Not a great article, which is unfortunate given that pro-cycling articles always get the same tired responses in defense of driving (it doesn't work for my particular situation, it's too cold some of the year in some places, etc...).
Public transport doesn't allow for social distancing and there's no space for additional cars.
For urban society overall, more people cycling results in decreased travel times due to less traffic congestion, a healthier population (both from the exercise and distance) and reduced air pollution. Plus there are great economic benefits. Not everyone needs to cycle for everyone to benefit.
If American local governments want people to use bikes for urban mobility then they need to tell law enforcement and prosecutors to actually take bike theft seriously. In many cities it's tough to even get police to file an official report for a bike theft. And the few thieves that are apprehended are typically released with a slap on the wrist. I've seen homeless camps in the Bay Area filled with bike parts, obviously stolen, and the police do nothing.
I'm not going to ride my bike to the store unless I can be sure it will still be there when I come out.
Anybody who has ever had a car stolen already knows how (un-)seriously police take that crime, so it's unlikely they'll start taking seriously the theft of bicycles that cost something like 1/40th to 1/80th of what typical cars cost.
Police are never going to get into the business of tracking down your private property. It's not a good use of their time.
The good news is that you can largely mitigate the risk of almost all kinds of bike theft with some pretty basic preventative measures.
I use both a heavy U-lock and a thick cable lock. I've never had a bike stolen though I have had accessories stolen.
You don't need to make your bike impervious to being stolen, just harder to steal than another bike near it so that the thieves pick that one instead. That isn't particularly hard in my experience. In my case I have two different types of locks as that increases the chances that a thief won't have the right tools to defeat one of the locks. E.g., if a thief has something to pry a lock off that would work on the U-lock, that won't work on the cable lock.
Yeah, I use a heavy D/U-type, a thick cable, and a bar-type (like an Abus Bordo). Pain in the arse carrying them about but I've never had a bike stolen in London.
Some people want more expensive bikes, namely electric bikes that provide more mobility, and to a vastly greater number of people.
It also suggests that there will always be a class of vulnerable bikes available for theft alternatives. The cost is still there, simply borne by 'someone else'.
I'm not saying this strategy can be implemented by everyone, will work forever, or that it's just. My only claim is that if you implement it now, it'll greatly reduce the probability of theft.
Also: My bike is actually fairly expensive but doesn't look so. The new cost was over $1000 at the time as I recall, comparable to a new e-bike. (I bought it used for a fraction of that.) The bike doesn't need to be cheap, just not look attractive to a thief.
We recently moved to a community where we can bike to school, work, and shop on a path that is separate from the road. It has exceeded my expectations on how easier it is to use my bike for daily transportation.
Having biked in NYC pre and post bike lanes, I will say that, while riding in downtown traffic was a fun unique experience if you're into that sort of thing, riding a bike share bike in the bike lane made me feel the same way, that bike as a primary transportation could be real there as well.
There are lots of cheap used bikes on Craigslist that will last a long time. Maintaining them is way cheaper than maintaining a car. Cheap bikes are not as targeted for theft, a cheap lock will go a long way towards protecting from theft.
If you don't mind me asking, what state is this community in? I've been looking for a change and the western states seem appealing. Something like this would factor into my decision.
In general I think this is more about cities using the reduced traffic and shutdowns to accelerate their existing infrastructure plans. There are a reasons why cycling & walking ties in to COVID-19 (mostly getting people off of public transportation), but all of the places which are doing this were already heading down this path (for good reasons).
Road construction and maintenance can be paid off using taxes on various things(property taxes and gas taxes).
Mass transit relies much more on ridership. (NYC Subway is massively underpriced)
Also - road maintenance is highly dependent on road use. Biggest degrading factors for the westside bike path on Manhattan have been natural(weather and flora). I've been on bike paths that were paved in the 60ies and are still in great condition... without maintenance.
This is the worst possible time to start an infrastructure project. The intermediate states matter, and construction sites are evil.
San Fransisco's Vision Zero is why I haven't been able to cycle to work in two years. In the name of bicycle safety, the city tore out my bike lane and replaced it with a ditch.
I don't really need it; I'm a confident vehicular cyclist and I'll take a traffic lane. But the lane I need to be in, which used to be a straight line, is now gated behind an extremely dangerous zipper merge around a half-finished bus boarding island. I have never been more afraid on the road than when navigating a situation allegedly intended to make me safer.
The sidewalks in my neighborhood are being widened, and pedestrian bulb-outs are being added to make crossings shorter. Which means that for the forseeable future, the sidewalks are narrow passages between construction fences, and it's impossible to social-distance with oncoming traffic. The sidewalks around intersections are completely fenced off; to cross the street, you must get within inches of the cars.
All of these things will be great to have, when they are completed in 2030. But until then walking and cycling are much, much worse than they would have been if things were left alone.
> This is the worst possible time to start an infrastructure project. The intermediate states matter, and construction sites are evil.
The ideal time to do construction is when you have the least traffic and right now cities are seeing less traffic than they have had in decades.
> San Fransisco's Vision Zero is why I haven't been able to cycle to work in two years. In the name of bicycle safety, the city tore out my bike lane and replaced it with a ditch.
This has less to do with general principals and a lot to do with piss poor planning in SF. Here in Eugene, when they do construction, cycling safety is (mostly) taken into account.
> All of these things will be great to have, when they are completed in 2030.
Construction sites are a PITA for everyone and are definitely more dangerous for cyclists, but getting the construction over quickly is safer than dragging it out. Considering how bad bike commuting is in many places, dealing with a few years of marginally worse conditions to get much better infrastructure is worthwhile.
This feels like trying to shove this into the opportunity available. There is no indication that cycling is better for the virus. If anything it might make things bad. You now have people sweating all over and trying to take showers and so touching everything.
I thought the page will talk about scientific advantages to cycling or something like that but it just rambles hope about cycling benefiting from this.
Not defending the article, but if the alternative is for everyone to drive cars, I think you need to think about what that means for a second.
1. Everyone in the US has to own and maintain a car. (I've saved $85k by not owning a car over the past 10 years.)
2. We have an increase in the number of 2000 lb steel boxes driving around, polluting, being built and trashed.
3. More drivers, more deaths. Driving is already a leading cause of death in the US.
4. Further sprawl, growing infrastructure costs, higher taxes.
5. Further decline of spontaneous interactions in the US.
There are many many other negative externalities of car dependence. Cycling is an opportunity to reduce our car dependence, and is safer than public transportation for COVID.
Yes, sitting in your personal, 40 thousand dollar, 2 ton steel box anytime you leave the house is the best way to avoid COVID transmission. But it also destroys the earth, social ties, lives, etc.
> Yes, sitting in your personal, 40 thousand dollar, 2 ton steel box anytime you leave the house is the best way to avoid COVID transmission. But it also destroys the earth, social ties, lives, etc.
I think there's another point you've missed. You sitting in your personal 2 ton steel box is good for you, but it practically takes up the entire street space, and forces pedestrians to stay on the much narrower sidewalks, breaking the 6 foot social distancing rule-of-thumb. Opening up the streets to bicycles and pedestrians allows people to use the street to maintain safe distances.
I think this is a cute ideal for a world in which we all live in dense cities and have no business going anywhere but other places in the city. But in reality, I have business in other cities, even states. Work-related travel as well as visiting family. The former could surely be adjusted, but not the latter.
How many pedestrians do you typically see on the highways between cities?
I'm talking strictly about streets inside cities. Cars are great tools for traveling great distances. They're a ridiculous tool for traveling inside cities. They should be looked at with a similar level of absurdity as taking a cruise ship out on the lake for a weekend fishing trip.
It's a very American attitude that this is "cute" or "idealistic". In cities like Copenhagen and Amsterdam, bicycles dominate intra-city transportation. And what's funny about these cities is that they have worse cycling weather than most US cities.
1. Nobody's proposing an elimination of streets. What is being suggested is that streets become more open to cycling and even pedestrian use without an implicit serious threat of death.
2. Re-thinking cities, where we design not around personal car ownership and convenience is possible. There are countless solutions that still allow for automobile use. For example, a number of parking garages throughout—or on the edges of—the city. Think about amusement parks, for example. You can't drive your car right up to Space Mountain when you go to Disney World. You park your car in a massive lot, and a shuttle (glorified golf-cart) takes you into the park where there are miraculously no cars, and no threat of being killed as you cross the "street" to get a cotton candy.
As I said in my previous post—there are working examples here. There's no need to pretend these are unsolvable problems—or even difficult-to-solve problems. Would we need to re-shuffle some things in most US cities? Absolutely... but that's exactly what we're talking about doing.
> There are many many other negative externalities of car dependence.
Yes, exactly, all of these. All of the flaws with everyone driving and owning a personal motor vehicle that existed before the pandemic still exist during it and even afterwards. We cannot give back the gains we made in a handful of areas, and were in the process of making in a lot of other places, as a result of this. A virus running rampant is bad, but the economic and social upheaval of our planet becoming even slightly less hospitable due to climate change will beat all of this by multiples.
> Cycling is an opportunity to reduce our car dependence, and is safer than public transportation for COVID.
I agree that cycling reduces car dependence and can be a safe option, but I don't follow that public transit in the era and after COVID will be "unsafe." There's increasing evidence, like this linked Twitter thread[0] from a doctor reports, that it's sustained contact, particularly around activities that increase viral spread, that are the issue. Factors like air flow, air turnover, and fresh-air intake are shaping up to have pretty big influence; these are things that many buses and trains already account for with HEPA filters and air conditioning.
I'm less worried about transit than I am about what's at the other end of the trip. 30 minutes on a bus, I can control what I touch and wear a mask and there's onboard air handling with filtration. In a grocery store? Far less of that.
Look, I hate sprawl. It's physically revolting. Since I was a little kid I would always feel my whole body relax as soon as a skyscraper came into view. But these arguments are not going to be compelling for the people who need to hear them.
>Everyone in the US has to own and maintain a car.
More than 90% of American households already have a car. Many of the rest want them, and just can't afford it (either because of their own income or the scarcity of parking where they live).
>More drivers, more deaths.
True relative to staying home. Used to be true relative to public transit. May not be anymore, since public transit got a lot more dangerous.
Americans love their sprawl. The only reason it's not infinite is that at some point it gets counterbalanced by commute time. It's not clear that commuting is ever coming back on the scale we had before; remote or mostly-remote workers will, by and large, live even farther from population centers.
>Further decline of spontaneous interactions in the US.
Yes, that is an extremely compelling benefit and the explicit reason most people will seek it in a world newly cognizant of infectious disease risk.
> This feels like trying to shove this into the opportunity available. There is no indication that cycling is better for the virus. If anything it might make things bad. You now have people sweating all over and trying to take showers and so touching everything.
I don't think you understand what this is about. Most of the cycling for transportation is short hops, 0.5 - 2 miles and low key. No sweating or showers involved unless you live in Phoenix (in which case you have my sympathy regardless). I have a 7 mile commute and since it's cool in the morning and I'm not working out hard. I don't need to shower when I get to work.
Also, e-bikes are likely to be a bike part of this which makes the sweatiness even less an issue even if your commute is longer.
It does feel like they are trying to shove this solution in there to some extent. Many large cities have been trying to find ways to increase the amount of cycling and walking regardless. Cars and their infinite demand for resources (parking, wider roads, gas stations) have become a growth dead-end in dense urban areas.
As a transportation cyclist for over a decade, I never liked the disruptive activities some cycling activists do. I'm not convinced that they're effective at anything other than angering drivers.
Somewhat off-topic, but tangentially related: I feel like it is similar to all other kinds of disruptive protesters blocking the roads for people who are just trying to get to/from work
No matter the cause, blocking someone’s commute and making them waste time is not really going to convince them to be on your side, unless they were already on it. So you are essentially alienating the people in the middle and in the opposition to your cause, while not adding anything extra to those already on your side (+the possibility of some of those people defecting to the opposition, after being inconvenienced enough).
Exactly. I'm not opposed to demanding things. I just don't see particularly disruptive protests as effective at realizing those demands. As you point out, these protests might even be counterproductive.
If all they're doing is blocking the road as is the case in the photo I was responding to, that's not likely to help. That's screaming into the ether. It might make them feel better but it's not likely to solve the root cause of their problems.
I think a lot of activism is more about making the activists feel better than actually changing the world.
I'm prepared to accept that experienced activists probably understand what's effective better than I do, but I've never understood how this actually works in the case of doing very annoying stuff like blocking streets.
sure, it gets people's attention, but if they don't already care, why would you expect their solution to be "right this injustice" rather than "get the police to clear these people out of my way"?
Sure, they are welcome to ask for things non-nicely, but not in ways that majorly inconveniences people who are not related whatsoever to the issue they are protesting.
You are trying to protest corruption of your local city council by gathering outside of the building and yelling loudly? I will support you, maybe even join you, if I feel strongly enough about the issue. You protest the same thing by blocking off random highway ramps to any traffic (which could potentially affect emergency services), inconveniencing random people who have nothing to do with the issue? Yeah, you lost my sympathy and support, and very likely gave some ammo to those trying to derail your cause and those on the fence.
It's true for pretty much anything. You will never get any rights/freedoms if you don't demand. No freedom/right has ever been granted by the grace of the people in power.
I've seen it first hand in LGBT rights over the last 20 years. Angering a small part of the population exposed their alien nature to the majority, so the majority of people pick the "nicer side".
Not angering drivers hasn't worked at all, bike infrastructure has become worse over time. On the other hand, angering drivers did work in Netherlands.
To be clear, I'm not opposed to angering drivers period, just certain activities which accomplish nothing other than angering drivers. For example, I will often briefly take the lane if it is the safest option for me or legally required (e.g., making a turn). Yes, many drivers hate this but the benefits seem clear to me, and their anger really is misplaced here.
I don't know much about the history of cycling in the Netherlands. Where can I read about how angering drivers helped there?
But that's the point — just because a tactic worked in some societies, does not mean it will work in all of them.
In the Netherlands these disruptions effected policy change. In the US disruptive protests result in police brutality, protestors getting run over, and then public support for policies restricting disruptive protests.
When policies get implemented in the US, it's through corruption — including policies we'd agree are good, like bike-friendly policies being pushed through municipal governments by major corporations who want them for their employees, so they get implemented where it benefits them and not where it benefits marginalized communities who don't work for them.
As long as there's enough money pumped into a policy, no amount of disruption will affect it in the US. Disruptive actions _that don't target who's funding the policies_ won't accomplish anything here, no matter how effective they were there.
So that's why people say "disrupting commutes won't work" here. The people commuting aren't funding these policies; they could all be voters and change out the entire city government and the same money will just pump through different people, and policies won't change, and the next time a disruptive protest happens the public turns against them because what did it accomplish last time?
Meanwhile, the people who do fund policy are flying over them or riding past them in private or restricted lanes that they pushed through municipal government, looking over at the protests, maybe even cheering them on.
There are countless cases where people have annoyed a group of people to sway the majority. (Do you think that LGBT got it's freedoms by not annoying anyone?)
Just like public debates between politicians, these protests don't have to get the people getting annoyed on the side of the protesters. It's about getting attention and convincing others.
If I stand and block the road for an ICE worker getting to the parking lot and he tries to drive over me - I'm getting more sympathy and exposure for annoying one ICE employee.
I think saying it hasn't worked is misleading. It has worked overall, it just hasn't worked for your preference. Most people prefer driving in the US. That's the preference of the constituency and it must be respected to some extent. Disrupting society because you didn't get your way doesn't seem compatible with accommodating a diversity of perspectives and the Democratic process.
Put another way, how would you feel if car drivers rebel and park their cars across all the bike lanes?
At some point the majority was in favor of slavery and against women's suffrage. I don't think that's a very good argument. The majority is often wrong, especially if the social system or the infrastructure around them is wrong.
Btw, car drivers already park their cars across all the bike lanes, there is no need for a hypothetical.
> At some point the majority was in favor of slavery and against women's suffrage. I don't think that's a very good argument. The majority is often wrong, especially if the social system or the infrastructure around them is wrong.
So change opinion based on legal protest and organization. Blocking infrastructure that others rely on is militancy. And let's get real - this is cycling we're talking about, not slavery. To compare the two is to downplay what slavery actually entails (brutal violence, theft of civil liberties).
> Btw, car drivers already park their cars across all the bike lanes, there is no need for a hypothetical.
A very narrow minority does this, and usually it is out of ignorance, not malice.
> Blocking infrastructure that others rely on is militancy
If protesters blocked all the routes - yes. But it's a case of causing inconvenience. Causing inconvenience is militancy only in a very broad definition of militancy.
But it's a very typical thing to see - when you're in a privileged position and all convenience is targeted at you, loss of that convenience is often perceived as oppression.(Have you heard how evangelicals in US moan about being the actual oppressed people?)
>A very narrow minority does this, and usually it is out of ignorance, not malice.
Blocking some routes is the same as blocking all the routes in many cities, since road space is often near capacity. Therefore physically preventing someone from going home is militancy. Such actions cause multi-hour gridlocks. It prevents busy people from getting home to their families. It prevents emergency vehicles from making it to those in dire need. In major cities, such disruptive actions are stealing tens of thousands of hours from people in aggregate. That is not just an inconvenience. You are casually tossing around the word privilege but the real privilege is thinking that your desire for cycling infrastructure is more important than the needs of a much larger number of people that are harmed.
> Have you heard how evangelicals in US moan about being the actual oppressed people?
I am not religious but there are many ways in which they are correct to make that claim as well.
> Knowingly breaking rules is malice.
Sounds like you agree that protesters blocking infrastructure is malice.
> A very narrow minority does this, and usually it is out of ignorance, not malice.
Some of the worst offenders, delivery truck drivers, tend to know that parking in the bike lane is illegal. They tend to not care about cyclists, which is different from ignorance or malice.
Nothing will get done until a critical mass (see what I did there?) of the population realizes that something needs to be done. That won't happen until people perceive that they are personally inconvenienced often enough.
Do you advocate against funding for safe and effective cycling infrastructure? Okay then. I'm in the infrastructure you've provided me, and you get to go my pace.
neither protest nor anti-protest; someone once told me, if the drivers of the cars -- have experienced being a cyclist -- then they will treat you with some deference; if the drivers of the cars -- have not experienced being a cyclist -- then they find it easier to dismiss, endanger and rage against you. Decades of urban cycling in the USA have shown all angles of this.
People who can afford cars are going to continue driving them. Given the option between bicycling and driving, someone who can afford a car or already has one will likely opt to drive if public transport becomes impractical because of reduced capacity, mask wearing, etc. The poor are left to either ride "filthy" buses and trains, ride a bike, or walk.
> People who can afford cars are going to continue driving them.
Right now businesses and residential units are required by law in most cities to provide parking, take that away and the cost of owning a car goes up quite fast. If you have to pay $500/ month to park your car, it won't just be the poor who live the car-free lifestyle, lots of people with opt out of that.
In the Netherlands, almost everyone rides a bike (rich/ poor) because it's the best way to get around cities. In the US, nobody rides bikes because the infrastructure is designed for cars. In the UK and Paris (where this article is focused), they are somewhere in-between and trying to get closer to where the Netherlands is.
In the Netherlands, most people who don’t live in a major city center (and many who do) still own a car. Us riding bikes isn’t an either/or thing, people do both.
With respect to COVID-19 transmission, it seems to me like anything that takes some potential carriers off public transportation improves the situation for the remaining passengers, whether that's privately owned cars, taxis, ride-sharing, cycling, or others deciding to walk.
One point people overlook is that cars are an existing item that many people already posess. A fast change to biking can put a high demand on their production, which is also based on steel or, even worse, carbon fiber. And then in 6 months many people are going to trash or forget about the bike, essentially just causing a temporary production spike with lasting effects on the environment.
I think more accent should be put on NMF bikes, Natural Material Frame, like those made of bamboo [0] or wood. These materials absorb CO2 from the air to grow, unlike steel or carbon which produces it.
1 A lot of us cant or prefer not to live in the heart of the city
2 Most offices are not built with showers and secure bike parking - for longer distance commuters last time I worked in central London I wanted to use a Brompton but boss said no I cat store it in the office so that was that.
It's kind of silly to protest the feasibility of cycling because it requires a certain kind of infrastructure given the truly enormous costs we've endured to create -- and recreate in the case of cities that predate the automobile -- cities that accomodate the automobile. That all looks baked-in and natural to you, because it's always been that way, but make no mistake, it's the largest engineering project ever undertaken by mankind.
The problem is these materials are typically composite materials that have not just the 'raw' carbon fiber bits, but also various resins and other binding materials. We actually have the same problem of not being able to recycle fiberglass already. The early wind turbines which are now at end of life are actually just being buried (landfilled) rather than recycled (https://www.bbc.com/news/business-51325101). There is potential to overcome this (https://www.compositesworld.com/blog/post/perhaps-were-getti...), and techniques for recycling other composite materials like SMC (https://www.proboat.com/2016/09/recycling-dead-boats/) could be adopted perhaps. But in the end it'll come down to the economics of it, and we really need to move to a world where repair and reuse is easier, rather than expecting a black box recycling process to solve our problems.
Practically - we don't need to recycle long lasting products immediately(2+ decades).
Take a GF boat or a CF* bike - both of them have a lifetime of at least 10 years. Storing them in a concentrated manner, will take a very small amount of space(we overestimate our landfill needs) and would make recycling or dismantling much cheaper when the tech comes in.
(*CF bikes last longer than alu alloy frames, btw)
This article doesn’t really say much. It makes a vague claim that cycling promotes social distancing, but so do cars. In fact, enclosed cars are much more distant than bikes trailing each other at ten feet lengths. As far as I can tell the author is asking for driving infrastructure to be repurposed under the guise of the pandemic, but it just comes off as an opportunist grab while everyone who might care about driving convenience is distracted by the virus.
Most cities with a subway or significant bus infrastructure have very high population densities. "Everybody drive" is not going to work in places where driving isn't already the default mode of transit.
Plus, few people can afford it. Have you looked at the price of a parking spot in e.g., major parts of Boston or NYC? 5-6 figures to buy, or hundreds/mo to rent, and that's with working mass transit. I guess that those prices would at least triple if everyone started driving. Lots of wealthy people take the subway and commuter rail.
I don't think cycling is the solution. But cars are definitely a non-starter.
The problem is that cars don't scale as a transportation solution. They take up too much space. Normally public transport fills the gap, but it's hard to keep your distance in a crowded train.
Bikes on the other hand scale much better. You can easily double a road's throughput with bikes. Now take away lanes used for parking and even more bikes fit on the road.
Removing a lot of street parking would increase the throughput of a street 12-36 times easily.(a regular NYC one way street will have one lane for traffic and two lanes "for parking")
Ubiquitous car ownership is physically impossible in urban areas— usually at least 10 people live in a building one or two parking spaces wide, and even if parking were solved, urban roadways cannot handle all those cars driving at once — and many people are unable to drive for health, financial, or legal reasons.
Bicycles (or other small wheeled vehicles) are much more accessible to more people now that electric power is practical in addition to human power.
In many urban areas, there is a lack of _any_ safe bike routes from point a to point b, which is not the experience of the motorist.
The places discussed in the article rely far more on public transportation than cars for day to day transportation. It is also impossible for either Paris and London to transition from public transportation to cars because you can't widen city streets.
Public transport doesn't allow for social distancing and there's no space for additional cars.
For urban society overall, more people cycling results in decreased travel times due to less traffic congestion, a healthier population (both from the exercise and distance) and reduced air pollution. Plus there are great economic benefits. Not everyone needs to cycle for everyone to benefit.