Fwiw the only place I had a bike stolen was the secured underground garage in my apartment complex. Never had issues just parking it out front while running errands or other such stuff, or parking outside work during the day. I'd figure foot traffic would keep angle grinding down. I've personally not seen angle grinding done that brazenly before, seems liable overnight though where the thief has time to work and the assumption no one is awake to hear the grinder (such as what happened in the case of my apartment).

If I can't find a good spot to actually lock up the bike though I will just bring it in to wherever I'm going. Shops or restaurants don't seem to care if a bike is parked in the corner and you can thread your ulock through the wheels and make it useless to ride off with.

Yeah, that's a real problem. For practical urban riding, I use a beater fixie that I can replace for less than a car payment. I've had a few stolen, but that's across decades. This is probably highly dependent on your particular location. But I've also had cars broken in to.

Replacing the bike is actually a lot easier than getting the windows fixed IME.

Writ very small, though. You can easily fit a dozen bikes into the space of one parking spot, if not more (double-decker racks exist!), and it is a lot easier to contrive a spot for your bike in the absence of bike racks than it is to park a car when there's no parking.

Heck—if you have a car & your building doesn't have parking, you're basically screwed. If you have a bike & it doesn't have a bike rack, you can just carry it up & put it on your balcony. At that point, I don't think you can really compare the two.

The problem is smaller and that is bad? That’s getting pretty close to the definition of better.

That’s cool but one counterexample does not negate the general trend. Most places have few dedicated bus lanes. Most cities have approximately zero dedicated bus roads.

Even the cited system seems to be limited and exists to connect with trains as well as buses that use normal streets. Wikipedia says that they chose buses for this expansion instead of trains specifically because there was already a strong bus system, which uses the same city streets as cars and trucks.

Safe for cars/bikes, or the passengers vs the bicyclist?

Hail comes to mind. Lightning possibly (I believe cars are much better insulated against lighting strikes). High winds could easily push bikes around / knock them over where cars just keep going.

We drove our van through a forest fire (Cedar Creek Fire - a BIG one) and got a bit of smoke, but otherwise, just fine. No way would I have attempted that on a bike - the increased aerobic activity alone (to say nothing of embers / ashes / etc) would have probably caused crazy amounts of smoke inhalation / death.

And there is a reason drivers hate SOME bikers - here in CA, many simply refuse to follow the rules of the road. My light turns green, and 5 seconds later, some biker comes rolling along in the perpendicular direction - I almost hit him. This kind of stuff happens over and over. I am very fond of bikers when they follow the rules - I bike sometimes too.

Hell, we organize championships: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VMinwf-kRlA

> They don't need access to suburban environments.

How are suburban environments stocked then? Surely village grocery stores are not stocked with milk one bike load at a time.

> Even in the inner city here trucks are banned outside of loading and unloading hours to foster a walk-able environment.

Sure. But they use the same infrastructure. The fact that the vehicles are built for different purposes and may have different regulations doesn’t mean the cost of infrastructure isn’t shared. Pervasiveness of roads makes it easy for cars, trucks, ambulances, buses, and even bikes to get around more easily.

Just like the pervasiveness of the Internet make it easy to scroll TikTok, purchase goods from Amazon, and read books through Project Gutenberg, even though those are very different use cases.