10 ms·

What a City Would Look Like If It Were Designed for Only Bikes

73 points by geezsundries 11y ago

smcl 11y ago
That "bike friendly" apartment block looks extremely pedestrian hostile
- davidy123 11y ago
  Yes, what they have done here is replace landscapes marred by roads with landscapes marred by paved bike paths. Even as a cyclist I'd say it's not a very nice solution.
- WorldMaker 11y ago
  The "hallway with lanes"? The thing that isn't obvious at first glance (but is more obvious in further design depictions) is that it is setup like a miniature version of a typical street in which to the immediate sides of the bike lanes are "bike parking" spots and on the far sides of those spots are pedestrian "side walks". It seems like a fair design to me.
  - Super_Jambo 11y ago
    Really? You're using up an absolutely vast area in your building for bike paths. You also are forced to build everything into a ramp shape so that the bikes can get in. Oh and alternative solution (put a bike garage on the ground floor). Is cheaper and probably nicer to live in since the people on the top floor can use lifts instead of riding an extra couple of k up hill.
    - WorldMaker 11y ago
      The whole point of the conceptualization is to explore what cities/buildings might be like if we built bike-first. Of course it's not "practical" versus the cheapness of first floor bike garages. It's meant to be a vision of what we might do if we rebuilt things from first principles. Certainly you could do both: have a good lift to your floor in the evenings that you could ride your bike into and then in the mornings coast your way all the way down as a fun way to start your day. Some people would even appreciate the extra uphill climb every day as an easy way to stay fit in their own home buildings. Another thing to note here is that the conceptualized buildings are a lot wider than they are tall. The impression being that even if you had an elevator to your floor you might still want to ride your bike to your unit as the floor itself will be long enough to warrant that sort of thing. Again, the goal here is to question design principles and it is a fair and interesting design because it asks questions about our assumptions. We currently don't build buildings more than a quarter mile wide because once inside them we assume everyone has to walk. Thus we tend to build taller buildings instead. Shorter, wider, ramp-like buildings are an interesting idea and this concept gives us a vocabulary to discuss them. Do I expect to see these in cities any time soon? Definitely not. But it is still a neat design worth discussing, especially if it allows us to re-question old city design assumptions.
    - logfromblammo 11y ago
      An alternate alternate solution would be to install elevators more friendly to cyclists. I imagine they would have to be larger in floor area, with wider doors, both front and back, and have different floor request controls. I see the appeal of biking up to your own front door without getting off, but ramps may be the worst possible way to do it. In the use case where you are carrying heavy items in panniers on your bike, you need some way to get those items from the garage to the apartment. Why not use the bike itself? And if you can put your bike in your apartment, you don't need the garage.
  - dalke 11y ago
    You consider it a fair design. I look at it as a waste of space. All it does is replace "car" with "bike". It even says so, with "Residential bike parking should have the same space-syntax relationship to the front door and kitchen as car parking does in a contemporary house in the suburbs." Look at how much hallway space it needs to have a cycle path, plus bike parking. It adds, what, 2-3 meters of hallway width? Plus there's space inside the apartment. Is all that space really justified? A normal apartment bike room can store a much higher density of bicycles. Even more if there are hangers, or multi-level racks. Using that 'same space-syntax relationship', if the weather outside is horrible so the children play in the hallway, do the cyclists get priority? On a bicycle lane they do. But inside an apartment complex? With these mega-wide hallways, what if someone wanted to put up planters rather than using the parking space? Would that be okay? Or use it to store something other than a bicycle? (Eg, kick bike, tricycle, recumbent tricycle, stroller, wheelbarrow, luggage cart.) If not, why do bicycles get priority? In my apartment building the solution is easy - we can't keep anything in the hallway. Consider more specifically. "The apartment entryway is designed with space for a bike." Yeah, no. In winter my bike has slush and road gravel on it. Why would I want to bring that inside? Right now I leave it in the bike room, which has a cement floor. Expressed using the same 'space-syntax', I walk in through the front door, not the garage door.
    - WorldMaker 11y ago
      By "fair design" I don't necessarily mean "practical", I'm implying "interesting" and "conversation starting" and "worth examining/talking about".
      - WorldMaker 11y ago
        Also, the specific context here was "Given semi-protected sidewalks this design seems to provide equal access to both bicyclists and pedestrians".
    - WorldMaker 11y ago
      You do have some interesting questions here about hypotheticals if one was to try to build something like this. Yes, these hallways you would probably not want to carpet if you expect people to ride in them with dirty bikes. They'd probably be something easy to clean like concrete or tile or plastic. I think that children playing would probably get priority over bicyclists much as such things happen in neighborhood cul-de-sacs. Also, if there is some explicit ownership of the "bike parking spaces" in front of/near a unit then I absolutely would expect people to use them as they see fit, including things like planters, assuming such things don't impede the other uses of the hall (biking, walking). Most buildings consider hallways common space that units have no ownership of. There's nothing wrong with maybe giving some ownership to part of a hall. It could add to the sense of community of the building. (In my own condo building our car parking spaces are owned by unit owners, so our spaces will sometimes get used as temporary workspaces or child toy storage zones when our cars are out parked on the street, so long as we don't block other spaces and stick to our area. If I decided to set planters on my space while my car was in the shop, I certainly could.)
Avalaxy 11y ago
A bike ramp into the apartment is useless. You can just take the elevator with your bike, or you know... Just make a garage for bikes on ground floor. The article doesn't really say much about how to design a city for bicycles, which mostly comes down to providing good roads where you aren't bothered by cars.
- micheljansen 11y ago
  Yep, I live in the Netherlands and my apartment complex has a separate entrance to a bicycle storage area on street level, which connects to the central hallway. Parking's only half the story though. You also need to feel safe to ride a bike, which requires infrastructure and attitude.
  - deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]
- mayneack 11y ago
  Also to make the ramp reach a reasonable height with a reasonable angle, you'd have to have incredibly long buildings that would require going all the way to one end to reach the top floor.
  - jules 11y ago
    Indeed, even taking the stairs would be much faster. With a bike you would carry more weight to the top, and go a longer distance. This more than offsets the difference between walking and biking.
- logfromblammo 11y ago
  Yes. I stopped reading there. Any architect who thinks floor-traversing ramps will ever be preferred over elevators had best start designing temporary homes from cardboard, in anticipation of living in one.
  - logfromblammo 11y ago
ape4 11y ago
A secure/convenient place to lock your bike at ground level is better.
crystalmeph 11y ago
For one thing, you wouldn't have to look at old or infirm people...
geezsundries 11y ago
I'm confused as to why they created bike paths in apartment building hallways.
- davidw 11y ago
  Indoor races when the weather is bad? :-)
jacquesm 11y ago
That's a city designed for ONLY bikes, and no city will ever be designed like that, no cars allowed is nice in theory but not workable. To be practical it would at a minimum have to accommodate foot-traffic, supply lines to stores (or did you think that those stores will be supplied by cargo bikes?) and access for disabled people (not everybody can ride a bike). So it's a nice thought experiment but not at all practical, on top of that 'bike lanes in apartment building hallways' make you wonder just how much experience the designer has riding bicycles, you park your bike at the interface between inside and outside and you don't run around the apartment hallways on a bicycle because of (1) pedestrians, (2) playing kids, (3) the fact that you now have to elevate your bicycle every time you want to go in or out of your house and (4) storing your bike at streetlevel is simply much more practical.
- tonyedgecombe 11y ago
  "no cars allowed is nice in theory but not workable" I think cities existed before cars.
  - mc32 11y ago
    You need emergency services access, delivery vehicles, moving vehicles. (ambulances, fireengines, delivery vehicles to fill new houses, moving vehicles for people moving house, etc.)
  - deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]
  - sageikosa 11y ago
    Yes, with appropriate access to horse, mule, wagon, river and/or seaport.
  - notahacker 11y ago
    Large horse-powered vehicles to transport stuff existed before bicycles, and there aren't many cities that weren't designed to accommodate them. Those that were tended to be built in locations where bikes aren't an option either, usually more for the strategic benefit than because people thought that carrying heavy loads up hills on their back made a pleasant change from roads clogged with horse and carts.
acaloiar 11y ago
Even as a cyclist these designs seem myopic to the demands of civic design such as pedestrian friendliness and affordability. Perhaps a Dubai could afford retrofitting, but as these designs stand, they are only practical (and I use that loosely) for new construction.
jbb555 11y ago
It would look empty, because who would choose to live there?
zyxley 11y ago
> and maybe even wheel their bike through stores as they shop, with a sleeping baby in the bike carrier, or use the basket to hold groceries Anyone who has ever actually had a bike for more than a week and who actually shops for their own groceries will know this is a terrible idea.
- jrock08 11y ago
  Why? I use panniers for my groceries, however, the grocery store won't allow me to just bring my bike inside, so instead I have to take the panniers off my bike and put them in a cart. Using my bike as the cart would make sense.
  - zyxley 11y ago
    Now imagine trying to get something from a freezer or off of a top shelf without having to put the kickstand down and then up again after over and over and over.
throwaway41597 11y ago
Misleading title and absurd idea: they suggest having bike lanes inside buildings. This is wasting precious real estate: the indoor bike lanes and parkings are nearly as big as the apartments they service. Why not build streets in buildings if you prefer cars? or a river if you're a boat person? or a half-pipe for skaters?
electricblue 11y ago
particular small areas with extremely high pop density might improve if cars were banned but for the most part adding separate bike paths that don't interact with roads much is the way to go. The sloped apartments seem dangerous and stupid.
- ctdonath 11y ago
  particular small areas with extremely high pop density might improve if cars were banned Cars, on the whole, occupy a single flat level. Why don't buildings spread out over roads as the norm? rather than the occasional oddity of a road tunneling thru a building, why isn't that the norm? Ventilation etc problems can be solved. There's N stories of unused space over the roads; leave the first 2-3 stories for road tunneling, and fill in the building-sized empty spaces above.
  - electricblue 11y ago
    Probably because it's prohibitively expensive compared with just building a larger building next to the road and it's aesthetically pleasing to have space between buildings and humans like sunlight.
mroll 11y ago
One problem that immediately stands out to me is how sweaty everyone would be. I'm in shape but riding around a city on a hot day would have me drenched.
- dalke 11y ago
  In this vision of the future, I believe all of the bike paths will be indoors and air conditioned.
wehadfun 11y ago
A bike friendly building is a good idea if city really, really wanted to promote bike use. Being able to ride your bike into a grocery store, shop, then ride your bike into your kitchen and unload is kind of awesome. But this is the last step after bike only roads and decent bike public transportation.
Shivetya 11y ago
If exposed to weather it is an automatic fail. Sorry, that is just how it works. From any transportation alternative that is no enclosed it always comes down to comfort. One day it is too hot, another too cold, or too wet, and on and on, until the excuse is no longer needed as the alternative mode is parked. So any bicycle or pedestrian friendly environment needs weather protection as part of its design. It does not need be fully enclosed but that type of protection may be required depending on climate. Perhaps a convertible system where panels retract?
- larrymyers 11y ago
  I happily commute by bike year round in Chicago, as do many other thousands of people that live in the city. It gets into the 90's in the summer, and well below freezing in the winter. If it's hot I pack my work clothes and change (and shower if needed) at work. If it's cold I dress warmly. It's amazing how quickly you warm up when pedaling more than a few miles. If it's raining I wear a rain jacket, and the fenders on my bike keeps water from splashing up on me. So no, weather is not an automatic fail. It's just a mindset change if you're used to be in the enclosed bubble that car provides.
hackuser 11y ago
I had thought the custom on HN was to post valuable, constructive comments, and not to find fault or to post typical Internet forum sniping and hyperbole. Perhaps it's my impression, but I've rarely seen anything constructive recently. Almost everything in this discussion, for example, is reaction and sniping ("useless", "absurd", "stupid", etc.). It's a way to hang out and socialize online; there's nothing wrong with it. But personally, I've read enough Internet sniping for a lifetime; it's not thoughtful, informative, insightful or constructive; I don't learn anything and leave uninspired. Perhaps it's just my impression or it's temporary; perhaps it's a bigger change (related to YC and its leadership distancing themselves from HN?). Is there anywhere online where the sniping is eliminated and the discussion more valuable? EDIT: Sorry, I know it's off-topic, but there's no other place to post it (that I know of).
- yodsanklai 11y ago
  No problem with people saying "it's useless" as long as they make their point with some arguments (which was the case with some of the other comments).
  - hackuser 11y ago
    > No problem with people saying "it's useless" as long as they make their point with some arguments My opinion differs: 1) IME, comments which begin with hyperbole such as "it's useless" rarely improve beyond that. I generally stop reading there (I don't have time to read everything). My theory, anecodotally confirmed, is that if they are careless with their language (i.e., the lazy use of hyperbole), probably they will be careless with their content. 2) It's rude to whomever wrote the article, and it also creates that environment for interactions between commenters. 3) That kind of rant is like a virus; it spreads through discussions and through the community. I believe this concept is well-established among veteran forum maintainers. From Paul Graham, talking about what he learned from running HN: [1] It's pretty clear now that the broken windows theory applies to community sites as well. The theory is that minor forms of bad behavior encourage worse ones … I was living in New York when Giuliani introduced the reforms that made the broken windows theory famous, and the transformation was miraculous. And I was a Reddit user when the opposite happened there, and the transformation was equally dramatic. ... Bad comments are like kudzu: they take over rapidly. … If someone submits a lame article, the other submissions don't all become lame. But if someone posts a stupid comment on a thread, that sets the tone for the region around it. ---- [1] http://www.paulgraham.com/hackernews.html http://www.paulgraham.com/hackernews.html
coldcode 11y ago
I live 43 miles from my job, all on major interstates, in a big metro area. What good would this do? Unless you designed the city for mixed living/working/shopping in the first place, most US cities could never change to be bike first. This isn't SimCity where you can raze the whole town.
- s73v3r 11y ago
  "I live 43 miles from my job, all on major interstates, in a big metro area." Nobody forced you to live so far away from your job. You're already catered to by virtue of having those interstates in the first place. Quit complaining that other people, who aren't you, are finally getting some attention.
  - logfromblammo 11y ago
    Other than all the other people that outbid you for less distant homes, you mean. Or those who consistently NIMBY-veto any potential development of high-rise residential buildings near their existing homes. Or the zoning boards that outlaw the very concept of homes being adjacent to businesses. Actually, there are quite a lot of people who force me to live further away from my job than is strictly necessary. They are the very same people who would almost certainly undermine--and eventually destroy--any bicycle-oriented development. It would be unwise to dismiss those factors as mere whining.
    - s73v3r 11y ago
      No. Sorry, but it's still you who choose to live that far away from your job. You could have chosen another job, or you could have chosen to spend more money on a house, or buy less house. Nobody forced you to live where you do right now. That decision was all you.
      - logfromblammo 11y ago
        So you're basically telling me it's my fault for not being rich enough to do what I want. Thanks. If I had unlimited time and unlimited funds, I could certainly shorten my commute down to the distance from my bedroom to my in-home office, all in my palatial mansion in the heart of a culturally vibrant, crime-free, educated, and thriving city. Unfortunately, living in the real world, there are external constraints upon my decisions that I have no individual control over. Those constraints rule out the fantasy that you seem to have invented wherein I can just choose to be Batman in my Batcave, and the local government begs me for my help via a spotlight, instead of constantly demanding that I jump through whatever idiotic regulatory hoops it cares to set up. In the real world, the amount I am paid for my work is determined by market conditions. The affordability of housing is determined by market conditions. The cost of living is determined by market conditions. Within those bounds, I make the best decisions I can, according to my own priorities. And yes, I do have higher priorities than being able to walk or bicycle to work. I believe those priorities cannot be greatly altered while still remaining a socially responsible person. There are more variables involved than just home-office distance and pay rate. You have no idea what it would cost for me to halve my commute distance, or to quarter it. It may well be the difference between retiring at age 75 instead of 67, or not retiring ever. Or it may be the difference between helping my all my kids to pay college tuition, or not. Or maybe it's just the difference between eating fresh ground beef or canned Spam. This is why I suggest it is foolish to blithely discount all those unseen individual reasons people have for following a particular lifestyle. People generally make the best decisions they can, using the resources they have available, according to the priorities they have established for themselves. So when someone says, "I wish I could live closer to work," your response probably should not be, "You can, but you obviously don't want it enough." Because what you're conveying is that person is not enough of a selfish prick to make their spouse commute further, send their kids to lower-performing schools, spend more money on an apartment, house, or condo with less relative utility independent of its location, spend more money now at the expense of savings or investments, possibly uproot any existing social networks for other members of the household, maybe adapt to an entirely different culture in the new location, and even physically moving a truckload of accumulated property and possessions over some distance. What that person was really saying, without actually saying it, was, "I wish I could live closer to work without changing into a sociopath, ascetic, hermit, or hobo, and without switching to job that I would hate." So maybe adopt a new priority, and make sure it ranks higher than biking to work: don't be a dick. That's it. Have some care for the daily struggles of your fellow humans. You might just find that redesigning entire cities to make cyclists happier has a side-effect of making all the non-cyclists absolutely miserable. And maybe the current automobile-centric design of cities is overly unfair to bikers. You can't just ignore bikers because you love driving. You have to consider the impact on everyone, not just your paragons, eidolons, and chosen ones.
domfletcher 11y ago
I'm curious to see the interaction between self driving cars and bicycle friendly cities. What about banning human driven cars from a city and then using the resultant savings in road space to make it more cycle friendly?
jules 11y ago
I wonder if that expert has been to the Netherlands or Copenhagen. In fact I wonder whether he has really experienced a bike for day to day use, because some of the ideas are very strange. It's telling that most bikes in the pictures are racing bikes. What's the advantage of bikes in apartment buildings? Why not park the bike at the ground floor? It would waste a lot of space in the corridors. Think about what you'd rather have: 2 meters extra apartment, or 2 meters extra wide corridor. Bikes in shops will not work either. Walking through a shop with a bike seems extremely unwieldy; you would need much larger space between the shelves. A bike in your hand makes it hard to pick up things from the shelves. A bike does not stay upright by itself when you go to pick up something from the shelves, so you have to park it with that thing that I don't know the English name of. Even then, if you load the bike with a bag of groceries it usually falls over. When you are walking on one side of your bike it's hard to reach over your bike while not falling over. Bike parking space is a non-problem compared to car parking space. No cars whatsoever is unrealistic even in bike utopia. How do you move big and heavy things? No ambulance, no fire trucks?
- benkuykendall 11y ago
  Kickstand?
  - jules 11y ago
    Yes, thanks :)
- pi-err 11y ago
  Agreed. Strangely, this concept seems to replicate with bikes most mistakes done previously with cars (and 60's concepts around planes). The designer is actually sort of aware of this, not understanding the consequences: > "Residential bike parking should have the same space-syntax relationship to the front door and kitchen as car parking does in a contemporary house in the suburbs," Fleming says. Designing cities around people, not a way to transport them, is missing from this approach. It's actually a much harder challenge than figuring out funny (and unsustainable) ways to bring "speed" to personal transportation within cities. Creatively, this concept is entirely underwhelming.
cdnsteve 11y ago
I think the concept is interesting but needs some tweaking. The main issue with any core downtown is space. There simply isn't any available, for anyone. The space that is available is extremely costly so we need to think outside the box. Bike paths on the ground aren't the only option. Go up. Elevated bike paths, much like the Vancouver Skyrail, are an option. http://www.railway-technology.com/projects/vancouver/vancouver5.html http://www.railway-technology.com/projects/vancouver/vancouv... - The elevated structure would only be for cyclists - You could literally ride above all the downtown traffic - Dedicated lanes so you don't get road rage
Kluny 11y ago
I'm a cyclist and I love the idea of making cities more bike friendly, but this group of designers has missed a major point. Cities are for PEOPLE. Not for cars, not for bikes, but for humans. Space for people to live and exist in should be the highest priority, and anytime you start cutting into living space to make more room for vehicles, you're making the city less human friendly. That's what these guys seem to be doing. They're saying, "cars aren't important, bikes are!" But neither bikes nor cars are important. People are. I'd even suggest that a major reason why cars have supremacy at the moment is that they are more inclusive of people than bikes are. I prefer using my bike any time I possibly can, but I am young, fit, childless and live within 2 minutes of my job. Cars are inclusive of people who have more than one kid, live across an interstate from their job, and may have mobility issues - and bikes are not. This redesigned city needs to make room for people who aren't 25 years old and single.
- _delirium 11y ago
  That's very cultural I think, not really inherent. My impression from living in Copenhagen from some years is that bikes in that context are somewhat more inclusive than cars, though neither is perfect. (I personally mostly used a mixture of walking + transit.) Families with two kids use bikes all the time [1], and the median bicyclist is a middle-aged office commuter, not a 25-year-old single person. Mobility scooters are also permitted in bike lanes (and you see them fairly often), which further expands the inclusiveness of bicycle infrastructure. [1] These are popular among families: http://livingcph.dk/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/christiania.jpg http://livingcph.dk/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/christiania.j...
- drsim 11y ago
  It's extreme for sure, but it's a concept. 'Concept cars' are produced as a visionary direction a car manufacturer may take their range. This should be read the same. I live in Copenhagen and can't observe any way in which cars here are more inclusive than bikes. A high percentage of bikes have a child seat, there are cargo bikes for multi-child families and the rail network is geared up to take bikes for commuters. Older people cycle well past retirement, so their lifelong mobility keeps them healthily mobile too. The big, fast metal box of a car dehumanises people by isolating them from slower and more vulnerable road users. Bikes mix much better with pedestrians when they need too than a looming car.
ilaksh 11y ago
I like the general idea of moving away from cars and creating architecture that supports that. I feel that my idea solves many more problems than this design though. I do not have drawings and 3d renderings etc. or own a firm and I am just an individual, but my tiny villages concept is much more comprehensive. http://runvnc.github.io/tinyvillage/ http://runvnc.github.io/tinyvillage/
netcan 11y ago
There seems to be a great amount of enthusiasm in the zeitgeist about the future, positive and negative predictions. A lot of it comes with some far out economics baked in nonchalantly. Basic incomes, abundance economies & zero marginal cost everything. I like it and I do quite a bit of indulging in this sort of thing myself. But… I don't think I'm seeing the trends in gadgetry, software, and manufactured goods at work everywhere. The production cost (and often the price) of manufactured goods (used to be "mass produced) has come down tremendously compared with average income. The trend is hundreds of years old. Underpants, sugar bowls, cereal commodities and almost everything else you can fit under a very wide umbrella of "manufactured goods" is heading towards free, or at least extremely cheap. We've seen it happen with a lot of things. Clothes pins & pencils used to be worth something, but I can't remember cost ever being a factor. They're basically free. Software also. I agree that a lot of things are headed towards "abundance." The things that aren't are often things that keep getting better, things where we have an appetite for (qualitative) more, iphones & whatnot. The bicycles come into it at the points where there isn't a fruitful trend towards more, better everything. Housing & transport are still most people's 2 biggest expenses. These have improved in quality over time and we consume more (bigger house, long commute, overseas holiday…) but there isn't an obvious "trend towards abundance." The fact that a radical idea (radical because of the radical trade off of eliminating cars) like this is interesting is kind of proof that this thing is not moving and we're frustrated. We still commute a lot, and we don't enjoy it. It pollutes. It's noisy. Expensive. Slow. It's not much different than 1980 or even 1965. I think housing and transport are the stick in the abundance ideas. In 25 years roads might be full of quite, clean, electric, driverless, parkingless cars but even that amazing achievement will still not match the technology trends that have brought other things up the quality and abundance curve.
kazinator 11y ago
I speak as a non-car-owning bicycle commuter when I say that bicycle lanes inside apartment building hallways are ... glaringly stupid. Rabid bicyclowns like this give the rest of us a bad reputation for fanaticism.
joveian 11y ago
I like that they are trying to consider different possibilities, although I'm not personally fond of what they came up with. For example, one picture looked like ramps for bikes to go over cars, but in practice it works better for cyclists to go under (even though from an engineering standpoint it is more work to put the heavy traffic on top). I also don't want bikes to be indoors (and I primarily bike for transportation). I like David Hembrow's blog about cycling infrastructure in the Netherlands. Here is a good post on myths and excuses about cycling infrastructure: http://www.aviewfromthecyclepath.com/2011/02/all-those-myths-and-excuses-in-one-post.html http://www.aviewfromthecyclepath.com/2011/02/all-those-myths...
- lifeformed 11y ago
  Why should bikes go under the cars?
  - joveian 11y ago
    Otherwise bikes get an extra hill :). And then you get extra speed when you don't need it. Down and then up is easy. Although for typical intersections I'm not sure either is a particularly good idea most of the time. Other options are separate signals or giving priority to cyclists (Hembrow has a bunch of pictures of this stuff), or, as someone else mentioned, for high density areas having a separate fully elevated bike path could work too.

73 points by geezsundries 11y ago

smcl 11y ago

That "bike friendly" apartment block looks extremely pedestrian hostile

davidy123 11y ago
Yes, what they have done here is replace landscapes marred by roads with landscapes marred by paved bike paths. Even as a cyclist I'd say it's not a very nice solution.
WorldMaker 11y ago
The "hallway with lanes"? The thing that isn't obvious at first glance (but is more obvious in further design depictions) is that it is setup like a miniature version of a typical street in which to the immediate sides of the bike lanes are "bike parking" spots and on the far sides of those spots are pedestrian "side walks". It seems like a fair design to me.
- Super_Jambo 11y ago
  Really? You're using up an absolutely vast area in your building for bike paths. You also are forced to build everything into a ramp shape so that the bikes can get in. Oh and alternative solution (put a bike garage on the ground floor). Is cheaper and probably nicer to live in since the people on the top floor can use lifts instead of riding an extra couple of k up hill.
  - WorldMaker 11y ago
    The whole point of the conceptualization is to explore what cities/buildings might be like if we built bike-first. Of course it's not "practical" versus the cheapness of first floor bike garages. It's meant to be a vision of what we might do if we rebuilt things from first principles. Certainly you could do both: have a good lift to your floor in the evenings that you could ride your bike into and then in the mornings coast your way all the way down as a fun way to start your day. Some people would even appreciate the extra uphill climb every day as an easy way to stay fit in their own home buildings. Another thing to note here is that the conceptualized buildings are a lot wider than they are tall. The impression being that even if you had an elevator to your floor you might still want to ride your bike to your unit as the floor itself will be long enough to warrant that sort of thing. Again, the goal here is to question design principles and it is a fair and interesting design because it asks questions about our assumptions. We currently don't build buildings more than a quarter mile wide because once inside them we assume everyone has to walk. Thus we tend to build taller buildings instead. Shorter, wider, ramp-like buildings are an interesting idea and this concept gives us a vocabulary to discuss them. Do I expect to see these in cities any time soon? Definitely not. But it is still a neat design worth discussing, especially if it allows us to re-question old city design assumptions.
  - logfromblammo 11y ago
    An alternate alternate solution would be to install elevators more friendly to cyclists. I imagine they would have to be larger in floor area, with wider doors, both front and back, and have different floor request controls. I see the appeal of biking up to your own front door without getting off, but ramps may be the worst possible way to do it. In the use case where you are carrying heavy items in panniers on your bike, you need some way to get those items from the garage to the apartment. Why not use the bike itself? And if you can put your bike in your apartment, you don't need the garage.
- dalke 11y ago
  You consider it a fair design. I look at it as a waste of space. All it does is replace "car" with "bike". It even says so, with "Residential bike parking should have the same space-syntax relationship to the front door and kitchen as car parking does in a contemporary house in the suburbs." Look at how much hallway space it needs to have a cycle path, plus bike parking. It adds, what, 2-3 meters of hallway width? Plus there's space inside the apartment. Is all that space really justified? A normal apartment bike room can store a much higher density of bicycles. Even more if there are hangers, or multi-level racks. Using that 'same space-syntax relationship', if the weather outside is horrible so the children play in the hallway, do the cyclists get priority? On a bicycle lane they do. But inside an apartment complex? With these mega-wide hallways, what if someone wanted to put up planters rather than using the parking space? Would that be okay? Or use it to store something other than a bicycle? (Eg, kick bike, tricycle, recumbent tricycle, stroller, wheelbarrow, luggage cart.) If not, why do bicycles get priority? In my apartment building the solution is easy - we can't keep anything in the hallway. Consider more specifically. "The apartment entryway is designed with space for a bike." Yeah, no. In winter my bike has slush and road gravel on it. Why would I want to bring that inside? Right now I leave it in the bike room, which has a cement floor. Expressed using the same 'space-syntax', I walk in through the front door, not the garage door.
  - WorldMaker 11y ago
    By "fair design" I don't necessarily mean "practical", I'm implying "interesting" and "conversation starting" and "worth examining/talking about".
    - WorldMaker 11y ago
      Also, the specific context here was "Given semi-protected sidewalks this design seems to provide equal access to both bicyclists and pedestrians".
  - WorldMaker 11y ago
    You do have some interesting questions here about hypotheticals if one was to try to build something like this. Yes, these hallways you would probably not want to carpet if you expect people to ride in them with dirty bikes. They'd probably be something easy to clean like concrete or tile or plastic. I think that children playing would probably get priority over bicyclists much as such things happen in neighborhood cul-de-sacs. Also, if there is some explicit ownership of the "bike parking spaces" in front of/near a unit then I absolutely would expect people to use them as they see fit, including things like planters, assuming such things don't impede the other uses of the hall (biking, walking). Most buildings consider hallways common space that units have no ownership of. There's nothing wrong with maybe giving some ownership to part of a hall. It could add to the sense of community of the building. (In my own condo building our car parking spaces are owned by unit owners, so our spaces will sometimes get used as temporary workspaces or child toy storage zones when our cars are out parked on the street, so long as we don't block other spaces and stick to our area. If I decided to set planters on my space while my car was in the shop, I certainly could.)

Avalaxy 11y ago

A bike ramp into the apartment is useless. You can just take the elevator with your bike, or you know... Just make a garage for bikes on ground floor. The article doesn't really say much about how to design a city for bicycles, which mostly comes down to providing good roads where you aren't bothered by cars.

micheljansen 11y ago
Yep, I live in the Netherlands and my apartment complex has a separate entrance to a bicycle storage area on street level, which connects to the central hallway. Parking's only half the story though. You also need to feel safe to ride a bike, which requires infrastructure and attitude.
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
mayneack 11y ago
Also to make the ramp reach a reasonable height with a reasonable angle, you'd have to have incredibly long buildings that would require going all the way to one end to reach the top floor.
- jules 11y ago
  Indeed, even taking the stairs would be much faster. With a bike you would carry more weight to the top, and go a longer distance. This more than offsets the difference between walking and biking.
logfromblammo 11y ago
Yes. I stopped reading there. Any architect who thinks floor-traversing ramps will ever be preferred over elevators had best start designing temporary homes from cardboard, in anticipation of living in one.
- logfromblammo 11y ago

ape4 11y ago

A secure/convenient place to lock your bike at ground level is better.

crystalmeph 11y ago

For one thing, you wouldn't have to look at old or infirm people...

geezsundries 11y ago

I'm confused as to why they created bike paths in apartment building hallways.

davidw 11y ago
Indoor races when the weather is bad? :-)

jacquesm 11y ago

That's a city designed for ONLY bikes, and no city will ever be designed like that, no cars allowed is nice in theory but not workable. To be practical it would at a minimum have to accommodate foot-traffic, supply lines to stores (or did you think that those stores will be supplied by cargo bikes?) and access for disabled people (not everybody can ride a bike). So it's a nice thought experiment but not at all practical, on top of that 'bike lanes in apartment building hallways' make you wonder just how much experience the designer has riding bicycles, you park your bike at the interface between inside and outside and you don't run around the apartment hallways on a bicycle because of (1) pedestrians, (2) playing kids, (3) the fact that you now have to elevate your bicycle every time you want to go in or out of your house and (4) storing your bike at streetlevel is simply much more practical.

tonyedgecombe 11y ago
"no cars allowed is nice in theory but not workable" I think cities existed before cars.
- mc32 11y ago
  You need emergency services access, delivery vehicles, moving vehicles. (ambulances, fireengines, delivery vehicles to fill new houses, moving vehicles for people moving house, etc.)
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
- sageikosa 11y ago
  Yes, with appropriate access to horse, mule, wagon, river and/or seaport.
- notahacker 11y ago
  Large horse-powered vehicles to transport stuff existed before bicycles, and there aren't many cities that weren't designed to accommodate them. Those that were tended to be built in locations where bikes aren't an option either, usually more for the strategic benefit than because people thought that carrying heavy loads up hills on their back made a pleasant change from roads clogged with horse and carts.

acaloiar 11y ago

Even as a cyclist these designs seem myopic to the demands of civic design such as pedestrian friendliness and affordability. Perhaps a Dubai could afford retrofitting, but as these designs stand, they are only practical (and I use that loosely) for new construction.

jbb555 11y ago

It would look empty, because who would choose to live there?

zyxley 11y ago

> and maybe even wheel their bike through stores as they shop, with a sleeping baby in the bike carrier, or use the basket to hold groceries Anyone who has ever actually had a bike for more than a week and who actually shops for their own groceries will know this is a terrible idea.

jrock08 11y ago
Why? I use panniers for my groceries, however, the grocery store won't allow me to just bring my bike inside, so instead I have to take the panniers off my bike and put them in a cart. Using my bike as the cart would make sense.
- zyxley 11y ago
  Now imagine trying to get something from a freezer or off of a top shelf without having to put the kickstand down and then up again after over and over and over.

throwaway41597 11y ago

Misleading title and absurd idea: they suggest having bike lanes inside buildings. This is wasting precious real estate: the indoor bike lanes and parkings are nearly as big as the apartments they service. Why not build streets in buildings if you prefer cars? or a river if you're a boat person? or a half-pipe for skaters?

electricblue 11y ago

particular small areas with extremely high pop density might improve if cars were banned but for the most part adding separate bike paths that don't interact with roads much is the way to go. The sloped apartments seem dangerous and stupid.

ctdonath 11y ago
particular small areas with extremely high pop density might improve if cars were banned Cars, on the whole, occupy a single flat level. Why don't buildings spread out over roads as the norm? rather than the occasional oddity of a road tunneling thru a building, why isn't that the norm? Ventilation etc problems can be solved. There's N stories of unused space over the roads; leave the first 2-3 stories for road tunneling, and fill in the building-sized empty spaces above.
- electricblue 11y ago
  Probably because it's prohibitively expensive compared with just building a larger building next to the road and it's aesthetically pleasing to have space between buildings and humans like sunlight.

mroll 11y ago

One problem that immediately stands out to me is how sweaty everyone would be. I'm in shape but riding around a city on a hot day would have me drenched.

dalke 11y ago
In this vision of the future, I believe all of the bike paths will be indoors and air conditioned.

wehadfun 11y ago

A bike friendly building is a good idea if city really, really wanted to promote bike use. Being able to ride your bike into a grocery store, shop, then ride your bike into your kitchen and unload is kind of awesome. But this is the last step after bike only roads and decent bike public transportation.

Shivetya 11y ago

If exposed to weather it is an automatic fail. Sorry, that is just how it works. From any transportation alternative that is no enclosed it always comes down to comfort. One day it is too hot, another too cold, or too wet, and on and on, until the excuse is no longer needed as the alternative mode is parked. So any bicycle or pedestrian friendly environment needs weather protection as part of its design. It does not need be fully enclosed but that type of protection may be required depending on climate. Perhaps a convertible system where panels retract?

larrymyers 11y ago
I happily commute by bike year round in Chicago, as do many other thousands of people that live in the city. It gets into the 90's in the summer, and well below freezing in the winter. If it's hot I pack my work clothes and change (and shower if needed) at work. If it's cold I dress warmly. It's amazing how quickly you warm up when pedaling more than a few miles. If it's raining I wear a rain jacket, and the fenders on my bike keeps water from splashing up on me. So no, weather is not an automatic fail. It's just a mindset change if you're used to be in the enclosed bubble that car provides.

hackuser 11y ago

I had thought the custom on HN was to post valuable, constructive comments, and not to find fault or to post typical Internet forum sniping and hyperbole. Perhaps it's my impression, but I've rarely seen anything constructive recently. Almost everything in this discussion, for example, is reaction and sniping ("useless", "absurd", "stupid", etc.). It's a way to hang out and socialize online; there's nothing wrong with it. But personally, I've read enough Internet sniping for a lifetime; it's not thoughtful, informative, insightful or constructive; I don't learn anything and leave uninspired. Perhaps it's just my impression or it's temporary; perhaps it's a bigger change (related to YC and its leadership distancing themselves from HN?). Is there anywhere online where the sniping is eliminated and the discussion more valuable? EDIT: Sorry, I know it's off-topic, but there's no other place to post it (that I know of).

yodsanklai 11y ago
No problem with people saying "it's useless" as long as they make their point with some arguments (which was the case with some of the other comments).
- hackuser 11y ago
  > No problem with people saying "it's useless" as long as they make their point with some arguments My opinion differs: 1) IME, comments which begin with hyperbole such as "it's useless" rarely improve beyond that. I generally stop reading there (I don't have time to read everything). My theory, anecodotally confirmed, is that if they are careless with their language (i.e., the lazy use of hyperbole), probably they will be careless with their content. 2) It's rude to whomever wrote the article, and it also creates that environment for interactions between commenters. 3) That kind of rant is like a virus; it spreads through discussions and through the community. I believe this concept is well-established among veteran forum maintainers. From Paul Graham, talking about what he learned from running HN: [1] It's pretty clear now that the broken windows theory applies to community sites as well. The theory is that minor forms of bad behavior encourage worse ones … I was living in New York when Giuliani introduced the reforms that made the broken windows theory famous, and the transformation was miraculous. And I was a Reddit user when the opposite happened there, and the transformation was equally dramatic. ... Bad comments are like kudzu: they take over rapidly. … If someone submits a lame article, the other submissions don't all become lame. But if someone posts a stupid comment on a thread, that sets the tone for the region around it. ---- [1] http://www.paulgraham.com/hackernews.html http://www.paulgraham.com/hackernews.html

coldcode 11y ago

I live 43 miles from my job, all on major interstates, in a big metro area. What good would this do? Unless you designed the city for mixed living/working/shopping in the first place, most US cities could never change to be bike first. This isn't SimCity where you can raze the whole town.

s73v3r 11y ago
"I live 43 miles from my job, all on major interstates, in a big metro area." Nobody forced you to live so far away from your job. You're already catered to by virtue of having those interstates in the first place. Quit complaining that other people, who aren't you, are finally getting some attention.
- logfromblammo 11y ago
  Other than all the other people that outbid you for less distant homes, you mean. Or those who consistently NIMBY-veto any potential development of high-rise residential buildings near their existing homes. Or the zoning boards that outlaw the very concept of homes being adjacent to businesses. Actually, there are quite a lot of people who force me to live further away from my job than is strictly necessary. They are the very same people who would almost certainly undermine--and eventually destroy--any bicycle-oriented development. It would be unwise to dismiss those factors as mere whining.
  - s73v3r 11y ago
    No. Sorry, but it's still you who choose to live that far away from your job. You could have chosen another job, or you could have chosen to spend more money on a house, or buy less house. Nobody forced you to live where you do right now. That decision was all you.
    - logfromblammo 11y ago
      So you're basically telling me it's my fault for not being rich enough to do what I want. Thanks. If I had unlimited time and unlimited funds, I could certainly shorten my commute down to the distance from my bedroom to my in-home office, all in my palatial mansion in the heart of a culturally vibrant, crime-free, educated, and thriving city. Unfortunately, living in the real world, there are external constraints upon my decisions that I have no individual control over. Those constraints rule out the fantasy that you seem to have invented wherein I can just choose to be Batman in my Batcave, and the local government begs me for my help via a spotlight, instead of constantly demanding that I jump through whatever idiotic regulatory hoops it cares to set up. In the real world, the amount I am paid for my work is determined by market conditions. The affordability of housing is determined by market conditions. The cost of living is determined by market conditions. Within those bounds, I make the best decisions I can, according to my own priorities. And yes, I do have higher priorities than being able to walk or bicycle to work. I believe those priorities cannot be greatly altered while still remaining a socially responsible person. There are more variables involved than just home-office distance and pay rate. You have no idea what it would cost for me to halve my commute distance, or to quarter it. It may well be the difference between retiring at age 75 instead of 67, or not retiring ever. Or it may be the difference between helping my all my kids to pay college tuition, or not. Or maybe it's just the difference between eating fresh ground beef or canned Spam. This is why I suggest it is foolish to blithely discount all those unseen individual reasons people have for following a particular lifestyle. People generally make the best decisions they can, using the resources they have available, according to the priorities they have established for themselves. So when someone says, "I wish I could live closer to work," your response probably should not be, "You can, but you obviously don't want it enough." Because what you're conveying is that person is not enough of a selfish prick to make their spouse commute further, send their kids to lower-performing schools, spend more money on an apartment, house, or condo with less relative utility independent of its location, spend more money now at the expense of savings or investments, possibly uproot any existing social networks for other members of the household, maybe adapt to an entirely different culture in the new location, and even physically moving a truckload of accumulated property and possessions over some distance. What that person was really saying, without actually saying it, was, "I wish I could live closer to work without changing into a sociopath, ascetic, hermit, or hobo, and without switching to job that I would hate." So maybe adopt a new priority, and make sure it ranks higher than biking to work: don't be a dick. That's it. Have some care for the daily struggles of your fellow humans. You might just find that redesigning entire cities to make cyclists happier has a side-effect of making all the non-cyclists absolutely miserable. And maybe the current automobile-centric design of cities is overly unfair to bikers. You can't just ignore bikers because you love driving. You have to consider the impact on everyone, not just your paragons, eidolons, and chosen ones.

domfletcher 11y ago

I'm curious to see the interaction between self driving cars and bicycle friendly cities. What about banning human driven cars from a city and then using the resultant savings in road space to make it more cycle friendly?

jules 11y ago

I wonder if that expert has been to the Netherlands or Copenhagen. In fact I wonder whether he has really experienced a bike for day to day use, because some of the ideas are very strange. It's telling that most bikes in the pictures are racing bikes. What's the advantage of bikes in apartment buildings? Why not park the bike at the ground floor? It would waste a lot of space in the corridors. Think about what you'd rather have: 2 meters extra apartment, or 2 meters extra wide corridor. Bikes in shops will not work either. Walking through a shop with a bike seems extremely unwieldy; you would need much larger space between the shelves. A bike in your hand makes it hard to pick up things from the shelves. A bike does not stay upright by itself when you go to pick up something from the shelves, so you have to park it with that thing that I don't know the English name of. Even then, if you load the bike with a bag of groceries it usually falls over. When you are walking on one side of your bike it's hard to reach over your bike while not falling over. Bike parking space is a non-problem compared to car parking space. No cars whatsoever is unrealistic even in bike utopia. How do you move big and heavy things? No ambulance, no fire trucks?

benkuykendall 11y ago
Kickstand?
- jules 11y ago
  Yes, thanks :)
pi-err 11y ago
Agreed. Strangely, this concept seems to replicate with bikes most mistakes done previously with cars (and 60's concepts around planes). The designer is actually sort of aware of this, not understanding the consequences: > "Residential bike parking should have the same space-syntax relationship to the front door and kitchen as car parking does in a contemporary house in the suburbs," Fleming says. Designing cities around people, not a way to transport them, is missing from this approach. It's actually a much harder challenge than figuring out funny (and unsustainable) ways to bring "speed" to personal transportation within cities. Creatively, this concept is entirely underwhelming.

cdnsteve 11y ago

I think the concept is interesting but needs some tweaking. The main issue with any core downtown is space. There simply isn't any available, for anyone. The space that is available is extremely costly so we need to think outside the box. Bike paths on the ground aren't the only option. Go up. Elevated bike paths, much like the Vancouver Skyrail, are an option. http://www.railway-technology.com/projects/vancouver/vancouver5.html http://www.railway-technology.com/projects/vancouver/vancouv... - The elevated structure would only be for cyclists - You could literally ride above all the downtown traffic - Dedicated lanes so you don't get road rage

Kluny 11y ago

I'm a cyclist and I love the idea of making cities more bike friendly, but this group of designers has missed a major point. Cities are for PEOPLE. Not for cars, not for bikes, but for humans. Space for people to live and exist in should be the highest priority, and anytime you start cutting into living space to make more room for vehicles, you're making the city less human friendly. That's what these guys seem to be doing. They're saying, "cars aren't important, bikes are!" But neither bikes nor cars are important. People are. I'd even suggest that a major reason why cars have supremacy at the moment is that they are more inclusive of people than bikes are. I prefer using my bike any time I possibly can, but I am young, fit, childless and live within 2 minutes of my job. Cars are inclusive of people who have more than one kid, live across an interstate from their job, and may have mobility issues - and bikes are not. This redesigned city needs to make room for people who aren't 25 years old and single.

_delirium 11y ago
That's very cultural I think, not really inherent. My impression from living in Copenhagen from some years is that bikes in that context are somewhat more inclusive than cars, though neither is perfect. (I personally mostly used a mixture of walking + transit.) Families with two kids use bikes all the time [1], and the median bicyclist is a middle-aged office commuter, not a 25-year-old single person. Mobility scooters are also permitted in bike lanes (and you see them fairly often), which further expands the inclusiveness of bicycle infrastructure. [1] These are popular among families: http://livingcph.dk/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/christiania.jpg http://livingcph.dk/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/christiania.j...
drsim 11y ago
It's extreme for sure, but it's a concept. 'Concept cars' are produced as a visionary direction a car manufacturer may take their range. This should be read the same. I live in Copenhagen and can't observe any way in which cars here are more inclusive than bikes. A high percentage of bikes have a child seat, there are cargo bikes for multi-child families and the rail network is geared up to take bikes for commuters. Older people cycle well past retirement, so their lifelong mobility keeps them healthily mobile too. The big, fast metal box of a car dehumanises people by isolating them from slower and more vulnerable road users. Bikes mix much better with pedestrians when they need too than a looming car.

ilaksh 11y ago

I like the general idea of moving away from cars and creating architecture that supports that. I feel that my idea solves many more problems than this design though. I do not have drawings and 3d renderings etc. or own a firm and I am just an individual, but my tiny villages concept is much more comprehensive. http://runvnc.github.io/tinyvillage/ http://runvnc.github.io/tinyvillage/

netcan 11y ago

There seems to be a great amount of enthusiasm in the zeitgeist about the future, positive and negative predictions. A lot of it comes with some far out economics baked in nonchalantly. Basic incomes, abundance economies & zero marginal cost everything. I like it and I do quite a bit of indulging in this sort of thing myself. But… I don't think I'm seeing the trends in gadgetry, software, and manufactured goods at work everywhere. The production cost (and often the price) of manufactured goods (used to be "mass produced) has come down tremendously compared with average income. The trend is hundreds of years old. Underpants, sugar bowls, cereal commodities and almost everything else you can fit under a very wide umbrella of "manufactured goods" is heading towards free, or at least extremely cheap. We've seen it happen with a lot of things. Clothes pins & pencils used to be worth something, but I can't remember cost ever being a factor. They're basically free. Software also. I agree that a lot of things are headed towards "abundance." The things that aren't are often things that keep getting better, things where we have an appetite for (qualitative) more, iphones & whatnot. The bicycles come into it at the points where there isn't a fruitful trend towards more, better everything. Housing & transport are still most people's 2 biggest expenses. These have improved in quality over time and we consume more (bigger house, long commute, overseas holiday…) but there isn't an obvious "trend towards abundance." The fact that a radical idea (radical because of the radical trade off of eliminating cars) like this is interesting is kind of proof that this thing is not moving and we're frustrated. We still commute a lot, and we don't enjoy it. It pollutes. It's noisy. Expensive. Slow. It's not much different than 1980 or even 1965. I think housing and transport are the stick in the abundance ideas. In 25 years roads might be full of quite, clean, electric, driverless, parkingless cars but even that amazing achievement will still not match the technology trends that have brought other things up the quality and abundance curve.

kazinator 11y ago

I speak as a non-car-owning bicycle commuter when I say that bicycle lanes inside apartment building hallways are ... glaringly stupid. Rabid bicyclowns like this give the rest of us a bad reputation for fanaticism.

joveian 11y ago

I like that they are trying to consider different possibilities, although I'm not personally fond of what they came up with. For example, one picture looked like ramps for bikes to go over cars, but in practice it works better for cyclists to go under (even though from an engineering standpoint it is more work to put the heavy traffic on top). I also don't want bikes to be indoors (and I primarily bike for transportation). I like David Hembrow's blog about cycling infrastructure in the Netherlands. Here is a good post on myths and excuses about cycling infrastructure: http://www.aviewfromthecyclepath.com/2011/02/all-those-myths-and-excuses-in-one-post.html http://www.aviewfromthecyclepath.com/2011/02/all-those-myths...

lifeformed 11y ago
Why should bikes go under the cars?
- joveian 11y ago
  Otherwise bikes get an extra hill :). And then you get extra speed when you don't need it. Down and then up is easy. Although for typical intersections I'm not sure either is a particularly good idea most of the time. Other options are separate signals or giving priority to cyclists (Hembrow has a bunch of pictures of this stuff), or, as someone else mentioned, for high density areas having a separate fully elevated bike path could work too.