What we wanted was to adjust the car to the city

July 29, 2015 7:25 AM

How Groningen invented a cycling template for cities all over the world
Motorists woke up one mid-70s morning to find new one-way streets made direct crosstown journeys impossible by car. Forty years later Groningen boasts two-thirds of all trips made by bike … and the cleanest air of any big Dutch city

Nowadays, the inhabitants of Groningen possess an average of 1.4 bikes per person. The average number of bikes per household is 3.1. And, while the number of cars is declining, the use of bicycles in the city is still growing. So much so that, according to Wallage, a new discussion has arisen about the predominance of the bike. “There is some tension between pedestrians and cyclists. Cyclists are considered too domineering by some people. There are complaints that they throw down their bikes virtually everywhere and that pedestrians occasionally get run over by cyclists.”

posted by moody cow (92 comments total)

This is a fun story, but inevitably makes you wonder "How could this work in my area?" and being in Texas, where the distances are long and the weather is often ugly, it seems an unlikely thing. Though maybe motorcycles/scooters could work, but they bring their own issues.

Also what about old people or the disabled? They talk about moving the buses outside the center...so people will have to travel further from stops to the shops? What about those for whom that's a real hardship, especially in bad weather?

What do you do with babies, when you commute by bike? What is the safety of that method, for the child, in a collision with another bike or a fall? We have a weird situation here in the states, where kids riding in cars are heavily regulated in terms of being in special seats, but then you can slap a helmet on your kid and put them on the back of your motorcycle legally. Which is incredibly unsafe and should not be happening, but are bikes safe either?

I'm not snarking, I just seldom see these questions addressed in "Yay bike commuting!" pieces.
posted by emjaybee at 7:55 AM on July 29, 2015 [3 favorites]

Aaaaaand the first comment is a "can't happen here."

Everyone, please be sure to keep track of future comments on your bingo card to win fabulous prizes such a lifetime supply of Turtle Wax or Rice-a-Roni, the San Francisco treat!
posted by entropicamericana at 8:05 AM on July 29, 2015 [26 favorites]

This is a fun story, but inevitably makes you wonder "How could this work in my area?"

Yeah, a lot of American cities, and Americans, are built around the need and apparent desire for people to live dozens of miles away from where they do stuff. Building for density, neighborhoods, and walkability is what is required. Already, though, a lot of businesses are finding it a lot more attractive to move back to cities from crappy car-only exurb officepark campuses. Cities are, more and more, building for density, transit-orientation, and people-centered urbanism - and people and economies are benefitting!

re: the elderly - dense, walkable, ped-friendly neighborhoods are probably a lot *less* isolating than a lot of other alternatives. Also, in car-dominated environments, the elderly are over-represented in severe injuries and fatalities from car collisions. So, i think the answer to "what about the elderly or disabled" is, "they benefit!"

as for kids: Many people use a bakfiets. They're safe.
posted by entropone at 8:06 AM on July 29, 2015 [11 favorites]

The article addresses some of the concerns in the first comment: despite the claim that "the young population is one of the reasons why cycling is so popular – along with the mild climate and the absence of hills," there is enough concern or attention paid to inconvenient and unsafe weather conditions that traffic lights have rain sensors to give quicker priority to cyclists on wet days and there are heated cycle paths so cyclists won’t slip during bouts of frost.

They made harder to travel by car, keeping cars out of the core of the city and forcing them to use a ring road. When traveling by car becomes a hassle, bicycling and walking is the default traveling option.

Simply put, you need to have decision-makers who are completely on board with making bicycles the primary mode of transportation, even if they aren't currently. If the current community design doesn't support biking by design or natural layout, then there needs to be even stronger support for more robust designs to support bicycling.

There are plenty of ways to haul babies and kids around, and the concerns of safety often come back to interactions with people in motorized vehicles, which are much larger, faster and heavier, and generally more prevalent, to the point that many drivers don't think to look for bicyclists or pedestrians. Helmet laws don't make bicycling safer as much as more attentive, considerate drivers.
posted by filthy light thief at 8:07 AM on July 29, 2015 [5 favorites]

I'm not snarking, I just seldom see these questions addressed in "Yay bike commuting!" pieces.

Every person who can bike and does reduces automobile traffic and parking issues for those who can't bike. A solution that doesn't solve every problem isn't automatically a bad solution.
posted by Etrigan at 8:08 AM on July 29, 2015 [28 favorites]

The crazy thing is, all those American cities were originally built to be usable by humans on foot, and then most of them had the life systematically engineered out. What can be done can theoretically be undone.
posted by enf at 8:08 AM on July 29, 2015 [20 favorites]

This one is pretty high tech, but in Copenhagen, which is also a great cycling city, you'll see a lot of bikes specially adapted for carrying kids (or other cargo).
posted by CheeseDigestsAll at 8:08 AM on July 29, 2015 [2 favorites]

entropicamericana, that's not what I said, and I am not against cycle commutes. But they present challenges, like any form of transportation, and I would be happy to hear about the ways to surmount those challenges.
posted by emjaybee at 8:09 AM on July 29, 2015 [1 favorite]

related: a Danish study found that a mile traveled by car is a $.20 economic loss to society. A mile traveled by bike is a $.42 economic gain to society. [source]
posted by entropone at 8:09 AM on July 29, 2015 [12 favorites]

The crazy thing is, all those American cities were originally built to be usable by humans on foot, and then most of them had the life systematically engineered out.

Big cities west of the Mississippi may have been established by humans before cars, but the vast majority of their physical growth happened after cars were common enough to be a major design consideration.
posted by Etrigan at 8:09 AM on July 29, 2015 [6 favorites]

The crazy thing is, all those American cities were originally built to be usable by humans on foot, and then most of them had the life systematically engineered out. What can be done can theoretically be undone.

See The Invention of Jaywalking and the Rise of Car Culture (previously)
posted by filthy light thief at 8:09 AM on July 29, 2015 [8 favorites]

Also, in the Netherlands, I saw lots of tiny vehicles called the Canta. It's a tiny car designed and built for people with disabilities. It's so underpowered that it's allowed on bike paths. I think each one is custom-made to accomodate people's specific mobility challenges [more info].

Something like this would be terrifying in many American cities - but in Dutch cities it is an effective, efficient, and useful mobility aid.
posted by entropone at 8:11 AM on July 29, 2015 [14 favorites]

A bakfiets is an expensive investment for a lot of families, but I also see a pretty decent number of parents putting their babies on seats that mount to the top tube. Eight years ago, such bike seats used to be a surefire way to ID recent Dutch and Danish emigres to the city because they were the only ones that I'd see (whereas American parents used the conventional bike seat that mounted on the bike, like in Peanuts comics from time immemorial), but the front seat has definitely gotten more popular over the last few years, and it doesn't require quite the garaging arrangements that a bakfiets does.
posted by bl1nk at 8:12 AM on July 29, 2015 [3 favorites]

People who won't use a search engine to see if their unaddressed questions are actually unaddressed are traffic.
posted by srboisvert at 8:12 AM on July 29, 2015 [5 favorites]

seats that mount to the top tube

I regularly see a guy on my commute home that has one of those. He put a large foam noodle over the handlebars and stem so the floppy child won't hurt its head.

The foam noodle has bunny ears on it.
posted by backseatpilot at 8:15 AM on July 29, 2015 [4 favorites]

I have no kids and not planning on having them ever, but dang, do I want a cargo bike. It would make grocery shopping so much easier and fun!

I wish wish wish North American cities would adopt a more Eurocentric bike culture--well, Continental really, as the UK has never seemed bike friendly at all to me--but our cities are laid very differently because we have so much more room. But then again, I also wish for high speed rail, so as you can tell, I live in a state of hopeless wanting!
posted by Kitteh at 8:15 AM on July 29, 2015 [1 favorite]

emjaybee: I would be happy to hear about the ways to surmount those challenges.

Make bikes (and pedestrians) first, cars second. That is a significant shift in mentalities for many places in the US, as Car Culture (including freight movement via road) is the only focus, with bike and ped amenities seen as annoying expenses and unnecessary complications to otherwise straightforward road designs (speaking from professional experience). There was (is?) a federal document that even referred to bicyclists as hazards for people in cars, because bicyclists make sudden and unexpected maneuvers (as if car drivers never did this, and ignoring the fact that a small pothole is annoying to a car and potentially deadly to a bicyclist, so they have a damn good reason to dodge around poorly maintained shoulders).
posted by filthy light thief at 8:16 AM on July 29, 2015 [10 favorites]

Also, in the Netherlands, I saw lots of tiny vehicles called the Canta.

Yup. They even made a ballet for them. These are only sold to people who need them, though there is a huge second hand market for them because they're so useful and cool.

There are also more general bromcars, with moped engines but a small car body, which are bike path legal.
posted by MartinWisse at 8:18 AM on July 29, 2015 [3 favorites]

There's a part of me that likes to believe that the Connect Historic Boston project (which proposes to make the Boston downtown core more pedestrian and bike friendly by, among other things, encircling the entire downtown area in a ring of off-street cycle tracks ) is part of a stealth initiative to simulate something like this in the future.

(like maybe a 50 years in the future, but I'd still be jazzed to be able to bike from, say, Somerville to Quincy on completely car-free road infrastructure sometime in the next decade)
posted by bl1nk at 8:19 AM on July 29, 2015 [2 favorites]

Kitteh: But then again, I also wish for high speed rail, so as you can tell, I live in a state of hopeless wanting!

It's not hopeless, and car-choked cities might even push private companies into such significant investments. For example, there's a proposed Dallas-to-Houston railway that is currently in active planning and fund-gathering mode in Texas.
posted by filthy light thief at 8:20 AM on July 29, 2015

Eight years ago, such bike seats used to be a surefire way to ID recent Dutch and Danish emigres to the city because they were the only ones that I'd see

The real reason Dutch parents used that sort of handle bar kid seat so often is that little kids make a great rain and wind shield and with the weather in Holland being what it is...
posted by MartinWisse at 8:20 AM on July 29, 2015 [17 favorites]

For anyone looking for a decent round-up of high-speed rail plans (and dreams) around the US, here's a Wikipedia article on the topic, where I see that the above-referenced Dallas-to-Houston high speed rail line is an attempt by U.S. Japan High Speed Rail to sell a Japanese Shinkansen high-speed train to/in Texas.
posted by filthy light thief at 8:23 AM on July 29, 2015

I've been enjoying the explosion of bike paths and cycling-friendly infrastructure around Boston lately, but it's still very patchwork. And the in-between parts are still pretty dangerous, unfortunately.

I rode part of the new Bike to the Sea route the other week on my way up to the North Shore, and it's a really nice bike path! Getting to it, though, means going through some of the most dangerous intersections in the area and also cutting through an Orange Line parking lot and dodging buses coming up to the station. Bike lanes on the streets suddenly disappear at town lines, and shoulders and sidewalks suddenly stop right before the side streets pass underneath I-93.

It's getting there, but at this point I think the missing connections between bike route networks are a big stumbling block.
posted by backseatpilot at 8:23 AM on July 29, 2015 [3 favorites]

And for that matter, in a walkable city, motorized wheelchairs provide pedestrian-equivalent access for those who can't walk. But they are stigmatized in a way that cars aren't.
posted by enf at 8:25 AM on July 29, 2015

I have no kids and not planning on having them ever, but dang, do I want a cargo bike. It would make grocery shopping so much easier and fun!

Alternately, you could get a bike trailer and hitch it to your regular bike. Nashbar sells one for around $100 that folds flat for storage and is meant to haul kids around, but I've found that it works great for groceries and other cargo.
posted by indubitable at 8:27 AM on July 29, 2015

An issue with bike trailers in my city is that they are simultaneously very useful to the typical bike thief demographic (people without homes or cars who set up tent cities near or on parks), and inconvenient or difficult to lock up properly.
posted by idiopath at 8:34 AM on July 29, 2015 [6 favorites]

emjaybee, those are some really good questions and I think they are exactly the type of thing that most average Americans think when they read an article like this. Then they conclude, "Whelp, that would never work here" and that is the end of the story.

At the risk of writing an entire dissertation, I'll try a few short answers. But the really short answer is, much more cycling, much more walking, much more transit do not mean there is NO individual vehicular traffic left, just that there is quite a bit less.

"being in Texas, where the distances are long and the weather is often ugly"

This can work in essentially every city and small towns as well. In fact, small towns are the places where cycling and walking often work the very best, if a little attention is paid to making them feasible. Distances are short and motor vehicle traffic already relatively light. But yeah, it's not likely to work for people who live 28 miles outside of town on a ranch. But guess what--most people live in cities and towns. Even in Texas, many millions live in cities and towns. Suppose that 30-40% of trips of two miles or less were done by foot or by bike? Trips of two miles and less are a large proportion of all trips (something like 1/4 or 1/3) and in the U.S., these very short trips are overwhelmingly done as motor vehicle trips.

So the fact that this doesn't work in some places and some situations doesn't stop us from making it work in places and situations where it will.

Also, it's quite possible to bike and walk in various different types of weather. Humans are made for this.

"Also what about old people or the disabled? They talk about moving the buses outside the
center...so people will have to travel further from stops to the shops? What about those for whom that's a real hardship, especially in bad weather?"

If 1/3 of your city's trips are taken by bicycle and another 1/3 by transit (the actual numbers for a city like Copenhagen) that still leaves 1/3 of trips taken by automobile. And in fact for those people who do in fact need to travel by automobile, the fact that 2/3 of cars are now off the road makes that trip work. There are taxis, mass transit, rental vehicles and car sharing, and millions upon millions of people still own private vehicles.

In general, the type of city we are talking about here is far, far more accessible and livable by people with disabilities and elderly people than the average U.S. city. That is one of the major advantages of moving in this direction. People can age in place and maintain their independence for far longer.

The average person outlives their ability to drive by 10 years. How are you going to live that last 10 years of your live in the average American car-dependent suburb?

"What is the safety of that method, for the child, in a collision with another bike or a fall?"

In general what you find when the mass of traffic movement moves from large, heavy, vehicles with the potential to accelerate very quickly at that move (at least some small percentage of the time) at high speeds, to small, light, relatively slow moving vehicles, is that the injury and fatality rate drops very dramatically.

The cyclist injury rate in the Netherlands is a small fraction of that in the U.S., despite the fact that virtually no cyclists in the Netherlands wears a helmet and many, many children are toted around on bicycles (without a helmet in sight) in just the sort of manner you describe--sitting in tubs affixed to the bike, riding on the rack in the back, etc.

Overall, the traffic injury rate per million population in the Netherlands--including car, pedestrian, cycling, transit, etc--is about 1/3 that of the U.S. Sometimes the solution isn't greater and greater personal armor and fortifications, but in improving the safety of the overall environment.
posted by flug at 8:43 AM on July 29, 2015 [36 favorites]

Bike trailers are cool -- I've even ridden in one! -- but like any trailer, they require some extra proprioceptive effort to handle properly. Bakfiets look damn tempting, as do cargo bikes, once you adjust to the shift in balance that results from actually loading one up.

Democracy is pretty easy to carry around on the typical rear rack, though. (I'm not sure if I should try to work the election again this year. Tories have won every damn time I worked a poll, so I may be cursed.)
posted by maudlin at 8:46 AM on July 29, 2015 [2 favorites]

A bakfiets is an expensive investment for a lot of families

Sure, but a 2000 euro fancy bekfiets is still a lot less than 24,000 euro for a new Golf.
posted by bonehead at 8:52 AM on July 29, 2015 [6 favorites]

Chris Boardman did a nice piece during ITV's coverage of the Tour de France comparing cycling in Holland with cycling in Britain. Someone has uploaded it on YouTube here.
posted by The Ultimate Olympian at 8:54 AM on July 29, 2015 [3 favorites]

A bakfiets is an expensive investment for a lot of families,

Expensive as opposed to cars? Our circumstances are about to change to make sharing one car between 2 parents and the kid every day unworkable, so I'm getting a cargo bike (an Xtracycle longtail rather than a bakfiets). It cost £1250, plus another couple of hundred for the child seat and accessories. Ongoing fuel costs will be near zero (although from experience I will need to eat more food daily), annual maintenance £110 if I select the most expensive option from a local cycle shop chain. So around £1,600 initially, then £200 annually (round up for stuff like inner tubes, etc).
Compare that to a car to do the same job - say £3,000-£4,000 for a half-decent used car, then annually:
~£300 insurance (off the top of my head)
£40 MOT (annual safety check)
~£60-£130 tax (depends on emissions)
~£150 annual service
Based on experience it would cost around 15p a mile in fuel so £1.50 a day based on a 10 mile round trip, then there's intermittent expenses like tyres (£30-£60 each depending on the car).
So £3,500 initially, then nearly £1,000 a year in expenses.

So, what's an expensive investment, again?
posted by EndsOfInvention at 8:56 AM on July 29, 2015 [10 favorites]

We visit the Netherlands almost every year. The last time we had an interesting chat with a local in Amsterdam who pointed out that the pro-bike, anti-car laws were almost uniformly hated by the Dutch when they were introduced two or three generations ago "...and now look at us!"

There is definitely some danger - an American friend of ours was hit a couple of years ago by a bike about a kilometer from where we were talking! - but she wasn't looking, and it involved a broken collar bone and some discomfort and embarrassment. If she'd stepped out in front of a car it could have been far worse.

In New York City, we're 30 years behind. People park right on the bike lanes, and are rude if you ask them politely, or less politely, to move, ("See all those bikes swerving out into traffic? That's because you are in their lane...")

(The Hassids one district away used to systematically park on the bike paths because they didn't like women in shorts going through their districts. There were repeated ticketings, and they don't do it any more. They tend to prefer minivans so there's a natural tension between them and cyclists.)

I wonder what it'll be like 30 years from now - all bikes or much the same as now? Honestly, I suspect 30 years from now or certainly 60 years from now it'll all be canoes around here
posted by lupus_yonderboy at 9:00 AM on July 29, 2015 [1 favorite]

Big cities west of the Mississippi may have been established by humans before cars, but the vast majority of their physical growth happened after cars were common enough to be a major design consideration.

The flip side of that is that a huge part of their growth and expansion has happened quite recently, in the past 20-30 years, and so just as it was possible to grow huge sprawling unsustainable suburbs in the past 20-30-50 years, it will be equally possible to fill in and fix them in the next 20-30-50 years if that is the choice we want to make as a society.

The cities that we are now celebrating as great walking and cycling cities made exactly this choice back in about the 1970s. What we are seeing now is the result of 50 years of conscious choices and work. If they had made different choices over the past 50 years, they now could be exactly as automobile-centric as U.S. cities are today.

And any city or town could become a great walking and cycling city over the next 50 years if they make the choice now and follow it through. Being totally automobile-centric does seem to be the path of least resistance for U.S. cities, however.
posted by flug at 9:01 AM on July 29, 2015 [3 favorites]

New “park and bike” areas with bike rental services will emerge on access roads to encourage commuters to leave their cars behind and enter the city by bike

Portland's downtown and near NW area is a perfect candidate for this. Compact, walkable, booming, now has the streetcar and the MAX, very short on parking and very difficult to drive in, as in not worth it. But if you came in by car you're going to want to use your car to get to your destination because there's no very obvious alternative. If we had a few large parking lots at the perimeter with bike lockers and streetcar access and for that matter, private rickshaw and tuk-tuk operators, they would get used and five years later you could start closing off streets.
posted by George_Spiggott at 9:04 AM on July 29, 2015 [6 favorites]

Aaaaaand the first comment is a "can't happen here."

True, but seriously, take a scale map of the entire Netherlands and drop it on any of Texas' ten largest cities. There is a real scale problem. True, it's mostly created by Texans, but it is a real problem -- and while you may be able to cycle 25 miles a day to work and back, not many can.

Now, you can say, and you would actually be correct to say, that this is the fault of the people who built these cities in this way. Yep. But the fact is that this damage has already been done. You do not *instantly*, or hell, even on multi-year timescales, rebuild things like Dallas-Forth Worth. It took decades to throughly break DFW. It will take decades to unbreak them. Never mind that, by and large, most of the people who live there probably don't consider things broken.

Finally, that comment about climate? It's not a joke. Average high temperatures in the summer are 96F/36C. Average. 105F/40F is not only no unheard of, it's downright common. The record is 113F/45C. For three-four months of the year, you simply don't want to be riding a bike in the daytime down there.

Most of my European friends only half joke when they say that the US would be a lot better if we lived in a habitable climate. They're mostly right. There are a couple of OK spots. San Diego is nice....and...ummm.....anybody?
posted by eriko at 9:04 AM on July 29, 2015 [1 favorite]

The crazy thing is, all those American cities were originally built to be usable by humans on foot

To be fair, I am pretty sure the streets of Providence (founded ~1635), were originally built to be usable by no human thing at all.
posted by GenjiandProust at 9:08 AM on July 29, 2015 [3 favorites]

Welp, I guess there's no point in trying, then! Texas should keep building stuff like this!
posted by entropicamericana at 9:08 AM on July 29, 2015 [3 favorites]

Big cities west of the Mississippi may have been established by humans before cars, but the vast majority of their physical growth happened after cars were common enough to be a major design consideration.

Yes. You can see the line, really, it's basically the Mississippi River. The last Eastern Cities that were really built were Chicago and St. Louis, and St. Louis proper stayed really small for reason I'll elide here, but search on the "divorce" of the city and county of St. Louis if you want details. Maybe Minneapolis St. Paul.

Chicago was a city built on transit that had to adapt to the car. Kansas City, MO has a *very* different look to it -- much wider streets, much more spread out. KC was a city built around the motor vehicle. But when Chicago was making its big climb in population and St. Louis was at it's peak in population, KC was a terminus for the cattle drives and the railroads, and the western cities were just becoming connected to the eastern cities.

When the western cities really started to become big, we had cars. They built themselves around them. That alone is why they feel so different that cities like New York, Boston, or Chicago.

You can generally find these cores even in smaller towns in the east -- the highways between them will be wider, but they shrink down when you hit "main street", because that's how they were built, and it's hard to move buildings. So those small towns and cities, the highways get narrow as you pass through them. Just the way it is.

However, Chicago *did* move buildings because they needed a wider street to handle traffic moving north south when they turned Ashland Avenue into a 4 lane street after the fire, including moving Our Lady of Lourdes church (4640N Ashland) across the street! It weighed 10,000 tons, they moved it a foot a minute and rotated it 180 degrees. They also put it on a larger lot, which let them make the nave longer. "Make no small plans," indeed.
posted by eriko at 9:18 AM on July 29, 2015 [3 favorites]

> Every person who can bike and does reduces automobile traffic and parking issues for those who can't bike.

That has been the single most effective argument for bikes in my experience (as an American in a town that had 80% of its growth after 1950). A small investment in bike lanes removes cars from your commute: that is something drivers can get behind.
posted by Monochrome at 9:19 AM on July 29, 2015 [4 favorites]

Texan climate is serious, but "a couple of habitable spots" seems like silliness to me. California is nice and all, but I biked all four seasons in the alternatively hot and freezing Northeast and I am a giant wimp. In my suburb biking in the winter was actually sometimes easier than walking, because at least the roads got plowed! (Not usually true for sidewalks: property owners were responsible for clearing their own sections of sidewalk, and a lot of them seemed to be rich/non-civic-minded enough to just eat the fines without doing anything, so there were often sections of sidewalk that were totally unusable. God forbid you block a car from doing something though!) And friends tell me Minneapolis apparently has one of the best cycling cultures in the USA. Etc.
posted by en forme de poire at 9:20 AM on July 29, 2015 [2 favorites]

Even in a place like Brooklyn, it feels like the infrastructure challenges are so big. I have a bike, I really like cycling, I live only 3 miles from work and would probably at least bike-commute during the spring and fall -- except that 80% of my route is on narrow and very busy 2-lane roads where you're forced to take the lane, and cars turn left directly in your path at intersections, and I cannot arrive at work feeling like I've just lived through Mad Max: Fury Road. So, okay, we can't Copenhagenize rural Texas yet. But if we can take steps in the denser cities to make them friendlier to bikes, then maybe we can start to make bikes a normal method of transportation everywhere.
posted by Jeanne at 9:21 AM on July 29, 2015 [4 favorites]

When I lived in San Antonio TX, several of my coworkers biked to work at least one day a week, even with shoddy infrastructure and no particular bike culture. Even with some days over 100 degrees. Imagine what would result from improving infrastructure and promoting bike commuting or multi-mode commuting (ie, biking to bus stop, etc). In fact, to me Texas seems a lot more hospitable to bike commuting than many places in the US - there are no hills! It never snows!
posted by muddgirl at 9:23 AM on July 29, 2015 [2 favorites]

emjaybee: "Also what about old people or the disabled? They talk about moving the buses outside the center...so people will have to travel further from stops to the shops? What about those for whom that's a real hardship, especially in bad weather? "

Most places in the US have disabled bus services ... I think you do like walkable college campuses do, and have golf carts that serve as the "bus service" for the disabled in the walking-only area. Or, your handicapped placard gains you access to walking-only areas, as long as you drive below 10 mph. Or, with many more people on bikes, it's easier for those who NEED cars to USE cars with less traffic and easier parking. There are many practical options.

In a poorly transit-served area like Peoria, I honestly see a lot of elderly and disabled people riding mobility scooters on the shoulder of arterial roads with no sidewalk, because that's the only way to get where they want to go. (Sometimes you can't get to the bus stop without being ON THE ROAD!) They just redid one of our arterials to have bike lanes and safe crossings (tulip crossings), and it goes past public housing, and my husband and I were just commenting last week how much less terrifying it is to drive there now, since the older folks on mobility scooters are now in protected bike lanes. Sure, we in the cars are going 25 instead of 45 since the street's been reduced, but that's okay! It's a very pleasant drive now that it's more boulevard-y.
posted by Eyebrows McGee at 9:23 AM on July 29, 2015 [4 favorites]

One of the things that helped the Dutch move to bikes after the 50s/60s push towards cars was a change in the zoning laws that prevented large out-of-town retail developments. That promoted a lot of smaller local shops, and made it much easier to spend most of your time and fulfil most of your living requirements within a sensible walking/biking radius.
posted by Devonian at 9:28 AM on July 29, 2015 [5 favorites]

But guess what--most people live in cities and towns.

People who live in cities think all cities are like the city they live in.

20% of the US lives in Major Metro areas, and another 34% in the areas surrounding them. So, yeah, most, I guess, but only barely. And it is important to note that the "areas surrounding cities" extends for 50 miles. Forex, Naperville and Chicago are 33 miles apart. To a large extent, the people who work in the cities live in these bedroom communities that are quite far, by bike, from the city.

The rest of the US(~46%) lives in micropolitan areas or rural (50,000 or less). The census defines "urban" as any cluster of greater than 2500 people, but that doesn't account for density - Delta CO with 27 people per square mile is as urban as Newark NJ at ~4500, according to the census.

The US is literally pockmarked with these little blink and miss'em towns and nearly half the country lives in them. Commutes of 75-100 miles one way are not uncommon. The low density makes public transportation improbable and when it does happen, routes are small and served infrequently. The large commute distances make bike travel unreasonable for all but the young.

I say this - I bike to work every day. I specifically bought my house to enable that. I'm not anti-bike. People really do misunderstand just how big America is, and how significant the sprawl has gotten.
posted by Pogo_Fuzzybutt at 9:33 AM on July 29, 2015 [4 favorites]

Yes. You can see the line, really, it's basically the Mississippi River. The last Eastern Cities that were really built were Chicago and St. Louis, and St. Louis proper stayed really small for reason I'll elide here, but search on the "divorce" of the city and county of St. Louis if you want details. Maybe Minneapolis St. Paul.

Minneapolis/St Paul has an old style core - an awful lot of our sprawl and development didn't really happen until the seventies/eighties. We have inner ring suburbs that are basically bike accessible if you're just going from there to downtown or a nearby part of the city (although biking from, say, Edina to Robbinsdale would be a bit of a slog).

Weather is the big drawback to biking in a lot of the US. My bike commute can be as short as a five mile round trip if I don't take the scenic route, and it's still a bit of a bear in high summer. As it is, I can bike at a moderate rate to work in work clothes and not arrive disgustingly sweaty and in need of a shower, but if I had a longer commute I'd have trouble. (I also wonder if stronger worker protections in W. Europe help in terms of lateness if you have a flat, time to change clothes if you need to, etc).

And I know we get a lot more snow in parts of the US than in most of Europe - the amount of heating you'd need to keep our bike paths snow free would be nuts. They have started plowing the main paths now, which is great, although they get plowed last and don't get plowed if there's just, say, an inch of slush. Unfortunately, that tends to freeze and become an inch of rutted ice.

If we were a truly bike-centric city, we'd have real problems during the month or two when the weather really prevents cycling. In 2014, we had about two months of polar vortex when extreme cold alternated with huge amounts of snow, so it was either too cold to bike or there was a huge amount of unplowed snow on the streets and it wasn't safe. And last winter we had about a month of mini-vortex where it was mostly too cold to ride. So everyone who normally biked took the bus - and if that were a third of the city, I don't know what we'd do. (And we do get isolated stretches in summer where I think it's too hot to ride - if the high is going to be 95 or over, or if it's going to be 90ish and very humid, I get anxious about physical activity outdoors and take the bus.)

I think that because much of the US has such climate extremes, it might be more practical to focus the majority of our efforts on increased public transit and only some efforts toward bike infrastructure. Biking is great. I don't own a car and hope if I'm lucky never to need to buy one again. But I think that climate concerns are very real, especially given that most places in the US are going to be working against long distances. A moderately fit person can do, say, a fifteen mile round trip commute regularly if the weather is consistently manageable (moderate heat, moderate cold, more steady rain than crazy dangerous rainstorms) but you just can't do it year round if you're dealing with 95 degrees in summer and a foot of snow every ten days for the middle of winter.
posted by Frowner at 9:43 AM on July 29, 2015 [2 favorites]

Even in as dense an area as New York, keep in mind that cycling is a 79 percent male activity. In the article I linked to, there's a lot of discussion about safety in the sense of getting hit by cars, but not so much about the safety of being in an uncovered vehicle late at night, although they do touch on higher appearance standards for women and the difficulty of transporting children. There's more to this issue than "car culture" and "America's love affair with the automobile."
posted by Ralston McTodd at 9:43 AM on July 29, 2015 [4 favorites]

On the up-side, my town is part of the Blue Zones project, and has recently put in stuff to encourage non-car commuting (renta-bikes, connecting up trails, etc.). There are people in Texas who want this stuff. But there's a lot of tension; after all, oil money still speaks loudly around here.

I can't talk about it much, but my firm is one of those involved in the high-speed rail project. We also do a lot of city planning that encourages cities to build pocket parks and connect small paths and trails with larger ones to make more biking/hiking possible.

One of the tensions with all this is that living close-in is trendy, therefore expensive. If you want to live in the most walkable areas, you pay a premium. Or you live in the soon-to-be-gentrified-but-still-crime-prone parts of town. Next out, you either live in old suburbs (poor) or newer ones (less poor). Way far out, you live in brand-new McMansion communities or build your own personal little ranch, and get used to long drives to get anywhere.

So the working poor folks are those least likely to be able to do much walking or biking. They are stuck out in the old suburbs, or if they are still close in, are seeing prices and rents start to rise (Fort Worth is definitely gentrifying) and local businesses being pushed out. They won't be able to stay there long enough to enjoy the new bike lanes and sidewalks that are coming in.
posted by emjaybee at 9:45 AM on July 29, 2015 [1 favorite]

*sigh*

Daily person trips peaked in 1995 at 4.30 trips per person per day. Daily miles per person showed a slightly different pattern, peaking in 2001 at 40.25 miles per person per day and declining to 36.13 miles per person per day in 2009. The average person trip length also decreased in 2009 when compared to 2001; average person trip length in 2001 was 10.04 miles and in 2009 it was 9.75 miles, which reduced the average person trip by approximately one-quarter of a mile. --FHWA

"69% of trips are two miles or less."

posted by entropicamericana at 9:50 AM on July 29, 2015 [1 favorite]

Further to my comment above, it would be ideal if parking in the perimeter lots were free, because parking is not only difficult but quite expensive downtown, so this would be a huge incentive to use this system. But if you couldn't get the lots financed and built with that plan, then work out a revenue sharing agreement with the public transport system such that your parking ticket is good for free bike locker rental as well as streetcar, bus and MAX rides. Or vice-versa: where purchases of public transit tickets at the lots partly go to fund the parking structures.
posted by George_Spiggott at 9:50 AM on July 29, 2015 [1 favorite]

While using it commute regularly here wouldn't be a great idea, between bad weather (good temperature, but a lot of rain and wind), bad roads, some steep height variations, no place to park on a lot of places except trees, lighting poles or traffic signs and the usual "fuck you" drivers. But I wish I had learned how to ride, because at least I could lose weight in a more elegant fashion.
posted by lmfsilva at 10:07 AM on July 29, 2015

So the working poor folks are those least likely to be able to do much walking or biking. They are stuck out in the old suburbs, or if they are still close in, are seeing prices and rents start to rise (Fort Worth is definitely gentrifying) and local businesses being pushed out.

though, just as a counter example (and oft-used in some advocacy circles re: the danger of thinking of cyclists as being one particular tribe of commuter) there are also a lot of working poor who ride bikes because they either can't afford a car, or don't have access to driver's licenses. However, because they're usually wearing bluecollar clothes and riding janky Walmart bikes, and typically don't participate or volunteer in street advocacy (because they don't have time) they tend to be invisible in our discussions. But, given current census data, Latinos and other minorities actually tend to be overrepresented in bike commuting usage.

also, Frowner, I don't think Swedes or Danes or Germans are strangers to any level of snow or cold or rain, but I don't think that's stopped them from riding. In my visits, they do a decent, but not excellent job of keeping roads and cycletracks ice free, but between a combination of common sense and adaptability they seem to manage. I think, at the end of the day, you have to get to your job, and you will do what you need to accomplish that. The main thing, I believe, that deters North Americans is the question of safety. If you build the safety infrastructure, people will invent their own adaptations for weather.
posted by bl1nk at 10:37 AM on July 29, 2015 [6 favorites]

there are also a lot of working poor who ride bikes because they either can't afford a car, or don't have access to driver's licenses. However, because they're usually wearing bluecollar clothes and riding janky Walmart bikes, and typically don't participate or volunteer in street advocacy (because they don't have time) they tend to be invisible in our discussions. But, given current census data, Latinos and other minorities actually tend to be overrepresented in bike commuting usage.

^This.^ For every hipster fixie rider or a white-collar commuter like me, there are a lot of poorer folks who ride their bikes for these reasons. Yeah, sure of course, I want bike lanes but they aren't just for me. They're for them too.
posted by Kitteh at 10:44 AM on July 29, 2015 [7 favorites]

But Ralston, that degree of gender imbalance is not observed in places like Denmark or the Netherlands. It seems like that is probably an effect, not a cause, of car-centric road policies: those make biking more dangerous, and also bolster its reputation of being a type of extreme sport, vs. a standard, safe, fun commuting option.
posted by en forme de poire at 10:46 AM on July 29, 2015 [6 favorites]

Honestly, I suspect 30 years from now or certainly 60 years from now it'll all be canoes around here

new amsterdam!* :P
posted by kliuless at 10:49 AM on July 29, 2015 [2 favorites]

I do wonder how much of the gender divide is specifically a fear of harassment/sexual violence versus other factors (like having responsibility for young children, and being taught to take fewer physical risks) -- personally, I am much more afraid of drivers who don't see me or don't respect my right-of-way than of people who target me for harassment, and the sexual harassment I get on a bike is much less than that I get on the bus/subway.
posted by Jeanne at 10:51 AM on July 29, 2015 [2 favorites]

Neat-o! I've been working and living in Groningen for the past year, and I've definitely noticed that the city is positively dominated by bikes. From what I can observe, the main "perks" of riding a bike in this city are:

- at busy intersections, a separate all-way "scramble" just for cyclists (i.e., not cyclists + pedestrians)
- pretty much every one-way street has an exception for bikes, so you can always take the straightest route from point A to point B
- on the smaller streets, street parking is just wide enough to make it very difficult for motorists to (dangerously) zip by cyclists.
- on heavily-trafficked streets, there is always a designated bike path that is separated from the road by a raised kerb
- on regular streets, there are no bike lanes and motorists are forced to share the right-hand lane (note: as far as I know, motorists are always legally at fault in car-bicycle collisions).
- most importantly, the local motorists know how to drive with a zillion bicycles around them. That makes a big difference, I think.
posted by LMGM at 10:54 AM on July 29, 2015 [8 favorites]

3rding Kitteh and bl1nk... One of the most common demographics I saw riding bikes in suburban NJ was Latino men who were commuting to and from work. Anecdotally, I often saw them having to take much hairier routes than I usually did to get to where they lived (e.g., crossing major highways at night! probably because any affordable housing in NJ is across a highway from where the jobs are, let alone amenities like groceries). It seems like those guys would have benefited hugely from having some decent bike infrastructure that didn't force them to contend with 70mph cars just to get from point A to point B.
posted by en forme de poire at 10:55 AM on July 29, 2015 [2 favorites]

In thinking about this, most of the objections I have relate to when you have to be somewhere on a tight schedule, like work or your kids' school. But if work keeps changing enough, say, that telecommuting is more common and people living far out wouldn't necessarily have to come in to urban centers every day, we could even build more local "village" type places around where where people live/shop/have schools. That could both allow more cycling/walking and account for the fact that the US is always going to be a more spread-out place than Europe.

I could, if allowed, easily do my job this way right now. But I work for a conservative company that thinks offsite working is a perk and thinks it will negatively impact my productivity. So I drive 40 miles round trip every day. I can't afford to live closer in; the houses closest to my office are way out of my price range. But if coming in was only something I did 1 or 2x a week, I could live in a small town and walk/bike more.
posted by emjaybee at 11:18 AM on July 29, 2015

- most importantly, the local motorists know how to drive with a zillion bicycles around them. That makes a big difference, I think.

Beijing has gone in the opposite direction where a city that was dominated by cyclists has, due to economic expansion, allowed several citizens to buy cars in recent decades (though they've smartly maintained several cycletracks and pieces of infrastructure). So, traffic mix is more like 50/50 car/bike or 60/40 car/bike and roads are congested, but because so many of the drivers have living memories of getting around the city by bike, and still own bikes, their posture with respect to cyclists is far more humane and respectful than North American drivers have been.
posted by bl1nk at 11:28 AM on July 29, 2015 [2 favorites]

Explain to them that people who have active commutes are more productive and healthier. I even found a Texas-appropriate link.
posted by entropicamericana at 11:32 AM on July 29, 2015

also, Frowner, I don't think Swedes or Danes or Germans are strangers to any level of snow or cold or rain

No, actually, Minnesota has much more extreme weather than Germany or the Scandinavian countries - we're a LOT hotter in the summer, we get an average of 54 inches of snow per year in Minneapolis, which is more than the total annual average precipitation in Germany, our average winter temperature is 16 and the average January temperature in Berlin is 32.

I have noticed that on metafilter people from temperate parts of the US and from Europe very often believe that their cities are just like ours, and that places they think of as "cold" and "snowy" are as cold and snowy as Minnesota. Everyone is all "oh, I live in England, why don't you selfish Americans turn off the air conditioners" and so on.

Minnesota is quite hot in the summer and routinely almost catastrophically cold and snowy in the winter. I have ridden through six winters now and semi-ridden through two; I currently don't have any significant health problems which prevent me from biking. I assure you that covering longish distances by bike here in the dead of winter or the middle of summer is not like biking on a rainy day in Malmo.
posted by Frowner at 11:36 AM on July 29, 2015 [9 favorites]

"Actually, Alaska, the coldest state in the U.S., has the highest rate of active commuting. About 8 percent of workers there commute by foot and another 1 percent by bike."

Local climates don't exert much influence on biking and walking. (Although there is a relationship with *hot* weather, it doesn't seem to be strong.)
posted by entropicamericana at 11:40 AM on July 29, 2015 [5 favorites]

In the dead of winter, I ride a five mile round trip. I'm unusually cold-tolerant and bike on any day where the high is expected to break ten degrees F. My biggest challenge - I have glasses and it's difficult to cover my face (which is absolutely vital when it's 0F when you're leaving for work) without also steaming up my glasses. A balaclava routes my breath right into my glasses and ski goggles steam up. So I usually just wrap my face in a scarf, which means that I have frozen scarf over my mouth for most of the ride and I can't breathe very well. I like riding in the winter, but it has its discomforts.

I have poor circulation in my hands and feet, so I sometimes have to stop mid-ride to try to warm up my toes and fingers, which is tricky, again, when it's ten degrees out.

Many people who bike seriously through the winter here have those heavy-duty gloves that you bolt onto your bike handles. Many have the wide-tired bikes, and I'm thinking of getting one for the really icy days. Many people bike in ski goggles. Big insulated boots and snow suits aren't uncommon for anyone who has more than a couple of mile commute. And that's for two months at the core of winter, not just one or two bad days. It's really fucking cold, is what I'm saying. Biking when it's under about fifteen degrees can be really, really hard.

Also, biking over snow is more tiring than biking over cement, even when the snow is packed down into a hard layer. Biking over rutted ice uses your whole body. Biking over thin black ice is terrifying and I've fallen several times.

None of this is impossible, but I can see that there will be a time in my life when I'm just too old and physically fragile to be able to withstand the temperatures and the physical challenge.
posted by Frowner at 11:48 AM on July 29, 2015 [1 favorite]

Local climates don't exert much influence on biking and walking.

Okay, this does not make sense to me unless it's not broken out by season, because I bike in the city year round, and LOTS of people stop riding in the winter. Right now, I see tons of fellow commuters and the bike racks at work are full. In December, I see very few people and have my choice of bike parking. Right now, the bike rack at the grocery store is always mostly full; in January it's usually just me and maybe one other bike.

Far more people bike year-round here than was the case ten years ago, but most people who bike commute only do so between about March and the first snow.

Climate seems to me obviously to have an effect on the commute - during the polar vortex and last winter's cold spell, the buses were absolutely packed, and lots of people I see on my bike route were on the bus instead of biking.

If what that chart is saying is "places that are very cold still get lots of bike commuters when the weather is okay", that makes sense, but I'm telling you - there just aren't as many bike commuters between early November and mid-March.
posted by Frowner at 11:53 AM on July 29, 2015

What we need is Space for Pootling!
posted by rum-soaked space hobo at 12:43 PM on July 29, 2015

Hey Frowner, you may already be aware of this, but if not, you can get metal studded bike tires for winter riding. They're supposed to really help with traction on ice.
posted by indubitable at 12:46 PM on July 29, 2015 [1 favorite]

Yeah, I ride year round and I have my choice of bicycle rack spaces in the winter months, whereas right now at the peak of summer we are doubling up on every space. Maybe local climates in California don't affect ridership, but people definitely go back to cars, buses, trams, and trains during the winter in Gdansk.

I'd like to see future cities with lots of pedestrians, bicycles, electric buses (no tracked vehicles), and small driverless electric taxis that never go above 30 mph. Expand the no-private-cars zone a little every year until you've got no private cars in the city.
posted by pracowity at 12:48 PM on July 29, 2015

indubidtable, the standard trick around here was to cinch zip-ties around the tyres. Not as good as purpose-built weather tyres, but it did the trick for some during the odd surprise snow.
posted by rum-soaked space hobo at 12:55 PM on July 29, 2015

rum-soaked space hobo -
that tends to make braking a little bit impossible for most bikes.
posted by entropone at 1:05 PM on July 29, 2015

Frowner, as someone who rides year round in New England and has to deal with their fair share of ice covered roads and below freezing days, you have my respect and sympathy. I totally affirm your observation that a lot of people put their bikes away in the winter, but with regards to this statement:

Weather is the big drawback to biking in a lot of the US ... And I know we get a lot more snow in parts of the US than in most of Europe - the amount of heating you'd need to keep our bike paths snow free would be nuts.

I think comparing Minneapolis to 'a lot of the US' may be falling into the same fallacy you indicated earlier about imagining that "a lot of cities must be like mine." I think that if one were to look at where a lot of Americans actually live, the analogy to Western European cities like Copenhagen, Berlin or Groningen (or Barcelona or Seville for Texan and Southern Californian comparison) still holds.

I also believe that entropicamericana's link was focused on whether the average climate for a location has an effect on bike commuting, not whether or not bike commuting changes with temperature in a location. Basically, if you live in a city that tends to be colder, you've adapted to what's normal for the climate and made decisions on how you're going to adapt to traveling outside; and your decision on whether or not you will ride a bike will still be more related to perceptions of speed and safety rather than comfort. I think it's also worth noting that the percentage marked in that link is about people who bike or walk to work. So it's about % of the population who choose not to use their car for commuting (possibly because they live in a city with good infrastructure for transit or biking as opposed to it being so cold that you need to commute in a climate controlled vehicle)
posted by bl1nk at 1:20 PM on July 29, 2015 [1 favorite]

Many have the wide-tired bikes, and I'm thinking of getting one for the really icy days. Many people bike in ski goggles. Big insulated boots and snow suits aren't uncommon for anyone who has more than a couple of mile commute.

Studded tires have been a better investment for me than a dedicated fatbike would be (one pair of studded tires has lasted me a few winters so far, and no need to buy a whole new bike.) I recommend these to anyone who's worried about slipping on ice, because that is an entirely reasonable worry in winter.

As for clothing, interestingly, it's for my longer winter rides that I need less core insulation. After the first couple of miles I'm toasty -- except for my extremities. Insulated boots and lobster gloves are pretty fabulous, and I got a bunch of those chemical toe warmer things that I can stick on the bottom of my socks. For me, I'm comfortable biking in the cold if I can just keep my toes, nose, fingers, and ears warm enough, and make sure I'm otherwise well enough ventilated enough not to be a sweaty mess when I get where I'm going. Wool sweaters are ideal, since they're breathable. I always figure anyone I see who's biking in an enormous parka must be new at winter biking -- I don't need a big coat unless I'm walking!

I have a hard time convincing the fair-weather bike riders that I genuinely find it more comfortable to bicycle in winter, but it's the truth. The "do I have appropriate winter clothing?" questions are more than offset by the "did I apply enough sunscreen?" questions I ask myself in summer. But there definitely are lots of people who'll only bike in spring/summer/fall, and that's better than not biking at all. Air quality problems are even more likely to be a problem in summer, so every automobile not being used for a single trip contributes to keeping our air breathable.
posted by asperity at 1:24 PM on July 29, 2015 [3 favorites]

I absolutely agree that we need to communicate to drivers that Space for Cycling helps them have more space for motoring.

One canard that you often hear in London on the "couldn't 'appen 'ere" front is "yeah well Holland's flat, mate!"

I've lived in San Francisco, and to me London is absurdly gentle in its rolling river valley. But there's a detail people forget, which I take these opportunities to point out:

"Oh yeah, it's much harder for them!" I say, "they haven't got these lovely hills to block the wind. Cycling's much easier over here--if only we had the infrastructure they did!"

My Dutch friends regularly complain about the wind. If you have a tail wind, it's easy, and a headwind can be frustrating to grind against. But the worst is a side-wind, where you get no benefit in either direction. The flatness of the Netherlands really isn't as helpful an asset for cycling as outsiders seem to think.
posted by rum-soaked space hobo at 1:25 PM on July 29, 2015 [3 favorites]

Okay, this does not make sense to me unless it's not broken out by season, because I bike in the city year round, and LOTS of people stop riding in the winter.

Yeah, I think the disconnect is that you're describing a within-city seasonal trend, but the graph entropicamericana presented is describing is a between-city trend. I definitely buy that seasons have an effect on biking, but for example, despite having if anything slightly milder winters than Minneapolis, Boston still only has around a third of Minneapolis's bike commuter percentage. I think that underscores the outsize role that factors like municipal/state transportation policies (and past decisions) play in determining how many people bike to work.

Similarly, with respect to the figures Pogo_Fuzzybutt mentioned above about the prevalence of micropolitan areas in the USA, certainly some of those are very low density. But also, that density isn't uniform, and many of those areas are made up of smaller, denser areas that are pretty small from one end to another in terms of the absolute distance. Even taking that most extreme example of Delta County, CO, over half of the population seems to be in still in more spatially-compact towns that have a much higher average density than that overall figure of 25 people/sq mi, and many of those towns are less than a few miles across. Practically speaking of course, you'd of course run into problems in many of these areas as a most-of-the-time biker, but I suspect a lot of that is because of past decisions that ended up favoring car use (e.g. highways that prevent non-car-users from getting from point A to point B; zoning laws that favor amenities that are exclusively accessible by highway), and not that those towns are intrinsically too sparse to be bikeable. There's a greater link between density and public transit availability (though I think that's often overstated too), but sparseness can actually be an asset for biking: lower population density means less-crowded roads, for instance.
posted by en forme de poire at 1:41 PM on July 29, 2015 [2 favorites]

entropone: oh right, my Gazelle has coaster brakes on the rear, so I kind of take that for granted.
posted by rum-soaked space hobo at 1:42 PM on July 29, 2015

One of the biggest problems from an advocacy standpoint is that when you show Dutch people cycling in all weather to prove that it can be done casually and easily, the Top Gear viewership all get their seatbelts in a twist and drag all their friends to say "see what they want us to have to do!!!!"

You can show a really efficient cycle junction that allows people to glide through effortlessly in droves, and all the anti-bike nuts will show the video to their compatriots and say "Lookit that! Terrifyin', innit!" And places like Westminster make policy decisions on emotion and bad data.

We've got a real headwind against sane infrastructure in the UK, and there's no way to overcome it until we get just one location that does it right. I think we need to find our Groningen, and then people can just see it working on this island and
posted by rum-soaked space hobo at 1:49 PM on July 29, 2015 [3 favorites]

Nobody has mentioned e-bikes, which are a whole different route to getting more people on bikes. Having a motor along essentially makes hills less steep, headwinds less mean-spirited and temperatures lower. The first two are obvious, the third is that on a very hot day, you can crank the assist way up and go 18mph with very little effort. Add a little water spray-bottle, and you've got AC., or at least, evaporative cooling. (The down side, of course, is that that same 18mph is SUPER cold in the winter. )

What's really a shame is that there isn't a reasonable way to finance the purchase of a bike. If you want to spend $15k on a car, you can pay $330/month for 4 years and get the car now. If you want to spend $3600 on the kind of electric-assist cargo bike that makes an ideal second car, you need to sock away that $300/month for a year to save up.

For perspective, the average new car costs 32k - that's like $600/month! For that kind of money, this same "average" person could buy this bike every year for four years in a row.

If you're thinking about a cargo bike, be sure to read reviews on Hum of the City. She seems to have ridden pretty much everything.
posted by kevin is... at 1:59 PM on July 29, 2015 [5 favorites]

I think that because much of the US has such climate extremes, it might be more practical to focus the majority of our efforts on increased public transit and only some efforts toward bike infrastructure.

We can totally do both! Those goals overlap to a very large degree. For example, Denver cut the ribbon yesterday (!) on a pedestrian-bicycle bridge that will make it easier for people to cross an interstate highway without having to walk or bike along major multi-lane arterial roads. The bridge goes directly to a light rail station and bus transfer point, so it's also going to significantly increase people's access to public transit.

And since pretty much all transit requires at least a short walk or bike ride, improving facilities near stops and stations pays off for everyone. Even small incremental improvements really make life easier for people on the ground, like fixing drainage on a sidewalk that floods and ices over in the winter next to a bus stop, or changing the timing on a traffic signal.

It was amazing to read about the massive overnight changes Groningen made, but every little bit of incremental change helps, and it doesn't always have to be done directly by governments. In much of the US, property owners are responsible for installation and upkeep of adjacent sidewalks, and they're often the ones installing bicycle racks. If there's a new development planned, that's the easiest possible time to make them do the right thing, and make that little bit of space better. These things add up, and if we keep at it, we'll get closer to Groningen-style infrastructure.
posted by asperity at 2:00 PM on July 29, 2015 [4 favorites]

Low-density areas benefit from the "gap-joining" that cycling can do. Good cycle infrastructure (which, as we've established, is also good mobility scooter/wheelchair infrastructure) means that residents can travel the five blocks to the bus stop on their own instead of forcing the bus to take a near-useless meandering course through areas that shouldn't be supporting heavy vehicles like that. Bus schedules improve, ridership goes up, and everybody wins.
posted by rum-soaked space hobo at 2:17 PM on July 29, 2015 [3 favorites]

There is one thing I wish to point everyone reading this article to as a word of caution:

The essence of Van den Berg’s traffic circulation plan, as it came to be called, was that the centre of Groningen would be divided in four sections. For motorists, it would become impossible to go from one section to the other: cars had to take the ring-road around the inner city, whereas cyclists could move freely about on new cycle paths constructed to accommodate them.

Note that cars weren't banned from any of those four sections outright. Instead, access between the sections was limited for cars. This means that the entire area was considered a destination for cars rather than a thoroughfare.

This is a critical distinction, and one that UK traffic planners have missed entirely while tarting up streets in a "Dutchy" style. Most notably, the Exhibition Road "shared space" project applied Dutch access road ideas to a major rush-hour thoroughfare, while leaving the nearby access roads untouched.

Part of the reason this mistake keeps happening (and oh, does it ever keep happening!) is that we haven't yet adopted fully the model from Van den Berg's circulation plan. This notion of preventing destinations by car from becoming thoroughfares has the rather unglamorous name of "filtered permeability" in English urban planning cirlces, and it is absolutely essential for getting this stuff right. Motorists should have main roads as thoroughfares, and no "rat runs" should exist to encourage them to take shortcuts through places where people are walking and children are playing.

All the "cycle lanes" in the world won't help us if we can't even keep destinations and thoroughfares straight in our road plans!
posted by rum-soaked space hobo at 2:25 PM on July 29, 2015 [10 favorites]

But also, that density isn't uniform, and many of those areas are made up of smaller, denser areas that are pretty small from one end to another in terms of the absolute distance.

The problem isn't purely one of density. It's that a substantial number of people who live in those smaller towns commute to larger ones for work. Without a car, that lifestyle is impossible.

The other thing is time. Depending on things, it's about 45 minutes to go 10 miles and that probably represents the longest commute most people are comfortable with.* Beyond that, fuck it, I'll take the car and get some of that time back.

Grand Junction, CO is 40 miles across with a small downtown area and business and residential areas interspersed throughout. It's a pretty typical mid-sized town in that regard. Odds are good that if I should change jobs, it will involve a return to commuting by car - or selling the house and moving, whichever is less trouble - because there just aren't that many opportunities within X miles of the house.

That aside, yeah, the biking thing works best when there is a certain amount of density - so that you can find that critical mass of amenities and jobs within reasonable distance of housing. And that is the main issue, I feel. Below that level, bike transit becomes less viable, and huge swaths of the American population (~40-50% or so) are living in those areas.

Which isn't to say that Chicago and Minneapolis and their burbs shouldn't build bike lanes. It's that America faces challenges that Europe doesn't, and some things that work well there are not likely to work as well here.

*I am very sure that the European 32 hour standard workweek and relaxed attitudes about work help, too
posted by Pogo_Fuzzybutt at 2:36 PM on July 29, 2015 [1 favorite]

people who live in those smaller towns commute to larger ones for work. Without a car, that lifestyle is impossible.

Though many of those people may live within a mile or three of grocery stores, libraries, bars, restaurants, movie theaters, or anywhere else we might want to go that's not work. We concentrate on commuting modeshare because that's what we've got the most survey data for, but most people make at least one more trip a day that's not to work. Making those trips easier for people to do without cars is a good thing no matter what our commutes are like.
posted by asperity at 3:10 PM on July 29, 2015 [4 favorites]

the point isn't what kind of cities we *have*, it's what kind we should *build*.
posted by entropone at 4:01 PM on July 29, 2015 [6 favorites]

Regarding the conversation about biking safety for women: I'm a woman who lives in DC, doesn't own a car, and recently began using a bike as my main form of transport after walking. Even after taking public transport, I still often had a few sketchy blocks to walk home, and I can't afford regular taxis or ubers. A bike feels like a much safer alternative to walking, and while some incidents do happen to women on bikes, it's not like being a woman alone in a taxi is really a guaranteed way to avoid assault either.

I think one reason biking has been so male-dominated in the past is partially because of the idea that biking requires special gear. Unlike men, who could change from a biking outfit into a work outfit without much effort - or even just bike to work in their trousers and undershirt - women have to pay a lot more attention to makeup, hair, shoes, and other aspects of a professional look that are more easily ruined by intense biking. We also tend to have less discretionary income then men to pay for expensive hobbies. Also, to be honest, I was turned off by biking for a long time because I met so many arrogant hipster bros who mansplained to me why it was the One True Form of Transport.

However! In DC now I see tons of women bikers, even women who are visibly pregnant, and I'm starting to see more people pulling around kids. I think it's totally possible to make biking an accessible space for women. The perception is changing from "you need to have expensive shit and a fancy outfit to do that" to "oh I can get this casual bike-share membership and ride to work in my skirt and flats, it'll cut my commute in 1/4th and I don't have to go on the metro and press up against a bunch of sweaty dudes."

I've come to really love biking and think the District is doing some great stuff to encourage it, like building an increasing number of bike lanes, especially ones separated from the main road, so you can go a whole route without riding alongside traffic, and having a cheap bikeshare program, so you can casually try it out or commute one-way without spending a lot of money. Notably, there are also several non-profit groups that take newbies out to learn city riding - some are specifically by-women-for-women.

Obviously this will work differently in cities that are less centralized, but I think with a little effort it's totally possible for dozens of American cities to become really accessible to casual bikers. And a whole city doesn't need to be bike-accessible. The suburb where I grew up would have benefited from some bike lanes from the neighborhoods to the grocery stores and coffee shops 2 miles away. I think there are a lot of people who don't enjoy traffic and the car commute, and would welcome policies to make walking and biking feel more safe, accessible, and convenient. And once they take it up, more and more people will. It just requires cities to begin putting a few systems in place.
posted by Solon and Thanks at 4:54 PM on July 29, 2015 [5 favorites]

women have to pay a lot more attention to makeup, hair, shoes, and other aspects of a professional look that are more easily ruined by intense biking

True fact: it's more comfortable to bike in a dress than in trousers. Though I do change my shoes to bike to work because a) I don't wanna scuff my nice dress shoes and b) I have no desire to lose any toes if I'm wearing anything open-toed. But it's not like everyone needs to worry about shoe maintenance (and tbh we probably don't really need all those toes.)
posted by asperity at 5:08 PM on July 29, 2015 [1 favorite]

Re: climate in cities. There should be more done for cities that simply shutdown in even the wussiest of storms. I can't count how many times Portland would shut down just because there was a tiny bit of snow. The MAX, the streetcar, and busses would all be delayed (sometimes the streetcar would be shutdown and the MAX wouldn't run as many cars) and traffic would be a disaster, which made biking even more dangerous as people have no idea how to drive in even a little bit of snow. Not only that, but you have these idiots driving around everywhere with chains on, screwing up the roads, which means more money taken out from bicycle infrastructure projects and back into repairing the roads (while neglecting the roads in East Portland as well). The rare few times we actually got a big storm the city looked like the apocalypse. The sidewalks and streets were totally iced over, no one came by to salt the roads or move snow, public transport was non-existent to certain parts of the city (particularly going N/NE). There are major hurdles to creating a cyclist/pedestrian oriented city when every winter it seems something terrible is happening (although last winter was incredibly mild, the winter of 13/14 was like an apocalypse to some people. Thankfully I was close enough to my work to walk there.)

On top of that, demographics are changing. Portland may be one of the best cycling cities in America (I think it's #2 now) but will it still have a population that supports that in 10 years? There are a lot of high density condos going in a lot of inner NE/SE neighborhoods and I've seen people complain about them not putting parking in, because people are moving there and commute by car but then park their cars in the neighborhoods, then the people in those neighborhoods have to park further away from their houses. I know that sounds trivial to a lot of us, but I've witnessed this first hand with my parents (albeit in Reno) where our neighbor parks in front of our house and my father, who has a bad leg and back, has to park further and therefore walk longer to get inside. This passes them off. The condos think they're incentivizing people to walk and bike everywhere, but in reality they're just walking around their neighborhood then driving to another one. It's not exactly helping traffic when people still want to drive 5 miles just to go to a neighborhood that looks just like theirs (fuck you Little Big Burger!)
posted by gucci mane at 5:15 PM on July 29, 2015

Ok I'm totally stealing this layout for my Cities: Skylines city
posted by destrius at 6:40 PM on July 29, 2015 [2 favorites]

Bicycles are cool for lots of people (me included), but within the city lots of people need a three- or four-wheeled enclosed motor vehicle of some sort. The best thing for a city would be pedestrians able to call driverless vehicles to come and pick them up. A phone app, no doubt, that checks your identification and location, asks whether you have any special needs, sends the closest available car to come and get you, takes you where you want to go, and bills you for it. If you're old, the taxi is free or at a reduced price.

A common use case I have in mind is the old women who live near me. One has a bad hip from a fall, one has terrible foot problems that make her hobble in tiny steps, and another is just getting quite old and depends on a cane. They don't have cars, can't ride bikes, live on pensions, don't have money for normal taxis, and live too far from bus, tram, and train stops to make mass transit any use. They walk everywhere they go. They are independent.

They ought to be able to use voice commands or simple touch screens to summon a little electric car and to tell it where they want to go, and they should not have to worry about the billing because the government or their children would take care of it. And the distances might be small for us -- just a block or two for shopping or seeing a friend -- but a long way for an old woman walking on a crutch or a cane.

A system like that could intermesh with bicycles quite nicely. They could share the same paths if you kept the speed and weight of the electric vehicles low.
posted by pracowity at 3:52 AM on July 30, 2015

pracowity, see the earlier comments about the Canta.
posted by entropone at 7:20 AM on July 30, 2015

If you make it easy to park, people will drive more. Parking, like every other aspect of the happy motoring society, is massively subsidized in America. I'm tired of paying for it. If we're such a free-market, we should let people pay the true cost of parking.
posted by entropicamericana at 7:28 AM on July 30, 2015 [10 favorites]

me and a friend from richmond, va (RVA) who worked for the department of public utilities (DPU) and is really into trains often talk about public transportation and lament the passing of richmond's electric trolley system. in a random occurrence i was having lunch with another friend who works in IR at dominion power and happened to be joined by the head of generation who mentioned that he kept a historic map of richmond in his office, whereupon i tried to impress him with the idea of bringing back the trams :P (for a PR victory!)

anyway, my trainspotting/railfan friend and i have decided that maybe the world has moved on and that 'packet switching' within a city might best be conducted with golf carts (driverless or otherwise! hyperloop for inter-city travel i guess ;) like in the villages? all of which to say, to make it relevant to the thread, that this could help cities become more bike friendly.
posted by kliuless at 11:22 AM on July 30, 2015

If you make it easy to park, people will drive more.

Yep. Make all on-street parking cost what it's worth, and stop making minimum parking requirements for businesses. It would also be nice if they converted the first row of every parking lot into bicycle and motorcycle parking.
posted by pracowity at 12:07 PM on July 30, 2015 [4 favorites]