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| ▲ | at_compile_time 18 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | The problem with car-dependent cities is that they are very spread out. Why does public transit suck and why don't many people use the bike lanes? Because everything is far away. We've built our cities this way. Our tax system encourages it (by not taxing land value directly and exempting development from taxation), and our zoning requires it (my city is almost entirely zoned exclusively for single-family detached housing). Bike lanes are nice, but they don't make a 25-km ride through endless suburbia any shorter. You can't just copy the superficial traits of bikeable European cities and hope to get the same results. We need to fundamentally rethink the way our cities are allowed and encouraged to grow. | | |
| ▲ | nradov 12 hours ago | parent [-] | | I don't use the bike lanes because most of the places I go don't have secure bike parking. I'm worried my bike will be stolen, and the local police don't take bike theft seriously. Some of the local dedicated bike trails have been essentially taken over as homeless camps, which are ironically full of stolen bike parts. | | |
| ▲ | aziaziazi 3 hours ago | parent [-] | | Your concern of theft is a dominent reason cited for not using bikes in wester countries. Interestingly, bike theft per capita is higher in bike paradise like NL and Copenhagen while ranking in the least concerns of those users. |
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| ▲ | robocat 18 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | It is outrageously expensive. "Building 101km of cycleways across Christchurch to cost $301m", population 405000, So that is $750 per person, which is about 1% of median earnings for a year. That is paid for mostly by car owners (via petrol tax and car tax) and a bit by home owners. And the new infrastructure is visibly under-utilised - at best a few % of traffic. You could force people to bike using laws and economics I guess... I would be interested to see a per-trip cost analysis for cyclists. There is just no way to economically justify bikelanes everywhere - bikes are great for some trips and some demographics. Can you point me to a report that has a cost/benefit analysis of adding bike lanes for a city? A city that isn't "ideal" for cyclists... | | |
| ▲ | nehal3m 18 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | 301 million dollars for 101km of infrastructure is cheap compared to building highways [0]. The price of the usual infrastructure is a burden on everyone as well, not just car owners. You shouldn't have to force anyone to choose any particular mode of transport. I think people choose what is most convenient and that happens to be cycling in urban areas where there is safe infrastructure for it. Your question reads pretty weird to me; building cycling infrastructure makes a city more ideal for cyclists, that's exactly the point. I didn't read it yet, but I found a paper that seems interesting and in the direction of your question. [1] [0]https://www.worldhighways.com/news/european-highway-construc...
[1]https://economics.acadiau.ca/tl_files/sites/economics/resour... | | |
| ▲ | robocat 17 hours ago | parent [-] | | > is cheap compared to building highways How about cycleways are cheap compared to building airports? Cycle lanes are not substitutes for highways nor airports. | | |
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| ▲ | pg314 18 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | > It is outrageously expensive. Quite the opposite. > Can you point me to a report that has a cost/benefit analysis of adding bike lanes for a city? A city that isn't "ideal" for cyclists... https://www.benelux.int/wp-content/uploads/2023/03/Report_Cy... | | |
| ▲ | robocat 17 hours ago | parent [-] | | The paper suggests biking only 118 days per year. The car ownership costs are not "saved" - the projected savings are wrong. Ownership car costs are 0.167/km and savings by riding a bicycle are 0.349/km. Two ignored real costs of bicycling are lack of optionality (planning ahead for weather changes, locked into transport mode) and carrying capacity (groceries, children, sports equipment, etcetera). And I'd like to see other costs of cycling (wet weather gear, helmets, locks) included. About the quality I expected. | | |
| ▲ | pg314 an hour ago | parent [-] | | > The paper suggests biking only 118 days per year. The car ownership costs are not "saved" - the projected savings are wrong. Were does it suggests that? The number 118 doesn't appear anywhere in that document. > Ownership car costs are 0.167/km and savings by riding a bicycle are 0.349/km. Where do you get these numbers from? > carrying capacity (groceries, children, sports equipment, etcetera) I do all grocery shopping for a family of four with a cargo bike. I pick up and drop off children in the cargo bike. You can think up objections all day if you want, but that doesn't change the fact that some people succeed in living car-free. Nobody is forcing you to take a bicycle. Even if you personally don't like cycling, you should still encourage others to: every cyclist you see riding around is one less car stuck in traffic with you. > And I'd like to see other costs of cycling (wet weather gear, helmets, locks) included. Then you're in luck. On page 24, they include a budget of 117 EUR for gear and accessories. |
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| ▲ | 8note 16 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Bike lane construction tends to be lumped in with regular road maintenance, which makes it look expensive, but the really expensive part is doing repairs on the existing roads. "Building bike lanes" for 300M is more palatable than "fixing potholes and repainting" for 300M | | |
| ▲ | mnau 15 hours ago | parent [-] | | Depends on where you live I guess. "Fixing potholes" would be far more palatable than "bike lanes" over here. |
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| ▲ | mkl 17 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | This seems to be the source of that quote: https://www.stuff.co.nz/the-press/news/124611551/building-10... Note that this is NZ dollars, and that spend is over ~16 years. I.e. ~NZ$46/year/person ≈ US$27/year/person at current rates. The article compares the costs to road and motorway costs in Christchurch. |
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| ▲ | JumpCrisscross 20 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | > not that expensive to put down a bike lane Scale-wise insufficient. We aren’t going to get to net zero with bike lanes. | | |
| ▲ | recursive 19 hours ago | parent [-] | | Who said net zero? Perfect is the enemy of good. | | |
| ▲ | JumpCrisscross 5 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | > Who said net zero? OP is expressing dismay at EVs and suggesting building bike lanes instead. (Not in addition to.) The latter doesn’t solve the problem the former is being built to address. More bikes is nice. More EVs are necessary. Suggesting more bikes as an alternative to EVs isn’t perfect versus good, it’s fielding rubber ducks against battleships. | |
| ▲ | jimjimjim 18 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Comments like these need to be included in almost any discussion about transport or in fact any discussion about any change. Most people (or both sides) dismiss ideas because they are not 100% perfect. And ignore the fact that nothing can be perfect | | |
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| ▲ | TeMPOraL 18 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Bike lanes and bikes aren't alternatives to most of what motorized transport is providing. | | |
| ▲ | dublinben 17 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | 30% of the US can’t drive, whether because of disability, age, financial hardship, immigration status, or any number of other reasons. Why don't you hold the current system of "motorized transport" to the same impossible standard of solving all transportation needs as you expect of bikes? | | |
| ▲ | XorNot 9 hours ago | parent [-] | | Because your groceries are delivered by truck. Your houses are built with materials delivered by truck. In fact your entire lifestyle and the existence of the services which support those people, is provisioned and delivered by local road transport. |
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| ▲ | acdha 18 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | At least 80% of urban car trips could be replaced since the invention of the e-cargo bike. That doesn’t mean it works everywhere, of course, but there are millions and millions of people driving a single digit number of miles, usually at slower than bicycle doors-to-door speeds, and are never carrying 3+ kids and hundreds of pounds of cargo. | | |
| ▲ | TeMPOraL 18 hours ago | parent [-] | | Think roads, not cars. | | |
| ▲ | acdha 17 hours ago | parent [-] | | I am. Most of our road costs are for suburban car commuters and for subsidized car storage. If it was business usage and transit we’d need far fewer lanes, especially since businesses would use rail transportation more if the roads weren’t so heavily subsidized. |
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| ▲ | wbl 18 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Most car trips are very short, and commuting to a CBD is easily served by transit. | | |
| ▲ | TeMPOraL 18 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | That still doesn't solve last mile supply of stores and offices, nor does it solve construction, policing, emergency services, etc. Each of those likely has possible alternatives to motorized transport, but they're all different alternatives. Meanwhile, today, they all share the same road network with regular civilian commute, sharing costs and mutually improving efficiency. Put differently: instead of imagining all passenger cars replaced by bikes, imagine all roads replaced by bike lanes, then extrapolate from that. | |
| ▲ | nradov 12 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Most middle-class people, especially parents of small children, aren't going straight back and forth between home and work. They're making other stops for day care, school, shopping, after-school activities, gym, etc. Often there are tight time constraints which make public transit unusable. Like it would be impossible to use transit to pick my daughter up from school and get her to practice on time. It's a constant juggle and the childless young urbanites who dominate HN seem to be ignorant of how regular people live. | | |
| ▲ | RugnirViking 4 hours ago | parent [-] | | I find it so weird that people constantly speak as though public transport is this hypothetical maybe like a moon base or something. I use exclusively public transport, bikes, and walking. My whole family (with children) does. It's just not a problem. Children walk or cycle to and from school. By themselves. When they're very young their parents did go and pick them up sure, but then its a small school within walking distance. We rented a car and a trailer for a couple hours recently to move a double bed. It posed no problem, and was dramatically cheaper than owning a car for a month would be even if the car itself was free. I got a nice cabinet for my friend recently. We are going to take the drawers out and move it to his place on a bus. I don't think it would fit in your car. | | |
| ▲ | TeMPOraL 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | Replacing most of car traffic in a city with public transport (and bikes and such) is possible, and it can work - after it stabilizes. The transition seems extremely disruptive, which might be why people speak of it as if it couldn't work. I'm a parent with small children. We have a car, but we only use it for inter-city commute. Everything within city bounds, we handle by public transit or walking (or electric scooters). It works because we live close to the kindergarten, and close to multiple public transit hubs, and I work remotely. It works, because we planned for it in advance. Now, take a typical car-commuting, office-working parent of today. Like most, the place they live in is frozen in some balance between their and their spouses' jobs. Changing it would upend someone's schedule, and possibly involve kids changing schools/neighbourhoods (which isn't good for them). At that stage in life, one's combination of home, workplace, kids schools and after-school activities, is pretty much frozen in place. If they made it work with car commute, it probably can't work with public transit, and thus if you suggest the change, they'll look at you as if you came from Mars or something. |
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