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The Economist has published an article (paywalled, sorry) on the state of cyclists in New York, which dropped the day I was leaving the city. It was the first time I had visited as an adult. I came away with some respect for it (loved the food, service, and how fast everyone walked). The point of the story is supposedly that cyclists are now being treated unfairly:
I’m a cycling nut, so the issue is close to my heart. In a T2 city, I feel like our role is that of a scapegoat. People fantasize about killing cyclists pretty regularly, and none of them understand the challenges and tradeoffs we have to deal with. At this point, I've just thrown up my hands in despair at this ever being better, so I just get on the road as little as possible.
The people on two wheels in NYC are a different breed. Each of the longtime residents I asked - 100% - are now more scared of cyclists than cars. My 3 day trip felt the same to me. Every car was attentive and respectful of me as a pedestrian. The cyclists were fast, heavy, and disregarded almost every crosswalk signal or red light, despite having their own lanes. What’s the quantitative danger?
Notice the sleight of hand here. What’s included are E-Bikes, scooters, and mopeds - each of these truly motorized vehicles. The number of people killed by analog cyclists nationwide has been, for many years, single digits. This is important. E-bikes allow users to achieve speeds and momentum totally beyond their skill, and are often part of poorly maintained machines that are part of sharing programs. My mind is blown that even 8 people have been killed - that's an enormous number even in a place as dense as NYC. It probably means a huge number of serious injuries as collateral damage.
Put simply, the fixie riders racing through the city are psychotic but not dangerous to pedestrians.
As you’d expect, the lede is buried, along with the Culture War. The cyclists zipping through the city on E-bikes are exclusively yapping in a foreign language on speakerphone, with DoorDash bags on the back of their cycles. Nothing should get in the way of private taxis for burritos.
To recap how insane this is:
It’s so similar to LA, albeit with fewer vehicle fires and bricks on heads. The fix just cannot be the obvious and correct one. Instead, it’s to hop on Reddit to “map police hotspots” or refuse to stop as a way to LARP civil disobedience.
There are of course many bigger problems than electric bikes or cyclists in the world or even in New York (crazy homeless for instance). Nevertheless, cycling shouldn't be needed in a rich country. Rich countries should have well-functioning public transport in urban centres which is apparently missing in America.
If you want to go somewhere, drive or use public transport. This is fast and you can use the travel time to read or whatever if you're not driving.
If you want to wander around, or exercise, walk. You can mull things over in your head without needing to be in a high state of alertness.
In between is not a good place to be as people point out downthread. It causes accidents due to there being no good infrastructure for it. And there's no good infrastructure for it because it fundamentally doesn't make any sense, there's no need for this medium speed, low-safety, exhausting means of transport.
It's a fairly good way to get enough exercise. I vastly prefer cycling outside than being in a gym.
Walking is incredibly weak exercise. Going full tilt on a bicycle at maybe 20 mph is incredibly taxing, you'll be spent after 1h, 1.5 hours. It's similar to running, but much lower risk of injury.
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As long as we are banning modes of transportation, why not just ban driving in cities instead?
Most of the cars in cities are carrying only one passenger. Even if they carry groceries, the amount of groceries they carry would often fit in a cargo bike. And as you point out, public transport is always an option. For people who need to transport heavy goods, there is already a solution in the pedestrian zones: just have certain hours where cars and trucks are allowed to drive in (slowly), for the purpose of transportation.
Electric bikes are reasonably fast and likely have a lower TCO than cars. We will also free a lot of space currently dedicated to cars, and improve the quality of life for people living next to big roads.
People who still want to own cars can just park them outside the city.
I am not actually suggesting this, but it sounds more reasonable to me than banning bikes.
How many people do you see driving vs cycling? There's a reason for that. It's very silly to ban driving, I don't believe you think it's more reasonable to ban cars than bikes. And I don't even want to ban bikes.
"we designed a huge majority of the land use of the built environment for only one modality of transportation, and now that modality is the dominant form. Checkmate atheists"
You're not exactly working with a control group here...
Horse and carriage, here in the East. The pavement's gotten better, the rights-of-way often haven't. Driving's just a lot better than cycling for most things. You can carry more stuff (and passengers), you're protected from the weather, it's harder to steal a car, you don't get tired doing it, etc. Downsides are it's bigger, takes a lot of space to park, and creates more traffic.
Fully agree, that's why I own a car. I am typing this from the waiting room at the dealership as they replace my underside cover.
There is one thing that driving profoundly fails at though, both on its own and really really badly once you compare to cycling.
Scale.
The road capacity of downtown cores is fixed. The population, as more and more towers get built, is not.
Each human wants to go places, if they all pick "car", eventually it all stops working. Nothing can fix this aside from having people go places not in a car.
Coincidentally, bikes are ridiculously better than cars downtown as they are much faster.
From my apartment to the dealership is 19 minutes right now by car or bike. This afternoon rush hour, it'll be over 30 minutes by car, and still 19 minutes by bike.
The problem there is too many people in too little space. I spent some time recently in a couple of cities MUCH less dense than NYC (one was less dense than my suburb, in fact), and things were far more civilized. You could bike, you could drive, you could walk, all without being jammed.
Switching cars to bikes doesn't solve the problem of scale, it just delays it. Back in the 1980s, when China was much poorer, they still had traffic jams -- they were bicycle traffic jams. And in places with winter (which includes NYC), it doesn't help much at all, because bicycles are terrible in winter, and you need things to work in bad conditions as well as good.
At this point it's all just preferences though. I believe what you say, it is a calmer existence in a less dense north american city. I also find it a soulless hellscape of awful design that I want to get away from immediately, whereas one of my favorite activities is wandering around Toronto with my dog (no destination, just vibes).
Edit: I should add, I have no problems with less dense cities, and think they should be free to shape their built form however they please, which they do. I dislike this form, so I don't go (which is fine). But then dense cities don't get this benefit, and have to cater to everyone's tastes, which results in really mediocre outcomes. If one doesn't like bike lanes, one should move somewhere that doesn't have or need them, instead of fighting to make everything worse for everyone, including themselves.
The issue is that people who have (valid) preferences for living in less dense cities then try to take their preferences and impose them on dense cities (also funny how the suburban preference people still love coming downtown, but the downtown people don't want to go hang out in the suburbs, I wonder why), and everyone loses because it fundamentally doesn't work because of spacial limitations and a refusal to change anything, ever.
Build bike lanes for more efficient transportation? No! Can't take space from cars?
Build LRTs or dedicated bus lanes? NO! can't take space from cars.
Build subways? Okay but only one as they are expensive.
WHY IS TRAFFIC SO BAD? WHO COULD HAVE PREDICTED THIS WOULD HAPPEN?!?!?!?
I'll also offer some hope re: cycling. I bike most months of the year, basically only Dec/Jan are when my ability to bike is seriously constrained. Snow plowing infrastructure has improved a lot, and we have sidewalk plows now that do bike lanes, so they're quite clear. Also climate change means even Toronto winters are very mild. Feels like we get more rain than snow in winter now, and days under -10 are so rare vs my childhood.
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Well, it is fixable for some values of fixable: build enough parking and roads to allow this to happen. Effect is that your city is now 50% parking by area and 20% roads by area.
This may be overall desirable outcome for some and worth benefits of everyone getting by car everywhere.
Yeah great plan, let's see how that's working in cities which have leaned that way like LA.... Oh wow no way, it's one of the most congested places on the continent? That's crazy! Who could ever have predicted that...
Maybe Dallas and Houston? They're doing better than LA, but no suprise their traffic congestion stats get worse every year. It's almost like this doesn't work at scale.
Putting aside the fact that cities that are 50% parking area absolutely suck.
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That would be far too few roads for a dense city. NYC roads (including on-street parking) are 24% of the land area -- 36% in Manhattan -- and doesn't have enough.
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Speak for yourself! I often have trouble keeping myself awake at the wheel.
That said, I'd like to add to your list of advantages: You can drive long past the point where injuries or sickness prevent you from walking notable distances.
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depending on context in modern world getting some exercise can* be benefit, not a problem
*obviously, not always
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well, cycling is useful if you are getting from or out of urban centers and when public transport routes fit poorly where you want to get
cycling is both faster and cheaper than cars, public transport and walking (if you value your time at more than Eastern European minimum wage, cycling costs per km are minimal if you are not forced to cycle at roads with 100km/h speed limits)
Yes, it is not accessible if your city has no proper infrastructure, for people disabled and/or so fat to qualify as land whale. And in cities which are more vertical than horizontal. But that leaves plenty of use.
There's a lot of New York City talk in this thread. I accept that maybe for major cities such as that bikes are faster. They sure are not faster than a car anywhere I have lived. Like almost all Americans I don't live in New York City or any place nearly as densely populated. Cars beat bikes on total trip time and it is not remotely close.
Yes, outside denser urban areas cars are going to be much faster. Noone is cycling between cities because it is faster than car.
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Any solution for the United States needs to work for fat people in the suburbs or it will simply not work.
Ok, maybe you hate suburbs and fat people, but they’re not going anywhere.
Yep. I'm lean and in the suburbs. I bike as a hobby and fun activity with my family. Good thing to do with kids on Saturday.
I certainly don't bike to work. I'm way too far away. I also need to drive my kid to private school. I'm not doing that on a bike.
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It seems like you don't like cycling.
How about
This is all completely orthogonal to whether cyclists obey traffic laws. I'm all for ticketing cyclists and making their movements more legible to the law. I think this would go a long way towards cycling becoming more normalized so that people can have discussions based on tradeoffs rather than emotions.
Walking is better in most circumstances:
Much cheaper.
Also provides exercise. You can run if you want more.
Lets you think and go on autopilot, making up for lost speed.
Syncs with other forms of transport well, no restrictions on taking a non-existent bike with you.
Safer.
Can easily head into a shop without having to tie up a bike.
Can easily navigate stairs and get more direct routes.
I want to avoid the "lived experience" trap. That' said, both you and @hydroacetelyne are making some assertions about how cycling compares to other modes of transportation that are totally incorrect. They make it obvious you don't have firsthand experience and dislike it enough that you aren't believing other people when they explain the advantages it provides.
I'm not going to demand you hop on a bike and try and use it more for 6 months before you share an opinion. But try and assume we aren't all just a bunch of idiots who happened to like the worst form of transportation that's ever existed to fuck with other people.
Example: On Saturday mornings, I'll wake up before my wife and hook up a 2-kid trailer to my bike. I'll take a greenway for around 4 miles. The last half mile is a mix of sidewalk, crossing a 5-lane road, and parking lots. I would never even consider it during rush hour, but at 7:30 it's perfectly safe with long sightlines and low traffic etc.
My day starts with ~600 calories burned, quality time with my children, vitamin D, a delicious breakfast, and a rested/happy wife. That's a lot of birds knocked out with one stone.
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You might be on to something here. We should replace all trans-atlantic flights with ships again. It's so simple, the passengers can just think and that will pass the additional time, they won't even notice!
Walking to my office is a 1hr 25 min walk, or 28 minute bike. I would vastly prefer to not wake up a full hour earlier, and no amount of extra "thinking" time will make up for that...
Solved by bike rental/bike share programs in most major cities.
This is significantly easier and faster (or equivalent, if there is ample parking) than parking a car. This takes 30 seconds? How is this a barrier?
Clearly I hit a nerve here, people are getting very emotional about an objectively minor issue. Dumb strawmans like 'cancel air travel' don't make the point you think they're making. Air travel exists for a good reason, because people demand it, because there are proper use cases and so the infrastructure is built up. Bicycle infrastructure doesn't exist in the same way for much the same reason. It doesn't make sense. If it actually made sense people would do it en masse. Even in the Netherlands, car travel is twice as popular as bicycle travel.
I personally don't like cars and don't own one. But I'm capable of looking beyond my own personal interests and can accept that car travel's popularity has good reasons behind it.
I am not asking people to walk 90 minutes to work. Simply use public transport or drive for long distances like almost everyone else.
It wasn't a strawman, it was a humorous example to point out that "it's fine if your travel time increases 3x, you can just think about stuff and you won't even notice" is a profoundly silly thing to say. Obviously we're not going to replace air travel with ocean liners.
I'm not sure why you think there isn't demand for bike travel? Do you think there is a conspiracy to make bike lanes against the will of the electorate? In Toronto, where I live, pro-bike lane politicians are quite popular, and we just had an election where a very notable anti-bike lane incumbent lost their seat in an election where their party dominated.
Toronto bike share use has increased like 20% YoY for 5 years and counting.
Again you say "biking doesn't make sense" but I don't understand where you get that. From my apartment to my office the options are:
Drive: 20-30 minutes (longer with accidents or road closures), parking is $30+ a day in the area.
Transit: 45 minutes, longer with (frequent) delays
Walk: 1.5 hours
Bike: 28 minutes
Biking makes the most sense here by far, because it's tied for fastest, it's the cheapest, and most importantly imo, it's by far the most consistent
And this pattern plays out constantly. Driving is fast, unless it's rush hour. Parking is very expensive. Transit basically always takes 30+ minutes due to walking, waiting, and transfers. Biking is incredibly fast and always the same amount of time per distance.
Note, I live in the downtown core of a major city. I don't give a shit about biking in a suburban hellscape and I agree it's probably not a very good mode of transportation out there. Although I find it pretty funny that "the land of the free" totally falls apart for "preference of form of travel". Similarly, I also find it funny you feel comfortable dictating people's travel options to them.
Last I checked, shipping is not 3x slower than air travel, more like 200x slower. It's a totally different line of thought.
North America cannot run public transport properly, that's the fundamental problem. That's what I've been saying from the start. Cycling shouldn't be needed at all.
Wouldn't it be ridiculous to see people hand-threshing grain? In what world is that rational? If they say 'oh fuel is too expensive and we can't get a harvester because the warlords will steal it', then that's the real problem. It's not that it's superior to do agriculture like you're in the bronze age, it's that there's a deficiency elsewhere. For cycling: too many people being crammed into crowded cities. Cars being too big. Public transport full of crazies and drug fiends, unpunished fare-dodging. Artificially expensive construction costs crippling infrastructure development.
Civilization is supposed to go up the energy ladder, not down.
Cycling is not worth banning. But people should not be commuting with this method, it should not be a rational choice for people in a rich country.
We agree on a lot, basically all of that
I just really push back on the biking is not rational piece. Even when streetcars are running flawlessly I can out bike them because they have to stop at every stop to offload/pick up, I don't.
I also never have to wait for my bike to arrive, although I guess you could spam so many vehicles headways were always <2 min but that's not economical or practical.
I also enjoy the fresh air and exercise in the morning, it's a great way to wake up.
Also transit doesn't run on residential side streets, so the 5-10 minute walk to get to transit (or get from transit to your destination) is a significant portion of overall trip time, which is totally skipped on a bike.
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for all travels or for travels where bicycles make sense?
cars are clearly better at long distance travel, this does not make them better at commuting 2 km
at short distances cycling is typically faster, more pleasant, cheaper and healthier than public transport
From wikipedia: Around half of all trips in the Netherlands are made by car, 25% by bicycle, 20% walking, and 5% by public transport
2 km is easy walking distance anyway, I walked about that far getting to school as a child.
Contrary to all the people in this thread saying I have no experience of bikes, I have a friend used to be really keen on them and commuted by bike. However being out on the road with all the multi-tonne death machines and fumes was not his idea of a good time, so now he just takes public transport.
so for trips where cycling is actually a good idea (less than half of all) cycling is almost certainly more popular than cars
yes, cycling becomes better idea if there is infrastructure for it (the same as with driving, cycling, flying and public transport)
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Walking 10km for errand is not reasonable, cycling 10km works fine if you are not an invalid or land whale.
Cycling is less expensive than walking if you value your time at more than Eastern European minimum wage. In European cities it is cheaper than cars, public transport or walking.
Cycling syncs with other forms of transport well (you can leave bicycle at bus station or train station or elsewhere and cycle back when you return).
really? is that supposed to be a real obstacle? This takes less than 30 seconds, maybe minute or two if they failed to set up a bicycle parking
I guess it could be a problem in La Paz or other highly-vertical cities.
In the United States, the average person is a land whale in the suburbs with high rates of petty crime. These facts aren’t going anywhere.
"land whale in USA" is not "most circumstances"
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If you value your time, buy whatever you need and get it delivered to you. Do you really want to be all sweaty from a bike ride when you're going out to lunch? Drive, get a taxi, an uber or public transport and do something else on the way.
If it's still there. Huge numbers of bikes are stolen in the US and elsewhere. They're innately easy to steal.
Note that humans need some exercise anyway, by cycling you also do this. So effectively time cost may be zero or extremely low, if you planned to exercise. I guess in theory you could drive/order deliveries and do some high-intensity-training and be more efficient with your time overall.
If I cycle somewhere I can spend less time on gym or similar (that I would probably not do anyway and would get diabetes already and be standard issue land-whale, cycling is for me the primary way of exercising at all)
I am not able to deliver dentist to my apartment. The same goes for many services and products. For example best pastry shop in my area is not offering deliveries at all. And deliveries often require 20+ minutes waiting time, this is more than enough to get somewhere and be already eating. And sometimes you need to wait for hour or more and you get food that needs to be reheated.
heavily depends on local climate I guess, I can imagine in some cases it could be unavoidable. I am probably not going to cycle in Dubai if I would have misfortune to be there.
for commuting you do not luxurious bicycle worth stealing (if you live in hellhole where people will steal everything nailed down and then steal nails that may pose problems, but if you cannot leave low-end bicycle for two weeks at bus station then something went wrong)
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Biking is a fairly pleasant way to travel if you have bike paths and your town has moderate year-round weather. I pretty much always take my kids that way in a cargo bike instead of driving. It typically only turns a 10 minute car ride around town into a 20 minute bike ride.
I definitely make sure the ride is mostly bike paths through parks though, since I'm too paranoid about cars.
My cargo bike has an e-assist, so it's not exhausting. I don't even think it gets my heart rate up (I get my exercise by running 6 days a week, instead). It's also capped at a fairly low speed, since crashing at 30mph with your kids is bad.
Also it's actually more expensive per mile than driving my car, so it's not even really an efficiency thing. It's just awesome to ride around on a sunny day with my kids. We can stop by the farmers market and then have a picnic in the park. And then hit the splash pad in another park. It's great.
I live in an unusually bike friendly US town and I'm having a hard time imagining moving because I don't want to give this up.
I'm not saying we need to radically redesign society to accommodate this, but it's also not the worst thing.
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How do you feel about the Netherlands?
Every bike advocate brings them up, and for for good reason - they make all of these modes work, they all have a place in a modern city.
Obviously you can't copy paste their designs right away to current American cities, but you absolutely can move in that direction.
I don't know much about the Netherlands but it is quite flat there, advantaging bikes. What if your city has hills and slopes?
Depends on size. It will range from "minor annoyance/breaks monotony" to "cycling is not going to happen at all".
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That does make them less useful, especially for the less athletic. Very hilly cities may see less ridership. E bikes of various assist levels can help a lot with this.
Also, even in hilly cities there are likely still recreational cyclists. In many cases they can be accommodated with infrastructure that doesn't appreciably slow down cars, or with infrastructure that benefits both cyclists and pedestrians (stuff like better mixed use paths, or better designed intersections). If the city is so hilly that very few people will cycle for practical purposes, that's definitely a reason to keep prioritizing cars in cases where there would be tradeoffs (narrow streets with no room for bike lanes, etc).
However many many cities, like the cited NYC, are quite flat, and this isn't an issue.
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This is your brain on America.
If your city has hills and slopes, you use the pedals lol.
How steep are the hills around you? Some of the quieter roads in my not-flat American city are almost 20% (short) grades. I can bike up those, barely, but I suspect the median cyclist without an e-bikes will have to get off and walk. Honestly going down those by bike scares me.
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This may be news to you but there is geography outside the USA. Some of us even live outside America. It is a pain to be constantly biking up and down hills.
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I don't think I've been to a city where public transit didn't have a last mile problem except the very densest parts of tier 1 cities like London, Paris, etc. Busses are almost always slower than cycling on the periphery, and it's cost-prohibitive to have metro stops every mile once you're out of the very center of town. And most people don't live in the very center of town.
Just walk? You can also use a bus, which is complicated if you're bringing a bike.
Walk? How much time do you think people have to dedicate to commuting every day?
It would take twice as long for me to walk to my local train station as it does for me to drive to work. Then, it would take me as long again to walk to work from the destination train station.
Taking a bus to the train station takes longer than just biking there.
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how it solves
?
Also, cycling in cities is faster than buses also in city centers.
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I don't entirely disagree with your general point, but metro stops don't have to be the big stations we usually associate with them. This stop in suburban Pittsburgh (and within walking distance of the home of wannabe Trump assassin Thomas Crooks) is pretty common and not too expensive to build. A lot of the country streetcar stops used to be like this before they were removed in the 1960s. The only catch is that the train has to have an additional door in the front to accommodate the lower-level of the station, and as a consequence, people who intend on getting off at those stops need to make sure they ride in the front car.
That stop is what I would call "out in the sticks" rather than merely "suburban". The caltrain corridor in the SF bay area is primarily suburban and the lack of grade separation is a nightmare.
In any case, the major cost is not plopping down a station by the side of the road, it's laying the track and running the trains on spur lines that by their nature are going to be highly underutilized (due to the lack of density).
I don't even see this as a counterexample because (if Google maps is to be believed) there's no transit for miles around these lines.
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