7 ms·

It depends on what you mean by efficient, I guess. I like the graphic on this article, https://www.treehugger.com/urban-design/how-much-space-do-people-take-dif

It depends on what you mean by efficient, I guess. I like the graphic on this article, https://www.treehugger.com/urban-design/how-much-space-do-people-take-different-modes-transport.html https://www.treehugger.com/urban-design/how-much-space-do-pe... It shows how many more people can efficiently use roads while on bikes than in cars. So, if we define efficiency by that measure (obviously this matters more in cities and congested areas), then yes, it's more efficient.

rayiner 8y ago
I see that graphic a lot, but it's not a very useful one, because it ignores residential patterns. Most people can't use a bike. So if you displace one car, you're not going to replace it with one bike, much less than 5 that would otherwise fit in the same space. The efficiency question is: what minimizes the amount of collective time people spend getting where they need to go. Bike infrastructure might actually make that worse, slowing down the majority for the sake of a tiny minority that can use a bike to get where they're going.
- bluejekyll 8y ago
  > it ignores residential patterns I would argue that what we need to discuss more, is how do we make transit more efficient for the different residential patterns. Is driving to a parking lot, and then getting on a bike, scooter, skateboard, a more efficient option? Or transferring to a train/bus? Do we really want people driving into city centers? > Most people can't use a bike. I don't think you mean that exactly, I think you're extrapolating from your residential patterns comment. Most people can ride a bike, we just need to make it a better option in different areas. > what minimizes the amount of collective time people spend getting where they need to go. Bike infrastructure might actually make that worse. This isn't supported by my personal experience (live in a city), it's faster for me to bike somewhere, than drive and look for parking. Here's a 538 article specifically on this: https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/bike-lanes-dont-cause-traffic-jams-if-youre-smart-about-where-you-build-them/ https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/bike-lanes-dont-cause-t... "This is an important point: Bike lanes don’t cause a lot more congestion if you put them on the right streets. If you cut down the size of streets that are already near capacity, you’ll create severe congestion. But if you start with roads that are well under capacity, you’ll only increase the congestion a little bit. And it may not even be noticeable."
  - cannonedhamster 8y ago
    Doesn't sound like you know Cambridge at all. There aren't many under capacity roads, especially when winter snow comes down. What this is going to do is make traffic slower, encourage more bikers who will ignore traffic rules and act unpredictably, and generally muck things up. Cambridge is actually probably a really great candidate for bike lanes with multiple colleges nearby, but let's not pretend this isn't going to absolutelymake commuting worse. Biking into work isn't an option for me. When I come into the Cambridge office it's 5 hours in the car round trip. Nevermind the jerk motorcycles who drive down center lanes, cut cars off, pop wheelies in the highway, etc. I can definitely say the animus bicyclists receive is undue. My wife and daughter have been threatened with vehicles, I've been hit in a crosswalk walking by a car, and I can't even get into how bad it is trying to follow the rules in Boston with pedestrians crossing against the signal while you've got a short green.
    - megaremote 8y ago
      > bikers who will ignore traffic rules Bikes ignoring traffic rules is a 1000x better than cars ignoring traffic rules. Since cars actually kill people. 40,000 a year in the US. Every year. But hey, you don't give a shit about that, right?
      - JohnFen 8y ago
        This is true, but it doesn't excuse bikes ignoring traffic rules. Also, bikes striking pedestrians can kill them just as dead as cars can.
- teddyh 8y ago
  > Most people can't use a bike. Huh? What kind of people are you referring to? In my simple observation, most people can indeed use a bike. And in some countries, like Denmark, or China, it is my impression that most people do use a bike.
  - wtetzner 8y ago
    I think he means most people don't live close enough to the city that they could reasonably ride a bike to get where they need to go.
    - atoav 8y ago
      That is why you have park & ride concepts and trains. In many european cities you have places just outside the city where you can park your car or hop of and take your bike and take the last mile by bike or public transport. Having all your commuters drive their car into the city is not at all a good idea. I lived for years at one heavy intersection in one of Germanys biggest cities and I can tell you, if you watch the traffic for half an hour you will see maybe one or two cars with more than one person in them. I moved from their because the dust and the noise were having a huge impact on my health. I don't think it is about banning cars from city centers totally. It is about finding acceptable solutions that work without forcing people. Encourage them. Have a working public transport system. Make it cheap. Make it so cheap that driving a car will cost you. Include all problems cars cause in a urban space in some kind of toll or tax.
      - wtetzner 8y ago
        Park & ride is a fine idea, but Massachusetts needs to invest in that sort of infrastructure before it will become viable for commuters. Currently there's the commuter rail, which is hard to get to from many areas, is quite expensive, and doesn't run very frequently. It's not good enough to get people to stop driving.
        jessaustin 8y ago
- adrianN 8y ago
  Just building protected bikelanes is not enough for cities that were build over decades with a car-centric layout. You need to drastically reduce parking and increase the density. This is a process that will take a long time. Changing cities is hard.
  - cannonedhamster 8y ago
    Boston/Cambridge were built for horses not cars. A car centric layout would actually create way more space to accommodate the bicycles.
    - adrianN 8y ago
      More space for traffic is generally bad for everybody since it increases the number of miles between the places where you want to be.
- beat 8y ago
  Take a bike on public transportation for longer-distance routes. I don't know what sort of barbaric backwater you live in, but in my bike-friendly city, all the buses and light rail have bike racks, and bike commuters regularly use them for the longer legs. In a super-dense city like Cambridge, it's even more true. Less need for long travel, more need for bikes in the congested center.
  - wtetzner 8y ago
    The problem is the people who can't afford to live in Cambridge. There isn't much in the way of public transportation to get you to Cambridge.
    - beat 8y ago
      How many of those people can afford a car?
- TulliusCicero 8y ago
  > Most people can't use a bike. This is simply false. Most people absolutely can use a bike. Maybe not for every possible trip, but for many of them, yes. Just look at the bike rate in the Netherlands, if you don't believe me. There are a variety of possible modes available, and they can be mixed and matched as people need and want. Driving to a suburban park and ride transit station, taking the train into the city, and then using bike share to get to your final destination, is a perfectly sensible thing.
  - wtetzner 8y ago
    > Driving to a suburban park and ride transit station, taking the train into the city, and then using bike share to get to your final destination, is a perfectly sensible thing. And if Massachusetts had that kind of infrastructure, it would work out fine. But it doesn't, and just making a city more bike-friendly doesn't solve the problem on its own.
- baron_harkonnen 8y ago
  I think you could arguably entirely remove non-commercial vehicles form dense cities like Boston and New York. You could build massive parking garages at the limits of the city and suburban commuter could just park and take alternate transit from there. During peak traffic in both of these cities I've been easily able to walk as fast as traffic, forget how much faster public transit or biking would be. If you displaced all the cars within a city, then transportation within the city would likely be faster and more efficient for everyone. City buses would be much nicer if there was virtually no traffic in the city. Biking would likewise be a more realistic option if was dramatically safer and had better infrastructure for storage. of course that's a pipe-dream, but the obsessive car culture in the US is a nightmare so it's nice to have some contrast.
  - cannonedhamster 8y ago
    Not all of the mass transit in Boston is weather protected. Snow routinely causes train stoppages. The lines are also really old, being dug by hand when street cars and horse and buggy still existed. There's also the face of massive cost increases forcing people to take transit and park, not to mention the increase in commuting time by not getting directly to your location. I've been on some really great transit systems in places like Bucharest and Tokyo. Boston is an unfortunately poor comparison on some lines.
  - rayiner 8y ago
    I don’t disagree with that at all—that’s the ideal. But I don’t know what version of the United States you’re living in, but in mine, most cities don’t have that infrastructure, are too politically incompetent to be able to build that infrastructure cost effectively, and most of the few cities that do have it (like DC and New York) have let it decay to the point where it’s not timely and reliable. One of the things transit advocates fail to grapple with is that our municipal political systems in the United States are broken. When it costs New York City 5-7 times as much money per mile of subway as it does Paris or London, you can’t build enough subway to meet peoples’ needs. (The debate over transit would be totally different if, for what MTA spends now, it was building five times as much track to meet peoples’ needs.) Who would run the transit that goes from the edge parking lots to the city in your hypothetical? It would be WMATA. The same organization that, despite ample funding, let DC’s Metro decay to the point that they had to turn off automatic train control—a feature that was designed into the system at inception in the 1970s. That’s the political reality we have to design our transportation systems against. Looking over the pond at what they do in Amsterdam or Paris is foolish—it’s like designing a plane for earth’s gravity based on what it would take to fly a plane on Mars.
- JohnFen 8y ago
  > Most people can't use a bike. What? How do you figure? My observation is that most people absolutely can (and many would seriously benefit from it). Maybe not for every situation, but for the rare ones where a bike won't do, a cab will.
  - modoc 8y ago
    Winter (ice, snow, freezing winds) Rain storms People who don't want to show up to work sweaty (my work never had showers and I'm the sort of person who creates a lot of sweat (and smell) even if I'm taking it easy on a bike People who live more than X miles from where they are going People who live up/down major hills etc..... I lived IN Boston for a while, and actually rode my bike to work during the summer (didn't own a car) and just let everyone suffer through my sweat. But I couldn't do it in the winter (yes I know some people do). Aside from the physical cold/misery, the snow and ice made many roads extremely dangerous. The last few places I've lived were in the suburbs, commuting to other suburbs (luckily I've been avoiding the worst city traffic). The distances were too great to bike (unless you like a 3+ hour commute). shrug. Its great if you live somewhere that biking works for you, but don't expect everyone everywhere can just give up their car, jump on a bike, and carry on with life...
    - megaremote 8y ago
      Wow, excuses? Ok. Yes, car driving is easier, it always will be. But how about you drivers start actually paying for what you use, the pollution you create, the roads that are paid for by taxes?
      - modoc 8y ago
        You mean gasoline taxes? lol
        megaremote 8y ago
        No, since that only covers a small amount of what you use. Think about the 40,000 deaths a year. Who pays for that? Not you. The 500,000 seriously injured? Not you. The pollution you cause? Not you. The 3m children with Asthma caused by drivers? Not you. The list goes on...
- llukas 8y ago
  > I see that graphic a lot, but it's not a very useful one, because it ignores residential patterns. Yes parking needed for cars would be several times bigger than what cars occupy.
- megaremote 8y ago
  > Most people can't use a bike. This is a lie, most people can use a bike.

rayiner 8y ago

I see that graphic a lot, but it's not a very useful one, because it ignores residential patterns. Most people can't use a bike. So if you displace one car, you're not going to replace it with one bike, much less than 5 that would otherwise fit in the same space. The efficiency question is: what minimizes the amount of collective time people spend getting where they need to go. Bike infrastructure might actually make that worse, slowing down the majority for the sake of a tiny minority that can use a bike to get where they're going.

bluejekyll 8y ago
> it ignores residential patterns I would argue that what we need to discuss more, is how do we make transit more efficient for the different residential patterns. Is driving to a parking lot, and then getting on a bike, scooter, skateboard, a more efficient option? Or transferring to a train/bus? Do we really want people driving into city centers? > Most people can't use a bike. I don't think you mean that exactly, I think you're extrapolating from your residential patterns comment. Most people can ride a bike, we just need to make it a better option in different areas. > what minimizes the amount of collective time people spend getting where they need to go. Bike infrastructure might actually make that worse. This isn't supported by my personal experience (live in a city), it's faster for me to bike somewhere, than drive and look for parking. Here's a 538 article specifically on this: https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/bike-lanes-dont-cause-traffic-jams-if-youre-smart-about-where-you-build-them/ https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/bike-lanes-dont-cause-t... "This is an important point: Bike lanes don’t cause a lot more congestion if you put them on the right streets. If you cut down the size of streets that are already near capacity, you’ll create severe congestion. But if you start with roads that are well under capacity, you’ll only increase the congestion a little bit. And it may not even be noticeable."
- cannonedhamster 8y ago
  Doesn't sound like you know Cambridge at all. There aren't many under capacity roads, especially when winter snow comes down. What this is going to do is make traffic slower, encourage more bikers who will ignore traffic rules and act unpredictably, and generally muck things up. Cambridge is actually probably a really great candidate for bike lanes with multiple colleges nearby, but let's not pretend this isn't going to absolutelymake commuting worse. Biking into work isn't an option for me. When I come into the Cambridge office it's 5 hours in the car round trip. Nevermind the jerk motorcycles who drive down center lanes, cut cars off, pop wheelies in the highway, etc. I can definitely say the animus bicyclists receive is undue. My wife and daughter have been threatened with vehicles, I've been hit in a crosswalk walking by a car, and I can't even get into how bad it is trying to follow the rules in Boston with pedestrians crossing against the signal while you've got a short green.
  - megaremote 8y ago
    > bikers who will ignore traffic rules Bikes ignoring traffic rules is a 1000x better than cars ignoring traffic rules. Since cars actually kill people. 40,000 a year in the US. Every year. But hey, you don't give a shit about that, right?
    - JohnFen 8y ago
      This is true, but it doesn't excuse bikes ignoring traffic rules. Also, bikes striking pedestrians can kill them just as dead as cars can.
teddyh 8y ago
> Most people can't use a bike. Huh? What kind of people are you referring to? In my simple observation, most people can indeed use a bike. And in some countries, like Denmark, or China, it is my impression that most people do use a bike.
- wtetzner 8y ago
  I think he means most people don't live close enough to the city that they could reasonably ride a bike to get where they need to go.
  - atoav 8y ago
    That is why you have park & ride concepts and trains. In many european cities you have places just outside the city where you can park your car or hop of and take your bike and take the last mile by bike or public transport. Having all your commuters drive their car into the city is not at all a good idea. I lived for years at one heavy intersection in one of Germanys biggest cities and I can tell you, if you watch the traffic for half an hour you will see maybe one or two cars with more than one person in them. I moved from their because the dust and the noise were having a huge impact on my health. I don't think it is about banning cars from city centers totally. It is about finding acceptable solutions that work without forcing people. Encourage them. Have a working public transport system. Make it cheap. Make it so cheap that driving a car will cost you. Include all problems cars cause in a urban space in some kind of toll or tax.
    - wtetzner 8y ago
      Park & ride is a fine idea, but Massachusetts needs to invest in that sort of infrastructure before it will become viable for commuters. Currently there's the commuter rail, which is hard to get to from many areas, is quite expensive, and doesn't run very frequently. It's not good enough to get people to stop driving.
      - jessaustin 8y ago
adrianN 8y ago
Just building protected bikelanes is not enough for cities that were build over decades with a car-centric layout. You need to drastically reduce parking and increase the density. This is a process that will take a long time. Changing cities is hard.
- cannonedhamster 8y ago
  Boston/Cambridge were built for horses not cars. A car centric layout would actually create way more space to accommodate the bicycles.
  - adrianN 8y ago
    More space for traffic is generally bad for everybody since it increases the number of miles between the places where you want to be.
beat 8y ago
Take a bike on public transportation for longer-distance routes. I don't know what sort of barbaric backwater you live in, but in my bike-friendly city, all the buses and light rail have bike racks, and bike commuters regularly use them for the longer legs. In a super-dense city like Cambridge, it's even more true. Less need for long travel, more need for bikes in the congested center.
- wtetzner 8y ago
  The problem is the people who can't afford to live in Cambridge. There isn't much in the way of public transportation to get you to Cambridge.
  - beat 8y ago
    How many of those people can afford a car?
TulliusCicero 8y ago
> Most people can't use a bike. This is simply false. Most people absolutely can use a bike. Maybe not for every possible trip, but for many of them, yes. Just look at the bike rate in the Netherlands, if you don't believe me. There are a variety of possible modes available, and they can be mixed and matched as people need and want. Driving to a suburban park and ride transit station, taking the train into the city, and then using bike share to get to your final destination, is a perfectly sensible thing.
- wtetzner 8y ago
  > Driving to a suburban park and ride transit station, taking the train into the city, and then using bike share to get to your final destination, is a perfectly sensible thing. And if Massachusetts had that kind of infrastructure, it would work out fine. But it doesn't, and just making a city more bike-friendly doesn't solve the problem on its own.
baron_harkonnen 8y ago
I think you could arguably entirely remove non-commercial vehicles form dense cities like Boston and New York. You could build massive parking garages at the limits of the city and suburban commuter could just park and take alternate transit from there. During peak traffic in both of these cities I've been easily able to walk as fast as traffic, forget how much faster public transit or biking would be. If you displaced all the cars within a city, then transportation within the city would likely be faster and more efficient for everyone. City buses would be much nicer if there was virtually no traffic in the city. Biking would likewise be a more realistic option if was dramatically safer and had better infrastructure for storage. of course that's a pipe-dream, but the obsessive car culture in the US is a nightmare so it's nice to have some contrast.
- cannonedhamster 8y ago
  Not all of the mass transit in Boston is weather protected. Snow routinely causes train stoppages. The lines are also really old, being dug by hand when street cars and horse and buggy still existed. There's also the face of massive cost increases forcing people to take transit and park, not to mention the increase in commuting time by not getting directly to your location. I've been on some really great transit systems in places like Bucharest and Tokyo. Boston is an unfortunately poor comparison on some lines.
- rayiner 8y ago
  I don’t disagree with that at all—that’s the ideal. But I don’t know what version of the United States you’re living in, but in mine, most cities don’t have that infrastructure, are too politically incompetent to be able to build that infrastructure cost effectively, and most of the few cities that do have it (like DC and New York) have let it decay to the point where it’s not timely and reliable. One of the things transit advocates fail to grapple with is that our municipal political systems in the United States are broken. When it costs New York City 5-7 times as much money per mile of subway as it does Paris or London, you can’t build enough subway to meet peoples’ needs. (The debate over transit would be totally different if, for what MTA spends now, it was building five times as much track to meet peoples’ needs.) Who would run the transit that goes from the edge parking lots to the city in your hypothetical? It would be WMATA. The same organization that, despite ample funding, let DC’s Metro decay to the point that they had to turn off automatic train control—a feature that was designed into the system at inception in the 1970s. That’s the political reality we have to design our transportation systems against. Looking over the pond at what they do in Amsterdam or Paris is foolish—it’s like designing a plane for earth’s gravity based on what it would take to fly a plane on Mars.
JohnFen 8y ago
> Most people can't use a bike. What? How do you figure? My observation is that most people absolutely can (and many would seriously benefit from it). Maybe not for every situation, but for the rare ones where a bike won't do, a cab will.
- modoc 8y ago
  Winter (ice, snow, freezing winds) Rain storms People who don't want to show up to work sweaty (my work never had showers and I'm the sort of person who creates a lot of sweat (and smell) even if I'm taking it easy on a bike People who live more than X miles from where they are going People who live up/down major hills etc..... I lived IN Boston for a while, and actually rode my bike to work during the summer (didn't own a car) and just let everyone suffer through my sweat. But I couldn't do it in the winter (yes I know some people do). Aside from the physical cold/misery, the snow and ice made many roads extremely dangerous. The last few places I've lived were in the suburbs, commuting to other suburbs (luckily I've been avoiding the worst city traffic). The distances were too great to bike (unless you like a 3+ hour commute). shrug. Its great if you live somewhere that biking works for you, but don't expect everyone everywhere can just give up their car, jump on a bike, and carry on with life...
  - megaremote 8y ago
    Wow, excuses? Ok. Yes, car driving is easier, it always will be. But how about you drivers start actually paying for what you use, the pollution you create, the roads that are paid for by taxes?
    - modoc 8y ago
      You mean gasoline taxes? lol
      - megaremote 8y ago
        No, since that only covers a small amount of what you use. Think about the 40,000 deaths a year. Who pays for that? Not you. The 500,000 seriously injured? Not you. The pollution you cause? Not you. The 3m children with Asthma caused by drivers? Not you. The list goes on...
llukas 8y ago
> I see that graphic a lot, but it's not a very useful one, because it ignores residential patterns. Yes parking needed for cars would be several times bigger than what cars occupy.
megaremote 8y ago
> Most people can't use a bike. This is a lie, most people can use a bike.