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.
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.