8 ms·

I don't mind the weather in Copenhagen where the amount of people who bikes every day exceeds the amount of people who take public transportation every day by a

• paganel 7y ago
  Copenhagen doesn’t have 40 degrees Celsius heatwaves in the summer nor winter blizzards that make you feel like you’re in Siberia, while places like the US East Coast (and I guess even the Chicago area in the Midwest) have them both.
  • vincnetas 7y ago
    But that does not mean that parts os US that have favorable conditions should not improve bike infrastructure. You are comparing one city (88.25 km²) to a country (9.834 million km²)
  • fergie 7y ago
    Copenhagen might not quite have 40C heatwaves, but it certainly has winter blizzards that make you feel like you’re in Siberia.
    • deleted 7y ago
      [deleted]
    • zoren 7y ago
      Not very often and not for very long. Source: lived here 38 years.
  • inopinatus 7y ago
    Melbourne, Australia has heatwaves exceeding that, and shivers through thoroughly miserable wet winters, and yet we have a large, thriving, and ever-growing corps of recreational, competitive, and commuting cyclists, and that's despite the increasing hostility and declining levels of competence exhibited by local drivers. The suggestion that cycling is a fair-weather activity is hogwash.
    • glangdale 7y ago
      Those aiming to debunk me - and all I said is that public transport should take priority over some dramatic increase in spending as envisioned in this article - seem to read rather too much into the fact that some demographic cycles a lot. There are huge demographic clusters (particularly late-middle-age to old, middle-aged-to-older women) who, statistically speaking, don't. I'm sure that we're off to the Proof By Anecdote races again about all the spry old folks who cycle everywhere. But in practice weekly cycling rates in places like NSW and VIC for the middle-aged are about 10%, tops, and this declines faster as people get older. I would hazard a guess that on bad weather days, this skew gets even more extreme i.e. fewer people cycle total, and even fewer proportionally out of the demographics that don't ride much. I don't know about Melbourne, but the idea that we should splash out Serious Cash on cycling infrastructure in Sydney (vs filling out our shithouse transit network) is just laughable. I'm pro bike lanes and better infrastructure (particularly at the expense of cars), but this 'think big' stuff is really on the nose in terms of equity of access.
      • WalterBright 7y ago
        Here in Seattle, with a powerful bike lobby, the cyclists come out when it's warm, dry, and daylight. Which is about 30% of the year. The demographic that bikes are young, fit adults. Can't bike much of anywhere without struggling with hills.
        • bkor 7y ago
          > The demographic that bikes are young, fit adults. Can't bike much of anywhere without struggling with hills. If only young/fit people use the infrastructure then the infrastructure is really poor! Note than I'm from the Netherlands and comparing countries is a bit weird. Why not aim for a better infrastructure than the Netherlands? Anyway, for hilly areas I expect a large share of people to use electric bikes. And way more care for safety. In Netherlands they think about possible safety issues. Meaning, someone on a bicycle going down a huge bridge is probably going fast and doesn't want to stop. You could argue that a bicyclist shouldn't do that, but that's pretty pointless. What's better to engineer the infrastructure in a way that deals with that. Hillier areas would require a lot of thought.
  • mdibiase 7y ago
    If the argument is that it's unbearable to commute by bike in scorching heat, I would argue you could still bike and ask your employer to install showers at your workplace. That's how it's done in the Netherlands, where most (modern-ish) offices have showers next to enclosed bike parking facilities.
    • eloisant 7y ago
      San Francisco has the best weather you can think of for biking: never too cold, never too hot, not that much rain. Yet the bike infrastructure is mostly bike lanes painted on the road and used as additional parking.
    • walterstucco 7y ago
      > you could still bike and ask your employer to install showers at your workplace Honestly I go to work to work, not to shower.
    • erik_seaberg 7y ago
      When companies are leasing space and skimping on office walls, major plumbing expansions are unlikely. We can't even get more toilets.
• asjw 7y ago
  I don't speak danish, but according to that graph your claim is not supported BTW how many people use a bike is a useless metric, how far they travel and for how much time is more important. Copenhagen is not a good example, it's very small, very flat and public transport is very expensive and it doesn't have to handle the same number of commuters many other cities have to. For example in Milan everyday a million people come to work from cities around it, in Rome it grows up to a staggering 1.5 millions. Bike is not favourite because it's better, but because politics made it preferable (less expensive) Things are changing, Copenhagen had it's first subway only in 2002, decades later other major cities and people will start using it more and more, because the city has invested a lot of money on it and can't handle people not using it or, as it is now, prices have to be very high, which kinda defeat the purpose of a public transport. Subway it's a good rival for bikes, because they use different paths. If you increment surface transport in cities with a large number of bikers, they start to compete for road space and it create tensions that need to be resolved. Bikes in Copenhagen and many other small/medium northern city are the effect of inertia (historically they usesd bikes because it's what they always used), much as the ridiculous number of cars in cities like Rome. As reference, the Copenhagen subway is run by ATM, the public transport company of Milan (Italy), where prices are an half even though the city is much bigger city, but there are public bikes as well, bike lanes everywhere and lots of car sharing companies. But the best feature of Milan is still walkability + public transport (subway it's much better than buses and very good on average) because much of the population cannot ride a bike for more than a few kms at a time.
  • bkor 7y ago
    > BTW how many people use a bike is a useless metric, how far they travel and for how much time is more important. As a Dutch person: what you're forgetting is that often the entire design of a city accommodates using bikes. Meaning: everything you might need is close by. Further, the more people use a bike, the more people are aware of people on a bike. The same people who use a car also use a bike (at least in Netherlands and Denmark). For Rome, the city is designed in a weird way. Cycling there is awful. Further, the traffic lights are utterly terrible. You're waiting way too long (though this is the case in pretty much most countries in the world). When infrastructure is designed in The Netherlands the impact is assessed on public transports, roads, cycling infrastructure, etc. That determines where office space is put, etc. Now for Netherlands there's millions using public transportation, also e.g. using a train. The bike storage areas around the big train stations are massive. Notice how I mentioned that Dutch people are using bikes, cars, public transport? There's not 1 solution or something that's bad/good as you make it out to be.
• rsj_hn 7y ago
  Holland is the densest nation in Europe, but still has substantial farmland, so the urban parts are very dense. It is flat with a mild climate, and the entire urban areas combined would fit into an area smaller than New York City. This is somehow a reproducible model in your mind. Then there are real economic and social trade offs that need to be seriously discussed. Historically the beautiful, walkable, lovely human scaled cities we all love before the automobile had large inequalities in land ownership. A small number of landlords owned most of the living units and everyone else rented from them. This was because the jobs were in the cities, so landlords could effectively tax people for having access to the high paying jobs. Once they got 1/3 of everyone's income, they could roll that over to purchasing more units faster than the renters could both pay rent and save to buy their own house. This creates a situation where a small number of families own most of the beautiful historical buildings that renters occupy in those lovely downtown cities. It was the introduction of the car that created a real middle class and increased home ownership allowing people to escape the thumb of their landlords and buy cheaper land surrounding the cities while keeping their jobs in the city. This shifted the economic rents captured by urban landlords and transferred it to auto manufacturers and other producers, shifting resources away from rent extraction and towards production, which spurred economic growth, home ownership, and family formation all together. The growth of suburbs was merely a byproduct of this economic geography. As transportation technology improves, cities become less dense over time. All cities, the world over, are slowly getting less dense. Living units are growing a few percent each year size, so what used to house a family over time becomes a studio apartment, and in this way, even as the buildings remain the same, urban density declines. Even builder taller buildings doesn't overcome the inexorable decline of density, a process uninterrupted since the early 20th century. Global populations are diffusing, spread out constantly trying to stay one step ahead of the urban landlords and take better advantage of new transportation to buy units farther away where land is cheap enough for them to buy their own small lot. When you start reversing this, you also start rolling back homeownership rates. Those lovely, dense walkable cities in the US are majority renter populations. They are also demographic sinks -- people don't reproduce at anywhere near replacement levels compared to more rural environments where homeownership rates are higher as are fertility rates. In other words, there are real inequality and social sustainability problems with dense living. It's not even something that is demographically sustainable. These cities require a constant inflow of people from more rural areas or immigrants from other countries to prevent demographic collapse. That doesn't mean that there aren't solutions -- perhaps there are! You can adopt public policies that disincentivize renting and subsidize homeownership in cities. You may (or may not) address the demographic collapse of urban areas. Spain (and the Netherlands) have massive problems with demographic collapse but have achieved high home ownership rates, but it addressing transportation promotion with homeownership and family formation all together, because all of these are intimately related. This is something that the anti-car crowd has never done, nor is it even on their radar. That people leave the city because they want to buy their own house and have kids, and once they are in the suburbs you really need a car -- that doesn't seem to register. Instead, it's all talk about building more infrastructure and this will suddenly reverse these trends. This isn't a serious engagement of the issues.