Now I arrive at work and I'm soaked either from sweat or rain. Now what? I can stink up the office with my B.O. all day while I desperately try to dry my clothes. Or I go through the indignity of getting to work, waiting an hour to cool-down and dry off, then trying to change out of my riding kit into some decent professional work clothes in a dirty stall in the men's room after giving myself a paper towel bath in the sink.
Then at the end of a long work-day, reverse this absurd course of events? Now instead of a 10 minute drive and 8.5 hours at the office followed by a 10 minute drive home (total time commitment under 9 hours), I've succeeded in turning my 9 hours of work time into a 10.5-11.5 hours of work time so I can put myself dangerously out in traffic, exposed to the elements and be uncomfortable the entire day and can't go anywhere else once I'm there?
Even if the stars aligned and I had door-to-door bike trails, I wouldn't partake in this uncivilized madness. I'd much rather just get home earlier, not smelling like exhaust fumes and body odor and go do a leisurely jog around my neighborhood park for a half hour or go to one of the 3 gyms next to my house where I can ride a stationary bike in a temperature controlled environment while watching TV.
Edit: for the record, I support dedicated bike lanes and infrastructure almost everywhere because of all the side benefits it brings. But I'm also not treating it as a religious issue, mindful of acute practicalities that explain the world better than assuming one of the most technologically sophisticated countries on the planet doesn't like to ride bikes to work because they're too stupid to do so.
You prefer comfort over bikes - we get it. But bicycling is not "uncivilized madness". Its common way of transportation in most of the world (with exception of majority of the US). Healthy as well (much more healthy than gym).
Now that I live in Sydney I don't ride at all - I just don't feel safe.
I live in the third largest city in Australia. Much of it is ridiculously hilly, the weather is usually stinking hot (apart from a few weeks of 'winter'), but we have plenty of cyclists... Not as many as the average European country but definitely enough to be annoying when you're driving!
Living in France for a couple of years, and visiting London, Rome, and various other parts in that direction, I didn't see any more bicycle traffic than I see in the US. The one place where I have seen a lot of bicycles is Beijing, but that has completely disappeared in the past few years.
I wish we could discuss these things without turning it into a "the US is strange and stupid" whinefest.
I haven't been to France but have you been to Amsterdam, Berlin or Copenhagen?
It is perfectly valid to criticize US without it being "the US is strange and stupid"
I have no problem with stuff like "the US should...." Where I have a problem is with "everybody else does it another way" when it's just not true.
Aside from adopting the metric system, I can't think of any legitimate criticism that fits that mold. Bicycles certainly don't seem to.
Edit: keep down voting in spite of your own ignorance. I've been lots of places the world over, and not seen lots of bikes outside of very very few areas with near perfect conditions for them.
But as we all know, driving in major cities is no longer optimal.
Any city that chooses driving over all other modes of transportation has deliberately decided it is closed for further growth at some point. Once you reach that critical population point, car-dependent life just becomes hell.
Unfortunately, for millions and millions of people, the city is viewed as a work location, not a living location. Building bike friendly infrastructure ends at the city limits and needs inter-government coordination and cooperation to achieve door-to-door biking. If you've ever dipped your toes in cross-county or other inter-government initiatives, you'll know that this is an extremely difficult proposition.
Oh I'm sorry, this is apparently a religious issue and faith with get me over all practical issues.
Nobody ever made this claim, so there's no way to illuminate you about it. Same goes for the part about the idiots and morons.
Which part exactly doesn't make sense
For instance the part where you say Is an inconvenient, slow, tiring way to travel in anyplace without a good climate or near perfect. That is merely a generalized opinion.
I'm sorry if I offended your religion.
Why change now? It's assertions all the way down.
Either you're being sarcastic or you have never spent time in London.
Also because is followup reference to "all the bikers there" is straight-up true, there are loads of bikers in London, really, though it doesn't follow from the statement before. Is that an attempt at sarcasm that fails because of a failed attempt at a false statement? Who knows. Why can't funkyy just say what they mean? Who knows.
Never been to Tokyo or Singapore, but if they're anything like Seoul, where I've spent months, riding a bike in the streets is both playing Russian Roulette and virtually impossible on account of the bad terrain (and for pretty much all the same reasons I brought up earlier). You also have almost no place to store them given the size of the average apartment. Outside of dedicated parks, I've almost never seen a person on a bike their either.
I've been to dozens of countries on almost every continent, and bikes are a very uncommon mode of transportation. That's why places like the Netherlands, where it is common, are so notable. If it was common, we wouldn't care.
Rather than being snarky, what's your suggestion for overcoming these practical and social issues?
I also don't buy the "small apartments" thing. We live in a 650sq ft apartment and have 4 bikes hung up on our wall. Where there's a will, there's a way.
650 sq ft is a pretty large place by Korean standards. I expect by Tokyo or Singapore as well.
I'd dare say we could fit 4 bikes in a much smaller place too. It's not the size of the place that's at debate here though.
The article discussed in this thread brings up one suggestion for overcoming practical issues. There are many, many more (proven) solutions to choose from -- when you make bicycle transportation pleasant enough, people will start using it.
If the "social issues" you talk about are because there's a group of people who thinks transportation by bicycle is uncivilized, I think it is a matter of education and tolerance. Once using bikes is common in a country, you will see that the only social issues are about people having unjustified fears (about the implications of considering bicycles as a method of transportation during city planning) and there are no real social issues other than people being dicks.
Social issues refer to body odor my bike riding colleagues carry around with them all day because our workplace doesn't have a shower.
So all and all, I agree with you, it's common in these places because the combination of these things makes riding very practical and they're noteworthy because of it.
-edit- I forgot to mention that most apartment buildings will have stacked locking bike racks. This combined with the generally low rate of theft, easily available recycled (read: cheap) bicycles makes them very affordable and low risk.
Of course if your ride is over an hour you may want to consider alternatives, such as catching a train for part of the journey. I have known plenty of people that have 30-50 minute rides, and also others where riding a bike takes exactly as long as being stuck in traffic.
Cost incurred by one car of maintaining the road is essentially negligible. The majority of road damage comes from heavy vehicles or weather. Additionally it's interesting you want to 'charge for externalities' when it's actually the cyclists getting a free ride in this category. License fees and gasoline taxes contribute to road funding. Nothing related to cycling does.
I agree with parking, but only if it costs something. If the office already has it, you not using it will not likely save the company any money by refusing to use it.
The only externality you might not be paying enough for to drive to work is the gas filling (assuming non electric). However, the numbers regarding the impact of CO2 are mostly just made up from sums of imagined future or previous natural disasters that can't be directly linked to CO2 emissions.
Peddling to work only eliminates the mild inconvenience of filling up my tank once every 2.5 weeks or so.
When I drive, I suddenly realize what a waste of time it is. And it's not really fun because of traffic either.
I actually miss public transport. I also imagine that cyclists do similar things. The trouble in this argument is that maybe the cyclists also enjoy cycling like I did skating. To most people who solely drive to commute, it's a thing they don't particularly enjoy.
It can be subtly simple things, like, working in a job where you have to go across town to a customer site 3 times a week during the middle of the work day and can't afford to take 2.5 hours out of your day to bike there and bike. Or living in a place with lots of hills, or having no place to clean up once you get to work.
All those issues have to be solved long before bike lanes becomes part of the discussion for biking to become a practical choice. A few people who are really into biking, crazy spandex outfits and all, might be willing to ignore those practical considerations, but if you want to get the average citizen up on a bike like in the Netherlands, you have to solve the rest of the issues.
Regardless, if it's not right for you it is right for someone on your approximate route. So if you can't be convinced to ride in but they can that's win-win. They have an easier ride into work on a bike and you have a less congested drive in because the biker is one less driver.
If there are any people riding bikes on my route I have yet to see them in 7 years.
https://subsite.kk.dk/sitecore/content/Subsites/CityOfCopenh...
How fast can you travel through town by bike and car? The average travelling speed in Copenhagen is 15.5 km/h for cyclists and 27 km/hour for cars. In places with green wave for cyclist the average speed is 20.72 km/h.
In the city that I live and work in, at rush hour? Absolutely nowhere.
I really don't think that adding more bike lanes would get everyone biking or "solve the issue" entirely. That isn't a reasonable position. But nonetheless, we need more bike lanes. We need more separated, safe bike lanes. We need them in every city, except maybe for those who have got there already - i.e. Amsterdam, Copenhagen and very few others.
Survey after survey where I am shows that the main thing preventing higher (not universal, just higher) uptake of cycling to work is not the distance, or the weather, it's the fear factor, i.e the lack of safe facilities like bike lanes.
http://thinkingaboutcycling.com/article-fear-of-cycling/ http://www.economist.com/blogs/blighty/2013/09/cycling-londo...
But I've yet to see a discussion that talks about the "rest of the ride." Even with bike lanes, biking isn't feasible for most people for a wide variety of reasons. I've attempted to provide those reasons here, and I'm fortunate enough to have buckets of karma to shed because as you can see, nobody wants to concern themselves with prerequisite issues that are probably more important to biking (i.e. if they aren't solved, no amount of bike lanes will make a substantial difference).
The HN community suffers from a religious myopia at times that the living conditions and lifestyle of a single 20-something males in Silicon Valley represents the accumulated averages for the rest of the world and should be the model for everybody else. The community is shocked and disgusted when dissenting voices try to provide insight as to why most people are not single 20-something males in Silicon Valley. TBH, I don't think a discussion about bike lanes belongs on HN except that it brings up this demographic discussion. As you can see, the HN hive-mind is not receptive to people of different demographic groups, even if those groups might be better representative of the rest of the country or world.
I ride every day. You can too.
You want to ride, go ahead. He wants to drive, that's fine. Neither one is more right or wrong than the other. Stop acting like driving is morally wrong (if you're not, many are).
In fact, the record high ever for the city isn't even within 10 degrees of the temperature I've had where I live over the past two weeks. Our all time average, not average high, is about the same as Copenhagen's record high.
Our winters are colder and wetter also.
Your experience is not universal. I live in a large, crowded city, and I know from repeated experience that in my case, in rush hour, cycling to work takes 30 minutes, public transport takes 40-60 minutes and driving in my own vehicle takes mental insanity and a parking space, which nobody has.
Cycling is not only the fastest method, it has the least time variance, and is cheapest.
If there were zero cars, there would be more injuries, but they'd be less serious.
If there were zero cyclists, there'd be fewer injuries, and they'd be less serious. (Talking about crowded city traffic, not high speeds.)
When there are cars, and enough cyclists to cause problems, there are more injuries, and they're more serious. Cars and fleshbags--I mean, bikes--do not mix.
http://www.reference.com/motif/sports/average-commute-in-mil...
The average commute in miles for Americans is 16 miles and 26 minutes for one way. That's 32 miles and 52 minutes for a round trip every day.
Let's assume we decide we want to get the "Average" American biking to work instead. We have to figure out how we can convince people who spend an hour on the road everyday to spend 8 hours on the road biking instead, or give up their houses and pay more for smaller accommodations closer to their work to shorten the distance.
>spend 8 hours on the road biking instead
4mph is a slow running speed...
The average speed of a bike commuter is under 10 mph. 32 miles thus takes more than 3.2 hours, * 2 = 6.4 hours per day biking the same distance as the average American commuter currently drives in 1/3 the time. Toss in a couple hills and you could easily hit 8 hours total biking time.
People who commute 32 miles one way should get a new job, a new place to live, or work from home.
If finding the perfect job were that easy, we wouldn't be having this discussion. Do you even live on this planet?
Sure, and I don't drive farther than it is to outer space every day, like people putting in 60+ miles to commute to an office because reasons.
(Can't have the kids go to school with the black folk is my guess.)
The average speed of cyclists in Copenhagen is under 10 miles per hour. Add in a couple long hills and you are at 6-8 times faster on any given day.
The question of "why don't Americans bike to work more" is not going to be solved with any number of bike routes (which I support the building more of BTW) until it can be solved for frankly trivial cases like mine. It suggests that local environmental conditions are probably more important to favoring biking than any number of infrastructure initiatives. Simple things like "bad weather" and "showers at places of employment" and "places to store bikes so they won't get stolen during the day" probably have to solved en masse long before bike lanes become part of the discussion.
All the unused empty bike lanes in the world aren't going to kick start a biking revolution.
Most employed Americans live, work, or both inside highly urbanized environments where parts of their commute involve roads that you can't reliably do 20mph on, much less 60. Crowded roads and stoplights put a real crimp on speeds, and it can take 5-10 minutes to cover a mile -- if you're lucky.
And with the car you have a parking problem as well.
"How fast can you travel through town by bike and car? The average travelling speed in Copenhagen is 15.5 km/h for cyclists and 27 km/hour for cars. In places with green wave for cyclist the average speed is 20.72 km/h."
It seems like Copenhagen is an especially unfriendly car environment.
Another advantage for cyclists is "right on red". Even though it's illegal, a lot of people does it. Sometimes the car lane to turn right is packed and you have to wait several intervals for you to turn right, and the cyclists just pass by.
The roads are small, especially compared to the US. And there're just too many cars!
I think you are probably right that bike lanes alone aren't going to get a lot of people biking, but I think you are wrong that they don't matter. It's a situation where each piece of the puzzle needs to exist, so safe routes probably matter just as much as sensible city planning and shower availability and so on. The existence of safe routes could even impact planning some (because if there is significant interest in using them to commute, it should show up in housing decisions).
You say that like it's a bad thing. At least I'm engaged on the issue and am actually trying to solve it rather than just paint lane markings all over creation and expect people to start hoping on bikes.
The claim being made, and the source of all my karma shedding on this is that adding more bike lanes will get more people to ride bikes. The "Field of Dreams" argument.
My counter argument is that bike lanes, while important, are not sufficient. Much more important, larger and prerequisite issues need to be attended to before bike lanes become part of the discussion. But I'm arguing against people who have a vested interest in biking, and really don't give two rats asses that biking is a horrible inconvenience most everywhere and would rather shoot derision and scorn and the car driving masses. Weather, environment, convenience, terrain, distance, time, hygiene etc. be damned; clearly most people are simply too fat and stupid to enjoy the glories and obvious benefits of riding bikes everywhere. Everywhere is exactly like the Netherlands right?
I'm actually a strong supporter of bike lanes for lots of reasons beyond biking. But I'm also not deluding myself and understand that the central claim is flat out wrong.
But this is a self-serving religious issue, no amount of reason can penetrate that.
This is one of the topics that really pulls out in front the inadequacies of the demographic that tends to be HN readers. It's pretty disappointing to be honest.
I do think the people replying to you saying "You can so bike" are engaging in relatively pointless activism (for one thing, 10 miles really is plenty far to try to build into every day). But that also isn't really the issue at hand.
All the article really says is that 1 designer thinks that bike lanes that 'feel safe' will get more people using them (and then a few characteristics are explored). I sort of think that shouldn't be a controversy.
This article is about adding setbacks and curbs and bike specific signals and you are engaging in 'paint lane markings all over creation'.
The comment you link agrees with you. There's not much glassy eyed pontificating about the wonders of bike lanes in the rest of the tree either.
Some cities are like that, and others aren't. People can vote with their feet. Guess which one people like better? (Hint: People have been moving out of dense cities for 100 years now.)
Are you planning on forcing people to accommodate themselves to your definition of the perfect city?
> We have disparate clusters/districts related to activities like 'work', 'play', 'shop', and 'sleep', rather than having these constructs evenly interspersed.
Is that supposed to be a bad thing? The world is not sim-city. Not everyone wants to live near a shopping area.
> We have supermarkets instead of markets.
Markets are not large enough to carry everything, so when I lived in a place like that I never went to the market, so I got the worst of both worlds: High density (i.e. traffic) plus a long drive.
I moved out.
You are acting as if the layout of cities was a commandment given from on high, but actually cities are laid out as they are because people like it that way.
It's probably the result of the lobbying power of a conglomerate of automotive stakeholders, formed in the 20s/30s. [1]
[1]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automotive_city#The_road_lobby_...
Reality is also that humans generally prefer having some room and space. Crowding people together CAUSES problems. If you've ever lived in an apartment building, you know this.
But it can't be any of that new technology enabling higher standards of living. No, it must have been an evil conspiracy. We should all ride bikes and live stacked on top of each other.
Data to support this? Every study I've seen recently shows that people are moving INTO cities, not out of them.
People are leaving the dense NE cities and going to the less dense south and west ones.
To pick the largest city in the US, the population density of Manhattan went from 21 in 1910 to 12 today. And Lower East Side went from 70 to 16.[1]
Also look at construction statistics, new home construction outpaces population growth, people are moving into less dense areas and need new housing.
They build a bit less than 1 million homes every year, and most of those are single family homes.[2] Population growth is about 2.8 million each year, but that's people not families.
[1] http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2012/03/01/realestate/man...
[2]http://www.economicpopulist.org/content/new-residential-cons...
I'll also present you with this about apartment construction now driving the economic recovery, not single family homes (disclosure: I work for rentals site hotpads.com, owned by Zillow) - http://time.com/102822/housing-apartments/
WRT NY's density falling, it could be an outlier or the norm. Still, from what I understand overall population densities are increaing in the US. [1]
[1] http://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/17/nyregion/suburbs-try-to-ho...
edit: Clarification and spelling.