I love this optimism. I’ve long held that I would move to a bike only city if it was in my current country (USA). Starting a bike friendly city seems complicated and expensive but renovating a city seems significantly less expensive but much more political. I’m not sure which is harder of the two.

Start local. Your local city counselors are generally receptive to feedback from their community (in my experience). Compared to national politics, they tend not to get as much feedback about local issues that people care about. Write a letter, even email, and you’ll be surprised. Then talk to your neighbors, and get them to do the same.

You then can live in a bike friendly city.

Biking's not my thing, but it's telling that surveys in the local MA area sometimes now say "aside from protected bike lanes, what would you most like to see?".

It is an indication that walk-and-bike interests are making good progress, and I'm glad to see it.

On the other hand, that's exactly how I would phrase the question if I wanted to prime the survey respondent to get a result biased toward freedoms for unprotected road users.

There's no good reason to phrase the question like that instead of filter the answers after the fact. The only reason is to get people thinking in a certain direction.

...they do that because if they don't, "protected bike lanes" will be the only thing they hear, and in Cambridge etc. the plans are in the works (slowly, but in the works) to implement them. They're looking for additional things, not the thing that's already in the works but takes time and the progress is non-obvious 'til it's done.

Then the item should say something to the effect of "You can make more than one suggestion." or even more concretely, "Please suggest your top five, or fewer if you can't think of that many."

I second this. And here’s proof it’s possible. It took a while, but we now have a part of the city that is designed around pedestrians: https://www.lenexa.com/government/departments___divisions/co...

I think the political hurdles would be far worse than any expense, especially here in America where the car-centric attitude is so deeply embedded.

I think it's more that any threat to auto sales would cause marketing and lobbying spend to go up accordingly. Those two things determine what information Americans get exposed to, and what gets subsidized and what gets regulated. The US car-centric attitude is about half t-shirt slogans, half the necessity to have a car in a place built for cars with hourlong commutes, so why not love them?

Regulations on marketing, campaign finance, and quid-pro-quo would go a long way in demolishing political hurdles between us and a lot of better things.

Yeah, in the US (from a distance), the political hurdle seems to be the hardest. In terms of actual effort, it's definitely possible to make big strides: https://twitter.com/z_a_c_h_k_a_t_z/status/14646977114422067...

Aren't there some student cities, etc. like that there?

Even Seattle and NYC had parts that were very walkable, especially compared to LA.

So does the majority of South Florida, every street has a sidewalk, you can walk across bridges, highways, etc. One of the best in the US.

If one of the best in the US means you have to walk across highways that sucks

I assumed it means there are either frequent bridges or tunnels that gets you to ither side of highway.

Why is there a highway in the middle of an area people are supposedly walking in

Cause there are houses on both sides.

You don't see the issue here?

In quite a lot of places, highway was first. So, no I don't see issues.

Highways exists. There are two options. First, they divide country into two parts you cant cross on foot without taking long hike. Or, you build tunnels and bridges.

Florida is the deadliest state, and South Florida is actually home to some of the highest pedestrian per capita death rates in the country. https://smartgrowthamerica.org/dangerous-by-design/#custom-t...

Only Americans would consider South Florida "walkable".

The 90 degrees and humidity make it very unwalkable

That and all the pedestrian deaths. Florida is the second most dangerous state for pedestrians. https://smartgrowthamerica.org/dangerous-by-design/#custom-t...

Seattle proper is very walkable. I lived in Belltown for years and it was great how I could walk to pretty much anywhere in the city I wanted. Queen Anne and downtown were very accessible. I suppose I was never a big Capital Hill-goer so the longer walk there wasn't relevant.

And that wasn't even the student part.

Pedestrians play second fiddle to cars in Seattle as a whole. The walkable areas of Seattle are great, but they are a small portion of the city and are poorly connected. Some very active parts of the city have 4 or 5 lane arterials cutting through them with cars completely ignoring cross signals and pedestrians. Other areas lack sidewalks altogether.

See the "Lake to Bay" project, connecting a decent walking path from Lake Union to Elliot Bay. It will involve crossing streets. It will feature additional benches/seating and improved lighting. The initial proposal by a local resident was extremely well done.

That’s the very small walkable part.

Go to SoDo, or parts of South Seattle, or North Seattle, and it’s much worse, and that’s just “Seattle proper.”

Complaining about SoDo not being walkable seems silly..

I guess people are being anti-car extremists in this thread, but still. SoDo? Land of concerts and events and dispensaries?

SoDo has the only free public COVID testing center in the central area of the city. I don’t think it’s that unreasonable that people without cars should be able to safely access a public service.

Not to mention plenty of cyclist deaths from people who have to cross SoDo to get where they’re going.

Belltown resident for decades chiming in. It really is extremely walkable, including to Pioneer Square and Pike Place Market as well as locations the previous post mentioned.

Bell St. is a park (albeit paved for vehicles), and it finally received signage about local-only car access:

https://mcusercontent.com/b6749cc9930b55a313056721e/images/2...

That image is from the latest Belltown United newsletter - https://www.belltownunited.org/

I'm a proud Belltown Community Council supporter/participant.

NYC fully meets the definition of walkable.

It's nowhere near Amsterdam I'm afraid. Biking in NYC is pretty scary and vast amounts of public space are given over to car parking.

(BTW, I am lumping in biking with "walkable". A better term is "active travel")

Yup. Except for some dedicated cycleways, not bike friendly at all. Unless you have a deathwish, like this guy:

https://youtu.be/WyV894c8oqI

In Tokyo it is possible to just randomly walk out onto most streets and expect cars to work around you. There are obviously a number of busy roads that would be dangerous but cars will still stop (for example if you were to misjudge crossing a street) and of course the highways are off limits (but there was a case recently of a man standing in the middle of a highway redirecting traffic who was hit by autopilot telsa).

> there was a case recently of a man standing in the middle of a highway redirecting traffic who was hit by autopilot telsa

Slef driving would probably make the car problem worse.

As a pedestrian and cyclist in NYC, "fully" is not accurate.

I’d like to see less permanent scaffolding, and a better trash management system so that it doesn’t take room from pedestrians (not to mention the hygienic benefits). And the city could crack down more on the drivers who blow through red lights or stop across crosswalks.

But it’s hard for me to think of a city I’d rather walk between to random points in.

> But it’s hard for me to think of a city I’d rather walk between to random points in.

In the US? Sure. Now imagine a place where there are hundreds, thousands of cities that walkable or better, and you don't have to be a gazillionaire to live in one.

> And the city could crack down more on the drivers who blow through red lights or stop across crosswalks.

Based on my recent visit to New York, the main traffic issue I saw was really bad light timing. This trains both pedestrians and drivers to ignore the traffic signals.

I'm hoping self-driving cars will take people from the burbs to the cities, but then people can use public transportation and bikes in the cities.

Self driving cars will remove barriers (ie. licensing, age, ability, cost(if they're taxis)) that prevent people from driving and so it'll result in MORE cars on the road.

If we want to limit cars from our cities self driving cars is one of the worst developments that could occur.

Self driving cars should at most drive people to the train stations that take them to the city.

Why? Public transit takes about twice as long as driving a car.

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-020-61077-0 https://www.governing.com/archive/gov-transit-driving-times....

1 - traffic jams slow down public transit too if the road space is shared (buses, trams) or they increase the time needed to reach a train/subway station if you don't happen to live at walking distance from one.

2 - driving time is only half of the time you spend in a car. in Milan I could drive to work in 15-20 minutes, compared to 25-30 using the subway. good luck finding a parking spot though. they're either forbidden, very expensive or non existent. Not counting that many areas, like where my office is, are restricted traffic zones, getting a permit is really hard for non residents and fines are very high (very common in many medium to large cities in Italy). I gladly use the subway and read the news while commuting, so I don't even need to drive myself.

I'm really sorry for those that drive to work everyday, it must be hell, I don't understand how they can withstand it.

That's the problem, and why people choose cars over public transportation. It's a solvable problem however, and countries like Japan and Switzerland have done just that.

Because it fills the street with cars that are trying to go twice as fast as public transportation. That's the point of the entire thread, I think.

In São Paulo, Stockholm, Sydney and Amsterdam.

None of which are top tier cities when it comes to public transport. Why not talk about Singapore, London, Hong Kong, Paris and Tokyo?

The paper also ignores the last part of a car trip: finding a parking spot. In cities that takes often as long as the trip.

Public transit could be faster if we adopted Japanese style bullet trains and gave the buses their own dedicated lane. Running more frequent transit service and offering trains that skip some less popular stops also reduces travel time.

Cars are faster in car first environment, hmmm.

In the US because roads are built to maximize vehicle throughput rather than throughput of people. The former would have 2 lanes with cars and buses using all the road space. The latter would have a massive traffic jam in one lane and a clear land for buses. The buses carrying 30x the capacity moving freely is more efficient for moving people.

With more self driving cars there should be fewer accidents which translates to even faster driving times.

I'm hoping self driving cars will not happen for another two decades because they will cause more traffic, not less. The limiting factor for a lot of possible car trips right now is that a driver is required. When that limitation disappears you'll see an explosion in car trips without an occupant.

And to add to this: I can imagine an urban engineer walking through Amsterdam (or any other dutch city, really) to just despair. The sheer amount of infra Amsterdam has built to be this bike friendly is of an epic scale: The dutch have been doing their infra projects with 'bikes and walking comes first' in mind for about 50 years now; no wonder it seems undoable to reproduce that kind of thing in less than a decade.

For those who haven't been there: Entire, completely separated two-way wide bike paths with their own bridges and tunnels, nowhere near car roads. Huge swaths of the city that are _solely_ for bikes and walking, with only a few roads dedicated for cars. (i.e. to travel between 2 places in inner Amsterdam by car, generally you drive _away_ from your destination towards the ring, hop on a ring road, drive _past_ your target, and then drive back into the inner city. And yet this is faster than the US style because it avoids incessant waiting in queues and traffic lights, and there's far less traffic as bike/walk is a workable alternative). The bikes, where they even have to cross a car road, get preferential traffic lights and all the bike paths have double detector loops - your bike traffic light tends to switch to green just as you approach the intersection, and if you're the last in a peloton of bicycles you might notice the light switching to orange juuust as you pass the light. That's not a coincidence.

Yeah, you can build that up. But it takes quite a while, and requires a financial outlay that seems daunting unless you smear it out over 50 years.

However, perhaps, go to Copenhagen. It's often listed as just as bike friendly, if not _more_ bike friendly than cities in The Netherlands. This is hogwash (SOURCE: I've been in, and biked in, both places, recently). Copenhagen is great, Amsterdam is far better. However, Copenhagen looks much more doable.

Where Amsterdam has completely separated bike infra and no major car roads running through the center, Copenhagen has giant 3-lane-each car highways right through the busy city center, and almost no separated bike infra. What Copenhagen does have, is one entire lane of car traffic dedicated to bikes, with not a painted line, but an actual physical divider (just a curb thing. You can drive over them but if you do it at speed that might cause some damage, that's all. Cheap as heck, but an order of magnitude better than just a painted line of course). They are wider than 'the minimum necessary for the width of one bike' that you often see elsewhere.

A select few tricky intersections have dedicated bike infra. Maybe one bridge is bike-dedicated.

And that is all. That should fill you with hope: __That is enough__ to get the kind of bike-friendly name that Copenhagen enjoys. You can get that done in any major city on an acceptable budget within the span of a decade, assuming non-deadlocked political chaos (unfortunately, US and UK, you may have to return to that feeling of despair). From _there_, by all means, look at The Netherlands as bike walhalla.

Here's a simple formula to 'fix' the stroads of the USA. They tend to be 4 to 5 lanes each side, so there's plenty of room for this:

1. Turn the stroad into a road - few exits (no way to turn right onto a store's parking lot). But only 2 lanes. Reducing 5 lanes to 2 sounds like a disaster but it won't be: Road congestion primarily depends on the exit: If a popular destination cannot deal with the number of cars that want to exit off of it, even if you have 100 lanes, you _will_ end up with a traffic jam eventually. 2 lanes still allows dynamic traffic (faster traffic capable of passing slower traffic). That's 90% of the win right there, any further lanes barely make a dent.

2. Make strips of 'access road' - these are small, 1-lane roads with a low maximum speed, where every few meters an 'exit' to a store's car park or a home driveway. Between the access road and the main car road there's a real divider: A ditch, a small creek, or an actual metal divider if you have to (Especially in the US with all the trucks, I fear folks will just drive across the dirt or grass otherwise). If you wanna throw money at it and really work on making the place look nice: Line of trees does wonders. Only way to switch from the main road to the access road is to exit onto one from the major intersections which are now miles apart. Between 2 intersections there __are no exits at all__ on the main car road. To go to a store you drive to the intersection that precedes it, exit onto the access road, and drive to it from there.

3. We have 1 lane left (2 lanes to the car road, 1 for the divider, 1 for the access road). The remaining road can now be used to become a bike path. It should optimally be between the access road and the main car road, _between_ the trees : You don't want the bikes to have to deal with the exit/entries onto driveways and car park every few meters. You have plenty of space: in this setup, assuming you started with a 5-lane stroad, it's 2 lanes worth of space you get to play with.

It's not exactly cheap but the US is spending literally multiple billions on widening literally 26-lane-wide highways (Katy Highway for example) with some more lanes to 'fight traffic', which seems idiotic and indeed does not work - if you want to fight traffic, reduce traffic. One way to do that: Entice some car traffic to turn itself into bike traffic by making that a viable option. You won't, and can't, replace all the traffic. But if you can eliminate even 5% of the cars, traffic jams are reduced by 50%+. Building these bike strips and turning massive stroads into roads+streets is an order of magnitude cheaper.

Note that the primary problem is that the popular target exits lead into city blocks that simply cannot handle the traffic, hence, 'widen the highway' is a net negative, even: It makes people _think_ the car is now a better option (induced demand), but it didn't do anything at all to address the problem. So you really just need to add some bike infra to these overly busy destination city blocks to replace 5% of the traffic within them with bikes - just the 'local traffic' will easily do that. So, this WILL work.

And yet, it isn't done. What the fuck, USA?

>Yeah, you can build that up. But it takes quite a while,

"The best time to plant a tree was 30 years ago, the second best time in today"

Things could move a lot faster than Amsterdam did, honestly. If a decision was made to stop centering cars in city & infrastructure planning, you would see changes quickly. This isn't the same as being anti-car, it's just prioritizing differently.

The real kicker is that there is basically no way to do this without making car use less convenient, because for many decades the majority of planning and builds have been dedicated to making car use more convenient (or at least, not less) and externalizing most of the costs of it.

If you funnel all the traffic that needs to turn in the next 2 miles into a one-lane access road, you're just going to have them backed up past the exit on the main road.

The reason no one has implemented this system is that it wouldn't work.

Other cities have done it quite a bit quicker, Amsterdam had a head start to begin with because the old city always was hostile to vehicles simply by the way it was laid out.

Anything we can read or watch on the transformation Amsterdam made?

Here is one link:https://inkspire.org/post/amsterdam-was-a-car-loving-city-in...

There are other cities in the Netherlands, such as Utrecht as well: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-07-05/how-the-d...

Not Amsterdam, but Utrecht.. But still. I think Utrecht might be more bike friendly than Amsterdam, with a clear network of central bike ways and free secure bike parking throughout the city.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=fePpwYCs_JM

True in principle. But I think in this case, it's more interesting to observe which forces managed to change laws and culture in the US so radically that we got from the pedestrian-friendly state to today's situation.

Know your enemy and know what they are capable of, in a sense.

Just out of curiosity, do the elderly there pine for the more automobile-centric days of the 1970s?

Given how many elderly I see on bikes - not really.

On the other hand, cyclists in the Netherlands are totally disrespectful of pedestrians, making it almost less walkable than New York City, where for the most part you don't have to worry about getting hit by a bike at every corner.

Amsterdam is perfectly walkable. I'm still more worried by every combustion powered vehicle, specially those who think they are above the rules. Motorbikes are becoming a problem, while a bike is not gonna kill you.

It's possible that the cyclists are only hazardous in the touristy and busy old city. I had no trouble walking in the less-dense areas.

I disagree - see my other comment here. It might be part of a bigger Zeitgeist in NY, but pedestrians are bullied and disrespected at every level by cyclists. Danger increases further when bringing e bikes into the picture.

I've walked a fair bit in both cities, and that just doesn't match my experience at all.

Additionally, when people talk about how walkabout NYC is, I suspect they only really mean a relatively small part of the metro area.

Yes, they are definitely only talking about New York City itself and not the surrounding metro area. People mostly refer to the surrounding areas by other names, e.g. county names like Nassau County.

And even within the city, there are less-walkable areas, although for the most part there is bus coverage and sidewalks everywhere.

Where do you get your data from?

Anecdotal but firsthand.