Cycling is not only good for the environment, but for cities in general.
During the last confinement, when car traffic completely stopped, I realised that cars are the single biggest reason why living in the city can be unpleasant. People may not realise it consciously, but when they move out of the city, what they are looking for is a place with not as much cars driving around.
Cars destroy cities by making a vicious circle of making it unpleasant to live there, therefore enticing people to move to the suburbs and commute by car, which make the problem worse.
Setting up biking infrastructure fixes this, because it reduces the room for cars used by commuters, while creating room for bicycles used by people living in the city.
With less cars, you can make the city center where people work liveable. You can have offices mixed with housing and have people live close to their work place, further diminishing the need for cars.
If you think that your city can't possibly be a good place to cycle because weather / hills / etc, you are probably mistaken. Electric bikes and the appropriate clothes make biking pleasant in most places. IF there are not too many cars and infrastructure for the bicycle of course, which is probably the thing you don't have
This is something I've been musing over recently as well: cars really are responsible for much of what is unpleasant about city life. When people gripe about cities, their complaints are often around:
* Noise. From where I sit, the only noises that filter into my apartment from the city are occasional laughs or shouted conversations from bargoers, loud trucks grinding gears on the avenues, or honking of desperate commuters
* Lack of space. Basically every city block in the USA is surrounded on all sides by areas where, if you walk into them without your wits about you, you could be smashed by a multi ton vehicle. When streets are closed for street fairs or the like, the "lack of space" complaint often drifts away - the whole city is your space again.
* Danger. See above. There is of course also higher crime in cities, which I cannot find a way to pin on cars.
* Grime/poor air quality - pretty self explanatory
I'm hopeful that, with the pandemic increasing interest in the outdoors and making cities have to work harder for their tax base (because WFH means they can no longer rest on the "you have to live here to get a job" that they've been reliant on), city governments and voters will realize how much can be gained by dialing back on car investment.
Regarding crime. A huge factor in that is "eyes on the street." Car friendly streets massively reduce the eyes on the street for two reasons:
1. Cars travel fast and they obstruct the occupants' view in all kinds of directions. So the cars themselves don't really count as eyes on the street in the same way a pedestrian would.
2. Streets designed for cars are less pleasant to be in as a pedestrian or cyclist, so fewer people will be out on the street. You only walk on those streets if you absolutely have to be there.
Look at some YouTube videos of "open streets" in New York during covid.
It still boggles my mind that, with a 15% car ownership rate, how NYC not only still allows cars, but subsidizes them with absolutely free parking on city streets. The real estate price for a single parking spot in NYC must be astronomical.
If you go to any community board meeting, you'll hear old people rant for hours about how their cars are essential and bike are destroying the city. And for some reason, this is who politicians listen to.
Community board meetings in general are a problem that nobody has found a great solution to. Oddly enough, the pandemic has caused most of these to go virtual, which has nerfed a lot of the power of the highly motivated old people with too much time on their hands.
Honestly the easy solution is to ignore the CBs. Surveys show that the majority of people want more bus and bike lanes, so just build them and skip all of the "community input" aka "giving veto power to a small minority".
Wow, the blatant hypocrisy of this comment. Imagine some cause or topic in your local government that you're passionate about and someone saying, "hey, let's just do what we want because f*ck what the other side thinks".
If you don't like that a group of people have more perceived power than you in your local government then find a way to fix it ethically. Don't bypass local democracy just because you think it's easier to take a shortcut.
Hmm, I think the problem the person you replied to sees is that sentiment community board meetings are not as good at measuring what the "average citizen" wants as opinion polls. Why do CB meetings have the moral high ground?
What are the main problems you think of local government? I'm curious what the perception is in Europe. American cities aren't the pretty, walkable, public-transit oriented cities you have in Europe but that doesn't mean they're failures either.
A big problem is that local governments place a lot of weight on "community input," but the people giving input don't accurately reflect the community. People who show up to meetings tend to be strongly opposed to change and fit into demographic groups that have a lot of free time, i.e. older, richer, and whiter. This causes a lot of positive changes to be either outright vetoed or delayed indefinitely at the whim of NIMBYs.
This is kinda how democracy works, in all it's terrible glory. Apply your same logic to national elections, and you are essentially saying that the votes of some people should be worth less, and others more.
I don't disagree with you that this happens, but I'm not sure that removing the local democratic infrastructure is the right way to solve this problem.
So, the US actually has real local government, with elections at very low levels, relative to what is more centralised and formalised system in the UK & Ireland.
I'm not a big fan of the practices of a lot of these low-level elected groups (seriously, fuck you Palo Alto representatives), but the principle behind the existence of all the local town and county governance systems (and particularly the heavy reliance on elected people) are things that seem like really good ideas to me, and that I think should exist in more places (maybe they do, I'm sure the commenters here will alert me to such places ;) ).
I found this staggering though it is accurate. It's less surprising (though no less accurate) when you consider how the numbers skew by borough:
"Ownership is lowest in Manhattan, where only 22 percent of households own a car, while ownership is highest in Staten Island where cars are owned by 83 percent of all households. Queens (62 percent) is also above the city average, while the Bronx (40 percent) and Brooklyn (44 percent) look more like the city as a whole."
I've seen various threads promoting bicycles - and my life style is SO different that I can't conceive of using bikes and getting rid of my cars.
I drive 6 miles to church. My kids are in the minivan and can't ride bikes yet. We also have stuff with us: diapers, water cups, snacks.
My work (before WFH), is about 7 miles away. I could bike - but I take kids to day care, and they can't bike. Also, I can't wear "athletic" clothes to work, and I would still want to shower.
My wife goes shopping at garage sales where she frequently drives 25 miles. She often gets large items (ceiling fan, book shelf, art). She can't do this with a bike.
Grocery shopping could be bikeable. Get a wagon behind the bike, only shop when a spouse can watch the kids.
Spending time with friends isn't bike friendly. A 5 mile bike ride, with kids in toe, and all of their stuff won't happen.
Me, at the bar, could be on a bike.
As I look at the list, my kids REALLY stop me from switching to a bike. In addition, I still need a car occasionally (trips, fun restaurants, etc) - so I still NEED a car, I just might not use it as often.
Assuming you have a partner, each adult has two kids on their bike (one front seat, one back seat). At 6 the eldest can even cycle by themselves if you push. I'm Dutch and this is completely normal here.
Edit: with kids 6 miles is a stretch, not that it's super hard, but you'll often be tempted to just take the car. If you upgrade to an e-bike that temptation will be a LOT less.
I have a two part response to this. The first is that the goal of bike infrastructure is not to eliminate the car, but instead to give people the option of riding bikes when suitable. Some tasks (transporting large objects) will always be right for cars. But even getting families to shift to 1 car instead of two or three would be a huge resource saver.
But secondly, I would suggest a paradigm shift in how you think about things. You are probably right that for you, in the environment you live in, a bike is not the right choice. But an urban/suburban environment is not a fixed constant, so the question is why is your environment reliant on cars?
To respond to a few of your examples with this framework in mind.
- If your church and your work were closer, biking might make more sense. Suburban sprawl and zoning laws push things (housing, work, and amenities) apart that could be closer together.
- Your kids sound pretty young, but for when they get older if you lived in a place where it was safe to cycle alone, and their friends were closer to you, they could cycle to friends more easily. Unfortunately, with how things are, I wouldn't blame you for keeping them off the roads, as many U.S. roads are unsafe, especially for young kids.
- Again, it's not relevant until your kids are older, but the majority of Dutch children walk or bike to school, rather than being driven. From what I've seen, even elementary school aged kids will travel to school alone.
Now it could be that you just prefer the countryside, in which case of course bike infrastructure is irrelevant to you. But many people are more motivated only by a desire to avoid big cities in which case building out the "missing middle" between sparsely populated car dependent suburbia/countryside and dense urban centers could be the solution.
Well, of course there are. My mom used a bike for her first borne. She was poor. She had a lady in her apartment complex watch her daughter during work. She didn't really go out.
As soon as she could afford a car, she got one and her life expanded.
What do other families look like who have multiple kids and no car?
s/car/bike/ is obviously not the solution.
Not organizing your life around cars is.
This has more impact on one's life than just replacing a car with a bike, as a comparison between, say, a typical north american household lifestyle and a typical dutch household one readily shows.
I cycle and I agree it's a superior form of transport.
> cars are the single biggest reason why living in the city can be unpleasant
I'm pretty sure rent / house prices are the #1 negative people cite about cities. A relatively new phenomenon. In cities where prices have not risen as much, like Detroit, I doubt people say cars are unpleasant.
Ironically cars are probably depressing prices in the city significantly. For most normal people, a car lets them not overpay for land, by letting them live somewhere far away.
The pandemic changed that calculus. Normals don't work from home though. Normals were just sustained by PPP, until that ran out and they get (or already are) fired.
> infrastructure
The people living in cities with developing infrastructure change faster than the infrastructure gets built.
Let's say we're talking about a place where land values are rising despite no infrastructure changes. There, the people who want to leave rent or sell to the people who want to come, who already find the lack of infrastructure agreeable.
The people who are left over can't afford the higher rents.
So then, what you discover is situations like the Sommerville Green Line Extension. Many residents opposed it. "Gentrification" is a word used to describe the antagonist, for these people.
Why opposition to infrastructure? It raises rents.
It's a little reductionist, to make everything about dollar and cents. We're paying for the environmental and psychic impact of having cars everywhere with too few dollars.
But good luck advocating for infrastructure changes on a timeline faster than the makeup of the residents of the town.
Cars and parking lots take up a loooot of space in many American cities though. Space that could have been used to build housing or businesses or mixed-use instead.
> Ironically cars are probably depressing prices in the city significantly. For most normal people, a car lets them not overpay for land, by letting them live somewhere far away.
A good public transport infrastructure is much more efficient at transporting people in and out of cities.
I live around 20 miles from my the city center and public transport is faster at getting me there than a car and you don't need to search for a parking spot.
> We also found that the average person who shifted from car to bike for just one day a week cut their carbon footprint by 3.2kg of CO₂ – equivalent to the emissions from driving a car for 10km, eating a serving of lamb or chocolate, or sending 800 emails.
This is interesting, but might it be possible that at least some those cyclists ate 1 more serving of lamb (or other high-carbon meat) or chocolate than they normally would have because they biked? Or did they eat 1 more serving of mostly plant-based food?
Did they do an analysis of the amount of food consumed by the cyclist on the day they biked vs. the days they did not bike?
Anecdotally, I eat 3 meals, about the same as anyone, but I’m probably less prone to diseases of affluence than I would be if I drove everywhere. I’d wager that most Americans have a couple hundred extra daily calories in their budget that could safely be spent commuting by bike.
I agree: this seems like a very dumb statistic; I have nothing tangible to back this up (except the fact that I can arbitrarily fire off emails at 0 cost), but I have a sneaking suspicion that sending 800 emails has an essentially negligible carbon cost.
Are you suggesting that a cyclist would cancel out CO2 gains because they would need a whole extra meal of lamb per day? Apart from not being true this ignores all other externalities of car ownership and usage in cities.
Data please. I'm posing a question and looking for data, not speculative conclusions.
I'm a cyclist myself and I can definitely say that after biking 10km I end up wanting to eat more protein (and chocolate) than I usually do. Maybe not an extra full meal unless I do a century, but definitely a different meal than if I hadn't biked at all. Also, after exercise I often end up tired and buying food instead of making it myself. All I can say is that my eating habits do differ on days that I bike. I eat plant-based protein but there are lots of people who don't. That's why I posed the question.
Completely agree. A few years ago there was a couple of weeks of bad weather which meant nobody was driving around where I lived and it was wonderful. Then after it all melted it went straight back to normal: noisy, loud, dangerous and angry.
> People may not realise it consciously, but when they move out of the city, what they are looking for is a place with not as much cars driving around.
Nope, for me it's definitely getting away from the wrong sorts of people.
I look at European city centers where cars often times get thrown out now and: they don’t agree. Profits were way down even before COVID. Even if you offer people the option to not use their car, they will avoid it. No form of transportation will ever be as pleasant to use. Cars don’t make cities unpleasant, cities themselves are unpleasant. No matter if cars exist or not.
Bikes, pedestrians and cars must be properly separated to make safe cities. Doing that would maybe convince a few people to take a bike.
Or we can go back as you described. Destroy the cities we have built and build small walkable towns. That would mean that you have no say in what your job will be, but your parents do. That’s over 100 year old concept that worked well back then and would probably work well if you built it up again. But with modern demands of “personal freedom” it’s impossible to build.
In my anecdotal experience from the UK, high streets have been destroyed because they have failed to keep up with what people want.
Decades back, we started copying the US and building lots of out of town shopping centres surrounded by acres of car parking. Town centres started to compete by making it easier to drive in urban areas - but in doing so, they made the environment much less pleasant (loud, dirty, unsafe etc.)
Over time, retail became homogenised to the degree that every high street and shopping centre had exactly the same set of shops. This worked until internet shopping arrived. Why go outside to shop when it doesn't offer anything that you can't get on the internet - cheaper, and with a larger selection?
Now the only thriving high streets are those that offer something more than the internet can. Unique independent shops; space for people to meet friends and relax; street cafes; art/culture and so on. Removing cars in favour of walking and cycling is one of simplest and most powerful tools available to achieve this.
The only evidence i have is many cities around where i live tried to make driving to the city centers horrible, made parking expensive and not a long time afterwards the shops were almost regularly switching owners and contents. There are a lot of places empty now. Amazon likes the effort though.
The cities were there for thousands of years before the cars. In fact part of them were literally destroyed to make room for cars. It is from that point that the upper middle class left the city to live in the suburbs. Before they lived in the center. Now they are too many living in the suburbs, the traffic is hell, and everybody loses. Neighbourhoods where they removed the cars are a big success, where have you seen it happen differently ?
And I don't understand your issue with the jobs. Most jobs are in the cities, which is why people commute there. Why not live in the city then ?
I want to see it more often. Go ahead, build cities where every motorized vehicle is illegal. I am all for it. If it is so superior, then people will move to it.
I’ve only lived in Nordic capitals but as a pedestrian and citybike cyclist, less cars makes for an endlessly more enjoyable city center. Over here major shopping malls are already situated close to highways+public transit hubs so the city center is already home to more brick and mortar stores. I’d be interested to hear which cities have hated no-car zones.
In my somehow big city (1m habitants in France), they wanted to create a train line between my city and another one. As every infrastructure projects in France, the project eventually had years of delay (maybe 3 or 4).
So at the due date, no train line. But the trains (about 20 of them, IIRC) were acquired and stored somewhere.
So we had those trains without rails. Somehow, local politics decided to let them roll temporary on an existing national train line.
Nobody anticipated it, but all cities with a train station on this old line started to gain a ton of attractiveness. The real estate prices and population on those cities raised by 30-40% in 2 to 3 years.
People were just happy to live countryside while being able to move to work without cars. And that’s totally reasonable since with this high numbers of trains, this line is now able to have a 20min frequency.
Eventually, local politics decided to let the trains indefinitely and just buy 20 more for the new line. Which of course, added delay :D
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I have a great car. But I think any mean of transport is really more pleasant than car. The only problem is they are not always all as optimal as a car. But it’s an infrastructure problem. Public transports without rails is as optimal as your car without a road.
Busses don't have to have a mindset issue. They don't where I live. You'll just take the bus if it's faster than the tram or goes closer to where you want to be, that's the only consideration involved.
Maybe you should get out of the Ruhrgebiet more often. Pretty much all German cities that implemented Fußgängerzonen (pedestrian only malls) I can think about have thrived, big and small ones. I don't know what time frame you are talking about, but most cities in the Ruhrgebiet have been on a downward spiral since the 80s, so we might be looking more at a case of correlation not causation.
During the last confinement, when car traffic completely stopped, I realised that cars are the single biggest reason why living in the city can be unpleasant. People may not realise it consciously, but when they move out of the city, what they are looking for is a place with not as much cars driving around.
Cars destroy cities by making a vicious circle of making it unpleasant to live there, therefore enticing people to move to the suburbs and commute by car, which make the problem worse.
Setting up biking infrastructure fixes this, because it reduces the room for cars used by commuters, while creating room for bicycles used by people living in the city.
With less cars, you can make the city center where people work liveable. You can have offices mixed with housing and have people live close to their work place, further diminishing the need for cars.
If you think that your city can't possibly be a good place to cycle because weather / hills / etc, you are probably mistaken. Electric bikes and the appropriate clothes make biking pleasant in most places. IF there are not too many cars and infrastructure for the bicycle of course, which is probably the thing you don't have