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We Need to Dream Bigger Than Bike Lanes

• smt88 7y ago
  > Cars are the slowest, lowest-bandwidth forms of urban transportation. This is the kind of thing I read a lot in micromobility advocacy articles, but it seems like it can't be true. How can a bike, scooter, or moped be either faster or higher-bandwidth than a car? Also, serious question: if electric SDCs became widespread, would it still make sense to advocate things like bikes? You can't transport a family of three or a baby as safely in a vehicle smaller than a car (as they lack things like walls and air bags), and the many obese, elderly, and disabled people in the US can't use micromobility easily.
  • ako 7y ago
    I had no problems transporting my children, even when still a baby, in a cargobike (bakfiets). It's a pretty convenient way of transporting your children in and out of the city, as it actually gets you to where you need to go. Compare this to a car: you cant really get to the store you need to be, instead you have to park in a parking garage and then carry your baby in the maxi-cosi to the store. I prefer a bike.
    • smt88 7y ago
      > I had no problems transporting my children, even when still a baby I believe that you and other people do this. I wouldn't do it because I'm afraid of what even a minor cycling accident could do to a child. Of course I'm coming from a US-centric viewpoint, where bikes share space with cars, pedestrians, and (now) scooters.
  • jessriedel 7y ago
    These articles are indeed often hyperbolic, and many of your points are fine and neglected by proponents. However, "higher bandwidth" probably refers to the number of people per second that can be transported through a certain lane width. At most speeds cars require roughly 2 seconds minimum between them, and they mostly are single occupancy, so they can't do more than 0.5 persons per second per ~12 foot lane. Bicycles can do more on account of less spacing front/back and side to side. (This is sort of surprising given that bikes have a slower top speed, but it's really the time-spacing between vehicles, not their top speed, that matters when you're operating at capacity.) Bus can do more on account of being more passengers per vehicle. Trains are denser yet. All these have drawbacks on other metrics, of course.
  • mayneack 7y ago
    Most trips are very short. West LA where I live, biking is my fastest commute option (4 miles) because I don't get stuck in traffic. Pushing people out of cars would probably speed up the cars that are used by reducing the traffic around them. Families can handle more than you'd expect, and I regularly ride the bus with elderly and disabled people, but even if you have someone that needs a car, they don't necessarily need a parking space at each end.
    • telesilla 7y ago
      LA is one of the best cities to push cycling - it hardly rains. If the city subsidized electric bicycle uptake it could be a beautiful thing. Of course, you'd had to also make car lobbying illegal so good luck with that.
  • crazygringo 7y ago
    In cities, bikes are often faster than cars because they just don't get held up by traffic. In Manhattan or Brooklyn on normal streets my bike goes the same speed as cars when everyone's moving... but I don't suffer any of the bottlenecks. A delivery or moving van or garbage truck might be blocking traffic for two minutes but I go right by. At each red light there might be ten cars stopped but I go straight to the front and cross first when the light turns green. It's significantly faster, in congested Manhattan streets I'd estimate often twice the speed of taking a car/taxi, certainly during rush hour. And higher-bandwidth if you've ever been to, say, China. When you see 50 cyclists crossing an intersection taking up the space that would fit 5 cars, well it's pretty obvious.
    • geofft 7y ago
      Yup, between being able to move past traffic, occasionally being able to bypass rules of the road (e.g., even if you don't actually bike the wrong way down a one-way, you can still legally walk your bike to the end of the block in less time than it'd take a car to circle), being able to take the subway, and parking, I'm often as fast and occasionally much faster on my bike than a car would be. (My experience is also Manhattan/Brooklyn, though this was often true in SFBA too for short trips.) When I moved apartments recently, I easily beat my movers' truck via bike-subway-bike from my old place to the nee one because there was some temporary congestion on one of the main roads but the subways were fine.
  • jalgos_eminator 7y ago
    The key word here is "urban". I ride my bike around the city core sometimes just for fun and I can easily keep up with cars because they are going so slow. Now imagine how many bikes you could fit on a two lane road vs how many cars. Obviously if the car is coming from the suburbs its going to be faster. > Also, serious question: if electric SDCs became widespread, would it still make sense to advocate things like bikes? Yes, absolutely yes. The cars would still have to go somewhere after they have dropped off their occupants. Hopefully we will get on-demand carpool services that allow us to have vastly fewer vehicles on the road, which would free up space for bikes and other public transit. > You can't transport a family of three or a baby as safely in a vehicle smaller than a car Not everyone can use a bike of course. Some will have to use public transit, and yes some will have to use a car for various reasons. The streets don't have to be car-less, we just need to get enough cars off the road to ease congestion and be able to turn existing lanes into bike lanes or public transit lanes. Once good reliable and quick public transit exists, there won't be such a strong incentive to own a car.
    • kruczek 7y ago
      > Now imagine how many bikes you could fit on a two lane road vs how many cars No need to imagine: http://lh3.ggpht.com/_9F9_RUESS2E/S7tbclwxiPI/AAAAAAAACmw/uI1bCpNuKNA/s800/picoftheday0012-space-60people.jpg http://lh3.ggpht.com/_9F9_RUESS2E/S7tbclwxiPI/AAAAAAAACmw/uI...
      • BasDirks 7y ago
        It's a powerful image, but the angle and zoom of the first picture differs a lot from the other two.
      • panda88888 7y ago
        I feel the picture is misleading. First, the angle for cars results in a closer, more zoomed in picture than for the bus and bike. Second, it assumes 1 occupant per car, but a full bus. More likely, each car will probably average more than 1 occupant, and buses will probably be less than half full, if not 25%.
  • jeffnappi 7y ago
    One reason micromobility has higher bandwidth is that cars typically only have a single occupant, yet occupy the space of perhaps 5 bikes.
    • smt88 7y ago
      That makes sense, but I took the original claim to mean what's possible. So it seems like we're comparing apples-to-oranges: The reality of cars (single occupant) is lower-bandwidth than the fantasy of bikes (lots of bikes traveling like a school of fish). I agree with that. But if you compare the reality of both, cars are still massively higher throughput in the US. And if you compare the fantasy of both (fully-loaded cars vs. herds of bikes), then cars would again be higher-bandwidth.
      • jeffnappi 7y ago
        Yep, if we can get self driving cars and people are actually willing to share that space with strangers it will be a big win for transportation efficiency. However at the same time we should be investing in density and figuring out ways to make that work. Urban sprawl is massively innefficient by it's nature.
  • mdorazio 7y ago
    A lot of micromobility advocates also seem to really hate public transit for whatever reasons, even though it's often superior to cycling in time, safety, and throughput. To your second question, though, I think the answer is it depends on your intended location and use case. Most micromobility and cycling advocates want changes made to dense urban centers, which are less likely to cater to families with children. SDCs might actually make traffic worse in these places the same way ridesharing has since they will be spending some time driving around empty and also causing congestion when they pick up or drop off passengers. In more suburban settings, though, SDCs make a lot more sense.
    • smt88 7y ago
      > A lot of micromobility advocates also seem to really hate public transit for whatever reasons I haven't observed this, but it makes zero sense in the US. The only way you could get 25+ bikes on a road in most of our cities is if they're in a very dense place with great public transit. Otherwise, average commute distances are going to be too long for most people.
  • adrianN 7y ago
    A bike needs maybe five to ten square meters of road space at a speed of 20-30km/h. A car needs around fifteen square meters standing still. Buses and trains are better still.
  • rconti 7y ago
    Massive size, huge following distances and lateral gaps, perhaps?
  • ehnto 7y ago
    Cars are not space efficient. One person takes up the room of many scooters, bikes or mopeds. The infrastructure that supports cars also takes up incredible amounts of room. They are often slower simply because they are stuck. It is quicker for me to ride my bike 20km than to drive it in my city. So for space spent on one car to move it and park it in the city you could be moving far more people. If you move to a less car centric CBD, you can still keep some car infrastructure there for people who need a car to get around. But public transport can also be improved, I am willing to bet more mobility challenged people would benefit from that than assuming they all use cars to get around. Not everyone has a carer, or a car that they can utilize.
    • Tepix 7y ago
      They are also very inefficient with resources during construction and operation. Lastly they are the most dangerous to other traffic due to their high mass and high speed.
  • scarejunba 7y ago
    I’m faster than a car in downtown SF on my jump bike. Even on market I’m even because no one makes a green from one green.
    • scarejunba 7y ago
      Honestly didn't think I said anything weird. I imagine throughput is high because lots of us can do this. I'm not a hater, I actually have an SUV. I just also ride electric downtown.
    • dang 7y ago
      I've noticed this too, and that's not counting the time it takes to park. Even some bike routes outside of downtown break even with cars.
  • my_username_is_ 7y ago
    This may be because I don't live in a "real city" (population 100k, US), but I see people biking with kids all the time (typically in some sort of cargo bike that has had seats added to it). The big threat while biking with kids (or without kids, for that matter) is from cars clipping you as they pass or pulling out in front of you. It's the cars that are the problem, not the bikes. Creating the infrastructure to allow people to bike safely will allow people to do what they're already doing more safely, and it will encourage more people to try it themselves.
    • bkor 7y ago
      IMO the problem is not the car, nor the bike. The problem is that they're sharing the same infrastructure. For new infrastructure I'd suggest also thinking about mopeds and quick electric bikes.
  • novok 7y ago
    Cars transport around ~1500 people per hour per lane, while 2 bike lanes taking up the same amount of space of a car lane is ~5200 people per hour. A proper train line does 32'000 people per hour. https://www.theurbanist.org/2016/05/26/the-supply-and-demand-of-street-space/ https://www.theurbanist.org/2016/05/26/the-supply-and-demand... A more visual demonstration: https://humantransit.org/2012/09/the-photo-that-explains-almost-everything.html https://humantransit.org/2012/09/the-photo-that-explains-alm...
    • HunOL 7y ago
      With one exception that you have to find 5200 people, while cars actually transporting 1500 people and I am not talking about public transport. From my point of view the top priority should be good public transport.
  • ericd 7y ago
    Assuming you’re talking about two adults and one kid, two bikes? You can easily transport two kids and an adult with a bike+trailer. Alternatively, in the Netherlands, you see bikes being used as school busses, with 4-6 kids in a big bucket in front, and an adult pedaling it around. You can buy them from various importers elsewhere.
  • kqr 7y ago
    > You can't transport a family of three or a baby as safely in a vehicle smaller than a car (as they lack things like walls and air bags) Most families of three can drive their own vehicles, though. And air bags are really only necessary because of... you guess what. The "not everyone can ride a bike" argument is vastly overplayed. Not only can almost everyone ride a bike -- but even the ones that can't get a better road environment if fewer people go for the single-occupancy personal automobile as the default. It just occupies so much space that is 99% completely unused.
  • sm4rk0 7y ago
    You don't need air-bags if you don't have cars. You'd also have less obese people if they would ride bicycles. Car is not a solution - it's a cause of problems.
  • 205guy 7y ago
    Here is photographic evidence of transporting 3 kids, including a newborn in a childseat, on a bicycle: https://www.dcrainmaker.com/2019/10/continued-expansion-of-the-dcr-team-hello-p3.html https://www.dcrainmaker.com/2019/10/continued-expansion-of-t... Of course it's the Netherlands, and it is safe to do so when there is infrastructure for it like there.
• cgrealy 7y ago
  I live in Christchurch, NZ. After a massive earthquake in 2011, I had high hopes that we might redesign the city for the next 100 years instead of the previous 50 (i.e. for people, not cars). Instead the city council built a few bike lanes and even then people lost their goddamn minds. "You're taking away parking space!" "All these bike lanes are slowing traffic" "No one wants to bike into the city" Meanwhile, cyclists are steadily increasing in numbers and the centre of town is actually seeing some signs of life for the first time in decades. But heaven forfend we actually do something radical and pedestrianise the city.
  • WizardAustralis 7y ago
    The irony here is that the bikes aren't slowing traffic, the endless road works are. Also Chch is basically one giant Wilsons parking lot now. I love the place and I intend to settle there in a few years time but it is very disheartening to see a once in the life time opportunity to solve these issues get squandered in the space of a few years.
  • dcolkitt 7y ago
    The biggest counterpoint here is what about families? A mom with three young kids in tow pretty much needs a car to get around. Or elderly people? I can't really take my 90-year old grandma out to dinner if it requires her to bike her way to the restaurant. Thinking about non-car based transportation methods is great. But the reality is that large segments of society are always going to need some sort of car-based option. You can't just ban cars from a city center without totally excluding a lot of young people.
    • vecinu 7y ago
      How are other cities solving this problem? Does Grandma never go out to dinner in Tokyo or Bogota?
      • epse 7y ago
        They bike. Or take public transport and walk afterwards. My grandparents do this, and they wouldn't have it any other way.
• no_bikeholes 7y ago
  If I were elected to city council, I would work to reduce bike lanes and convert them to motor vehicle lanes. The more cars, the more economic activity, the more CO2, the more plant food, the more people who can be sustained by agriculture! One day power will be taken from the biking vegan green fadboys, and that day will be glorious!
• SllX 7y ago
  You know what? Fine. I think the increased trend in cycling in day, San Francisco is neat. I have questioned the sanity of those who thought plastic pylons were adequate “protection” wherever I’ve seen them. Streets are typically city-owned and managed though, and if you’re in a place with a tax regime like California’s, then you’re in a place that relies heavily on things like sales taxes and capital gains taxes which tend to go down the gutter, because good old fashioned property taxes, while extant, are not nearly adequate enough when 1. the assessed value of a property is completely disconnected from the market value which 2. leads to an illiquid property market which artificially inflates prices and 3. the actual property tax rate is largely outside the hands of the people who need to draw up a budget(supervisors, councilors, legislators). So you want more and better bike infrastructure? I want more and better bike infrastructure. I know! Let’s pay for it! But how are we going to? We could tax and spend, but now you need to see if voters would like more and better bike infrastructure. Oh I know! We can tax the future taxpayers! Sell bonds. Kick the can down the road. I’m sure there is nothing wrong with that. So now we know how we’re going to pay for it, how much are we going to pay? Well, how much do you like unions. If you’re a union guy, you have no incentive to get the job done any faster than on time, and plenty of incentives to not get it done on time. Well what about contractors? Small business owners have every incentive to get the job done on time because after this, they’ve got their next job to move onto. The more projects they can work in a calendar year, the more money they can make. Ah, but you don’t want them to just go in wily nilly, make a mess of things and disrupt the flow of traffic and business, wake up the neighborhood and just make things generally unpleasant! You’ve gotta have rules! Sure, you’ve gotta have rules. In fact, you’ve gotta have an environmental impact report, confine portions of the project to certain days, confine actual work to certain hours, have adequate signage posted everywhere, and marketing fluff posted all over about how all this “stuff” is going to make life worth living (here) even better! All of which costs time and costs money. And quite a lot of this really just extends the time it takes a project to complete. Like Irving Street, San Francisco. An extensive project to kick two or three bus stops down the road and extend the sidewalk a few feet on a couple of street corners which has taken, I don’t have a number on this, but well over a calendar year and has either just wrapped up or is about to wrap up. Actually I take that back, I just remembered part of the project is to move a couple of stops to 5th or 6th Avenue, the ones at 4th and 7th precisely are to be consolidated in the middle, and last I checked that ain’t finished. To say nothing of the numerous public meetings that must have gone into this project. It was even a good plan, it just took too damn long. But hopefully we can repeat this process block by block, and create dedicated bike infrastructure of the kind that would make a Dutchman feel right at home, and if it takes 30 years and enough money to fund a train between San Francisco and Los Angeles, then who cares because we’re rich and therefore time and money don’t mean anything at all! Even if you only have the same 80 or so years to love and live as everyone else. So let’s dream big, and maybe tackle the crisis or more like tragedy that is well, every single part of a modern day public project from start to finish so we can maybe build some bike superhighways from here to six blocks down the road within one human lifetime and only a little bit over budget.
• z3t4 7y ago
  An idea i have is bike tubes.
  • boxcardavin 7y ago
    You joke, but I’ve kicked around the idea of bike tunnels with collimated air blowing down them at 20mph to make riding at that speed more comfortable, and make loitering uncomfortable. Microautonomy might make that feasible.
    • z3t4 7y ago
      Yeh, it's basically science fiction. But they can be light-weight, and thus less expensive then highways.
• samcheng 7y ago
  I really think the concept of bike boulevards is one that needs more attention than bike lanes. Take a network of side roads and make them inconvenient for large vehicle through-traffic via bollards and other obstacles. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bicycle_boulevard https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bicycle_boulevard The result is a quiet, safe setting for 'micro-mobility' bicycles and scooters with decreased bike-car interaction. You don't even need bike lanes, because almost all of the traffic on those roads is bike traffic. The article talks about bus + bike roads, sort of like Market St. in San Francisco, but I don't think that's optimal. For one thing, buses should be able to go much faster than bikes, especially Bus Rapid Transit, and as such pose collision danger. Also, BRT should be upgradeable to light rail, and rails are very dangerous for micro-mobility devices with small tires. Buses and cars coexist easily on the road. Buses should have their own lane, next to the cars.
  • IshKebab 7y ago
    I don't think this would solve much. In the UK at least, side roads are plenty safe enough for bikes. The issue is the big roads that people want to actually cycle on (because they are the fastest route).
    • TulliusCicero 7y ago
      Yeah, here in Munich the side roads are generally safe for bikes because they're narrow, much narrower than side roads in the US. But that by itself wouldn't make for a ton of biking if we didn't also have many protected bike lanes on arterial roads, as well as off-street walk/bike paths.
  • TulliusCicero 7y ago
    Bike+bus collision danger can be largely mitigated with protected bike lanes and intersections. Also in practice, the extent to which buses can go faster than bikes is limited. There's a route I take to the local Ubahn Station, and in practice biking is about as fast as the bus, assuming the same starting time. Obviously the bus has a higher top speed, but it also has to stop every couple blocks, which eliminates its advantage. For BRT, probably a different story, but if it has a completely separate lane infrastructure, you can just have the same for bikes.
• jalgos_eminator 7y ago
  It seems like we need a cultural shift here in America, but I just don't see it happening. People here expect to be able to drive their car anywhere and get there in a reasonable amount of time and be able to find parking nearby. That's been our reality since post-WWII, but I think people need to come to grips with the fact that the gravy train is over for personal cars.
• xchaotic 7y ago
  I happen to live in an area where roads have been slightly overbuilt and there’s plenty of roads and hardly any traffic on them. I’d say the existing infrastructure is perfect for bicycles we just need to get rid of the cars.
• ddiq 7y ago
  Urban sprawl and planned cities are a pox on humanity. Look at this thread and tell me that these layouts don't look eminently more livable than the modern grid layout city. https://twitter.com/wrathofgnon/status/1186129107408392194 https://twitter.com/wrathofgnon/status/1186129107408392194
• glangdale 7y ago
  I'm curious as to what planet you'd have to be living on to think that if we have billions of dollars to spare on huge transport infrastructure projects that aren't cars, that it should go to bikes and not public transport + walkability. I'm guessing it's a special magic planet with startlingly good weather year-round, without disabled people, where everyone gets to age into spry Euro-oldsters. Not wanting to kick off a unproductive circular firing squad vibe - in an ideal world, we'd do both, and more public transit frees up existing roads for cyclists. But public transport has to come first.
  • donjoe 7y ago
    Yah... Bad weather isn't an argument though. I'm faster with my bike no matter the weather. Especially when it's snowing outside. Gosh, snow slows cars down massively. I love this time of the year: no one tends to speed any more since drivers are afraid of crashing their cars.
    • missosoup 7y ago
      Try riding to work on a 45 degree australian summer day when the UV index is so high that 5 mins is enough to get serious sunburn.
      • urban_winter 7y ago
        The UV issue is a red herring. There are many reasons why people need to be outside and cycling is only one of them. UV is a manageable problem for walkers and outdoor workers, cyclists are not a special case. I guess that you've never been on a bike on a very hot day. It's much, much more pleasant to be ventilated by your self-created airflow on a bike than it is to to have sweat pouring down your back as you walk around.
        • missosoup 7y ago
          I guess you've never experienced a 40-45c day. You sound like one of the regular tourist types we get who dismiss how seriously we take summer conditions and then end up with heatstroke and skin peeling off from sunburn. The 'self-created airflow' INCREASES the rate at which you gain temperature. Windchill is only 'chill' when the ambient air temperature is lower than your core temp. To cycle on a summer day, you need to slather yourself in SPF-40 sunscreen including underneath clothing, wear SPF clothing, and make sure to be constantly drinking water. And when you get to your destination you're definitely going to need a shower. I'll take public transport over that, thanks. So does the majority of people.
• baxtr 7y ago
  A bit off topic: but what I’ve asked myself since I’m biking through town daily. Is there an increased lung cancer risk for city bikers with all the car traffic out there?
  • abyssin 7y ago
    Yes there is, but it is statistically countered by the benefits of physical exercise that cycling provides. Car drivers are also exposed to pollution, although they don't breathe as heavily.
  • kwohlfahrt 7y ago
    The BBC did a video a few weeks back showing that you're exposed to more pollution in a car: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/av/uk-england-south-yorkshire-49960950/how-do-you-breathe-less-pollution-on-school-run https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/av/uk-england-south-yorkshire-499... Not sure how that translates to cancer risk but came as a surprise to me.
• blhack 7y ago
  Wr tried. People threw them in the ocean and got cities to ban them. It’s going to take me a long time to get over how broken hearted I am about people’s reactions to various bike and scooter share programs. I understand not using the services, but people were openly hostile to them.
  • 0xcase 7y ago
    the problem here with these services were that there have been just too many and around popular spots/bars/etc these share bikes just piled up to a point where it was nearly impossible to use the sidewalk especially for people with impaired vision
• chrisco255 7y ago
  This article paints the interstate highway system as some sort of evil incarnation without even giving so much as a breath to the idea that the Interstate highway system is one of the largest and most successful civil works projects of all time. The Romans had their aquaducts. The Americans have their highways. Prior to the Interstate system, it would take as much as two months to travel coast to coast. Eisenhower was part of an Army convoy in 1919 that did just that. It took them 62 days. With the interstate system, it can be traversed in just a few days. You have no idea how blessed you are to live in an age where transportation is so freely available. While our passenger train network may suck in the U.S. and rush hour traffic is awful, we have a phenomenal road and air travel network. Meanwhile, I support bike/scooter lanes in dense urban core areas. They're not a solution for most people though, unless you can afford to live in the densest and usually most expensive parts of a city. Autonomous buses should be within reach this decade. I can't think of a better mass transit solution more easily fitted into the existing systems than autonomous buses or micro buses that could fill more niches and provide reliable service 24/7.
  • adrianh 7y ago
    “They’re not a solution for most people” — I encourage you to come visit the Netherlands. You’ll see a society where bikes are regularly used by “most people.” Wealthy, middle class, poor — nearly everybody rides the same cheap black bike. And not just in the cities, but throughout the entire country. Sit in a cafe near a busy street in Utrecht, Amsterdam, Groningen, The Hague or Leiden, and you’ll see all walks of life riding a bike. It’s a lovely, human thing.
    • chrisco255 7y ago
      The United States is over 200 times larger than the Netherlands in area. Suggesting that the U.S. follow the Dutch model for transportation is completely missing the mark. It's not workable at U.S. scale. Many workers live 10, 20, even 30 miles from their jobs.
      • bkor 7y ago
        I'm not understanding why you'd not design infrastructure better? So not entirely made for one means (e.g. car). It'll always be a combination. Some parts will be able to be like the Netherlands. You're saying the US is huge, but still you want one solution for all?!? Further, it's pretty common in Netherlands to live in one big city and work in another. The Netherlands is small, so it'll usually be 10-20 miles away.
• pg_is_a_butt 7y ago
  Bike lanes are the WeWork of Civic grants. Do nothing, cash checks.
• danielecook 7y ago
  I’ve thought about this a lot having lived in Chicago and now London and seen two very different types of infrastructure. Chicago arguably has a true “cycle superhighway” with its 23 miles of continuous bike lane on the lakefront I was able to commute 10 miles to work very fast and with little exposure to cars. London is a work in progress, with lots of infrastructure slotted in. What I’ve come away with being a pretty committed bike commuter is that a good bike network should incorporate routes that are disassociated with the road network where possible. Like the lake path in Chicago, these routes are much safer, accessible to new cyclists, And fast (with few intersections). Also see Chicago’s elevated bike path the 606 for another example. London could develop something similar along the river Thames (it does exist in parts, but it needs to be continuous, wider, and better developed), and improve routes along its canals. London could also develop and allow more routes through its parks. This in particular is low hanging fruit as routes through many parks are limited and have just been added to roads that cut through parks in many cases (another issue worth debating is whether roads should be cutting through parks to begin with).
• reilly3000 7y ago
  US Federal highways were built for homeland defense first, then commercial traffic, then individual automobiles. The infrastructure is built on government credit and maintained via gasoline taxes. A 50 mile segment of freeway might move more than $50 million worth of cargo and labor each hour. The same is true for city streets, on a smaller scale. Bikes, by their nature, are rather terrible at moving things around like cows, refrigerated goods, building supplies and such. They are excellent at moving around people, and providing them healthy exercise in the process. The demonstrable economic impact of a road closure in terms of real wages, purchases, freight, and more is analyzed with incredible depth here: https://www.purdue.edu/discoverypark/nextrans/assets/pdfs/Final%20Report%20053PY03%20Estimating%20the%20Economic%20Impacts%20of%20Disruptions%20to%20Intermodal%20Freight%20Systems%20Traffic.pdf https://www.purdue.edu/discoverypark/nextrans/assets/pdfs/Fi... From an economic standpoint, the value that bike transportation facilitates is the aggregate value of the wages, production, and consumption of its riders. They represent 0.6% of urban commuters, with 86% in automobiles and 5% in mass transit. Even in Portland, OR only 3.5% of the workforce commutes via bicycle, and certainly less on the rare snow day. Many would argue that our transportation infrastructure is the cause of this disparity. I think that they are in fact a reflection of economic reality. In places where bicycles carry lots of economic value, such as a highly compensated workforce, they have more infrastructure. In places where they convey relatively little economic value, they receive virtually no accommodation. In agricultural areas, roads have special accommodations for tractors, and rail is extremely valuable. I could imagine, as many have and the article suggests, a vision for urbanism that is centered around human-first transportation networks. In a place where knowledge work dominates, this is entirely possible. Its happening now, in NYC where roads are being closed off to cars block by block. The roads themselves still exist because people still need things that are most efficiently moved by trucks, such as refrigerated goods, construction equipment, and so on. A pedal-powered utopia would need to have a robust solution for moving kilotons of things like food if people want to eat, building materials if people want shelter, stuff if people want stuff to put in their shelters, and raw materials if people want to make things instead of just consuming stuff. Bicycling provides plenty of recreational value, which is in itself economic value, and that should not be discounted. If we're envisioning things, I'd like to see integrated networks of airborne, ground-level, and subterranean conveyance, each with macro, micro, and intermodal transit solutions that have maximal economic bandwidth and minimal environmental impact. Better yet, technology that eliminates the need for transit, like localized manufacturing and recycling... ie, instead of a garage sheltering a car, it could hold waste materials, shredders, extruders, 3d printers/fabbers, etc for anything from plastics to proteins. If everything we needed to transport could be transported via bike or drone at the last mile(s), if everything we needed came in small packages, if labor happened in place, if everything we made came from commodity components and openly shared designs... roads would vanish rather quickly. Until then, bikes will get the infrastructure budget commensurate with the value they transport, and the same goes for each other mode. At least cyclists don't have to pay gas tax.
• EETruth 7y ago
  The underlining issue is that the working class mongrels utterly love their cars. Let them drive I say - they spend more money, they die in car crashes...
• bb101 7y ago
  Interesting how the author seems to think that cycling advocates have only a marginal impact on our built environment because they "ask for twigs". I would have assumed that the lack of cycling infrastructure in cities is more influenced by the people who have power over our town councils and planners -- wealthy developers and transport lobbyists. How likely are these people to use bicycles over cars themselves?
• choeger 7y ago
  > Now, almost anybody can go for miles fairly quickly without breaking a sweat. Yeah. Cars do that. Congratulations, you understand why people prefer motorized, individual over public or non-motorized, individual transportation. And btw, elevated freeways were one of the solutions for car traffic in the past... In a dense city, if you want to "reclaim" your space, you have to invest massively. And I'd say the inhabitants need to pay. So tax everyone close to a city center by 50% of their current rent/mortgage and you can build the infrastructure of your dreams. It's not the commuters that profit from that investment, so they should not pay. If you merely want to protect the air quality, just forbid ICEs inside the city limits after, say, ten years. But please be consequent and apply that to your buses, taxis, delivery vans etc. as well.
• reportgunner 7y ago
  The author of the article probaby bikes 10 minutes every day down a straight street and now he wants to try Trump's think big
• innocentoldguy 7y ago
  Fuck bicyclists. They are freeloaders on the infrastructure bought and paid for by people who buy gas for their automobiles (and heaped upon electric car owners where I live). In my city, there is a push to charge bicyclists an annual licensing fee, similar to cars, and to require they have license plates. Once bicyclists are paying their fair share for the roads, then we can start dreaming bigger than bike lanes.
  • TulliusCicero 7y ago
    Cyclists are already largely subsidizing drivers, because a) it's more than gas taxes and registration fees that go to roads, it's also general income taxes and local/state taxes, and b) bike infrastructure is radically cheaper than car infrastructure. You're looking at at least an order of magnitude difference in cost, which overwhelms the difference in taxes paid. That cyclists may only be paying 50% or even 25% as much as drivers doesn't matter if the cost of bike lanes and paths is 10% of the cost of roads for cars. Thus, it's actually drivers who are freeloading compared to cyclists.
    • innocentoldguy 7y ago
      Bike infrastructure IS car infrastructure for the most part. Also, auto drivers pay the exact same taxes that bicyclists do and additionally pay greater taxes in gas and licensing. Bicyclists always like to whine “Share the road.” It’s time they share the costs as well. Fortunately, there appears to be a push in my community to make that happen and I think it is great. Now, if you’re talking bike trails, then yes. Those are cheaper. If you’re advocating that bicyclists should be limited to bike trails, then I’m in full agreement. If they’re on the roads, however, they should be forced to pay all the road fees cars have to pay.
      • TulliusCicero 7y ago
        > Bike infrastructure IS car infrastructure for the most part. It is when it's bad, yes. Good bike infrastructure usually involves things like physically separated bike lanes, or off-street bike paths. > Also, auto drivers pay the exact same taxes that bicyclists do and additionally pay greater taxes in gas and licensing. I already addressed this in my comment; it doesn't matter when car infrastructure is VASTLY more expensive. Why would it matter that drivers pay double when they cost 10x? Cyclists subsidize drivers. Period. > If they’re on the roads, however, they should be forced to pay all the road fees cars have to pay. The whole reason roads are super expensive is because of cars, not bikes, so of course drivers pay more. If there were only bikes (and scooters and skateboards) on a given stretch of road, it would be called a multi-use trail, and it could be made for much, much cheaper, since the engineering standards would not have to be nearly as high. Your argument is exactly like if a city got rid of all its sidewalks, forcing people to walk on the road, and then to add insult to injury forced people to be 'licensed' and pay a registration fee to walk about. No freeloading steppers here, no sir! They need to pay their fair share now that they have no good options of their own! I get that it doesn't jive with your current worldview that cyclists are subsidizing drivers, but it's true. Those cyclists you deride as 'whiners' are paying your way.
• 11235813213455 7y ago
  Rarely I take bike lanes, they are less fast and irregular The road should be used by bikes in my opinion (lower infrastructure/maintenance cost, and the separation between road and bike lanes is actually how I broke my right clavicle), and bikes should have priority against individual cars (not urgency and shared transports of course)
  • TulliusCicero 7y ago
    This will never work except for the tiny percentage of people who are extremely confident riding with cars. You're never going to get grandmas and grandpas and 8-year-olds comfortably riding in car traffic on regular roads. I don't understand why people keep suggesting this when bikes generally already can use the road, and this is clearly a failure as far as getting more people biking. Meanwhile, basically everywhere that implements protected bike lanes and off-street bike paths aplenty gets tons of people biking. But we shouldn't do the thing that's proven successful, because...?
    • chrismatheson 7y ago
      A "simple" change could affect the way cars and bikes interact on the roads. It's always the cars fault. If the law were to change to favour the smallest, lest protected vehicle at all times then those driving cars would take much greater care when driving around them.
      • TulliusCicero 7y ago
        That would be a good, but insufficient change. People will drive fast on the wide, straight roads common in the states, for example, the road geography itself encourages it. Enforcement changes alone are not enough. Parents are never gonna feel safe letting their kids bike just because hey, if they get hit by a car it'll be the driver's fault!
  • Tepix 7y ago
    That depends entirely on the bike lanes. In the Netherlands you don't see any bicycles on the road when there is a nice, wide bike lane present instead. In Germany you see them quite often because the bike lanes there are often too narrow and their surface is in bad shape.
• knolan 7y ago
  I cycle 24km to work across the city each way on an ebike. It’s the fastest mode of transport available to me, even limited to 25km/h. The bike takes an hour, the bus 90 minutes because of its indirect route, and the car about the same with morning gridlock. You could do it in 35 minutes with no traffic. When I take the bus I arrive to work tired and groggy. When I cycle I arrive energised. I don’t drive because parking on campus is usually impossible. The problem is that there are limited shower facilities and the ones in my building are extremely grotty, so much so that some colleagues have stopped cycling. Appeals to facilities has only resulted in them locking one of the showers permanently. If more people cycle that’s great but it’ll have knock on effects on other infrastructure and organisations need to pull their finger out and make changes to encourage cycling.
  • scrollaway 7y ago
    24km? What's your bike's range? Over here ebikes are just about limited to 25-30km on full charge. Do you charge it at work?
    • koyote 7y ago
      So I don't own an ebike but I've rented an MTB ebike a short while ago and was able to comfortably do 70km while still having over 1/4 battery left. That being said, I did not have it set to the max the whole way. Mostly spent in eco mode which is more than enough
      • scrollaway 7y ago
        Wow, 70km! Where I live that's crossing almost half the country. I didn't know some ebikes had such a range.
        • lm28469 7y ago
          Some are pretty good, I think the last one I rented had 80 to 160km range depending on the power setting/terrain. I used it to visit around my home town, climbed hills (paved and in the woods), visited small towns 35km away, climbed the steepest road (7km, 600m height difference) in the area on full power, &c. and never worried about the battery. If I ever move back to the country side I'll get one for sure. You can even remove the 25kph limit and make it go up to 50kph if you get a license plate / insurance.
• jl2718 7y ago
  I love bikes. Obsessed bike commuter for many years. Anyway... Maybe the big engineering project he's looking for is parking garages to get the parked cars off the street. Maybe also block side streets to reduce intersections.
• sunstone 7y ago
  While it sounds preposterous right now this problem will soon solve itself with already built "bike lanes". And bicycles are not the solution. The solution, as this article touches on, is light weight electric transport using the existing road structure. There's a strong indication of this future in the fact that last year the Dutch bought more electric bikes than normal bikes in total. And they paid twice as much for their electric bikes ($2000) than they did for their pedal bikes. Let that sink in: The Dutch are already starting to abandon their pedal bikes. This is the future of urban transport: lightweight electrics. One underappreciated, but critical aspect of electrics is their lack of exhaust fumes. This will allow much more of city roads to be covered or even inside. With electrics you could park inside almost everywhere. Electrics will soon start to invade the "slow lane" of cities with bikes and mopeds. Even a cheap electric bike already feels much safer in urban car traffic than a pedal bike because it has super fast acceleration from a dead stop and therefore can ride in regular traffic without being an impediment or needing its own lane. If you want to lead this revolution forget about city council; buy yourself an electric bike and ride it in regular traffic with a hi-viz vest. The more people that do this the sooner the transition will happen. The current urban roads are the 'bike' lanes of tomorrow. (One thing city councils could usefully do right away is to immediately ban any fossil fuel motors under 125 cc from their roads.)
  • anyzen 7y ago
    Even electric bikes are not the solution, at least not in many parts of the world. What happens when it rains / snows? I don't know what the solution is though, maybe small electric cars, self driven, as part of public transportation service?
    • ido 7y ago
      I regularly ride my "normal" bicycle (including 2 little kids in a trailer) in the rain in Berlin (where it rains for 167 days per year on average, which is ~45% of the year). You just need the appropriate clothes & gear.
      • stinos 7y ago
• netcan 7y ago
  Renegotiating the basics so that bicycles (and other light vehicles) get similar status to cars and buses was always going to be an uphill battle. It's possible that a shift to driverless cars is an opportunity to do it. If driverless cars do succeed, there could be a shift away from private ownership. At that point, there's an opportunity to be encourage much narrower, slower, lighter vehicles in cities. You don't a 2 ton car to transport one person 9km @ 25kmph. The cars we have are so big because they occasionally need to transport a whole family long distance on a highway. With self driving taxis this could (plausibly) be handled by a different car. The conflicting road needs of bikes and lightweight vehicles (say <25kmph & <200kg) are much more manageable than bikes and pickup trucks (or buses).
• basicplus2 7y ago
  Travellators everywhere....
• sornaensis 7y ago
  We need to build bike lanes as their own adjacent network of lanes on our streets, with stop light integration within the city- meaning separation of cyclist and motorist, but adjacent -and bike lanes that run parallel to but removed from major thoroughfares. Aka the copenhagen model. Nobody is gonna ride a bike if it’s unsafe or difficult or if the bike paths are disconnected. So yes, we should be dreaming beyond bike lanes, because we ought to be building proper ones right now!
• rapnie 7y ago
  What I see a lot in this thread is people's either/or opinions. Love cars / hate bycicles or vice versa. No. It is a balancing act, where cars, bycicles and public transport co-exist, and infrastructure is developed strategically in smart ways and in a prolonged effort. When I was young in The Netherlands for the most part the cars still dominated the streets. Over time I've seen cities and road networks gradually being transformed to what I now consider a Walhalla for cyclists. Public transport plays a big role in that too, and the Dutch still love their cars. I highly recommend reading this article: "No helmets, no problem: how the Dutch created a casual biking culture" [0] which interviews the American Bruntlett family that wrote the book "Building the Cycling City: The Dutch Blueprint for Urban Vitality" [1] See also the great discussion on HN at the time [2]. [0] https://www.vox.com/science-and-health/2018/8/28/17789510/bike-cycling-netherlands-dutch-infrastructure https://www.vox.com/science-and-health/2018/8/28/17789510/bi... [1] https://islandpress.org/books/building-cycling-city https://islandpress.org/books/building-cycling-city [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17861803 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17861803
  • Svip 7y ago
    It really helps that in neither Denmark nor the Netherlands, helmets are mandatory. Unlike in say Sweden, where casual biking is having a hard time taking off. But it kind of bothers me that Danes and Dutchmen seem to be rather disinterested in one another's achievements on this front. There is a lot of lessons from both sides, that never seems to be discussed in one another's media, to the point (anecdote alert!) where I've seen people in either country be surprised that there is a similar biking culture in the other country. And people still love their cars in either country, even though I believe it's even more expensive to own a car in the Netherlands (and I thought Denmark was pricey!).
    • rapnie 7y ago
      I haven't been to Denmark so I can't compare, but I agree there is much to be learned by looking at how other countries fare. In the densely populated Netherlands we are facing very serious gridlock problems now with cars clogging the highways and railways at full capacity. We can't keep building new infrastructure (highways) at the pace we did before, because - besides being very expensive - we lack the space for it. New solutions may lie in promoting remote work, carpooling and shortening home/work commute distances. I also suspect that bicycle infra will be developed even further (e.g. with bike highways) as they take less space and are less disruptive to the landscape.
• gorgoiler 7y ago
  Dreaming bigger than bicycles would be helpful as well. Electrification, and having more than two wheels is a big step up in terms of practicality. There’s a real sweet spot somewhere around where electrified pedal tricycles, electric three wheel mopeds, and small electric cars like the Renault Twizy, that has huge potential. I cycle everywhere but I’m realistic about the issues with mass adoption. Bicycles are fundamentally unstable and they are too narrow to expect road discipline by cyclists to be an emergent property. There is also a very narrow band of weather conditions, especially as a function of how hilly it is, where most people can cycle without overheating. Electrification is a game changer but there’s no two ways about it: these are now literally motorbikes, with all the same potential for antisocial behavior (pavement riding, traffic weaving, shortcuts through pedestrian only areas.) Not being quite so efficient with the amount of road space used might benefit cyclist behavior and force the authorities hand into providing first class infrastructure for non-car travel. My personal solution is a bit of a hack: ride a cargo bike with a large front bucket. Keeps me slow and riding safely :)
• jka 7y ago
  It's excellent to see momentum building like this. Cycling: - Has lower cost-of-entry in terms of purchase/rental - Keeps you healthier, which can also contribute to remaining active and mobile in older age - Provides easier self-maintenance for most common faults - Requires less fuel (particularly combustible/fossil) - Can be just as fast, or faster, for transit from A to B in urban environments (especially with e-bikes) - Is more social and human - cyclists can chat to each other while commuting or in transit, rather than being isolated in glass bubbles (which sometimes leads to misunderstanding and road rage when a simple conversation - even if a little confrontational - might resolve things) - Requires less physical space - which eventually will make it easier to park cars, once we reclaim this inefficient use of our environments - Pollutes less - Is more easily portable within other modes of transport (trains, aircraft, or cars) - Is, in the presence of good bicycle infrastructure, simply a much more pleasant, enjoyable, and self-directed way to travel One remaining issue perhaps is large load-carrying; and that's certainly somewhere where cargo bikes and cargo e-bikes are innovating. And also a situation where the physical distribution of goods is changing (for example, via on-demand delivery services, some of which themselves use bicycle couriers). It's really time to get people shifting towards bicycles in a big way. The arguments against it broadly do not stand, especially in the presence of e-bikes. Cars aren't going to go away, but they're way overused currently.
  • Dumblydorr 7y ago
    So many great points. Bikes are the number one carbon cutting technology we need to scale up.
    • efa 7y ago
      And working from home. Just no commute at all!
• deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
• Kaiyou 7y ago
  I'm always wondering why it is the environment that has to change. I'm also living in a city and I neither own a car, nor a bike nor am I using public transport. I just walk everywhere I have to go. Think about why you can't just walk everywhere and if the answer is that you don't have the time, maybe you should consider just taking that time or reconsider life choices. Why can't you live near the things you need to regularly visit? There's nothing really preventing you. You just don't want to, right? So maybe everyone should think hard about themselves first, before dreaming about remodelling the environment.
  • ralfd 7y ago
    Or maybe this may work for you, but it doesn't scale.
  • zimbatm 7y ago
    There are a lot of different types of cities. European cities tend to be more dense and walk-able for historical reasons. Not everyone has the luxury of living in such nice environment or even moving places. Even as a walker, cities would be so much nicer to walk into without the threat of cars and the pollution that they generate. Imagine walking in the middle of the road, fresh air, you have the space to cross people, some space could be reclaimed for plants and benches. Why not create the ideal environment if we can?
    • Kaiyou 7y ago
      Personally, I wouldn't want to live in a city without cars. And that comes from someone not even owning a car. Simply because I enjoy walking while not meeting many people. So if as many people as possible can just drive to where they want to go that leaves me with more leisure while walking.
• zimbatm 7y ago
  > Too ambitious? Not nearly enough. What we need are breathing cities. Cities that are more friendly to humans and that function well. The problem with cars is that they are dangerous. On top of that they also create air and noise pollution and take a lot of space. Is it really worth living in a hostile environment when we have better alternatives available? The article is too focused on bikes. There are a lot of different aspects to a breathing city and bike lanes are an implementation detail.
• Merrill 7y ago
  When I see pictures of cities with lots of bikes, they are usually cities in South and East Asia. How did they become so successful? Is there anything to learn from their experience?
• IgorPartola 7y ago
  Might as well ask here, but why do bicyclists always seem to blow past stop signs and red lights? Whenever I am on a motorcycle, I always feel more endangered by a bicyclist coming out of nowhere than a car. Can anyone give me insight into this behavior?
  • granshaw 7y ago
    The common refrain I’ve heard is that it takes quite abit of effort to completely stop and then get back up to speed on a bike
  • zeendo 7y ago
    It's a similar (but better) reason that motorists pull into crosswalks and don't come to a complete stop at stop signs or red lights or go 5mph over the speed limit. In their mind there's very little risk to doing so. So many people like to equate this to a motorist doing the same thing but they're so clearly wildly different.
• gwbas1c 7y ago
  I lived in Palo Alto, CA, (heart of Silicon Valley) and commuted by bike to work. (I even took my bike on the train for a few weeks.) Once I met my wife, we were able to bike to each other's homes and also bike to work. It was great! Then we moved in together, and because she had a dog, Palo Alto became prohibitively expensive, and we had to move a few miles away. I only used my bike three times after that. Even worse, my job then moved in the opposite direction, so I ended up with a commute that was only possible by car. This is why I laugh at these kinds of articles. There's a lot we can do to encourage many forms of transportation, but the nature of a large world is that a car lets you drive 20 miles from point A to point B in a manner that's prohibitive by foot, bike, or train. IMO, I think extremely large, subsidized, easy-in, easy-out parking lots on the edge of population centers makes sense. Within the population center, vehicles should only be for public transportation, deliveries, and people with physical disabilities. It's a great compromise that works for people who just can't bike 60 miles a day, or for people who live in areas where trains don't make sense.
  • zzzcpan 7y ago
    > but the nature of a large world is that a car lets you drive 20 miles from point A to point B in a manner that's prohibitive by foot, bike, or train. Not prohibitive to do by electric bike though.
    • gwbas1c 7y ago
      Again, unrealistic attitudes like that are why I laugh at the article. You can't do 20 miles in an electric bike in the rain, or in the cold. It's just absurd.
  • bluGill 7y ago
    If more people used them trains and buses would be able to run much larger networks thus making the 20 mile commute via train reasonable. However until people use them the network cannot be that large. If the transit network was that large the freeway network in cities would not be worth it, thus further biasing trips to the train. However there is no easy way to get there from here.
• irrational 7y ago
  I feel like this person is an optimist, envisioning a future that is never going to happen. I envision a future of rapidly decreasing revenues as the boomers die off and the population size plummets, while simultaneously climate change starts to wreak havoc, resulting in city infrastructure not being maintained at all, much less being improved to the extent the author is recommending.
• eMSF 7y ago
  >As if that weren’t enough, they also stole our primary public spaces in cities: the streets. The irony of this feelgood narrative is that cyclists don't want pedestrians on their ways, either.
  • brnt 7y ago
    And for good reason: safe travel means separating speeds. Here in NL, the average cycling speed is about 20kph. Walking is about 5kph, 3 for the elderly. It's not a very good idea to share spaces. If space is the problem, it would be better to merge car and bike traffic [1][2]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bicycle_boulevard#Netherlands https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bicycle_boulevard#Netherlands [2] https://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fietsstraat https://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fietsstraat
• leecarraher 7y ago
  I think there is a bit of a catch-22 in regard to ridership and using already limited city roadway resources. I am privileged to have a protected bike lane for a about 50% of my commute to work, but can't deny the argument that it is vastly underutilized in comparison to roadways. Unfortunately this seems to further polarize cyclists and non-cyclists when I do need to share the roadway. It is a difficult problem that large scale public works cannot solve alone.
• peterwwillis 7y ago
  I love micromobility. I think it's the future of human transportation, in combination with better, more efficient, more convenient, mass-transit. But this "let's dream big about bikes" is like saying "we should feed the planet". Well that's a great notion, and we can totally do that. But who the fuck is going to pay for it? The car lobby had lots of money, and was able to seize on an abundance of necessity and want: the military needed to be able to move things, cities needed to be able to expand housing out to suburbs, the country needed work, and politicians needed an answer to these problems and a big win. Interstates were a godsend to all these various issues, and the car lobby's funding made that an easy argument to make. What the hell does the bike lobby have? Chump change. A lack of necessity. Hopes and dreams. Nobody's going to build a Futurama world based on that. You need more than dreams; you need a cause. And you need to be able to provide real value for everyone, not just people who like to bike. That means businesses, politicians, etc
• carapace 7y ago
  Make several separate but interconnected transportation networks. Peds; Bikes; Light EVs (scooters, kick and seated, small cargo movers, narrow (1 seater) cars); Buses & Cargo Trucks; Trains; Take advantage of grade (slope). Roads should have short ups followed by long downs (in both directions, it's possible) to let people take advantage of gravity. I once saw a fascinating pamphlet advocating for graded runways: planes taking off head downhill, landing, uphill. The idea was that you would save a ton of fuel.
  • magduf 7y ago
    >I once saw a fascinating pamphlet advocating for graded runways: planes taking off head downhill, landing, uphill. The idea was that you would save a ton of fuel. It doesn't work, unless you build double the number of runways, at huge expense, because you'd have to have runways going both uphill and downhill in the same direction. Runways in real airports go both directions, not just one. They change direction depending on the prevailing wind direction. You never land with a tailwind, or take off with one. So a graded runway wouldn't be usable part of the time, unless you built two of them like I said, or made the runway much longer. Honestly, this idea sounds like something dreamt up by someone who's never piloted an airplane. I've seen other proposals for airport/runway design like this which also were dreamt up by people who had never flown an airplane, and the reasons their ideas made no sense were easily pointed out by actual pilots.
    • carapace 7y ago
      Build a mound and put the airport on top with the runways radiating? I'm certainly not knowledgeable enough to argue the point.
      • magduf 7y ago
        Ok, but now you have an airport that takes 2-4 times as much space as normal ones. Airports already consume an incredible amount of space; most places don't have that much space to spare. This reminds me of someone's crazy proposal not too long ago (I think it showed up on this site) to make an airport with a big circular runway around it, with the idea that planes could be continuously taking off and landing. It didn't take long for some pilots to chime and and call the whole idea utterly insane and stupid because it's incredibly dangerous to take off or land while turning.
• maerF0x0 7y ago
  Part of the picture of why bike lanes lose is because those same cyclists frequently turn to cars/public transport during inclement weather, rendering those bike lines useless and the system inflexible to repurpose the space for the additional automotive load.
• AtlasBarfed 7y ago
  Cities should build elevated bike "superhighway" loops. The weight and material requirements must be a miniscule fraction of an elevated road, and they can probably be mounted to multistory buildings or other tall infrastructure, or even suspended.
• waxsonbrutus 7y ago
  Binatesatjvoj
• waxsonbrutus 7y ago
  Hgiok
• tempodox 7y ago
  Not just bike lanes. Ban private car traffic from cities completely. Only allow private cars between cities.