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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.
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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