5 ms·

I'd also argue the potential savings and advantages of e-bikes are undervalued because the bike infrastructure in even the best US cities isn't particularly gre

I'd also argue the potential savings and advantages of e-bikes are undervalued because the bike infrastructure in even the best US cities isn't particularly great. I've spent a fair amount of time in Denver, and while there are some good spots and ongoing improvements, the bike infrastructure in the city is honestly a lot worse than you might expect. Better bike infrastructure would almost certainly increase the e-bike value for people who buy them anyways, but even more importantly make them worth it to a lot more people.

chitowneats 4y ago
Denver is trying. But they have so far to go. I wish them luck and success. The driving culture is strong.
- zachkatz 4y ago
  Here's a random main street in Denver: https://www.google.com/maps/@39.7322582,-104.9861576,3a,75y,12.31h,92.44t/data=!3m7!1e1!3m5!1syomvuSdA5h6xaTaYomBYlw!2e0!6shttps:%2F%2Fstreetviewpixels-pa.googleapis.com%2Fv1%2Fthumbnail%3Fpanoid%3DyomvuSdA5h6xaTaYomBYlw%26cb_client%3Dsearch.revgeo_and_fetch.gps%26w%3D96%26h%3D64%26yaw%3D257.9331%26pitch%3D0%26thumbfov%3D100!7i16384!8i8192 https://www.google.com/maps/@39.7322582,-104.9861576,3a,75y,... Or another one: https://www.google.com/maps/@39.7356145,-104.9873758,3a,75y,0.86h,90t/data=!3m7!1e1!3m5!1ss1-KyeJbKNcEXc5iRxbgcg!2e0!6shttps:%2F%2Fstreetviewpixels-pa.googleapis.com%2Fv1%2Fthumbnail%3Fpanoid%3Ds1-KyeJbKNcEXc5iRxbgcg%26cb_client%3Dmaps_sv.tactile.gps%26w%3D203%26h%3D100%26yaw%3D51.559692%26pitch%3D0%26thumbfov%3D100!7i16384!8i8192 https://www.google.com/maps/@39.7356145,-104.9873758,3a,75y,... ...or another one: https://www.google.com/maps/@39.7383571,-104.9929042,3a,75y,199.02h,82.55t/data=!3m6!1e1!3m4!1sl6PP5k4kbs2dugYG4h1xIg!2e0!7i16384!8i8192 https://www.google.com/maps/@39.7383571,-104.9929042,3a,75y,... You can click around to pretty much any street in the city, and 100% of the space is dedicated to cars. A complete bike network that enables mass cycling is a dense grid that makes basically every street safe to cycle on: http://www.aviewfromthecyclepath.com/2015/05/the-grid-most-important-enabler-of-mass.html http://www.aviewfromthecyclepath.com/2015/05/the-grid-most-i... This is what trying looks like (Jersey City's Quick Build Bike Network ): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1mC1l8L5aBA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1mC1l8L5aBA Or this (Inside the New Plan to Make Paris ‘100% Cyclable): https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-10-22/how-paris-will-become-100-cyclable https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-10-22/how-paris... Denver is not even really trying.
  - chitowneats 4y ago
    If you're clicking around on random streets in Google Maps, it's clear you have no actual knowledge of the city. It's far less dense than any place you are comparing it to. Paris has been inhabited by city builders for thousands of years. Denver for about 150. It has such an uphill battle against its historical context as a Western U.S. mining town. Before that, the area was sparsely populated by Native American hunter-gatherers. You're not even pretending to consider the starting point. Why not compare it to places like Salt Lake City, or Boise? Cities that actually have some similarity to it terms of population and historical development. I encourage everyone to disregard the comment I'm replying to. It's totally ridiculous. Peak HN big-brain BS.
    - ultrarunner 4y ago
      I suspect the comment you encourage others to disregard is pointing toward intentions and the implementation of design. What about the age of a city dictates that there is a point it must choose to dedicate 100% of available space to cars? Amsterdam wasn't as navigable by bicycle only 20 years ago. I live in Phoenix, which is even more sprawled than Denver. I have a grocery store less than a mile from my house, and a bike path almost all the way there. Unfortunately, that path leads through an unlit and flooded underpass, through a flooded drainage canal, then ends with a stretch of grass and a guardrail to a 6-lane 55 mph road. They're so close, but there has to be an intention to complete the job. So far the powers that be intend only to serve cars. I hope that continues to improve in Denver (and elsewhere!) but sprawl and age aren't great excuses for clear choices.
      - chitowneats 4y ago
        Yet another person who's never been to any part of Denver outside downtown. The bikeability of Phoenix is atrocious. The two cities are not even comparable in this regard. Denver, like most places in the U.S., discovered bikeability in the last couple of decades. Meanwhile, Phoenix has maintained or even exacerbated the status quo. Denver has invested tens of millions into becoming a denser, more bikeable locale. It also elects politicians who campaign on and further this goal. The same cannot be said for Phoenix.
- Spivak 4y ago
  I think people mistake city planning where 12min Car / 55min Bus / 2hr Walk / 30min Bike is “driving culture” where so much noise is made about encouraging people to not drive while doing nothing and covering your ears when it comes time to make not driving viable. I would love to give up my car, we went down to one because wfh but there is no chance in hell we could go zero. We don’t even have a bus route down my street and I live in an area that is entirely dense apartments. The closest one is a mile walk to the nearest main road with no sidewalk. I decided to check my friends who live across down and it’s 20m by car, impossible by bus (Google just gives up), 6 hrs walking, and 1hr30 biking. I swear it’s “we tried bike lanes, what else do you want?”
  - hifromLA 4y ago
    Yeah that’s a very typical spread of travel times. There’s very few cities in America where a majority of trips are not best served by a car. Even cities like SF and Chi which ostensibly have good public transit, mostly have what I would call “downtown shuttles”. Any trip to the CBD is pretty reasonable by transit, but most trips both in the city and greater region are by bus which are by definition slower than a car. Cities oriented around the car (even relatively dense ones like LA) are very difficult to adapt to transit because there are no logical nodes at which to place the transit.
SauciestGNU 4y ago
I'm an outlier because I've been a bike commuter for over 10 years, but I recently bought myself an e-bike and one of the things I noticed is that it helps me cope with the poor cycling infrastructure where I am. It's really expanded the routes I feel safe taking in my city versus my "acoustic" bikes.
wonder_er 4y ago
I live in Denver, and find the bike infrastructure to be criminally inadequate. The same is true for the road infrastructure, but the bike lanes are set up to ensure that there's a continuous stream of dangerous and complex interactions where bicyclists would be effortlessly killed by a driver. I ride a scooter around the city full time, like a small motorcycle, and it's so fast and easy and convenient. I used to bike around the city but will never go back to biking. heres a cool litle project showing where ive ridden in denver (and the world) https://josh-strava-heatmap.herokuapp.com/ https://josh-strava-heatmap.herokuapp.com/
- krashidov 4y ago
  I'm curious. Why do you think a bike is more dangerous than a scooter? I find that on a scooter I am more prone to crashing from random bumps
  - alwayslikethis 4y ago
    Scooter as in a type of motorcycle with a step through frame: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scooter_(motorcycle) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scooter_(motorcycle) They are heavy and stable, unlike the standing type. They may be less dangerous than a bike because they can go quite fast, matching the speed of cars when riding on the road, which helps you avoid dangerous situations in which car drivers try to pass you without enough space to do so. Good bicycle infrastructure can minimize this, though it doesn't seem like Denver has it.
    - sangnoir 4y ago
      Parent may have been thinking of the other type of scooter with tiny wheels: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motorized_scooter https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motorized_scooter
  - wonder_er 4y ago
    u/alwayslikethis nailed it. I'm thinking of a scooter as in "a small motorcycle", with a gasoline engine. mibe is 170 cc, and it's perfect.
syntheweave 4y ago
I want the robocars to take over for the selfish reason of being able to safely ride a bicycle everywhere without any intervening bike infrastructure campaign. Like, the "urban traffic problem" really can be reduced in almost every respect to either "humans are unsafe drivers" or "cars take up too much space". Shrink the fleet down to robotaxis and ebikes and you've solved everything last-mile related with no streetscape changes, leaving just the longer journeys for shared modes. As a bonus, kids become much more self-mobile again.

chitowneats 4y ago

Denver is trying. But they have so far to go. I wish them luck and success. The driving culture is strong.

zachkatz 4y ago
Here's a random main street in Denver: https://www.google.com/maps/@39.7322582,-104.9861576,3a,75y,12.31h,92.44t/data=!3m7!1e1!3m5!1syomvuSdA5h6xaTaYomBYlw!2e0!6shttps:%2F%2Fstreetviewpixels-pa.googleapis.com%2Fv1%2Fthumbnail%3Fpanoid%3DyomvuSdA5h6xaTaYomBYlw%26cb_client%3Dsearch.revgeo_and_fetch.gps%26w%3D96%26h%3D64%26yaw%3D257.9331%26pitch%3D0%26thumbfov%3D100!7i16384!8i8192 https://www.google.com/maps/@39.7322582,-104.9861576,3a,75y,... Or another one: https://www.google.com/maps/@39.7356145,-104.9873758,3a,75y,0.86h,90t/data=!3m7!1e1!3m5!1ss1-KyeJbKNcEXc5iRxbgcg!2e0!6shttps:%2F%2Fstreetviewpixels-pa.googleapis.com%2Fv1%2Fthumbnail%3Fpanoid%3Ds1-KyeJbKNcEXc5iRxbgcg%26cb_client%3Dmaps_sv.tactile.gps%26w%3D203%26h%3D100%26yaw%3D51.559692%26pitch%3D0%26thumbfov%3D100!7i16384!8i8192 https://www.google.com/maps/@39.7356145,-104.9873758,3a,75y,... ...or another one: https://www.google.com/maps/@39.7383571,-104.9929042,3a,75y,199.02h,82.55t/data=!3m6!1e1!3m4!1sl6PP5k4kbs2dugYG4h1xIg!2e0!7i16384!8i8192 https://www.google.com/maps/@39.7383571,-104.9929042,3a,75y,... You can click around to pretty much any street in the city, and 100% of the space is dedicated to cars. A complete bike network that enables mass cycling is a dense grid that makes basically every street safe to cycle on: http://www.aviewfromthecyclepath.com/2015/05/the-grid-most-important-enabler-of-mass.html http://www.aviewfromthecyclepath.com/2015/05/the-grid-most-i... This is what trying looks like (Jersey City's Quick Build Bike Network ): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1mC1l8L5aBA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1mC1l8L5aBA Or this (Inside the New Plan to Make Paris ‘100% Cyclable): https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-10-22/how-paris-will-become-100-cyclable https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-10-22/how-paris... Denver is not even really trying.
- chitowneats 4y ago
  If you're clicking around on random streets in Google Maps, it's clear you have no actual knowledge of the city. It's far less dense than any place you are comparing it to. Paris has been inhabited by city builders for thousands of years. Denver for about 150. It has such an uphill battle against its historical context as a Western U.S. mining town. Before that, the area was sparsely populated by Native American hunter-gatherers. You're not even pretending to consider the starting point. Why not compare it to places like Salt Lake City, or Boise? Cities that actually have some similarity to it terms of population and historical development. I encourage everyone to disregard the comment I'm replying to. It's totally ridiculous. Peak HN big-brain BS.
  - ultrarunner 4y ago
    I suspect the comment you encourage others to disregard is pointing toward intentions and the implementation of design. What about the age of a city dictates that there is a point it must choose to dedicate 100% of available space to cars? Amsterdam wasn't as navigable by bicycle only 20 years ago. I live in Phoenix, which is even more sprawled than Denver. I have a grocery store less than a mile from my house, and a bike path almost all the way there. Unfortunately, that path leads through an unlit and flooded underpass, through a flooded drainage canal, then ends with a stretch of grass and a guardrail to a 6-lane 55 mph road. They're so close, but there has to be an intention to complete the job. So far the powers that be intend only to serve cars. I hope that continues to improve in Denver (and elsewhere!) but sprawl and age aren't great excuses for clear choices.
    - chitowneats 4y ago
      Yet another person who's never been to any part of Denver outside downtown. The bikeability of Phoenix is atrocious. The two cities are not even comparable in this regard. Denver, like most places in the U.S., discovered bikeability in the last couple of decades. Meanwhile, Phoenix has maintained or even exacerbated the status quo. Denver has invested tens of millions into becoming a denser, more bikeable locale. It also elects politicians who campaign on and further this goal. The same cannot be said for Phoenix.
Spivak 4y ago
I think people mistake city planning where 12min Car / 55min Bus / 2hr Walk / 30min Bike is “driving culture” where so much noise is made about encouraging people to not drive while doing nothing and covering your ears when it comes time to make not driving viable. I would love to give up my car, we went down to one because wfh but there is no chance in hell we could go zero. We don’t even have a bus route down my street and I live in an area that is entirely dense apartments. The closest one is a mile walk to the nearest main road with no sidewalk. I decided to check my friends who live across down and it’s 20m by car, impossible by bus (Google just gives up), 6 hrs walking, and 1hr30 biking. I swear it’s “we tried bike lanes, what else do you want?”
- hifromLA 4y ago
  Yeah that’s a very typical spread of travel times. There’s very few cities in America where a majority of trips are not best served by a car. Even cities like SF and Chi which ostensibly have good public transit, mostly have what I would call “downtown shuttles”. Any trip to the CBD is pretty reasonable by transit, but most trips both in the city and greater region are by bus which are by definition slower than a car. Cities oriented around the car (even relatively dense ones like LA) are very difficult to adapt to transit because there are no logical nodes at which to place the transit.

SauciestGNU 4y ago

I'm an outlier because I've been a bike commuter for over 10 years, but I recently bought myself an e-bike and one of the things I noticed is that it helps me cope with the poor cycling infrastructure where I am. It's really expanded the routes I feel safe taking in my city versus my "acoustic" bikes.

wonder_er 4y ago

I live in Denver, and find the bike infrastructure to be criminally inadequate. The same is true for the road infrastructure, but the bike lanes are set up to ensure that there's a continuous stream of dangerous and complex interactions where bicyclists would be effortlessly killed by a driver. I ride a scooter around the city full time, like a small motorcycle, and it's so fast and easy and convenient. I used to bike around the city but will never go back to biking. heres a cool litle project showing where ive ridden in denver (and the world) https://josh-strava-heatmap.herokuapp.com/ https://josh-strava-heatmap.herokuapp.com/

krashidov 4y ago
I'm curious. Why do you think a bike is more dangerous than a scooter? I find that on a scooter I am more prone to crashing from random bumps
- alwayslikethis 4y ago
  Scooter as in a type of motorcycle with a step through frame: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scooter_(motorcycle) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scooter_(motorcycle) They are heavy and stable, unlike the standing type. They may be less dangerous than a bike because they can go quite fast, matching the speed of cars when riding on the road, which helps you avoid dangerous situations in which car drivers try to pass you without enough space to do so. Good bicycle infrastructure can minimize this, though it doesn't seem like Denver has it.
  - sangnoir 4y ago
    Parent may have been thinking of the other type of scooter with tiny wheels: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motorized_scooter https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motorized_scooter
- wonder_er 4y ago
  u/alwayslikethis nailed it. I'm thinking of a scooter as in "a small motorcycle", with a gasoline engine. mibe is 170 cc, and it's perfect.

syntheweave 4y ago

I want the robocars to take over for the selfish reason of being able to safely ride a bicycle everywhere without any intervening bike infrastructure campaign. Like, the "urban traffic problem" really can be reduced in almost every respect to either "humans are unsafe drivers" or "cars take up too much space". Shrink the fleet down to robotaxis and ebikes and you've solved everything last-mile related with no streetscape changes, leaving just the longer journeys for shared modes. As a bonus, kids become much more self-mobile again.