work, I averaged around 20km/h or ~12mph door to door over a commute of 10 miles on a 40lb trike.
After getting fitter I'm about the same speed but a shower and change of clothes at the other end is optional now even on a 32C day rather than being drenched.
Your experience can only be due to bike hostile infrastructure or laws. If you had to stop three times for 2-5 minutes a piece at each intersection in a car while the empty lane for bikes and pedestrians got a green light on the off chance they showed up, you'd probably be complaining about how inconvenient driving was.
No, I'm just a person with very little natural fitness who happened to enjoy riding a bicycle.
If you commute in rush hour that is actually a lot faster than going by car, so biking is the fastest option available.
Edit: And that was at a leisurely pace, similar to the effort of walking.
Google maps calculations are decided by Google and take into account padding plus some degree of inclination calculation
I do a 4.8-mile trip on a class 3 ebike (28 mph) consistently in 14 minutes in San Diego north county.
_Averaging_ a 12mph pace with signal lights, traffic, and stop signs is an entirely different story, especially in a busy cities.
I agree it's easy if you're fit though. But I know it can be a pain for people who don't do sport at least weekly.
I think the worst part is a stop sign every block.
I used to commute by (ordinary) cycling and this is a huge part of it. It's stressful navigating on urban roads through taxis and vans who seem to see you as the equivalent of a preachy vegan on wheels and drive like complete arses as a result. I've been literally run off the road by people who either can't be bothered to check their mirrors or have some creepy notion that cyclists "deserve" to be scared off the road by their aggressive driving. The only deterrent seems to be wearing a camera because they know it's the only way they'll ever have a chance of facing prosecution for it.
I'd never dream of telling someone else how to live their lives, I'm not one of those moral crusaders who endlessly harrass people about giving up their cars in favour of bikes. I just don't want to get mowed down by Billy Big Bollocks because he's too important to wait ten seconds to overtake safely.
I could go for "often doable".
That’s a pretty uncharitable reading of their comment. It is obvious we are talking about people that are already physically capable of riding a bike and are discussing a specific distance for a commute.
Even so, I tried to find common ground by merely softening the "trivial" language to "often doable" rather than contradicting. Because clearly it will sometimes be "trivial".
So, I disagree with your assessment of "uncharitable". And I am taken aback that there is so much bitter contention over this issue when it seems to me as though the important thing is that e-bikes have made commutes much easier in general.
Stereotypes are only useful to the extent that they contain a kernel of truth, and this one is just false. The largest group of American bicycle-to-work riders lies in the $20-30k/year income group, i.e. poor people. With each increase of $10k/year income there are fewer riders.
https://i2.wp.com/cityobservatory.org/wp-content/uploads/201...
For example check out the restaurants in Mountain View, CA patronized by affluent employees of Google and LinkedIn. Walk around back and you'll see a bunch of cheap bikes.
For these reason and I’m sure others, bicycles for commuting are more popular outside of North America.
Perhaps in some places (where the major newspapers are?), but there area I grew up in has residential, industrial, and commercial all mixed up in a way that solves that issue: https://www.openstreetmap.org/#map=13/50.8285/-1.0276
(Likewise Berlin, though Berlin also has much better public transport).
Meanwhile, for $2,000 a month in the upper midwest you can rent a house with multiple bedrooms and bathroom on 40 acres of land, or a nicely remodeled house with a small yard and river views in a town if you prefer. Or, with enough for a minimum down payment saved up, you could also buy a small house on 5 acres in a forest.
Granted, you'll pay more for owning a car, but... deciding between studio, or a prime house for $300 less per month, and the car doesn't sound too unreasonable.
Probably do that in rural CA, too (certainly you can get a nice single family home in many CA suburbs), and not be as far (but probably still too far) from the job the individual in question has that enables paying $2,000/mo in the first place. And similar work closer (to either rural CA or the upper Midwest) would pay less.
If you went really rural, you would be able to get much more for your money.
The thought that biking is only for the rich is especially galling when I hear it said about NYC cyclists. The person saying this is thinking of the lycra'd-up dentist riding a Pinarello Dogma. The Manhattan Bridge had 180,000 bike trips on it this June. Williamsburg had 230,000.[1] Cycling is much more prevalent than non-cyclers think.
1: https://www1.nyc.gov/html/dot/html/bicyclists/bike-counts.sh...
That's not bad at all, close to 10% of car traffic, based on old numbers.
Public transportation and city bike rental systems should be free to ride. We all pay taxes to keep roads maintained, we should all pay taxes to keep public transportation maintained.
Not charging would help busses keep their schedules with less queuing and waiting, tourists would be less likely to rent a car, and it could help that chicken and egg problem. The problem with charging people with riding public transportation is you are taxing the very people we should be rewarding. The people who are committing to taking up less space on the road and living with a smaller carbon footprint are being penalized for their hugely beneficial decision to society not to drive. Making public transportation better and free are the two things that can transform a city and make it more equitable. Poor people would have more money and more places available to spend it. Every city benefits from its people having more money to spend and more places to spend it.
This would depend on first fixing the poverty and homelessness that make theft, vandalism and antisocial behaviour so common. These things cost money to protect them from the impact desperate people otherwise have on them.
Now, I’d be thrilled to help pay for that to all happen, but the order should be respected; making trains and buses free isn’t as simple as it sounds.
Also because when you are in separate cars, you can't get sick from, or harassed by, or groped by, other drivers. If another driver is bothering you, you can usually just speed up or slow down to increase distance.
To get true mass adoption of public transit in the US, as the parent comment said, you need to fix "the poverty and homelessness that make theft, vandalism and antisocial behaviour so common," or at least work around it. Maybe trains with a hundred doors leading to a hundred isolated seating areas would convince people.
How convenient for the car lobby that their luxuriously subsidized travel mode already excludes the poor, making them immune from this line of reasoning!
It might be expebsive, but it's definately as simple as it sounds.
I do not see how vandalism will be any different than it is today
Most bike thiefs are not homeless, especially high end bikes.
Not to many homeless have a bolt cutter in their worn packs, nor do they have a way to sell, or part out.
In my liberal wealthy enclave, it's middle class guys doing the stealing, or gangs.
(This whole blaming the homeless needs to stop. Most don't have the savy to steal a locked bike. Plus--riding a nice bike is a cop calling card. I know homeless guys who are afraid to carry their own prescriptions in their pack because they frisked so frequently.)
Yup. Bit like how it's hard to argue for building a bridge by the number of people swimming across the river.
It's even worse since the bridge will be built with connecting roadways on both sides so it will be instantly popular.
But often a few bike lanes will be constructed in isolation,t then people will complain "Look, we built these expensive bike lanes to nowhere and no one is even using them!" It takes a rich network of safe bike infrastructure to get average riders to use bikes. At least eBikes make hills less of an impediment.
Key example [0], the difference between the north and south entrances to the Sydney Harbour Bridge cycleway, which are under different local governments. The North Sydney council is actively fighting an upgrade [1], whereas on the south side it's smooth access expanding into a network of bike paths.
In my city, the major conflict points are all short stretches of busy narrow road, while paths are going in elsewhere.
[0] https://bicyclensw.org.au/a-tale-of-two-sydneys/ [1] https://architectureau.com/articles/sydney-harbour-bridge-cy...
My South Bay commute has nice bike paths part of the way, but they stop just short of a major highway-freeway intersection. Sure, it would be tough to build a good bike lane through this busy, high speed intersection. So there isn’t one. So the bike path just… stops. And you have to navigate this scary section to proceed. So almost nobody does.
It’s such a shame since we have among the best bike-weather in the world, and a fairly flat basin to ride in. A little more infrastructure would help a lot. And e-bikes have their place for people going more than 20 mins and need to arrive feeling presentable.
Here’s a theory: road cycling is more available to those who live reasonably close to work and have time to spare, and that is relatively rich people. Poorer people literally cannot afford not to have a car because they have to travel long distances to work, and their areas are not well served by public transport.
As to living near the urban core, inner cities have a lot of relatively poor people. Roommates and HUD style affordable housing add another dimension to housing that’s not obvious to most people. Twenty to Thirty percent of the units have been set aside for low or middle-income residents, which means the monthly rent is affordable to low or middle-income households and those households must qualify at the outset. https://www.residenewyork.com/faq/how-many-units-are-allocat...
Not necessarily. There is often less traffic at night, for example. It depends on how well-lit the route is.
I use this set (with the 1000 lm):
It’s like dealing with serious lap swimmers.
It does not matter whose job it is. If increasing speed improves safety for the cyclist, in this case by reducing the incentive for car drivers to overtake, then a good number of cyclists will do it.
There's no road I commute on (including 25 mph city streets) where a 30mph bike would keep up with traffic, riding a skinny tire 40 lb bike at 30mph in the road shoulder that passes for bike lanes around here sounds hazardous.
If I wanted to keep up with car traffic so I can ride in the road, I'd get an e-scooter or e-motorcycle that's designed for higher speed. But then I couldn't ride in bike lanes.
Bike lanes do not exist in most places. The poster had said that their comment was about:
> areas where the bike infrastructure is poor or nonexistent
If there are bike lanes, then being overtaken by cars is not as much of a problem. But in most places, cyclists have to use the same lanes as motorised traffic, so it is more important to be able to keep up.
They should, but OMG cars don't
I have to say though being able to keep up with cars when I can't have a bike lane is pretty nice.
https://www.electricbike.com/cheap-electric-bike/ http://myelectricbikemotor.com/category/30mph/ https://www.amazon.com/Folding-Electric-Bike-Adults-Enduranc...
Right now there is no way to identify a speeding bicycle, no matter how fast its going. You could be doing 50 in a 40 zone and there is no way to issue a fine.
Where in the Bay Area are bells required? I've never heard of police there ever enforcing equipment requirements, not even lights at night.
Overall it’s hard for different physical capabilities to share a resource. If the pandemic taught me anything, it’s that peoples perceptions and ability to act in the common good are wildly inconsistent.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conflicts_involving_Critical_M...
Critical Mass helped spur NYC’s bike lane growth. If you’re against direct action that’s fine, but it’s hard for me to see what works better in initiating long term transformation than direct action protests like Critical Mass.
I don't think it is just safety. Most people understand an e-bike is going to be more dangerous, but they are popular anyways.
The other factor is distance. e-bikes increase the distance that can be covered by a significant amount, which changes a lot of commutes from "too far" to acceptable. The only people who can afford to be within a bike commute are at least above-average income-wise.
Even satire news sites have caught onto this: https://www.thebeaverton.com/2020/09/i-bike-everywhere-brags...
No. The income bracket most likely to bike to work makes less than $10k/year.
https://i1.wp.com/cityobservatory.org/wp-content/uploads/201...
I rode a bike to school when my limited money would buy a very bad car or a nice bike. So I opted for the bike and had to ride it because that's all I had. I did that for a couple of years - even in the cold and ice. My commute distance varied in my biking days, from 6 to 20 miles.
I always obeyed all the traffic laws, though occasionally in the early AM I'd find lights that would not turn green for a bike no matter what I did.
I had people scream at me to get off the road, and otherwise be exceptionally rude. I occasionally had bike lanes and appreciated them, sought them out because it provided better spacing. But the busses on those routes were frequently in the bike lane and were, frankly, slower than I was. But navigating them was always a pain until I got well past them.
On slower roads (20-25 mph) with no bike lane I would take a lane to myself and keep up with traffic but only when I could reasonably keep up.
In the end, safety won out, and I abandoned the practice.
Now, as a driver, I am appalled at the behavior of cyclists. With my experience I take interest in and carefully watch their behavior.
Running red lights and not stopping for stop signs is the worst. And it's pretty universal.
Bad spacing in the lane, little to no accommodation for drivers when they could provide a bit more space for a comfortable pass. Sometimes they can't help it, and I get it, but when they can and don't... I always tried to be crystal clear about my messaging to the cars around me. I'm taking the lane here for my safety because there are parked cars in the bike lane or otherwise on the shoulder. I'm done now and look, I'm providing lots of space for everyone to safely pass me.
So the rude behavior I encountered was finally somewhat understood.
I really appreciated having good bike lanes. But cyclists do themselves no favors in how they conduct themselves, which will hurt them when pining for better road accommodations.
Even the cost factor is complicated. Everyone factors in the cost per mile of the bike, which is excellent, but the input calories are non-trivial and if you're not running the numbers on just ramen noodles it turns into quite a significant financial cost.
There are definitely health benefits.
Car-oriented transport infrastructure has been a terrible mistake. Don't blame the cyclists for trying to salvage something from the wreckage.
I don't blame them for trying to salvage/use something from what exists, I've been there. I found the behavior of ignoring established traffic law as if it were optional to be dangerous and selfish.
Don't they pay income tax? I think I read that most of the cost of roads in the USA is raised from income tax and sales tax.
> I found the behavior of ignoring established traffic law as if it were optional to be dangerous and selfish.
A lot of car drivers are out there too running lights, breaking speed limits and driving under the influence. People are the problem, not their transport.
Strong Towns also have some good examples of how car-oriented infrastructure can also be economically unsustainable in that it encourages low-density neighbourhoods with a lot of roads, so long term cities can't afford to maintain the roads without cross-subsidising it from new developments. So if the city stops growing, it often can't sustain the infrastructure it has! Whereas somewhat more dense areas (especially where retail and small business tenancies are mixed in with housing) can have much more property tax income per unit area as well as less road infrastructure to maintain which can tip the balance to being economically sustainable in itself.
It seems likely that cars actually hindered average GDP growth from '45 to today, rather than helping it.
Hong Kong is not car oriented and it develop just fine…
In Australia, bikes are required to follow the same rules as cars when on the road.
I have used a bike as my primary transportation for 15 years. The majority of rides are in traffic - there's very little dedicated bike infrastructure (painted sharrows or gutters don't count)
Trust me when I say, in the US, an intersection is the most dangerous place to be. You are a sitting duck if you aren't moving when clear.
A lot of drivers straight up don't pay attention at lights, due to phones or spacing out, and don't give you space when coming up behind you. Mix in right-on-reds, unprotected left turns, and the general drivers failure to negotiate turns - if it's clear I'm going. It's also safer for me to stay at a relatively consistent speed for predictable passing than accelerating in mixed traffic with very different acceleration curves.
At the same time, it takes a cyclist far longer to start off from being stopped, so every time they stop when they didn't really need to, it puts them in a vulnerable position for much longer time than was necessary. So apparently it turns out a lot safer to let cyclists slow at stop signs but not have to fully stop if it's safe to continue.
If all the give way signs on my commute were replaced with stop signs, I'd sure feel like rolling through them.
> Running red lights and not stopping for stop signs is the worst. And it's pretty universal.
Some areas have a yield at stop signs law for bikes so the stop signs could be legal, but I think a major driver of this kind of behavior is bike hostile infrastructure. If you've stopped for your 20th red light that prioritises non existent car traffic and that won't turn green today, or you're going past your fifth intersection that requires crossing at signals 3 times, waiting 2 minutes a piece on an empty road with visibility 500m in each direction it starts seeming pointless. Once someone is in the habit of disobeying clearly pointless (or in the case of many stop signs, actively unsafe because there is no visibility at the sign and accelerating up hill from a stop rather than 2mph causes you to spend far more time in the danger zone) signals and signage I can see it being easy to start ignoring others.
Respect works both ways, and when your city and laws clearly disrespect someone you shouldn't be surprised they stop respecting you.
Seems to me that it's a very bad idea to disrespect in ways that actively make your own life less safe. Especially on something as fragile as a bicycle. Regardless of the disrespect heaped your way.
https://www.thedrive.com/news/43060/coal-rolling-teen-that-h...
>Coal-Rolling Teen That Hit Cyclists Charged With Six Felonies
>The 16-year-old was not arrested after the incident, but has now surrendered to authorities.
>On September 25, a group of cyclists riding near Waller, Texas, were hit by a Ford Super Duty driven by a 16-year old youth. Reports from witnesses indicated the driver had been "rolling coal" on the group immediately prior to striking six cyclists, four of whom were hospitalized due to injuries sustained. Now, news out of Texas is that the teen driver is finally in custody according to the District Attorney of Waller County, over a month after the incident occurred.
>[...] Cyclist Chase Ferrell, who saw the events unfold, told Fox 26 at the time that the crash happened "because [the driver] was accelerating to blow more diesel fuel on these cyclists," adding that the driver "ended up hitting 3 people before his brakes even started." Ferrell noted that the teen remained at the scene after hitting the cyclists, and spoke to police. However, the driver was not arrested in the wake of the crash. "I don't understand, if it was me who had struck someone else, I would be in jail," noted Ferrell.
https://www.thedrive.com/article/9930/colorado-bans-rolling-...
>Colorado Bans Rolling Coal: Hallelujah!
>It doesn't matter that it will be nearly impossible to enforce: this legislation is more than welcome.
>For those not in the know, rolling coal is the name for blasting black smoke out the exhaust of a diesel-engined vehicle. It is done by modifying the air and fuel mixture in forced induction diesel engines to make the engines run rich, the result of which is a cloud of soot blowing out the tailpipes. This is done for the childish sake of annoying people, typically anyone that a coal-roller doesn't like, which includes but is not limited to hybrid drivers, convertible drivers, bicyclists, pedestrians, and anyone who so much as looks like they don't attend the same evangelical megachurch. Why do people do it? Nobody one can say for sure, though it has been suggested that it has its roots in anti-environmentalism.
Majority of America is overweight, staring down at their phones day and night, and dread physical activity. They also like to flex their position and wealth to others, one of the reasons why pickup trucks and big SUVs sell in great numbers. These people are in no hurry to transition to riding bikes.
The only way biking might work is if some popular celebrities on social media or otherwise started doing it, since many Americans just like to imitate what's popular.
The issue was that she and 4 years old walked 20minutes to preschool and back. That is it, 40 min total walking time was assumed to be beyond 4 years old capabilities.
I think there would be an increase in biking if the celebs did it, but I say this imagining a new generation of Americana growing up watching a bunch of them doing it, not just one or two starting tomorrow and the nation follows suit.
I'd disagree on the looking suave bit, it might just be because so many riders are clueless (and this perception being reenforced by selection bias), but someone on an escooter always looks far sillier to me than someone on a dutch style or folding bike, or even someone in lycra.
Regarding lycra - we can disagree on whether you look suave while riding, but a huge advantage of the e-scooter is that you don't need special clothing - don't even need to tuck your pants leg into your sock. You wouldn't turn up to a date clad in lycra - but you can ride an e-scooter to one.
Apologies, I was trying to say that the brompton was the horrifically expensive option.
Upsides is they are a bit better for carrying cargo, can handle slightly rougher terrain, are a little more comfortable at long range and are a little more compact than the more capable escooters.
Both have their place, I was just trying to mention another option that hadn't been included.
This has never been true, of course. As you would expect for something that costs a hundredth as much as a car, bicycling to work has always been more common among the poor: https://usa.streetsblog.org/2014/05/08/low-income-americans-...
Consider there may be a dignity issue: If you are a lycra-clad yuppy, you're cycling because you want to. If you're poor, it looks like you can't afford a car.
Here's another study showing the same https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Relationship-between-inc...
A bike-friendly infrastructure is based on three separate networks, for pedestrians, cycles and cars. Each of the three networks must be continuous, reasonably complete and able to stand on its own.
Ultimately it depends on the cycling culture in a place and a lot of that depends on whom cycling is available to. If it is more accessible you will probably find people acting more sensibly and more like pedestrians.
A mixed use trail can provide refuge from busy roads. This is much more important if roads are awful for cyclists and I this can often be the case in some parts of the world. If roads are good for cyclists then the obnoxious people who would otherwise endanger those on the trail will be happier going faster and straighter along the roads. But they will only get better if cycling is more popular which will only happen if it is more accessible.
I think mixed use paths are not particularly bad and are also necessary on the way to better infrastructure.
Calling them bike infrastructure is like calling a school zone with zebra crossings and speed bumps a highway.
They are what should be built first though, because you don't get new cyclists without low speed, safe, fully separated bike infrastructure. They should always be paired with a nearby road with a cycle lane and somr plan for separated infrastructure though.
The separated bike lane *and* the mixed use path is the end goal, but if the immediate goal is to save the city money and make people healthier rather than create conflict and negative sentiment towards cycling, then you need a separate route for ebikes and more experienced commuters. Sharrows or magic paint suffice for this (at least temporarily) with adequate traffic calming or if the main car flow has an alternate route.
Imo, American negative sentiment and aggression toward bicycles is way more about politics and assumed demographics then anything else. It does not matter how well behaved average cyclist is. It does not matter how intrusive or safe it is. The people who are aggressive will focus on that one minor infraction that happened once to validate their anger.
I think we overall agree, but there are many things that can be done to reduce conflit points.
Firstly I agreed that the mixed lane with a shared car/bicycle alternate route should come first (as this covers both short/slow speed trips and high speed/high confidence trips), but secondly the shared lane has an absurdly small cost. Under 5% of the space and an even smaller fraction of the money spent on roads will give you a world leading bicycle network, and if you build it, it will be used -- cycling on good infrastructure is simply so much cheaper and more convenient than car ownership and cycle lanes have so much more capacity than roads that it becomes a no brainer.
I agree that bootstrapping it to get the political will needed for that pittance is extremely hard, which is why we need to think very carefully about encouraging long distance commuters who must average over 15km/h to make reasonable time and people taking the pram for a walk to mix. Ebikes are a big potential issue because they are both fast and favoured by new riders. It will only take one ebike with the speed limiter removed accidentally injuring a kid and hitting the news to set back bike infrastructure in an entire country by years.
Step 1 is mixed paths connecting local destinations (schools, shops, church, etc) and start reserving your space for the separated bikeway
Step 2 is a fully connected network where all the mixed paths have an alternate route with magic green paint or sharrows for high speed trips and to handle congestion.
Step 3 is build the separated paths.
You can't skip step 2 or avoid thinking about step 3 until it is too late.
Additionally throughout this process you need to fix all the cyclist and pedestrian hostile signals (waiting for a full 5 minhte cycle at a one way street full of stopped cars because the button wasn't pressed is absurd) and provide some alternative to stop signs (carefully designed roundabouts, yield signs, or cyclists-yield laws with public outreach work okay).
It is already difficult to have a car near house where you live here.
You complain that bike lanes are not used "enough", but a single parked car forces a whole lane to have a throughput of 0 commuters per hour. A bike lane that gets a single cyclist per hour is infinitely more efficient!
There was not enough space for cars, we tore down entire neighbourhoods and blasted through bedrock to create highways.
There is not enough money to fund a moon program or fix climate change, but when time came to bail out the banks, if you stacked that money as 1-dollar bills it would reach the moon.
There is not enough money to Fusion research, but our fossil fuel and airline subsidies in one year are greater that all-time fusion research budget.
Priorities.
The prioritization back then was that "those people" don't matter. That is how those were build.
Especially in the US there is plenty of space you can take away from cars, both lanes and parking.
The Netherlands did not knock down and rebuild Amsterdam to build bike paths. They took space back from cars.
The first is car centric, with lots of roads and deep set backs. These cities are amenable to bike and public transit transformation in terms of space, but usually have political resistance to change. These cities will be the easiest to add extra bike infrastructure to, once a political mass is reached. My current city is like this, and the current bike path master plan is trying to add enough paths for 96% of the city to be near bike infrastructure (currently it’s 10%).
The second category are really dense, and do not have the space for any extra lanes. But these cities dedicate a huge amount of space for parallel parking. Theoretically the city could remove parking for bikes, but practically this means purposefully pricing people out of car ownership, which is obviously unpopular. These cities should focus on public transit, which is by and far the most space efficient way to move people. For a lot of these cities this is less about installing new lines, which is expensive, but about making the existing system feel cleaner and more dignified. It will always be hard to make improvements when even the crappiest sedan is considered a step up from taking the subway to work.
The key is that cars don't belong in most places anyway. A residential street can easily be design as a 10mph one way cobblestone road with calming measures, freeing up the "other direction" side of the street for a 2-way bike lane and expanded sidewalks. Larger roads can be redesigned similarly for bike/transit with cars filling in particular niches like delivery of bulk items, etc.
It also costs less to maintain, kills fewer people, massively reduces healthcare costs improves the local economy and is far nicer to live next to.
There is plenty of money, most places are just directing it to yet another road widening project that will make things worse.
In any case, it's pretty much a non-starter to prohibit at least conventional bikes or pedestrians even though, on the more crowded and narrower paths, I'll avoid them during busy times as a walker.
https://www.insidenova.com/news/arlington/w-od-trail-effort-...
Which is fascinating and really tells you something about ingroups and outgroups because cyclists are hurt and killed every day by drivers and strangely nobody seems to be that fussed about it.
The hatred heaped on cyclists escalates towards violence, and next to nobody on the escalating side (motorists) really acknowledges that it happens.
That being said, these are edge cases. The sad reality is that a driver must display extreme levels of negligence or malice before the state will step in to punish them. In NYC only 1 percent of drivers who injured a pedestrian or cyclist even got a ticket. Assuming the driver is sober and doesn’t flee the scene, neither cops nor DA’s really care about prosecuting negligent drivers who injure or kill anyone.
Ummm- yes, yes they are.
don't you have restricted ebikes in the US? In most of Europe they're either sold restricted to 25kmh, in which case they're legally bikes, or unrestricted, in which case they're legally mopeds
Even in the places I'm familiar with which still allow escooter rentals, my observation is you don't really see very many of them--either being ridden or littering the sidewalks. It does seem to be one of those things that, while you still see them, appear to have mostly been a fad. At least in the cities I'm familiar with.
Set speed limits and mercilessly fine serious violations, and the problem goes away as far as it will ever be.
Any reasonable speed limit for a shared use bike path (IMO, <15mph) will be routinely ignored by both e-bikes and roadies.
I'd say they are somewhat effective. I don't ride much on shared paths, but when I do, I usually see people not going full speed. After all, unlike with a car, it's also dangerous for the biker. The only concern might be that you may experience speed differently on an ebike/pedelec since you have to put in less effort. I've never tried those so I have no idea.
Here in New York City, people delivering food, packages, etc are one of the major biking contingents, I guess invisible to the Hacker News community.
Sadly, here in New York City, kids can't ride bikes around for fun except once or twice a year when they close Park Avenue or if you get an open street. I don't see why kids riding casually shouldn't be a major interest of the population. If the streets aren't safe for them, maybe change the streets and disallow cars instead of depriving kids of that space.
1. convert curbside parking into dedicated and protected bike lanes (not everywhere, but extensively)
2. require bike parking (preferably covered and right next to entrances/foot traffic) and liability requirements anywhere that has a (car) parking lot
this would put biking on par with cars and would encourage businesses to reorganize around mixed traffic, rather than car only.
Source: https://nhts.ornl.gov/tables09/fatcat/2009/vt_TRPMILES.html
We got to Santa Monica beach in the afternoon, spent some time there, and we had a reservation for dinner in koreatown (close to downtown), roughly 15 miles away. Closer to 5:30pm it was time to leave, so we split into two groups: 3 people decided to take Uber, 4 people (including me) decided to take those Lime/Bird escooters.
The results were rather surprising. The escooter group got to the restaurant about 15 minutes later than the Uber group, but only because we were navigating to the wrong place and overshot the restaurant by almost 2 miles. Without counting that, our overall trip was around 1.5 hours.
Here is the kicker: batteries on those scooters were rather not the best. With 4 people riding together, every 20 minutes or so, someone's battery would die (because we didn't all start with 100% at the same time, it doesn't mean that the battery life on those was just 20 minutes, it was just the offset that led to this). And when the battery would die, we wouldn't abandon the person, so we would start searching around for another scooter being available somewhere nearby.
With this in mind, if it was just 1 person riding by themselves, it would definitely beat an Uber ride on that day. And even with 4 people with batteries dying every 20 minutes on someone's scooter, we pretty much beat the people who took Uber by a small margin (which would have been much larger if it was just one person on one escooter).
To underline, I was surprised by two things on that day: how awfully close to the stereotype LA traffic actually was and how viable escooters were in that environment. Prior to seeing it with my eyes, I was also thinking that LA was a bit too sprawled out for it to work. Glad to have been proven wrong.
I'm a daily cyclist (18-20 miles round trip for work) and I don't know which one annoys me more: the lycra yuppie who wants to race me, or the e-bike Patagonia vest financebro yuppie who salmons[1] me while screaming through his AirPods :-)
[1]: https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2014/05/15/3124556...
While I agree with e-bikes being a generally good thing, I also think they involve a lot of secondary consequences and we still need to figure out the best solutions. For example, having more e-bikes on the already overcrowded bike path near where I live is becoming a disaster. There had already been enough problems with mismatched speeds, impatience on all sides, etc. There had even been fatalities. Adding e-bikes makes all of that even worse. While I have little love for the "rich lycra-clad yuppies" (there really are plenty of them) who are mostly just horrified by the idea of their hobby becoming more inclusive, I kind of agree with them that the path can't safely support yet another (faster, heavier) type of conveyance. I wouldn't want horses on the path for the same reason.
There's a complementary issue with e-bikes on roads. There's still going to be a speed mismatch, with e-bikes in the middle this time instead of the high end. Bike lanes are going to become more dangerous, traffic-light timings will have to change, etc. Where are the e-bikes going to be parked or stored while not in use? On my now-ended visits to Seattle I saw these problems already manifesting, and they're likely to become even worse as e-bikes continue to become more popular.
In the long term, maybe the "changed politics" will lead to improved infrastructure that supports all classes of users including e-bikes. In the short term, it's likely to be a free-for-all like I used to see in Bangalore with all the tuk-tuks and scooters mixed in with cars and trucks and buses. Not looking forward to it.
we need better infrastructure for non-car transportation. the short-term hell is simply more people experiencing what most cyclists are already used to.
Did you miss the part where the cyclists are the ones inflicting that hell on others sometimes? Cyclists haven't been the only ones demanding better non-automotive infrastructure. I've supported the local path with both my dollars and the sweat of my brow, only to have freeloading cyclists tell me that they have priority (exactly opposite to how the laws are written) and I should get out of their way. One political change that needs to happen is that cyclists need to stop looking down their noses at other non-automotive users. When cyclists stop treating pedestrians exactly the same way they complain about being treated by cars, maybe greater cooperation will be possible. Nobody likes the smell of hypocrisy.
yes, there's some bad cyclists. but because there's few enough cyclists, people who aren't cyclists like to group us all together. when a driver or pedestrian is an asshole, you say the person was an asshole, because you understand that they don't represent all drivers or all pedestrians any more than you do. but when a cyclist is an asshole, you jump to treating that as the behaviour of all cyclists, as if we're all the same, because we're just a group of weirdos that you don't feel a part of.
No, I don't, and even if that was meant as a generic "you" it seems a bit like attempted mind-reading. How about not doing that? FWIW, the people I've worked with on maintaining my local path are mostly cyclists. No friction there. When people call out "on your left" (interestingly that's most of the women and damn few of the men) I always say "thank you" in return. I'm well aware that most cyclists are good people and I treat them as such, but there are enough - and an even higher percentage among cycling activists - that it's a problem.
I guess I should have been more explicit about referring to that subset earlier, but other cyclists should be aware that those are the ones people remember (it's basic math + psychology) and exert peer pressure accordingly instead of getting aggressive themselves every time the issue comes up.
Ya know, I don't have to look any farther than this discussion to see people doing exactly that, painting all drivers as bad.
I had to slam on the breaks 3 weeks ago when making a left because of a biker completely running a red light in front of me.
I find the number running lights to be similar.
Mostly e-bike riders are just ignored. Like they don't affect us in any way and we barely even notice that they exist.
Do you want an e-bike you can ride like a bicycle, or do you want an e-bike you can ride like a motorcycle?
https://usa.streetsblog.org/2016/05/31/3-graphs-that-explain...
It's also a big issue with response time and with the rate pedestrians expect bicycles to be travelling. You shouldn't bike on the sidewalk because no one is looking for vehicles going more than a few miles per hour (walking). You shouldn't bike more than 15mph on trails/lanes shared with pedestrians for similar reasons. 20mph is a tolerable compromise, 25mph is flat out dangerous.
I ride a bicycle, bike and drive a car and the ammount of crazies on all sides leaves me speachless sometimes. I see cyclist cutting off cars and shooting into a roundabout just because cars will avoid them. I actually had a crash becasue of a retard like this and I chased him until I caught him. Took him to court and won.
On the other side of the coin - I see cars taking turns without checking their mirrors, overtaking while in a queue without making sure no cyclists are passing by. Smashed a bike to bits because of 1 twat. His insurance paid for the bike and treatment.
P.S. I'm not a perfect driver but people these days lack consideration and defensive driving(even the notion of it is foreign now)
What's pernicious about this is, that under normal circumstances most people won't have ridden a bike past these limits, maybe ever, so the first time you realize your bike can go from well behaved to on the pavement instantly is the worst time for it to happen.
I am always afraid of falling of the bike while there is a bus driving behind me. Could happed with a pothole, random garbage/bottle of the road, etv
Do some cities actually let cyclists bike on sidewalks? I bike 24/7 but this seems crazy. Bicycles needs their own, separate, protected paths, at the road level. Period.
There's something very nice about these types of mixed streets, but they're pretty much unheard in the US. They work very well on small residential streets, where cars would otherwise get 80% of the street width reserved to their use, even where car traffic is low.
Also, US sidewalks tend to be extremely narrow, which makes it worse to share modes.
There's a lot of mixed-use streets here without sidewalks, and if cars weren't allowed on them, they'd be great. I'm always worried about being hit by a car on them.
https://i.imgur.com/OzShuC8.jpg
I wouldn't generally call Tokyo a bike friendly city but they do have bike parking lots and more and more bike lanes are being added.
I've even seen bikes trying to make their way through a pedestrian crush that's basically the people density of Times Square in NYC.
Not sidewalks per se, but combined, mixed-used paths are very common. Whether this is a good idea or not is another issue.
In my city at least you can't really go fast on the sidewalks even if they're empty (lots of uneven brick, chunky curbs, trees, buildings have stoops, etc) so it's not a big issue. If someone has to go a couple blocks on the sidewalk they'll generally get back on the path / road as soon as able
Again, not saying it should not be allowed, but man, at that point please just take care of yourself and get a little honda motorbike and a full face helmet/leathers.
I certainly don't agree with 35km/h on bike paths. The current 25km/h is plenty and given their popularity with older ages, already producing outsized numbers of injuries and deaths.
It means that a ciclyst on an ebike can outperform a group of friends with normal bikes on an slope but can't stay with them on the way back home and they'll have to wait. I experienced that and it's not nice. The two types of bikes mix well only in low intensity sightseeing rides.
no commuter in shirt and trousers with saddlebags for the laptop etc is going to be running at more than 25kmh
I don’t know who “those people” are, or what regional politics are at play, but that doesn’t pass my “smell test”. How about deploying “think about the children” here for something that increases exercise and happiness, mobility, fosters growth… it’s not even contentious with respect to (e.g.) civil liberties.
I suspect the answer is people just don’t care. Especially once they’re behind the wheel of an automobile, electric or otherwise.
(Edit: expand/clarify suggested benefits)
Keep in mind that most cyclists are also drivers, and in the latter role many of them also don't seem to care. These debates often sound like we're talking about two disjoint groups of people, with one having a grievance against the other, but in reality they're just different transport modalities that people switch between.
The project kept getting derailed due to bicycle special interests having a literal fit because a section of the road was too narrow to have the walkable sidewalks(priority number 1), the cycle lanes with adequate safety, and not congest the rest of the road. A consulting company made recommendations based on traffic simulations and the requirements to have the bicycle route go off onto a parallel side street through this section.
Oh man, what a shit show it turned into. But most of the pushback against what the cyclist special interests wanted(lanes through this section, fuck everything else) had to do with the practicalities of balancing the requirements. Not the meme arguments people who hate cars often throw out as scarecrows.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traffic_calming
>Traffic calming uses physical design and other measures to improve safety for motorists, pedestrians and cyclists. It has become a tool to combat speeding and other unsafe behaviours of drivers in the neighbourhoods. It aims to encourage safer, more responsible driving and potentially reduce traffic flow. Urban planners and traffic engineers have many strategies for traffic calming, including narrowed roads and speed humps. Such measures are common in Australia and Europe (especially Northern Europe), but less so in North America. Traffic calming is a calque (literal translation) of the German word Verkehrsberuhigung – the term's first published use in English was in 1985 by Carmen Hass-Klau.
https://www.wired.com/2004/12/traffic/
>HANS MONDERMAN is a traffic engineer who hates traffic signs. Oh, he can put up with the well-placed speed limit placard or a dangerous curve warning on a major highway, but Monderman considers most signs to be not only annoying but downright dangerous. To him, they are an admission of failure, a sign - literally - that a road designer somewhere hasn't done his job. "The trouble with traffic engineers is that when there's a problem with a road, they always try to add something," Monderman says. "To my mind, it's much better to remove things."
>[...] In Denmark, the town of Christianfield stripped the traffic signs and signals from its major intersection and cut the number of serious or fatal accidents a year from three to zero. In England, towns in Suffolk and Wiltshire have removed lane lines from secondary roads in an effort to slow traffic - experts call it "psychological traffic calming." A dozen other towns in the UK are looking to do the same. A study of center-line removal in Wiltshire, conducted by the Transport Research Laboratory, a UK transportation consultancy, found that drivers with no center line to guide them drove more safely and had a 35 percent decrease in the number of accidents.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hans_Monderman
Hans Monderman: Rethinking the design of streets and public space.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bjBGokenEhQ
>An Urban Design London and Urban Design Group Lecture
>Hans Monderman has been one of the most significant influences on the current debate about the design of streets and spaces in the UK. A traffic engineer and road safety specialist from Northern Holland, he is celebrated as the pioneer of shared space as a means to influence speed and driver behaviour.
>Monderman has been the inspiration behind scores of towns and villages which work without road markings, traffic signs, signals, kerbs, barriers and bollards. ‘Most engineers, when faced with a problem, try to add something,’ he says. ‘My instinct has always been to take something away.’ Following a short introduction by Rob Cowan, Hans explains his approach, work and experiences.
It sure doesn't sound like the "bike special interests" were the ones being unreasonable here.
The congestion would not just be on that section of road, it would propogate out and cause major issues. The bikes are not going to experience congestion.
In the gold standard countries for cycling, this sort of design is done on purpose. Pedestrians get the best route, followed by cyclists, and vehicles have what's left.
Elsewhere, doing the easy work to accommodate cycling, then ignoring anything that would cause even the slightest inconvenience to cars, is the norm.
This is a big one for me. Cycling into work doesn't take too much time (30 minutes), and it's good to be active. But showering at work you often need to wait, you need to bring all your clean clothes with you, and after going back you need to shower again.
It just costs too much time to cycle because of the sweating.
With e-Bikes I'm able to cycle into work slightly faster (saving a few minutes when going up hill) and I'm still fresh when I arrive.
Sure it's not as sporty, but it's something, especially compared to driving.
i've seen this pushback come from two camps. 1) people with cars who get pissed when street parking or automobile lanes get turned into bike lanes (i prefer bike lanes, but i can at least understand this.) 2) professional users of the roads who saw early construction of bicycle infrastructure as something that would attract more cyclists and therefore make their jobs harder/riskier.
i feel like construction of bike infrastructure in many us cities is something that really blossomed in the late 00s/early 10s when urban cyclists were often more ragtag jorts with tattoos than "lycra-clad yuppies."
Cycling advocates like to talk about sharing the road but I've yet to see any sort of acknowledgement that there's plenty of bad behavior on the part of cyclists that needs some curbing as well.
What percentage of streets have physically separated lanes for biking, the way we have them for walking?
Bikes don't fit well with pedestrians or cars, and painted bike lanes are a joke -- imagine if you replaced every sidewalk with "painted walk lanes".
In places where there is good infrastructure, like the Netherlands, cyclist reputations for behaving badly are basically no different from pedestrian or motorist reputations.
Saying "the way things are is dangerous for me, so I'm going to break the law and be a danger to others instead because I'm what matters here" is not ok behaviour. If cycling is too dangerous for you, don't cycle. You don't get to say "driving in traffic is dangerous so I'm going to drive in the bus lane where there's less traffic", right?
[1] https://www.gov.uk/guidance/the-highway-code/rules-for-cycli...
In Germany, protected bike lanes are mostly extensions of the sidewalk, and while it's not ideal, it still works pretty well.
Evidence I can find suggests that's not entirely true. While pedestrians dying to bikes is extraordinarily rare, police reports of crashes in the UK in 2019 involving a (pedal cycle, pedestrian) pair happened 375 times and killed 4 pedestrians (~1%). Crashes involving a (car, bike) pair happened 13,336 times killed 48 cyclists (~0.3%).
That is (bike, pedestrian) happens 35x less often than (car, bike) but is fatal to the weaker party 3x more often when it does happen.
This dataset is particularly "accidents involving a pedal cycle and pedestrians which don't involve any other vehicles" so it excludes car -> bike + walker, kills walker situations.
(Injuries are another matter).
[1] https://www.gov.uk/government/statistical-data-sets/reported... looking at sheet RAS40004: Accidents, vehicle users and pedestrian casualties by severity and combination of vehicles involved (ODS, 105KB) with Vehicle A being Pedal Cycle -> Single Vehicle accident with Pedestrian and Pedal Cycle -> Two vehicle accidents with Car.
Also, note that super bike-friendly Netherlands has 1/10th the pedestrian fatalities with 1/4th the population of the UK. If bikes are that dangerous, why would such a bike-focused country have radically fewer pedestrian fatalities?
From what I've seen, the data is pretty consistent, in that more car-focused countries tend to have more pedestrian fatalities.
I think that's kind of missing the GP's point. AIUI they weren't saying cyclists shouldn't move to the sidewalk when necessary. They were saying cyclists should do so with respect for the sidewalk's primary users especially with regard to safety. A sidewalk is a kind of commons, to be shared. "I need this now so you all get out of my way" isn't good sharing, and in many places (where the law explicitly gives pedestrians right of way) should deserve a ticket.
But realistically, "cyclists should be nicer" isn't a policy prescription. We're just shouting into the void here, you can't actually accomplish anything significant with, I dunno, billboards shaming dickhead cyclists. Whereas zoning or road design changes could result in actual, meaningful change. And that would also result in cyclists being a lot nicer.
And I fully agree that there are a lot of bad bikers, but a bad biker is a nuisance to a driver while a bad driver is a potential fatality to a biker.
You're leaving out an entire category of users. Not that I'm surprised, having been in many of these debates regarding the multi use path near my home. "Share the road" turns into "get off the path" rather quickly, in my experience.
You have to see how this is a completely selfish position right?
The road is dangerous for cyclists so cyclists make the sidewalk dangerous for pedestrians. Sure there's a difference in degree but that's not a justification.
> And I fully agree that there are a lot of bad bikers, but a bad biker is a nuisance to a driver while a bad driver is a potential fatality to a biker.
To me, the "bad cyclist" is generally creating havoc on both the sidewalk and the street, alternating between street, sidewalk, crosswalks, alleys, etc. as it's convenient. This is really what I'm referring to when I said "especially at closing time". Those people are creating a dangerous environment for even safe drivers who may either hit them or get in an accident avoiding them.
I don't often find the hobbyist biker doing things like that which are dangerous to themselves except treating stop signs like yields.
I'm not nearly as concerned about the hobbyist as I am about the guy who thinks driving his ebike home from the bar is a great way to get home without drinking and driving. And that is definitely happening, especially with electric scooters.
That depends how busy the sidewalk is, and how the cyclist behaves. Conversely, I see videos of many places in North America where cycling on the road, even in dedicated cycle lanes, is a suicidal activity.
> The road is dangerous for cyclists so cyclists make the sidewalk dangerous for pedestrians. Sure there's a difference in degree but that's not a justification.
Have you ever tried biking on a 45/50mph road? The chance of you not being hit at the end of the day is not high. I'm not sure where else would one bike when there's such a large speed difference.
And in some US cities there really are no alternative roads with lower speeds limits to bike on.
It's also legal in my state to ride bikes on the sidewalk. That doesn't cause much of a problem for pedestrians because unfortunately there are few bike riders or pedestrians.
I only mention this to make people aware that what's legal depends on where they live.
When deciding policy, one cannot afford to frame things in terms of personal responsibility.
The red light, yes, that is valid complain. But stop sign, meh.
But also, pretty much any transport mode features people with bed behavior: cars, pedestrians, roller skaters. Those people are not even that much demographically different, unless the transport ends up tied to politics.
If cyclists had 90% of the road, and cars were forced to share the remaining 10% with pedestrians, everyone would be complaining (with reason) that's it's incredibly dangerous
Another catch is safety. Forcing bikes to share the road is dangerous. Cities really need bike lanes.
Is this even a thing outside of USA? Nobody thinks that where I live, and it's not a particularly bike-friendly country like Netherlands, just average EU country.
I'm curious about this - do you have specific examples? HOV/EV lanes?
Nassim Taleb made some pretty interesting points on the magnitude of a risk vs its probability. If you get a shower of pebbles thrown on your head, you'll be sore at worst. If you get the same mass thrown as one big rock... you're dead.
Same with bikes. You're much more likely to fall (you really are). But chances are, you'll not even ruin your clothes when you do, and the risk of serious injury, while of course present, is much much smaller.
we're talking here about cycling on bicycle lanes.
With e-bikes becoming more common, I know a number of people who would not have touched a bike share but are using it as a replacement for Uber/Lyft rides. People can cycle in to work without breaking a sweat.
It's a bummer that so much legislation aimed at reducing emissions subtly encourages the use of cars without throwing any bones to people who would like to ride bikes, electric or not.