8 ms·

FFS - it's not about the vehicle it's about the infrastructure. Roads are designed for and built for cars and so are the infrastructure around roads - from sh

FFS - it's not about the vehicle it's about the infrastructure. Roads are designed for and built for cars and so are the infrastructure around roads - from shops to cinemas. We spend trillions on car infrastructure and something around five bucks a year on painting lines for cycles. Don't make me laugh that suddenly e-bikes appear and they will get 20/30 % of the infrastructure spend cars do. The charging stations, the repair garages, the insurance industry come on. We are talking about re-engineering our cities totally - it's a huge spend.

standardUser 4y ago
This is very true and frankly, if a city is going to make that kind of radical infrastructure investment, focusing primarily on bicycles is an odd choice since a significant portion of any urban population simply cannot ride a bike.
- hnav 4y ago
  right, the transition has to span generations and in that time ebikes, escoots, wheelchairs and mobility scooters will probably converge on 20mph personal transport that can fit into public transport for longer hops
- adgjlsfhk1 4y ago
  Focusing on bikes makes sense because even if you only get 10% of people out of cars, that can easily be 50% less traffic. Obviously a wide variety of approaches are needed, but bikes are often the fastest transit between two points, are cheap (both to own and to build infrastructure for), and are a form of exercise so have a public health benefit.
- fnimick 4y ago
  > a significant portion of any urban population simply cannot ride a bike How so? People who are physically unable to are a vanishingly small number - maybe single-digit percentages.
- outworlder 4y ago
  > focusing primarily on bicycles is an odd choice since a significant portion of any urban population simply cannot ride a bike. That's not true. Sure, in some areas the population is very unfit. But that's a problem that bikes can help with. If you look at areas that are very bike friendly, most of the population will bike. Even the elderly.
- Fricken 4y ago
  I feel like I'm being too obvious here but a significant portion of any urban population can't drive either.
  - wiredfool 4y ago
    Not like that stops them...
- paulgb 4y ago
  The number I could find is that 6% of Americans don't know how to ride a bike, as of 2013[1] For comparison, far less than 94% of American adults have a license as of 2018[2]. And certainly, teenagers should count too -- having a bike opened up my world as a kid. [1] https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/how-many-americans-dont-know-how-to-ride-a-bike/ https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/how-many-americans-dont... [2] https://www.statista.com/chart/18682/percentage-of-the-us-population-holding-a-drivers-license-by-age-group/ https://www.statista.com/chart/18682/percentage-of-the-us-po...
  - mattmaroon 4y ago
    Eh, there’s a big difference between having known how to ride a bike when you were a kid and being willing to do it now. Under 30% of adults ride bikes in a given year, and less then half of them even ride twice a month. People don’t like bikes. They’re significantly more likely to injure you than a car (though more mildly, and probably a lot less likely to kill you if you’re riding somewhere designed for bikes and where there are no cars). They offer no protection from the elements. You have to wear a helmet and mess up your hair. Etc. Adults just don’t want to bike everywhere when they could drive and billions in infrastructure won’t make that much different.
    - paulgb 4y ago
      I know anecdotes are not data, but I've been surprised how much “elasticity” there is in NYC when it comes to people I know who are not disposed to ride a bike starting to ride a bike as infrastructure (meaning both bike lanes and ride share) improve. On the other hand, there are lots of reasons why adults who can drive don't want to drive. I have a license but I'd rather bike than drive and not have to deal with parking, gas costs, traffic, etc. Plus I get some exercise.
    - goosedragons 4y ago
      People don't like bikes when they are surrounded by two tonne metal monstrosities driven by people who aren't even paying attention half the time. Look at places like Amsterdam where there has been serious effort in building bike infrastructure. People bike.
- arrrg 4y ago
  What are you talking about? I’ve been struggling with obesity throughout my whole life (BMI of 46 at my high point which is damn high) and never been particularly fit, strong, or into sports. I don’t have a car (though I could afford one) and go nearly everywhere by bike. Non-electric bike. My hometown (Dresden, Germany) is relatively – but not totally – flat in all the places you might want to get to. That certainly helps. (Though the nearly non-existent biking infrastructure – except for painted lines – certainly doesn’t. But Dresden is not terminally car-centric, so it’s alright to drive there by bike.) I mean, just for moving around the city (usually around ten kilometer roundtrips, maybe the odd twenty kilometer roundtrip on the odd day where a more distant destination is where I want to get to) that just works for me without any problems, no matter how heavy I was. That doesn’t mean I go places at 30 km/h, in fact I might only go 15 km/h – but that’s still several times faster than walking and actually pretty competitive with cars and public transport. And while walking got harder as I got heavier (mainly just in terms of causing pain after relatively short distances), while climbing stairs got much harder as I got heavier, biking (and swimming!) honestly never felt that way to me, at least not for normal roundtrip distances around ten kilometers or so. I use bikes to get to places, to move throughout the world, not for sports. And for that you don’t need to that fit. And with an e-bike? That required fitness drops even lower. (Unfit seniors getting stuck somewhere in the alps with their rented e-bikes is a real classic …)
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- micromacrofoot 4y ago
  Can you cite a source on "significant" here? because it sounds very made up. Most people that can walk can ride a bike. Most people can walk.
  - Fricken 4y ago
    And Motorized Wheelchairs are micromobility. Cycling infrastructure is well suited to them.
    - micromacrofoot 4y ago
      Though to be completely fair, some parts of the US don't even have pedestrian infrastructure. It's amazing how poorly planned much of the country is.
- panick21_ 4y ago
  Its ridiculous to call it a 'radical infrastructure investment'. The Us already made all the radical infrastructure investment in their absurdly over-designed roads. Some idiotic cities in the South even have 12 feet road lanes when 9-10 is already enough. The US has the needed infrastructure, converting to an elite bike lane network is incredibly cheap. In fact it saves a huge amount of money. Far less costly accidents, healthier people, better business in the city, higher property rights and so on. This has been proven over and over again. Its just in the US where even liberals seem to just buy the car industry marketing hook, line, and sinker. It has been proven also, that once there is safe bicycle infrastructure, people will bike. And most people can bike just fine. In fact, because children can actually bike, its actually more accessible to the population then cars. There are even these people, they are called poor people, that also might have a bike but not a car. At some point people have to break out of it and think about these things with logic and consider the last 30 years of evidence, rather then 1960s propaganda.
mattmaroon 4y ago
It’s not just that it’s a big spend, but it’s a big spend on something 75% of people don’t use even if you did it. The enduring popularity of these articles on hacker news just shows a demographic bias. Sure if you are young and live in San Francisco or New York City, this might seem reasonable. But for the other 80% of America, who are old enough that simply falling off of a bike could cause real injuries, or live somewhere not dense enough to really get anywhere this way, or don’t want to ride a bike in the snow, especially in a city that may not be particularly great at removing it (which is almost all but the biggest of them) we’ll still take our cars thank you. Cars may be environmentally awful, but they’re great in basically every other way, so let’s just electrify them and build lots of new clean energy and stop trying to make everyone ride a bike.
- KennyBlanken 4y ago
  > The enduring popularity of these articles on hacker news just shows a demographic bias. Sure if you are young and live in San Francisco or New York City, this might seem reasonable. But for the other 80% of America, And this sort of comment shows demographic ignorance. Do you know what percentage of the US population lives in rural areas? Fourteen percent. Not even 1/5th of the US population. The rest live in urbanized areas. The percentage of the population over 60? About 17%. Pre-pandemic, in the Boston area, the regional transit system handled around 2 million trips a day. > Cars may be environmentally awful, but they’re great in basically every other way, so let’s just electrify them and build lots of new clean energy and stop trying to make everyone ride a bike. 60% of all car trips in the US are less than three miles, electric cars don't solve congestion and land use waste nor all the injuries and deaths, and last but not least: nobody is "trying to make everyone ride a bike." Stop straw-manning.
  - silisili 4y ago
    I feel like this is a bit misleading in the other direction, as it's lumping suburban in with urban. Which makes sense in some contexts, but probably not this one. Suburban sprawl is a huge problem wrt infrastructure. > According to data HUD and Census collected in the 2017 American Housing Survey (AHS), 52 percent of U.S. households describe their neighborhood as suburban, 27 percent describe their neighborhood as urban, and 21 percent describe their neighborhood as rural.
entropicgravity 4y ago
There is a transformation that is affordable and better than the current set up. That is, in the city core, allow only EV's and use cars that only take up a half of the current roads. This doubles the capacity of the downtown core roads, gets rid of all the tail pipe gases and costs almost nothing in re-engineering. A car like this, the microlino, would be a start: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uNp_M76wIws https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uNp_M76wIws
- dsego 4y ago
  Isn't that just an electrified BMW Isetta?
- HideousKojima 4y ago
  $16,000 for a car that can't reach freeway speeds, making it essentially useless outside of cities?
  - mwint 4y ago
    You will own nothing, and be happy, all within a 10-mile radius.
  - entropicgravity 4y ago
    Yes, there will be city cars and highway cars. With sharing services for either as needed.
micromacrofoot 4y ago
It's agonizing to get a single bike lane in most municipalities for a myriad of reasons. It's much easier to flood the city with ebikes and force them to address it by causing problems. It doesn't matter if it's a good idea or not, because it's already happening.
sleepybrett 4y ago
Assuming a perfectly gridded city core. Take the road every n blocks in each direction and make them bicycle only. A simple two-lane road would be enough. Place bollards at intersections that intersect a car lane for increased safety. Possibly paint those bike only lanes with large obvious markings to make it even more obvious. The bikes could follow similar traffic laws, one lane each direction, stop lights, the whole bit. These roads can be maintained just as they are for cars, except they would need much less repaving work as bicycles do not cause as much wear and tear as a car or truck. As this develops you can narrow the actual roadway for those roads and increase sidewalk size where appropriate. With some of this increased sidewalk space you place racks for locked parking. I'm a recent bike purchaser, I've had my ebike for about a year. I love my little cargo bike and take it all over my moderately sleepy city neighborhood to run errands, see friends, etc. I'm very nervous, however to take it anywhere near the downtown core. Too much traffic, bike lanes are generally 'paint only'. If I had separated infrastructure I would certainly travel downtown more often (there is a lot of separated infrastructure that can get me from my house to the edge of downtown, but once i'm downtown it's a shitshow). So I think that priming the pump with safe infrastructure is necessary to increase the use of modes of transport like bikes/ebikes/scooters/monowheels/etc. Once the use is up, the secondary effects will follow. More bike repair 'garages', more secure space to lock up in parking garages w/ charging (most ebikes just charge on a 110v wall wart (in my case a pretty beefy one) but that just means simple dc hookups.. I'm not sure if the current crop of ebikes have standardized on a particular voltage but over time in this scenario I suspect they will. I guess my point is that re-engineering is already happening in many cities. For years it was paint only bike lanes, now in my city (Seattle) we're starting to see even more bike lanes, though most paint only or shitty lane separation 'flags'. But also some more separated infrastructure. Hell last I checked they have fallen short on spending the budgets we give them for this stuff already. Car infrastructure was built up very quickly and without much actual thought. Hopefully we can do better.
- panick21_ 4y ago
  In lots of cities you can add bike lanes without any issues, you don't even lose capacity. I would start by simply having save bike lanes along all roads. Your suggest of making part of the grid bike only is also a good one, but its more radical. People will not even consider that unless there are already many bikers using these roads. You need to first have a bike lane and then you can make the argument it should be expanded. > would need much less repaving work Bike lanes shouldn't be paved at all. Its much better to use tiling methods, better for water and repeatability. You never basically need to repave them if cars don't destroy them.
panick21_ 4y ago
> Don't make me laugh that suddenly e-bikes appear and they will get 20/30 % of the infrastructure spend cars do. The charging stations, the repair garages, the insurance industry That is very cheap if you spend 20% less on cars. > come on. We are talking about re-engineering our cities totally - it's a huge spend. Its actually not. It actually saves a huge amount of money. And it really isn't that expensive. Car infrastructure can easily be adopted. Really what you need is a bunch of paint, some concert and maybe some billiards. Specially in the US where you have so many absurdly over-designed streets. Doing bike changes in old Europe is far more difficult, because simple there is often only one 2-lane road with thin borders. This saves a huge amount of money, makes the population heather, makes local business better off and so on. Saying 'come on' is ridiculous, this is a question of political will, not actually finances. Even with minimal budget you can do a huge amount if you want to.
- fundad 4y ago
  But we care about the lives of people other than car owners.
  - panick21_ 4y ago
    Yes, therefore you should have bike lanes. Not sure what hard to understand. Or are you joking?
- notjulianjaynes 4y ago
  >Really what you need is a bunch of paint, This is happening already in Massachusetts. Basically the only way for a city or town to get any state funding for non-highway roadwork is to sign onto the DOT's "Complete Streets" project [1]. Often this ends up turning a 4 lane (2x2) road into a 3 lane (1x1x1 center turn lane), and then uses the width from the lost 4th lane for a bike lane on either side of the road, with a rumble strip or barrier separating the bike lane from the car lane. Occasionally substitute for a widened pedestrian sidewalk on one side of the road, and a two lane bike lane replacing the sidewalk on the other side. Since this is the game municipalities have to play to get funding for the same sorts of roadwork they're used to getting funding for, it's lead to, for example, a 1 mile stretch of road with bike lanes separated by a few miles of 4 lane road on one end, and terminating about 100 yards before a dangerous intersection into a mega Walmart parking lot on the other end.[2] The intention is that gradually as roads need to be repaved, everything will connect. I'm generally for that, but it's made for some hilariously impractical bike lane placement in the interim. edit: typo [1] https://www.mass.gov/complete-streets-funding-program https://www.mass.gov/complete-streets-funding-program [2] https://goo.gl/maps/UifMDXmK4aa79ij47 https://goo.gl/maps/UifMDXmK4aa79ij47 *the satellite imagery here is out of date, but you can see where this road gets split by a center median and goes back to 2x2, which is also where the bike lane ends, just a few hundred feet before a stoplight/intersection with poor visibility.
fundad 4y ago
All that infrastructure was subsidized to sell us fossil fuels and the cycle goes on. It is like how High Fructose Corn Syrup exist to sell corn.
Schroedingersat 4y ago
A slightly wider strip of paint and some barnacles isn't a huge spend. Just widen one less road and it's paid for. Also I don't think you understand how ebikes are charged or serviced.
benhurmarcel 4y ago
You don't need charging stations, an e-bike battery will last you several days of heavy use without issue. I use mine on about 100km a week (commuting mostly) and charge it at home on the weekend. The "repair garages" are not an issue either, there are bike shops around. And insurance exists. The infrastructure that needs to be improved are the streets. Cycle lanes are needed, and secure attachments points for parking. That's it.
specialist 4y ago
The (USA) historical irony being how auto advocates took over the Good Roads Movement started by the bicyclists. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Good_Roads_Movement#20th_century https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Good_Roads_Movement#20th_centu...

standardUser 4y ago

This is very true and frankly, if a city is going to make that kind of radical infrastructure investment, focusing primarily on bicycles is an odd choice since a significant portion of any urban population simply cannot ride a bike.

hnav 4y ago
right, the transition has to span generations and in that time ebikes, escoots, wheelchairs and mobility scooters will probably converge on 20mph personal transport that can fit into public transport for longer hops
adgjlsfhk1 4y ago
Focusing on bikes makes sense because even if you only get 10% of people out of cars, that can easily be 50% less traffic. Obviously a wide variety of approaches are needed, but bikes are often the fastest transit between two points, are cheap (both to own and to build infrastructure for), and are a form of exercise so have a public health benefit.
fnimick 4y ago
> a significant portion of any urban population simply cannot ride a bike How so? People who are physically unable to are a vanishingly small number - maybe single-digit percentages.
outworlder 4y ago
> focusing primarily on bicycles is an odd choice since a significant portion of any urban population simply cannot ride a bike. That's not true. Sure, in some areas the population is very unfit. But that's a problem that bikes can help with. If you look at areas that are very bike friendly, most of the population will bike. Even the elderly.
Fricken 4y ago
I feel like I'm being too obvious here but a significant portion of any urban population can't drive either.
- wiredfool 4y ago
  Not like that stops them...
paulgb 4y ago
The number I could find is that 6% of Americans don't know how to ride a bike, as of 2013[1] For comparison, far less than 94% of American adults have a license as of 2018[2]. And certainly, teenagers should count too -- having a bike opened up my world as a kid. [1] https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/how-many-americans-dont-know-how-to-ride-a-bike/ https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/how-many-americans-dont... [2] https://www.statista.com/chart/18682/percentage-of-the-us-population-holding-a-drivers-license-by-age-group/ https://www.statista.com/chart/18682/percentage-of-the-us-po...
- mattmaroon 4y ago
  Eh, there’s a big difference between having known how to ride a bike when you were a kid and being willing to do it now. Under 30% of adults ride bikes in a given year, and less then half of them even ride twice a month. People don’t like bikes. They’re significantly more likely to injure you than a car (though more mildly, and probably a lot less likely to kill you if you’re riding somewhere designed for bikes and where there are no cars). They offer no protection from the elements. You have to wear a helmet and mess up your hair. Etc. Adults just don’t want to bike everywhere when they could drive and billions in infrastructure won’t make that much different.
  - paulgb 4y ago
    I know anecdotes are not data, but I've been surprised how much “elasticity” there is in NYC when it comes to people I know who are not disposed to ride a bike starting to ride a bike as infrastructure (meaning both bike lanes and ride share) improve. On the other hand, there are lots of reasons why adults who can drive don't want to drive. I have a license but I'd rather bike than drive and not have to deal with parking, gas costs, traffic, etc. Plus I get some exercise.
  - goosedragons 4y ago
    People don't like bikes when they are surrounded by two tonne metal monstrosities driven by people who aren't even paying attention half the time. Look at places like Amsterdam where there has been serious effort in building bike infrastructure. People bike.
arrrg 4y ago
What are you talking about? I’ve been struggling with obesity throughout my whole life (BMI of 46 at my high point which is damn high) and never been particularly fit, strong, or into sports. I don’t have a car (though I could afford one) and go nearly everywhere by bike. Non-electric bike. My hometown (Dresden, Germany) is relatively – but not totally – flat in all the places you might want to get to. That certainly helps. (Though the nearly non-existent biking infrastructure – except for painted lines – certainly doesn’t. But Dresden is not terminally car-centric, so it’s alright to drive there by bike.) I mean, just for moving around the city (usually around ten kilometer roundtrips, maybe the odd twenty kilometer roundtrip on the odd day where a more distant destination is where I want to get to) that just works for me without any problems, no matter how heavy I was. That doesn’t mean I go places at 30 km/h, in fact I might only go 15 km/h – but that’s still several times faster than walking and actually pretty competitive with cars and public transport. And while walking got harder as I got heavier (mainly just in terms of causing pain after relatively short distances), while climbing stairs got much harder as I got heavier, biking (and swimming!) honestly never felt that way to me, at least not for normal roundtrip distances around ten kilometers or so. I use bikes to get to places, to move throughout the world, not for sports. And for that you don’t need to that fit. And with an e-bike? That required fitness drops even lower. (Unfit seniors getting stuck somewhere in the alps with their rented e-bikes is a real classic …)
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
micromacrofoot 4y ago
Can you cite a source on "significant" here? because it sounds very made up. Most people that can walk can ride a bike. Most people can walk.
- Fricken 4y ago
  And Motorized Wheelchairs are micromobility. Cycling infrastructure is well suited to them.
  - micromacrofoot 4y ago
    Though to be completely fair, some parts of the US don't even have pedestrian infrastructure. It's amazing how poorly planned much of the country is.
panick21_ 4y ago
Its ridiculous to call it a 'radical infrastructure investment'. The Us already made all the radical infrastructure investment in their absurdly over-designed roads. Some idiotic cities in the South even have 12 feet road lanes when 9-10 is already enough. The US has the needed infrastructure, converting to an elite bike lane network is incredibly cheap. In fact it saves a huge amount of money. Far less costly accidents, healthier people, better business in the city, higher property rights and so on. This has been proven over and over again. Its just in the US where even liberals seem to just buy the car industry marketing hook, line, and sinker. It has been proven also, that once there is safe bicycle infrastructure, people will bike. And most people can bike just fine. In fact, because children can actually bike, its actually more accessible to the population then cars. There are even these people, they are called poor people, that also might have a bike but not a car. At some point people have to break out of it and think about these things with logic and consider the last 30 years of evidence, rather then 1960s propaganda.

mattmaroon 4y ago

It’s not just that it’s a big spend, but it’s a big spend on something 75% of people don’t use even if you did it. The enduring popularity of these articles on hacker news just shows a demographic bias. Sure if you are young and live in San Francisco or New York City, this might seem reasonable. But for the other 80% of America, who are old enough that simply falling off of a bike could cause real injuries, or live somewhere not dense enough to really get anywhere this way, or don’t want to ride a bike in the snow, especially in a city that may not be particularly great at removing it (which is almost all but the biggest of them) we’ll still take our cars thank you. Cars may be environmentally awful, but they’re great in basically every other way, so let’s just electrify them and build lots of new clean energy and stop trying to make everyone ride a bike.

KennyBlanken 4y ago
> The enduring popularity of these articles on hacker news just shows a demographic bias. Sure if you are young and live in San Francisco or New York City, this might seem reasonable. But for the other 80% of America, And this sort of comment shows demographic ignorance. Do you know what percentage of the US population lives in rural areas? Fourteen percent. Not even 1/5th of the US population. The rest live in urbanized areas. The percentage of the population over 60? About 17%. Pre-pandemic, in the Boston area, the regional transit system handled around 2 million trips a day. > Cars may be environmentally awful, but they’re great in basically every other way, so let’s just electrify them and build lots of new clean energy and stop trying to make everyone ride a bike. 60% of all car trips in the US are less than three miles, electric cars don't solve congestion and land use waste nor all the injuries and deaths, and last but not least: nobody is "trying to make everyone ride a bike." Stop straw-manning.
- silisili 4y ago
  I feel like this is a bit misleading in the other direction, as it's lumping suburban in with urban. Which makes sense in some contexts, but probably not this one. Suburban sprawl is a huge problem wrt infrastructure. > According to data HUD and Census collected in the 2017 American Housing Survey (AHS), 52 percent of U.S. households describe their neighborhood as suburban, 27 percent describe their neighborhood as urban, and 21 percent describe their neighborhood as rural.

entropicgravity 4y ago

There is a transformation that is affordable and better than the current set up. That is, in the city core, allow only EV's and use cars that only take up a half of the current roads. This doubles the capacity of the downtown core roads, gets rid of all the tail pipe gases and costs almost nothing in re-engineering. A car like this, the microlino, would be a start: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uNp_M76wIws https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uNp_M76wIws

dsego 4y ago
Isn't that just an electrified BMW Isetta?
HideousKojima 4y ago
$16,000 for a car that can't reach freeway speeds, making it essentially useless outside of cities?
- mwint 4y ago
  You will own nothing, and be happy, all within a 10-mile radius.
- entropicgravity 4y ago
  Yes, there will be city cars and highway cars. With sharing services for either as needed.

micromacrofoot 4y ago

It's agonizing to get a single bike lane in most municipalities for a myriad of reasons. It's much easier to flood the city with ebikes and force them to address it by causing problems. It doesn't matter if it's a good idea or not, because it's already happening.

sleepybrett 4y ago

Assuming a perfectly gridded city core. Take the road every n blocks in each direction and make them bicycle only. A simple two-lane road would be enough. Place bollards at intersections that intersect a car lane for increased safety. Possibly paint those bike only lanes with large obvious markings to make it even more obvious. The bikes could follow similar traffic laws, one lane each direction, stop lights, the whole bit. These roads can be maintained just as they are for cars, except they would need much less repaving work as bicycles do not cause as much wear and tear as a car or truck. As this develops you can narrow the actual roadway for those roads and increase sidewalk size where appropriate. With some of this increased sidewalk space you place racks for locked parking. I'm a recent bike purchaser, I've had my ebike for about a year. I love my little cargo bike and take it all over my moderately sleepy city neighborhood to run errands, see friends, etc. I'm very nervous, however to take it anywhere near the downtown core. Too much traffic, bike lanes are generally 'paint only'. If I had separated infrastructure I would certainly travel downtown more often (there is a lot of separated infrastructure that can get me from my house to the edge of downtown, but once i'm downtown it's a shitshow). So I think that priming the pump with safe infrastructure is necessary to increase the use of modes of transport like bikes/ebikes/scooters/monowheels/etc. Once the use is up, the secondary effects will follow. More bike repair 'garages', more secure space to lock up in parking garages w/ charging (most ebikes just charge on a 110v wall wart (in my case a pretty beefy one) but that just means simple dc hookups.. I'm not sure if the current crop of ebikes have standardized on a particular voltage but over time in this scenario I suspect they will. I guess my point is that re-engineering is already happening in many cities. For years it was paint only bike lanes, now in my city (Seattle) we're starting to see even more bike lanes, though most paint only or shitty lane separation 'flags'. But also some more separated infrastructure. Hell last I checked they have fallen short on spending the budgets we give them for this stuff already. Car infrastructure was built up very quickly and without much actual thought. Hopefully we can do better.

panick21_ 4y ago
In lots of cities you can add bike lanes without any issues, you don't even lose capacity. I would start by simply having save bike lanes along all roads. Your suggest of making part of the grid bike only is also a good one, but its more radical. People will not even consider that unless there are already many bikers using these roads. You need to first have a bike lane and then you can make the argument it should be expanded. > would need much less repaving work Bike lanes shouldn't be paved at all. Its much better to use tiling methods, better for water and repeatability. You never basically need to repave them if cars don't destroy them.

panick21_ 4y ago

> Don't make me laugh that suddenly e-bikes appear and they will get 20/30 % of the infrastructure spend cars do. The charging stations, the repair garages, the insurance industry That is very cheap if you spend 20% less on cars. > come on. We are talking about re-engineering our cities totally - it's a huge spend. Its actually not. It actually saves a huge amount of money. And it really isn't that expensive. Car infrastructure can easily be adopted. Really what you need is a bunch of paint, some concert and maybe some billiards. Specially in the US where you have so many absurdly over-designed streets. Doing bike changes in old Europe is far more difficult, because simple there is often only one 2-lane road with thin borders. This saves a huge amount of money, makes the population heather, makes local business better off and so on. Saying 'come on' is ridiculous, this is a question of political will, not actually finances. Even with minimal budget you can do a huge amount if you want to.

fundad 4y ago
But we care about the lives of people other than car owners.
- panick21_ 4y ago
  Yes, therefore you should have bike lanes. Not sure what hard to understand. Or are you joking?
notjulianjaynes 4y ago
>Really what you need is a bunch of paint, This is happening already in Massachusetts. Basically the only way for a city or town to get any state funding for non-highway roadwork is to sign onto the DOT's "Complete Streets" project [1]. Often this ends up turning a 4 lane (2x2) road into a 3 lane (1x1x1 center turn lane), and then uses the width from the lost 4th lane for a bike lane on either side of the road, with a rumble strip or barrier separating the bike lane from the car lane. Occasionally substitute for a widened pedestrian sidewalk on one side of the road, and a two lane bike lane replacing the sidewalk on the other side. Since this is the game municipalities have to play to get funding for the same sorts of roadwork they're used to getting funding for, it's lead to, for example, a 1 mile stretch of road with bike lanes separated by a few miles of 4 lane road on one end, and terminating about 100 yards before a dangerous intersection into a mega Walmart parking lot on the other end.[2] The intention is that gradually as roads need to be repaved, everything will connect. I'm generally for that, but it's made for some hilariously impractical bike lane placement in the interim. edit: typo [1] https://www.mass.gov/complete-streets-funding-program https://www.mass.gov/complete-streets-funding-program [2] https://goo.gl/maps/UifMDXmK4aa79ij47 https://goo.gl/maps/UifMDXmK4aa79ij47 *the satellite imagery here is out of date, but you can see where this road gets split by a center median and goes back to 2x2, which is also where the bike lane ends, just a few hundred feet before a stoplight/intersection with poor visibility.

fundad 4y ago

All that infrastructure was subsidized to sell us fossil fuels and the cycle goes on. It is like how High Fructose Corn Syrup exist to sell corn.

Schroedingersat 4y ago

A slightly wider strip of paint and some barnacles isn't a huge spend. Just widen one less road and it's paid for. Also I don't think you understand how ebikes are charged or serviced.

benhurmarcel 4y ago

You don't need charging stations, an e-bike battery will last you several days of heavy use without issue. I use mine on about 100km a week (commuting mostly) and charge it at home on the weekend. The "repair garages" are not an issue either, there are bike shops around. And insurance exists. The infrastructure that needs to be improved are the streets. Cycle lanes are needed, and secure attachments points for parking. That's it.

specialist 4y ago

The (USA) historical irony being how auto advocates took over the Good Roads Movement started by the bicyclists. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Good_Roads_Movement#20th_century https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Good_Roads_Movement#20th_centu...