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I agree that in a dense urban environment, the bicycle could be a much better fit for personal transportation. But as someone who has lived in smaller Midwester

I agree that in a dense urban environment, the bicycle could be a much better fit for personal transportation. But as someone who has lived in smaller Midwestern cities, many more lives that some people care to think about depend on the automobile as a livelihood. Even in smaller metro areas, a bicycle would not be a viable option in the least. Cities like Copenhagen and Amsterdam precede automobiles by hundreds of years, and are a better fit for bicycles and smaller personal travel mediums. That's where the disparity between the how the US travel system is structured compared to one with a much longer and storied history, like Europe.

xanderstrike 13y ago
That's my point though, the US travel system didn't just become structured this way arbitrarily, it was a conscious decision to design our infrastructure in a way that was hostile to anything other than cars (pedestrians, bicycles, even horse-powered transportation). Cars were the way to the future, or so they thought. Now, we have a hundred years of data and experience with the automobile, and it's become obvious that the fossil fuel powered car isn't a good long-term solution to the urban and suburban transportation problem. Literally everything about them is bad for the world, gathering and burning the fuel, the destruction required for their roads, the massive amount of space needed to store them, and the death and destruction they cause daily. Electric (and other alternative fuel) cars are less bad, but only in one small way, they address a single issue in an inherently flawed model. You say that Europe has an advantage because it's cities are much older, but it's important to understand that the Netherlands and Denmark were both on the same auto-centric trajectory that the US was on coming out of the World Wars and industrialization. Denmark only started rebuilding their cycling infrastructure after decades of disuse when the energy crisis in the 70s made using a car extremely expensive. In both countries, people realized just how bad cars were. The deaths of cyclists (especially children) sparked mass protests where people demanded cycling infrastructure, and they got it. They were able to convert a car-focused city (perhaps less so than Los Angeles or New York, but still) into a bike focused city. They were able to do it, why can't we?
akgerber 13y ago
Many smaller Midwestern cities (speaking as someone who grew up in one and went to college in another) were founded and to a significant degree built out in the streetcar era, and have a physical form in the central city that reflects that. In architecture and urban form, the neighborhood I grew up in quite resembles the walk/bike/transit hotspot inner neighborhoods of Portland, Oregon, for example. In many of those cities, the older, walkable neighborhoods have been left to decay, with gutted transit service, failing schools, and many fine old structures demolished to build parking lots or simply let to collapse., while many residents and jobs have decamped to auto-oriented exurban areas. But that is to a large degree a policy choice designed to maintain residential segregation, and something which can and must be reversed by different policy choices. It is more the Sunbelt than the Midwest where a vast majority of the infrastructure was built in the postwar automobile era, and most neigborhoods (if you can even call them that) are nearly inaccessible to the pedestrian, cyclist, and mass transit user.
akgerber 13y ago
This is Rotterdam at the end of World War II: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/1/19/Rotterdam.jpg/1016px-Rotterdam.jpg http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/1/19/Rot... Modern Rotterdam was built almost entirely after World War II, the same era that many American Sunbelt cities were built to their current size. In Rotterdam, the mode share is: 5% pedestrian, 14% cycling, 25% transit, 56% automobile. This is very auto-oriented for the Netherlands, but still more than twice the 6% bike mode share of Portland, Oregon, a mid-sized American city famous here for loving bikes. That illustrates quite well that America's near-exclusive automobile use in many cities is a matter of city planning and development policies in this country (wide, high-speed roads optimized for moving the maximum number of cars, minimum parking requirements, minimum lot size requirements and setbacks, strict zoning laws separating residential from commercial uses and single-family homes from apartments) mandating a suburban form that makes non-automobile transportation difficult or impossible. It's not simply a question of the age of a city.

xanderstrike 13y ago

That's my point though, the US travel system didn't just become structured this way arbitrarily, it was a conscious decision to design our infrastructure in a way that was hostile to anything other than cars (pedestrians, bicycles, even horse-powered transportation). Cars were the way to the future, or so they thought. Now, we have a hundred years of data and experience with the automobile, and it's become obvious that the fossil fuel powered car isn't a good long-term solution to the urban and suburban transportation problem. Literally everything about them is bad for the world, gathering and burning the fuel, the destruction required for their roads, the massive amount of space needed to store them, and the death and destruction they cause daily. Electric (and other alternative fuel) cars are less bad, but only in one small way, they address a single issue in an inherently flawed model. You say that Europe has an advantage because it's cities are much older, but it's important to understand that the Netherlands and Denmark were both on the same auto-centric trajectory that the US was on coming out of the World Wars and industrialization. Denmark only started rebuilding their cycling infrastructure after decades of disuse when the energy crisis in the 70s made using a car extremely expensive. In both countries, people realized just how bad cars were. The deaths of cyclists (especially children) sparked mass protests where people demanded cycling infrastructure, and they got it. They were able to convert a car-focused city (perhaps less so than Los Angeles or New York, but still) into a bike focused city. They were able to do it, why can't we?

akgerber 13y ago

Many smaller Midwestern cities (speaking as someone who grew up in one and went to college in another) were founded and to a significant degree built out in the streetcar era, and have a physical form in the central city that reflects that. In architecture and urban form, the neighborhood I grew up in quite resembles the walk/bike/transit hotspot inner neighborhoods of Portland, Oregon, for example. In many of those cities, the older, walkable neighborhoods have been left to decay, with gutted transit service, failing schools, and many fine old structures demolished to build parking lots or simply let to collapse., while many residents and jobs have decamped to auto-oriented exurban areas. But that is to a large degree a policy choice designed to maintain residential segregation, and something which can and must be reversed by different policy choices. It is more the Sunbelt than the Midwest where a vast majority of the infrastructure was built in the postwar automobile era, and most neigborhoods (if you can even call them that) are nearly inaccessible to the pedestrian, cyclist, and mass transit user.

akgerber 13y ago

This is Rotterdam at the end of World War II: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/1/19/Rotterdam.jpg/1016px-Rotterdam.jpg http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/1/19/Rot... Modern Rotterdam was built almost entirely after World War II, the same era that many American Sunbelt cities were built to their current size. In Rotterdam, the mode share is: 5% pedestrian, 14% cycling, 25% transit, 56% automobile. This is very auto-oriented for the Netherlands, but still more than twice the 6% bike mode share of Portland, Oregon, a mid-sized American city famous here for loving bikes. That illustrates quite well that America's near-exclusive automobile use in many cities is a matter of city planning and development policies in this country (wide, high-speed roads optimized for moving the maximum number of cars, minimum parking requirements, minimum lot size requirements and setbacks, strict zoning laws separating residential from commercial uses and single-family homes from apartments) mandating a suburban form that makes non-automobile transportation difficult or impossible. It's not simply a question of the age of a city.