I get what you're saying but you ever tried biking in Amsterdam at rush hour? There's just as much congestion. Nobody's going to die in a crash though, I'll give you that. But the experience itself is more crowded.

I think what you're looking for is a more rural existence.

> I think what you're looking for is a more rural existence.

Speaking for myself, absolutely not. The amount of things available in cities compared to rural areas is immense. I’ve lived in both.

Theater, music venues, libraries, restaurants, beer gardens, good food markets, schools. I have all of this writhing walking and biking distance. You don’t get that in rural areas without needing a car.

Rural areas are actually bike-averse. No shoulders, high speed limits, drunk drivers, asshole angry white guy pickup truck drivers, conservative contempt for "liberal" bicyclists.

They SHOULD be better but... no.

Then again my urban experience is Minneapolis St Paul, possibly the most bike-able city outside of winter I've seen.

i just saw the same in a documentary about biking in germany. major roads in rural areas have absolutely no space for bikes. cars go at the speed limit, and riding a bike from one village to the next is more dangerous than any city.

It depends. Many major roads have separate bike paths and if they don't there's always the option to use smaller, less travelled side roads but you have to plan your route in that case.

It's certainly not as bleak as you describe.

well that situation was what was shown in the documentary. i can't say how common that is, but given the cost and notorious lack of funds i think it is more common than we like. i could be wrong though. we could use google streetview to check.

as for alternative roads, that really depends. generally from my experience between two neighboring villages there tends to be only one road, unless you want to make a big detour. sometimes alternate roads exist when and old main road is replaced with a new one on a different route.

I do / have done the London cycle superhighway at rush hour - it's pretty much the same deal (although i would call any electric bikes "powered" and question if they should be on the same path / as powerful).

The point is if there was a dedicated (about a metre wide, cut off from road traffic by a raised kerb) cycle lane not just through Londons busiest roads but ... well everywhere there is a car road.

Just say if you want a car there you should also have a bicycle.

We seem to think that the industrial revolution chnaged something - like globally there should be some kind of "profit".

I think it's just we as a species get to still be at a subsistence level, just a higher subsistence level.

NB- re london cycleways - yeah people do die. The cannon street path was opposite the LFB station and they did not have far to go to wash the blood away sadly.

> although i would call any electric bikes "powered" and question if they should be on the same path / as powerful

Sort of agree, although an electric assist (for people who aren't in great shape, to get over hills) might be an exception. Limit it to 15mph or whatever.

Like the sibling mentioned, a pedal assist makes intersections safer - at least, it seems that way here in the southeast of the US. Barreling through a walkway and endangering the people around them is the problem, but it is kind of difficult to sell a bike with the potential for the former that doesn't have the latter as well.

It would be so nice to share most roads - but like op mentioned traveling through the historical European sites, the greenways being built here are approximating that. It is changing our city government significantly. Hope it is yours as well.

I'm daily cycling through Amsterdam (City center) at rush hours (8 am, 5 pm), it's busy but no congestion (longer than 10 seconds). But you definitely need some cycling skills and know your way around.

Imagine how that would look if everybody was driving their own car.

Standstill?

It's still easily twice as fast as trying to do the same route by car.

> I think what you're looking for is a more rural existence.

People tend to forget that while there are benefits in increasing density, they don't continue ad infinitum.

That’s not categorically good for everyone. This means we will need to have dense living conditions. A lot of people would much rather live in semi rural areas and have a lot of land and a lower density of people. That’s pretty incompatible with not having good car infrastructure.

The problem is that rural and suburban living is heavily subsidized in relation to urban living, which has economies of scale. This doesn't even factor in things like per-capita pollution. If people who would "rather" live a certain way actually paid their fair share (i.e. for negative externalities) it'd be a different story.

Infrastructure is used for a lot of things including transportation of goods and produce. It makes no sense to further incentivize moving to cities/urban areas as they already have plenty on incentives already.

> including transportation of goods and produce

Forgive me, if your rural land is on a major interstate then I definitely agree! For every branch off that major arterial the road becomes more and more specific to a few number of people, who rarely pay the full cost of the road/utilities that service them.

> It makes no sense to further incentivize moving to cities

I'm not asking for any incentives. I'm asking to stop sending my money to highway expansion, road repair and other services to people who live very sparsely. Let them pay for the extension (and maintenance) of service themselves, and then they can decide whether they would "rather" live there.

You’re inadvertently arguing against having a nation wide road system. In your ideal would cities be isolated? Have most of the country inaccessible to people? Have no small towns or villages? Have nothing quaint, no national parks, beach towns or farming communities? I don’t think you’ve thought this through.

You're effectively saying my family (in a city) should keep paying to make your life equivalent cost to a city life. I'm saying your life should come with the full cost of the burden it bears, that's all. We'll still have farming communities and beach towns but they can price their externalities in.

As an aside, it's a wild stretch to pull the national park system and state beaches into "I, one person, prefer to have multiple acres to myself", as if these programs exist so that you can live X many miles away from anything, for free.

> who rarely pay the full cost of the road/utilities that service them.

There are costs that are higher in cities too, such as public housing. There are costs that are higher in mountains and in plains, in the north or the south, on the coast or inland, for commuters and people who stay home and people with kids or without, those that have ICE or electric vehicles or bikes, etc.

Allocating taxes or fees based on service usage has a lot of negative effects: 1) It's very complicated to quantify: Those rural roads also carry goods to the city, for example, and each person in the city uses those goods at different rates. 2) It requires a metering, collection, enforcement, etc. infrastructure. 3) It's divisive: Instead of bringing the community together and saying, 'this is good; we should do this together', it becomes 'you used 10 micro-whatever more but only paid X'.

Instead of spending my energy and time on fees, I think this is a much better deal: I'm happy for my neighbors, urban and rural, to do well and have what they reasonably need, and they are happy for me to do the same.

At the same time, would you happen to know about any data or research that tries to sort out the economics of #1 above?

I've always thought there's a way to design living conditions for this sort of thing. Like... front door leads to front porch, front yard and sidewalk / bikeway. Backdoor leads to garage and alley and/or road.

The front door would lead to the relaxed communal part of the neighborhood.

The back door would lead to driving and work and the rest.

strangely, I remember going to a friend's parents house in florida. They lived on the intercoastal waterway. The driveway lead to the garage and the front door. The back door lead to the backyard and a boat dock.

I was cycling 13 miles. I expected to do 13 back. I just wanted to do it safely. along one stretch of road there was a path to the side - inwoukd get off the main road with lorries thundering past and cycle up the path happily not going to get killed. put such a path by every stretch of main road. Rural and urban. Then do something with the other roads.

People will cycle longer if we need to and can do it safely.