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I would beg to differ. 3 season biking is easy as pie, and 4 season with just a little effort. there was only maybe a month out of the year I couldn't bike to w

I would beg to differ. 3 season biking is easy as pie, and 4 season with just a little effort. there was only maybe a month out of the year I couldn't bike to work in Minneapolis or Chicago, all it takes is infrastructure and the right gear.

jodrellblank 6y ago
As easy as pie, all it takes to bike to work is all the tarmac and smooth roads of a car world, all the parking space of a small car world, all the maintenance of a small vehicle, and a car/bus/taxi/train system for when you can’t bike, and their infrastructure, parking and maintenance. Do bikes have the largest amount of unmentioned externalities of any form of transport?
- labawi 6y ago
  Have you been in a place where lots of people ride bikes? A small car world would be 100% -> 60% resource reduction. At reasonable scale, bikes are at least a 100% -> 10% reduction in all mentioned 'externalities' or should we say resource use, or 10x capacity for same resources, except for road size at maybe 3x, but still more than 10x on cost. Public transit would grow (no need to fit all cyclists), but that should actually be a net benefit. To comprehend the difference in scale, view images here [1]. Half as many cars wouldn't fit, even if they covered every cm of the image. [1] https://biketoeverything.com/2018/12/18/bicycle-infrastructure-in-amsterdam-and-the-netherlands/ https://biketoeverything.com/2018/12/18/bicycle-infrastructu...
  - jodrellblank 6y ago
    > A small car world would be 100% -> 60% resource reduction. You're missing the part I replied to which was about bikes being usable 11 months of the year. If you need all the car infrastructure for 1 month, plus the bike infrastructure, that makes it overall worse, not better. But discard that, if biking is a 60% reduction, then a walking+train world would be way more. Your link talks of a train station building a 12,500 bike-parking garage. For comparison the busiest train station in the UK (Waterloo) has 250,000 people using it every day. Note that the pictured bike parking in Amsterdam takes up the space of two of the large multistorey hotels next to it, just to store metal, but pushes actual walking humans two hotel distances further away from their destination just to walk past unused metal storage. Bike parking, like car parking, is a non-place in the sense of https://newworldeconomics.com//place-and-non-place/ https://newworldeconomics.com//place-and-non-place/ it's not somewhere anyone wants to go, or a place where anything happens. Scale that bike parking up to 100,000 people and it would be an enormous amount of physical city-center non-place. Now count that you have to park those bikes at both ends of every journey - bike parking at the supermarket, at the clothes shops, at the pubs, at the apartment buildings - and instead of a small, dense, walkable city center, you're now measuring the total area devoted to non-place metal storage in square kilometers, and inconveniencing everyone with kilometers more walking every week just to cross the distances taken up by mega bike park bloat. This picture is Shinjuku in Tokyo, the world's most populated city, near the world's busiest train station: https://newworldeconomics.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/shinjuku1.jpg https://newworldeconomics.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/shi... - can you imagine that street being as pleasant with 2,000 bikes barelling down it at 2x walking speed and every one of those eateries having 5-20 bike parking outside? And there's no chance those 12,500 bikes would fit on the trains, how many bikes fit on a passenger train, maybe 15 or so? Bike+train means most people can only bike on one side of any train journey. > Public transit would grow (no need to fit all cyclists), but that should actually be a net benefit. If public transit is growing, more people will be able to not-need bikes. > To comprehend the difference in scale, view images here [1]. Or you, view images here: https://newworldeconomics.com/what-a-real-train-system-looks-like/ https://newworldeconomics.com/what-a-real-train-system-looks... and comparisons here https://newworldeconomics.com/the-problem-with-bicycles/ https://newworldeconomics.com/the-problem-with-bicycles/ e.g. [1] "The typical U.S. solution is to surround the train station with acres and acres of free parking.[...] There are 157 acres of land in this photo. When you step off the train, you have immediate walking access to 157 acres of /nothing/" and [2] "The better solution is to surround the station with all the highest-value property. All the best offices, stores and restaurants are as close to the train station as possible, so we can walk there from the station, and where there is the most pedestrian traffic. Plus, you also try to put as many apartment buildings there as you can, so you can easily walk to the station in less than ten minutes." "if you want people to be able to live without automobiles, you have to make it easy to get from the train station to wherever you want to go on foot. This means you put all the good stuff right up against the train station — even build it into the train station itself if possible. When you step out of the train station, you want to land right in a wonderful pedestrian Traditional City environment, not a parking lot wasteland." When you switch a "large" surround of car parking for a "large" surround of bike parking, that doesn't fix anything. I put "large" in quotes because the measure is not abstract meters, dollars, or kilos of concrete, the measure is human size and human footsteps - walking past 12,000 bikes is 90% of people walking further for no benefit, while the bike owners also walk further for a small benefit of part of a journey, and puts desirable city space to use by metal instead of humans. [1] https://newworldeconomics.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/12/viennafairfax.jpg https://newworldeconomics.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/12/vie... [2] https://newworldeconomics.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/12/gakugeidaigaku.jpg https://newworldeconomics.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/12/gak...
    - jodrellblank 6y ago
      That is, the desire for and apparent need for bicycles comes from having a city built large enough for cars, too large to walk, and then having the cars removed. Where you are miles from your destination and between you and your destination are acres of no-place, nothing nice to travel through, nothing interesting to do. In a city built small enough to walk, bicycles are unwanted and unneeded extra hassle, and when you occasionally do have to walk a couple of extra miles it's through a vibrant, busy, maybe even beautiful, human space not concrete void. "It should be obvious that it is better to not need a bike than to need one. [...] we should not think about bikes-instead-of-cars, but rather getting over this unhealthy fixation on My Personal Transportation Device"
    - labawi 6y ago
      To be clear, I don't want to displace public transit -> bicycles. I was talking about cars -> bicycles. Densest cities are best served on foot - the places nobody would dare convert to car transit. As I emphasized, cars -> bikes is not 100 -> 60, but 100 -> 10. Meaning not 1.5x nor 2.5x but 10x density. A moderately priced double-decker staggered height bicycle parking comfortably fits 20+ bikes in the place of a single car. The only places that require comparatively large bicycle parking areas are large transport hubs, and in the example, the added distance for pedestrians is less than going between platforms, if any at all. In a typical not-overly-dense places, bike travel is technically faster than foot if you're going more than about 50m + about 120% of distance to parking (if not along the way). > U.S. solution .. 157 acres of free parking That is truly foolish, and would fit over a million bicycles even without racks.
      - jodrellblank 6y ago
        > The only places that require comparatively large bicycle parking areas are large transport hubs, and in the example, the added distance for pedestrians is less than going between platforms, if any at all. Everything requires comparatively large bicycle parking areas. Here https://newworldeconomics.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/osaka1.jpg https://newworldeconomics.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/osa... is perhaps 5-10% of the visitors bike parking, making the street 30-40% blocked and 30-40% wider for everyone. Here https://newworldeconomics.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/gakugeidai4.jpg https://newworldeconomics.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/gak... are maybe 10-20 bikes clogging up the path for thousands of people. > I was talking about cars -> bicycles. Densest cities are best served on foot Right, so if you're redesigning smaller and denser, why on earth would you build so everyone needs bikes, instead of building so everyone doesn't? And if you're not redesigning smaller, and distances are still car-suburb distances, they're still too far for bikes for most people and most journeys. You might have to do a 20 mile round trip to get into Houston center and back, for example, that's 1.5-2hrs biking. Way outside what you could expect most people to want to do regularly compared to say a 15 minute walk. 45k people live in https://newworldeconomics.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/gakugeidai2-2.jpg https://newworldeconomics.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/gak... this photo with a ~10 minute walk to all of those places including a train station with lots of regular large trains. > The only places that require comparatively large bicycle parking areas All bicycle parking areas are comparatively large for the people who don't have bikes. "The space of a single car" is ~3 meters. You only need 30 of those to push your walking commute, trip to the shops, visit to your friends, out by +1km and +2km after a round trip. Building for the 10% of bikers compared to the 90% of non-bikers is insanity. > That is truly foolish, and would fit over a million bicycles even without racks. If it did, it would still be 157 acres of non-place nobody wants to go to, spend time in, and resent having to get to the other side of. The foolishness is having that much inhuman space dedicated to metal storage, not that it's dedicated to fossil fuelled vehicles instead of pedal powered vehicles.
- InitialLastName 6y ago
  Don't fight it so hard. Every person on a bike reduces traffic on your car commute. Plus, they don't dump any particulates into your childrens' lungs.
  - jodrellblank 6y ago
    "Accept a bad solution because otherwise I'll threaten your children with a worse one" might be a convincing argument, but it's not a good argument. Designing things around bikes, and then everyone needs a bike, is a worse option than designing everything around humans (instead of some kind of vehicle).
    - dahart 6y ago
      Neither of those sentences is living in reality. Nobody's threatening children with a worse solution, we already have the worse solution, our children are already inhaling the pollution. You can choose to keep it or choose to lessen the pollution. As far as pollution goes, there's little difference between bikes and whatever alternative you're proposing (walking?). Walking doesn't pollute, bikes don't pollute, cars do pollute heavily. Bikes aren't a bad solution to pollution, they are a perfectly good solution. One of many. > Designing things around bikes, and then everyone needs a bike, is a worse option than designing everything around humans (instead of some kind of vehicle). I'd fully agree we should design things around humans, but where are people designing cities primarily around bikes? And what, exactly, are the problems we actually have with bikes? Not the fear-mongering made-up FUD, but real problems that exist already. Bike parking space is not an actual problem today. What is? What does it mean - exactly - to design around humans? You could argue the problems we have are because we designed around human convenience already, and allowed our walking space to be paved and prioritized for cars. Your arguments are vassellating between comparing to cars and then not comparing to cars. What's the goal post here? Are you demanding something perfect, or do you want to improve considerably over the crappy position we're in with cars? Is removing all vehicles entirely a realistic goal? Is redesigning all the largest cities on earth, and getting everyone to work within a mile of where they live realistic? Why are you trying so hard to lump non-motorized vehicles together with motorized vehicles? There is a large difference between having a gas-consuming engine and not having one, don't you agree?
- dahart 6y ago
  > all it takes to bike to work is all the tarmac and smooth roads of a car world, all the parking space of a small car world, all the maintenance of a small vehicle You are just joking, right? You’re exaggerating by an order of magnitude, you can literally fit 10 bikes in the space of a small car, on the road and when parked. You think bike maintenance is the same effort as car maintenance? I’m baffled by this claim, and I maintain several bikes and several cars. Cars are much harder, much more expensive to maintain, and require far more resources. Bike maintenance is something most riders can do on their own, while car maintenance is something people take to a shop. > Do bikes have the largest amount of unmentioned externalities of any form of transport? What on earth are you referring to? Are you comparing a few sidewalks and bike lanes in select metro areas to the 3 million miles of paved roads in the US? Are you suggesting the 1-2 ounces of oil I use on my bike chain per year is somehow worse than the average 2 metric tons of gas and oil used by the average car in a year? Are you including pollution in your list of externalities? Are you including accidents and fatalities in your calculation? I’m confused, I really can’t think of a single unmentioned externality where bikes don’t compare favorably to cars by a very wide margin. So, it seems like the answer is a really clear and obvious no, there are other forms of transport with externalities so much larger than bikes that it makes the mere suggestion seem pretty absurd. Examples include but aren’t limited to: cars, airplanes, and cargo boats.
  - jodrellblank 6y ago
    > You are just joking, right? you can literally fit 10 bikes in the space of a small car, on the road You are just joking, right? A Fiat 500 is 3.5 meters long and 1.6 meters wide. No way can you "literally" fit 10 bikes being ridden on the road in that space - or even 3. Parked, you might be able to fit 3 if they're staggered, but if you're going to tell me you can double-decker it, you won't also fit the stairs/ramp/elevator mechanism in that space as well. > You think bike maintenance is the same effort as car maintenance? You take it to a shop, drop it off, and leave it there, then get it back later? Yes, that sounds about the same effort. Except a car usually needs servicing and is still drivable, a bike is probably punctured or chain snapped and unusable, making it more hassle, and if you decide that means you have to do it yourself, more effort. Everyone remember how fun it is to take a bike wheel off and run it through the bathtub to identify the location of a puncture, yes? Never spent that much effort on taking my car to a garage. > Bike maintenance is something most riders can do on their own, while car maintenance is something people take to a shop. You've gone from "baffled by this claim" to "most people spend more effort on bike maintenance than car maintenance" in the space of a paragraph. No comment. > What on earth are you referring to? I'm referring to the things I said. If you didn't have paved roads made for cars, you would need to build them for bikes. You wouldn't need to build them for walking. Bikers never ever mention this, it's a kind of parasitism on the car infrastructure - a cost that bikers don't consider. If there were no cars, but we needed to upkeep hundreds of miles of tarmac roads, bikes would need to be taxed hugely. It's an externality in the sense that bikes need it, but aren't paying (directly) for it, and are offloading the cost onto car drivers (who currently need it more and do more damage to it). > Are you including pollution in your list of externalities? No I'm not including the cost of container shipping enough bikes for 500,000 people from China, or the cost of digging up the iron ore and making the steel and carbon fibre to build them, or the trash heaps where hundreds of thousands of bikes rot. Good point though, neither do bike enthusiasts. > Are you including accidents and fatalities in your calculation? The kind where a big heavy fast moving metal lump collides with a soft squidgy easily damaged slow-moving pedestrian? I'm not including those either, but I am against bikes being allowed anywhere pedestrians are, so let's add that in as well. > I’m confused, I really can’t think of a single unmentioned externality where bikes don’t compare favorably to cars by a very wide margin. Neither can I. That's a totally cherry-picked comparison because it's like saying "being stabbed compares favourably to being shot by a very wide margin". There's no unmentioned externality where walking doesn't compare favourably to bikes by a very wide margin - in a place which is designed and built for humans walking -- which all places should be because humans are more important than vehicles. Walking needs less tarmac, less machinery, less maintenance, less money, is more accessible to people of more abilities, takes less parking space, less infrastructure, causes fewer accidents, places fewer restrictions on clothing, has lower environmental cost, lower pollution, less waste, doesn't need helmets and high-visibility clothing and bike-locks, doesn't need insurance and breakdown recovery and loan-cars... > So, it seems like the answer is a really clear and obvious no, there are other forms of transport with externalities so much larger than bikes that it makes the mere suggestion seem pretty absurd. Cars pay for roads in terms of fuel taxes and vehicle taxes. Bikes don't pay for either. Cars often pay for car parks, bikes often use sidewalk, or car parks. Cars pay for accidents with mandatory insurance, bike riders are uninsured. That other things are worse was not my point, my point was that bikers gloss over needing roads and the cost of that, car drivers don't.
jupp0r 6y ago
True for you and me, insurmountable inconveniences for the average person.

jodrellblank 6y ago

As easy as pie, all it takes to bike to work is all the tarmac and smooth roads of a car world, all the parking space of a small car world, all the maintenance of a small vehicle, and a car/bus/taxi/train system for when you can’t bike, and their infrastructure, parking and maintenance. Do bikes have the largest amount of unmentioned externalities of any form of transport?

labawi 6y ago
Have you been in a place where lots of people ride bikes? A small car world would be 100% -> 60% resource reduction. At reasonable scale, bikes are at least a 100% -> 10% reduction in all mentioned 'externalities' or should we say resource use, or 10x capacity for same resources, except for road size at maybe 3x, but still more than 10x on cost. Public transit would grow (no need to fit all cyclists), but that should actually be a net benefit. To comprehend the difference in scale, view images here [1]. Half as many cars wouldn't fit, even if they covered every cm of the image. [1] https://biketoeverything.com/2018/12/18/bicycle-infrastructure-in-amsterdam-and-the-netherlands/ https://biketoeverything.com/2018/12/18/bicycle-infrastructu...
- jodrellblank 6y ago
  > A small car world would be 100% -> 60% resource reduction. You're missing the part I replied to which was about bikes being usable 11 months of the year. If you need all the car infrastructure for 1 month, plus the bike infrastructure, that makes it overall worse, not better. But discard that, if biking is a 60% reduction, then a walking+train world would be way more. Your link talks of a train station building a 12,500 bike-parking garage. For comparison the busiest train station in the UK (Waterloo) has 250,000 people using it every day. Note that the pictured bike parking in Amsterdam takes up the space of two of the large multistorey hotels next to it, just to store metal, but pushes actual walking humans two hotel distances further away from their destination just to walk past unused metal storage. Bike parking, like car parking, is a non-place in the sense of https://newworldeconomics.com//place-and-non-place/ https://newworldeconomics.com//place-and-non-place/ it's not somewhere anyone wants to go, or a place where anything happens. Scale that bike parking up to 100,000 people and it would be an enormous amount of physical city-center non-place. Now count that you have to park those bikes at both ends of every journey - bike parking at the supermarket, at the clothes shops, at the pubs, at the apartment buildings - and instead of a small, dense, walkable city center, you're now measuring the total area devoted to non-place metal storage in square kilometers, and inconveniencing everyone with kilometers more walking every week just to cross the distances taken up by mega bike park bloat. This picture is Shinjuku in Tokyo, the world's most populated city, near the world's busiest train station: https://newworldeconomics.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/shinjuku1.jpg https://newworldeconomics.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/shi... - can you imagine that street being as pleasant with 2,000 bikes barelling down it at 2x walking speed and every one of those eateries having 5-20 bike parking outside? And there's no chance those 12,500 bikes would fit on the trains, how many bikes fit on a passenger train, maybe 15 or so? Bike+train means most people can only bike on one side of any train journey. > Public transit would grow (no need to fit all cyclists), but that should actually be a net benefit. If public transit is growing, more people will be able to not-need bikes. > To comprehend the difference in scale, view images here [1]. Or you, view images here: https://newworldeconomics.com/what-a-real-train-system-looks-like/ https://newworldeconomics.com/what-a-real-train-system-looks... and comparisons here https://newworldeconomics.com/the-problem-with-bicycles/ https://newworldeconomics.com/the-problem-with-bicycles/ e.g. [1] "The typical U.S. solution is to surround the train station with acres and acres of free parking.[...] There are 157 acres of land in this photo. When you step off the train, you have immediate walking access to 157 acres of /nothing/" and [2] "The better solution is to surround the station with all the highest-value property. All the best offices, stores and restaurants are as close to the train station as possible, so we can walk there from the station, and where there is the most pedestrian traffic. Plus, you also try to put as many apartment buildings there as you can, so you can easily walk to the station in less than ten minutes." "if you want people to be able to live without automobiles, you have to make it easy to get from the train station to wherever you want to go on foot. This means you put all the good stuff right up against the train station — even build it into the train station itself if possible. When you step out of the train station, you want to land right in a wonderful pedestrian Traditional City environment, not a parking lot wasteland." When you switch a "large" surround of car parking for a "large" surround of bike parking, that doesn't fix anything. I put "large" in quotes because the measure is not abstract meters, dollars, or kilos of concrete, the measure is human size and human footsteps - walking past 12,000 bikes is 90% of people walking further for no benefit, while the bike owners also walk further for a small benefit of part of a journey, and puts desirable city space to use by metal instead of humans. [1] https://newworldeconomics.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/12/viennafairfax.jpg https://newworldeconomics.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/12/vie... [2] https://newworldeconomics.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/12/gakugeidaigaku.jpg https://newworldeconomics.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/12/gak...
  - jodrellblank 6y ago
    That is, the desire for and apparent need for bicycles comes from having a city built large enough for cars, too large to walk, and then having the cars removed. Where you are miles from your destination and between you and your destination are acres of no-place, nothing nice to travel through, nothing interesting to do. In a city built small enough to walk, bicycles are unwanted and unneeded extra hassle, and when you occasionally do have to walk a couple of extra miles it's through a vibrant, busy, maybe even beautiful, human space not concrete void. "It should be obvious that it is better to not need a bike than to need one. [...] we should not think about bikes-instead-of-cars, but rather getting over this unhealthy fixation on My Personal Transportation Device"
  - labawi 6y ago
    To be clear, I don't want to displace public transit -> bicycles. I was talking about cars -> bicycles. Densest cities are best served on foot - the places nobody would dare convert to car transit. As I emphasized, cars -> bikes is not 100 -> 60, but 100 -> 10. Meaning not 1.5x nor 2.5x but 10x density. A moderately priced double-decker staggered height bicycle parking comfortably fits 20+ bikes in the place of a single car. The only places that require comparatively large bicycle parking areas are large transport hubs, and in the example, the added distance for pedestrians is less than going between platforms, if any at all. In a typical not-overly-dense places, bike travel is technically faster than foot if you're going more than about 50m + about 120% of distance to parking (if not along the way). > U.S. solution .. 157 acres of free parking That is truly foolish, and would fit over a million bicycles even without racks.
    - jodrellblank 6y ago
      > The only places that require comparatively large bicycle parking areas are large transport hubs, and in the example, the added distance for pedestrians is less than going between platforms, if any at all. Everything requires comparatively large bicycle parking areas. Here https://newworldeconomics.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/osaka1.jpg https://newworldeconomics.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/osa... is perhaps 5-10% of the visitors bike parking, making the street 30-40% blocked and 30-40% wider for everyone. Here https://newworldeconomics.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/gakugeidai4.jpg https://newworldeconomics.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/gak... are maybe 10-20 bikes clogging up the path for thousands of people. > I was talking about cars -> bicycles. Densest cities are best served on foot Right, so if you're redesigning smaller and denser, why on earth would you build so everyone needs bikes, instead of building so everyone doesn't? And if you're not redesigning smaller, and distances are still car-suburb distances, they're still too far for bikes for most people and most journeys. You might have to do a 20 mile round trip to get into Houston center and back, for example, that's 1.5-2hrs biking. Way outside what you could expect most people to want to do regularly compared to say a 15 minute walk. 45k people live in https://newworldeconomics.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/gakugeidai2-2.jpg https://newworldeconomics.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/gak... this photo with a ~10 minute walk to all of those places including a train station with lots of regular large trains. > The only places that require comparatively large bicycle parking areas All bicycle parking areas are comparatively large for the people who don't have bikes. "The space of a single car" is ~3 meters. You only need 30 of those to push your walking commute, trip to the shops, visit to your friends, out by +1km and +2km after a round trip. Building for the 10% of bikers compared to the 90% of non-bikers is insanity. > That is truly foolish, and would fit over a million bicycles even without racks. If it did, it would still be 157 acres of non-place nobody wants to go to, spend time in, and resent having to get to the other side of. The foolishness is having that much inhuman space dedicated to metal storage, not that it's dedicated to fossil fuelled vehicles instead of pedal powered vehicles.
InitialLastName 6y ago
Don't fight it so hard. Every person on a bike reduces traffic on your car commute. Plus, they don't dump any particulates into your childrens' lungs.
- jodrellblank 6y ago
  "Accept a bad solution because otherwise I'll threaten your children with a worse one" might be a convincing argument, but it's not a good argument. Designing things around bikes, and then everyone needs a bike, is a worse option than designing everything around humans (instead of some kind of vehicle).
  - dahart 6y ago
    Neither of those sentences is living in reality. Nobody's threatening children with a worse solution, we already have the worse solution, our children are already inhaling the pollution. You can choose to keep it or choose to lessen the pollution. As far as pollution goes, there's little difference between bikes and whatever alternative you're proposing (walking?). Walking doesn't pollute, bikes don't pollute, cars do pollute heavily. Bikes aren't a bad solution to pollution, they are a perfectly good solution. One of many. > Designing things around bikes, and then everyone needs a bike, is a worse option than designing everything around humans (instead of some kind of vehicle). I'd fully agree we should design things around humans, but where are people designing cities primarily around bikes? And what, exactly, are the problems we actually have with bikes? Not the fear-mongering made-up FUD, but real problems that exist already. Bike parking space is not an actual problem today. What is? What does it mean - exactly - to design around humans? You could argue the problems we have are because we designed around human convenience already, and allowed our walking space to be paved and prioritized for cars. Your arguments are vassellating between comparing to cars and then not comparing to cars. What's the goal post here? Are you demanding something perfect, or do you want to improve considerably over the crappy position we're in with cars? Is removing all vehicles entirely a realistic goal? Is redesigning all the largest cities on earth, and getting everyone to work within a mile of where they live realistic? Why are you trying so hard to lump non-motorized vehicles together with motorized vehicles? There is a large difference between having a gas-consuming engine and not having one, don't you agree?
dahart 6y ago
> all it takes to bike to work is all the tarmac and smooth roads of a car world, all the parking space of a small car world, all the maintenance of a small vehicle You are just joking, right? You’re exaggerating by an order of magnitude, you can literally fit 10 bikes in the space of a small car, on the road and when parked. You think bike maintenance is the same effort as car maintenance? I’m baffled by this claim, and I maintain several bikes and several cars. Cars are much harder, much more expensive to maintain, and require far more resources. Bike maintenance is something most riders can do on their own, while car maintenance is something people take to a shop. > Do bikes have the largest amount of unmentioned externalities of any form of transport? What on earth are you referring to? Are you comparing a few sidewalks and bike lanes in select metro areas to the 3 million miles of paved roads in the US? Are you suggesting the 1-2 ounces of oil I use on my bike chain per year is somehow worse than the average 2 metric tons of gas and oil used by the average car in a year? Are you including pollution in your list of externalities? Are you including accidents and fatalities in your calculation? I’m confused, I really can’t think of a single unmentioned externality where bikes don’t compare favorably to cars by a very wide margin. So, it seems like the answer is a really clear and obvious no, there are other forms of transport with externalities so much larger than bikes that it makes the mere suggestion seem pretty absurd. Examples include but aren’t limited to: cars, airplanes, and cargo boats.
- jodrellblank 6y ago
  > You are just joking, right? you can literally fit 10 bikes in the space of a small car, on the road You are just joking, right? A Fiat 500 is 3.5 meters long and 1.6 meters wide. No way can you "literally" fit 10 bikes being ridden on the road in that space - or even 3. Parked, you might be able to fit 3 if they're staggered, but if you're going to tell me you can double-decker it, you won't also fit the stairs/ramp/elevator mechanism in that space as well. > You think bike maintenance is the same effort as car maintenance? You take it to a shop, drop it off, and leave it there, then get it back later? Yes, that sounds about the same effort. Except a car usually needs servicing and is still drivable, a bike is probably punctured or chain snapped and unusable, making it more hassle, and if you decide that means you have to do it yourself, more effort. Everyone remember how fun it is to take a bike wheel off and run it through the bathtub to identify the location of a puncture, yes? Never spent that much effort on taking my car to a garage. > Bike maintenance is something most riders can do on their own, while car maintenance is something people take to a shop. You've gone from "baffled by this claim" to "most people spend more effort on bike maintenance than car maintenance" in the space of a paragraph. No comment. > What on earth are you referring to? I'm referring to the things I said. If you didn't have paved roads made for cars, you would need to build them for bikes. You wouldn't need to build them for walking. Bikers never ever mention this, it's a kind of parasitism on the car infrastructure - a cost that bikers don't consider. If there were no cars, but we needed to upkeep hundreds of miles of tarmac roads, bikes would need to be taxed hugely. It's an externality in the sense that bikes need it, but aren't paying (directly) for it, and are offloading the cost onto car drivers (who currently need it more and do more damage to it). > Are you including pollution in your list of externalities? No I'm not including the cost of container shipping enough bikes for 500,000 people from China, or the cost of digging up the iron ore and making the steel and carbon fibre to build them, or the trash heaps where hundreds of thousands of bikes rot. Good point though, neither do bike enthusiasts. > Are you including accidents and fatalities in your calculation? The kind where a big heavy fast moving metal lump collides with a soft squidgy easily damaged slow-moving pedestrian? I'm not including those either, but I am against bikes being allowed anywhere pedestrians are, so let's add that in as well. > I’m confused, I really can’t think of a single unmentioned externality where bikes don’t compare favorably to cars by a very wide margin. Neither can I. That's a totally cherry-picked comparison because it's like saying "being stabbed compares favourably to being shot by a very wide margin". There's no unmentioned externality where walking doesn't compare favourably to bikes by a very wide margin - in a place which is designed and built for humans walking -- which all places should be because humans are more important than vehicles. Walking needs less tarmac, less machinery, less maintenance, less money, is more accessible to people of more abilities, takes less parking space, less infrastructure, causes fewer accidents, places fewer restrictions on clothing, has lower environmental cost, lower pollution, less waste, doesn't need helmets and high-visibility clothing and bike-locks, doesn't need insurance and breakdown recovery and loan-cars... > So, it seems like the answer is a really clear and obvious no, there are other forms of transport with externalities so much larger than bikes that it makes the mere suggestion seem pretty absurd. Cars pay for roads in terms of fuel taxes and vehicle taxes. Bikes don't pay for either. Cars often pay for car parks, bikes often use sidewalk, or car parks. Cars pay for accidents with mandatory insurance, bike riders are uninsured. That other things are worse was not my point, my point was that bikers gloss over needing roads and the cost of that, car drivers don't.

jupp0r 6y ago

True for you and me, insurmountable inconveniences for the average person.