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The average commute is 15 miles and the average cycling speed is 9mph which gives you an average of 3 hours per day commuting via bicycle. Can't imagine why rid

The average commute is 15 miles and the average cycling speed is 9mph which gives you an average of 3 hours per day commuting via bicycle. Can't imagine why riding bikes isn't normal!

jacobolus 9y ago
The average commute in cities with more cycling isn’t 3 hours. People just live closer to work. The big problem the USA has is that its zoning laws and urban planning are completely screwed up, making it impossible in most places to build bike- and pedestrian-friendly neighborhoods. (Minimum lot sizes, low units per lot, low height limits, large setbacks, wide streets, massive numbers of car parking spaces required everywhere, few mixed-use areas, neighborhoods cut off by highways, lots of disconnected dead-end streets, very high urban speed limits, ...)
- Cw67NTN8F 9y ago
  The road + trees, plus walking path is x. So carving out a 10-12 feet bike lane (two ways) is a challenge.
OscarCunningham 9y ago
The question should be why a 15 mile commute is normal!
- falcolas 9y ago
  Typically because families in the latter half of the 1900's wanted to move out of the crowded cities to raise their children, forming suburbs. We're left with that infrastructure with no real money to change it.
  - jacobolus 9y ago
    A lot of the regulatory changes were explicitly racist. By “crowded” what many really meant was “full of those people” (and especially after Brown v. Board “my kids might have to go to school with those kids”). And regulations were intended to prevent poor racial minorities from following. (Starting with explicit rejection of minorities, but when that was found illegal switching to regulations that deliberately made suburban life more exclusive or expensive.) Edit: For the downvoters, this is not a controversial summary. Start with e.g. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/how-federal-government-intentionally-racially-segregated-american-cities-180963494/ https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/how-federal-governmen... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_flight https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_flight https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Residential_segregation_in_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Residential_segregation_in_the... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exclusionary_zoning https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exclusionary_zoning There are ways we can start changing it though: change the zoning laws, change the tax laws, etc. Changes to the built infrastructure will slowly respond over the coming decades.
    - jcims 9y ago
      Lol, I don't think blackophobia is the primary driver for suburbs. Look at Billings, MT. .7% black and it is almost all suburb. Lots of people just like having a little privacy and a domain of their own.
      - jacobolus 9y ago
        Montana is 600 miles by 250 miles and has almost no people living in it. It’s entirely unsurprising that people who choose to move or stay there want to take up lots of space. As for racial makeup: Montana was largely settled by people given free land in return for moving there, and then in the late 19th century a mining boom; during that era local laws were quite discriminatory. It hasn’t recently had any booming industry that might attract a wide variety of immigrants. Billings is the largest city and has only 160k people. Billings is spread out along a federally funded interstate highway, and has plenty of available land. It’s a place with harsh winters that would be rather unfriendly to pedestrians/cyclists anyway. 95% of households own a car, and on average there are about 2 cars per household. (For contrast, in NYC there are about 0.6 cars per household.) As far as I can tell buses are the only public transit in town.
        falcolas 9y ago
        Small FYI - that mining boom meant that laws against races, religions, or otherwise meant remarkably little. The Copper Barons ran the cities, and all they were interested in was your labor, either in the mines or in support of the miners. Of course, this was also a time when the color of your skin mattered less than your place of birth. Irish and Chinese were held in equal contempt. Even today, some of those mining towns are bigger melting pots of various races, religions, and cultures than the port cities.
    - falcolas 9y ago
      I won't dispute that race and class may very well have had influence on zoning laws. However, it's a rather fundamental human desire to own your property which drew people capable of making the move out to the suburbs - especially since it was affordable on a scale unseen before (good middle class wages, large houses selling for next to nothing, cheap transportation). Hell, my dad was only a telephone lineman for Ma' Bell, and he could afford 5 acres of land and a house in (our city's version of) the burbs. Regardless of future changes to zoning laws, not everybody wants to live in big cities. There's a strong appeal to live in a house of your own, where your children can play in the grass with their house pet. Where they can go to school with a class size where they have a chance to actually know everybody in their class. If you really want to increase the density of cities even more, people will either require a) no choice but to move to the big cities, or b) a fundamental shift in thinking about owning their homes and raising their families. And please remember that you will be working against eons of human nature when attempting to create that fundamental shift.
  - joe_the_user 9y ago
    We're left with that infrastructure with no real money to change it. And with no money maintain it. Also with an "infrastructure of corruption" that soaks up whatever money is spent to change the situation. America has painted itself into a bad corner today.
mi100hael 9y ago
9 mph is awfully slow. Most cyclists who ride on a regular basis would be able to average around 15 mph. An hour each way is still a little long, but not terrible considering it doubles as a workout and obviates the need to visit a gym.
- joe_the_user 9y ago
  I love cycling but a two-hour cycling commute is going to be impractical for even people who like to go to the gym. And if we're talking average American commutes, a lot of them involve routes where you might have only freeways between you and your destination.
- Cw67NTN8F 9y ago
  ...and crash into cars or trees .
- matte_black 9y ago
  Cycling to work is in no way a replacement for proper full body workout. It does not obviate the need to visit a gym.
  - samsonradu 9y ago
    Does help though, you can get away with way less workouts per week if you cycle every day. Most people barely workout anyway so it would definitely be an improvement.
  - watchdogtimer 9y ago
    Most people in the US get little or no exercise. __Any__ exercise would be a big improvement over none.
  - Buldak 9y ago
    Is a "full body" workout necessary for most people? Obviously you won't have much in the way of upper body strength, say, if all you do is bike commute. But my understanding is that the amount of exercise required to be healthy is much less than what most fitness enthusiasts are committed to. It wouldn't surprise me if simply biking to work were sufficient to net most of the vital benefits of exercise for most people. (And even if it weren't, I'd still doubt that a gym membership is necessary.)
tir 9y ago
When I biked to work, I lived close to the downtown of a mid-sized city in the US - with traffic, I often wound up getting to work faster via bike than car.
stefan_ 9y ago
9 mph is super fast in NYC. Here is the Mobility Report from 2016: http://www.nyc.gov/html/dot/downloads/pdf/mobility-report-2016-screen-optimized.pdf http://www.nyc.gov/html/dot/downloads/pdf/mobility-report-20... A bus will be 4-6 mph, a taxi at great expense averages 8-9 mph. Sure, if you're not doing all 15 miles in city center but come in from outside, you can do moderately better than that, but for connections inside the city taking a bike is already the fastest transportation, even if you can only do 9 mph (and most people, in a flat city like NY, can do a lot more).
Johnny555 9y ago
If traffic constrains you to 9 mph, you car isn't going to be much faster than 20 - 25mph. Though where I live, a 15 mile car commute is going to be at least 2 hours/day, unless you have enough flexibility to drive outside of typical commute hours. When I had a city commute (in SF), I was doing around 12mph average to get downtown, and biking was faster than the train (driving wasn't an option due to parking availability, both at home and work). When I had a longer bike commute mostly on bike trails, I averaged 15mph at a moderate pace - I could go faster if I pushed harder. Hills used to be an issue for a bike commute, they could really kill your average speed, but with the advent of electric bikes, hills are much less of an issue - electric assist can get you over the hill quickly and without much effort.

The average commute is 15 miles and the average cycling speed is 9mph which gives you an average of 3 hours per day commuting via bicycle. Can't imagine why riding bikes isn't normal!

jacobolus 9y ago

The average commute in cities with more cycling isn’t 3 hours. People just live closer to work. The big problem the USA has is that its zoning laws and urban planning are completely screwed up, making it impossible in most places to build bike- and pedestrian-friendly neighborhoods. (Minimum lot sizes, low units per lot, low height limits, large setbacks, wide streets, massive numbers of car parking spaces required everywhere, few mixed-use areas, neighborhoods cut off by highways, lots of disconnected dead-end streets, very high urban speed limits, ...)

Cw67NTN8F 9y ago
The road + trees, plus walking path is x. So carving out a 10-12 feet bike lane (two ways) is a challenge.

OscarCunningham 9y ago

The question should be why a 15 mile commute is normal!

falcolas 9y ago
Typically because families in the latter half of the 1900's wanted to move out of the crowded cities to raise their children, forming suburbs. We're left with that infrastructure with no real money to change it.
- jacobolus 9y ago
  A lot of the regulatory changes were explicitly racist. By “crowded” what many really meant was “full of those people” (and especially after Brown v. Board “my kids might have to go to school with those kids”). And regulations were intended to prevent poor racial minorities from following. (Starting with explicit rejection of minorities, but when that was found illegal switching to regulations that deliberately made suburban life more exclusive or expensive.) Edit: For the downvoters, this is not a controversial summary. Start with e.g. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/how-federal-government-intentionally-racially-segregated-american-cities-180963494/ https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/how-federal-governmen... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_flight https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_flight https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Residential_segregation_in_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Residential_segregation_in_the... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exclusionary_zoning https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exclusionary_zoning There are ways we can start changing it though: change the zoning laws, change the tax laws, etc. Changes to the built infrastructure will slowly respond over the coming decades.
  - jcims 9y ago
    Lol, I don't think blackophobia is the primary driver for suburbs. Look at Billings, MT. .7% black and it is almost all suburb. Lots of people just like having a little privacy and a domain of their own.
    - jacobolus 9y ago
      Montana is 600 miles by 250 miles and has almost no people living in it. It’s entirely unsurprising that people who choose to move or stay there want to take up lots of space. As for racial makeup: Montana was largely settled by people given free land in return for moving there, and then in the late 19th century a mining boom; during that era local laws were quite discriminatory. It hasn’t recently had any booming industry that might attract a wide variety of immigrants. Billings is the largest city and has only 160k people. Billings is spread out along a federally funded interstate highway, and has plenty of available land. It’s a place with harsh winters that would be rather unfriendly to pedestrians/cyclists anyway. 95% of households own a car, and on average there are about 2 cars per household. (For contrast, in NYC there are about 0.6 cars per household.) As far as I can tell buses are the only public transit in town.
      - falcolas 9y ago
        Small FYI - that mining boom meant that laws against races, religions, or otherwise meant remarkably little. The Copper Barons ran the cities, and all they were interested in was your labor, either in the mines or in support of the miners. Of course, this was also a time when the color of your skin mattered less than your place of birth. Irish and Chinese were held in equal contempt. Even today, some of those mining towns are bigger melting pots of various races, religions, and cultures than the port cities.
  - falcolas 9y ago
    I won't dispute that race and class may very well have had influence on zoning laws. However, it's a rather fundamental human desire to own your property which drew people capable of making the move out to the suburbs - especially since it was affordable on a scale unseen before (good middle class wages, large houses selling for next to nothing, cheap transportation). Hell, my dad was only a telephone lineman for Ma' Bell, and he could afford 5 acres of land and a house in (our city's version of) the burbs. Regardless of future changes to zoning laws, not everybody wants to live in big cities. There's a strong appeal to live in a house of your own, where your children can play in the grass with their house pet. Where they can go to school with a class size where they have a chance to actually know everybody in their class. If you really want to increase the density of cities even more, people will either require a) no choice but to move to the big cities, or b) a fundamental shift in thinking about owning their homes and raising their families. And please remember that you will be working against eons of human nature when attempting to create that fundamental shift.
- joe_the_user 9y ago
  We're left with that infrastructure with no real money to change it. And with no money maintain it. Also with an "infrastructure of corruption" that soaks up whatever money is spent to change the situation. America has painted itself into a bad corner today.

mi100hael 9y ago

9 mph is awfully slow. Most cyclists who ride on a regular basis would be able to average around 15 mph. An hour each way is still a little long, but not terrible considering it doubles as a workout and obviates the need to visit a gym.

joe_the_user 9y ago
I love cycling but a two-hour cycling commute is going to be impractical for even people who like to go to the gym. And if we're talking average American commutes, a lot of them involve routes where you might have only freeways between you and your destination.
Cw67NTN8F 9y ago
...and crash into cars or trees .
matte_black 9y ago
Cycling to work is in no way a replacement for proper full body workout. It does not obviate the need to visit a gym.
- samsonradu 9y ago
  Does help though, you can get away with way less workouts per week if you cycle every day. Most people barely workout anyway so it would definitely be an improvement.
- watchdogtimer 9y ago
  Most people in the US get little or no exercise. __Any__ exercise would be a big improvement over none.
- Buldak 9y ago
  Is a "full body" workout necessary for most people? Obviously you won't have much in the way of upper body strength, say, if all you do is bike commute. But my understanding is that the amount of exercise required to be healthy is much less than what most fitness enthusiasts are committed to. It wouldn't surprise me if simply biking to work were sufficient to net most of the vital benefits of exercise for most people. (And even if it weren't, I'd still doubt that a gym membership is necessary.)

tir 9y ago

When I biked to work, I lived close to the downtown of a mid-sized city in the US - with traffic, I often wound up getting to work faster via bike than car.

stefan_ 9y ago

9 mph is super fast in NYC. Here is the Mobility Report from 2016: http://www.nyc.gov/html/dot/downloads/pdf/mobility-report-2016-screen-optimized.pdf http://www.nyc.gov/html/dot/downloads/pdf/mobility-report-20... A bus will be 4-6 mph, a taxi at great expense averages 8-9 mph. Sure, if you're not doing all 15 miles in city center but come in from outside, you can do moderately better than that, but for connections inside the city taking a bike is already the fastest transportation, even if you can only do 9 mph (and most people, in a flat city like NY, can do a lot more).

Johnny555 9y ago

If traffic constrains you to 9 mph, you car isn't going to be much faster than 20 - 25mph. Though where I live, a 15 mile car commute is going to be at least 2 hours/day, unless you have enough flexibility to drive outside of typical commute hours. When I had a city commute (in SF), I was doing around 12mph average to get downtown, and biking was faster than the train (driving wasn't an option due to parking availability, both at home and work). When I had a longer bike commute mostly on bike trails, I averaged 15mph at a moderate pace - I could go faster if I pushed harder. Hills used to be an issue for a bike commute, they could really kill your average speed, but with the advent of electric bikes, hills are much less of an issue - electric assist can get you over the hill quickly and without much effort.