> - might be impossible depending on work or children;
The newer style of cargo bikes can for many families replace a car. Have two kids seated in the trunk of the bike and drop them off at kindergarten, then continue biking to work and pick them up on the way home.
Those are a bit on the pricier side, though. Still cheap compared to a car, but people often look at them as something "extravagant" or "in addition" to a car. But they can be a replacement for most car use, and then just rent a car for other more seldom occasions.
And to avoid the initial big purchase, not even sure if it's something for you, there's a startup where I live ( https://whee.no/ ) where you also can rent the bike on a monthly basis. Really recommended to see if it suits your lifestyle.
Lastly, I also think this kind of easier movement will change how people live. You can no longer expect to move out of the city and still get a short way to everything by using your car, making life miserable for everyone else (noise, danger, pollution, too much asphalt). So I think we will see a shift in where people settle, where they will no longer base their lives around owning multiple cars.
In upfront transparency to avoid sounding like I have a superiority complex based on just how much I love my cargo bike, our family does still have a car.
Okay that being said… our cargo bike has replaced 90% of our “last mile” driving here in the city. We take the kids to school on it, we do grocery runs, we take it to the park, out to dinner, just about anywhere we can. In the first two years we’ve put at least 2k miles on it.
When we first bought it, I thought “okay when my wife rides the ebike with kids, I’ll just ride behind on my road bike.”
It took all but a week for us to go buy a second ebike because of how failed my idea was. The guy at the bike shop, same that we bought the cargo bike from, laughed and said that happened all the time.
While we have always been big into bikes, we’re on another level now. I always feel sorry for the poor suckers at the park who ask me how we like the bike who have to listen to me rave about it for 20 minutes when a “we love it” probably would have been enough.
Larry vs Harry Bullit rider here. my wife and I even rode it from London to Berlin (cheated with the ferry and train a lot) when we moved in late December. We have 2.5 kids. No car. I use car sharing when I need a van or wanna drive to the airport. Life is good
I might be safer than you think. I used to refuse to ride in a city because it seemed dangerous and many people I knew who rode in traffic had been in accidents with cars. But when I ended up on a bike trying it out, I found I could almost always (~95% of the time) avoid traffic, even without bike lanes.
Side streets and alleys are great - too slow for cars, but you're probably cycling at 10-15 mph, which is fine. Parks can be great - a shortcut with no cars and beautiful scenery, while the cars have to go the long way. Campuses, plazas, etc. etc. Even sidewalks when empty or nearly-empty can work to bypass traffic or go the 'wrong' way.[0]
[0] Second to riding, cyclists love to lecture others on how to ride. And a favorite outlet for their obsession is sidewalks. They don't discuss or consider the reasons or merits, they just have found an easy outlet for self-righteousness and repeat the same phrases over and over. Just remember that sidewalks are for pedestrians first; you are a visitor. Give them the right of way always, let them know when you're behind them (e.g., 'on your left!'), and give them plenty of space (trying walking when a bike buzzes past in either direction - from behind, you can't even hear it coming). Defer to their safety, real and perceived. It's easy. No problems at all IME, except self-righteous people over-excited at an opportunity to lecture someone.
If you're particularly envious you may want to consider asking how those who can't drive make do in your location. Life's about making choices and seeking different perspectives might help change and/or inform your priors.
Having experienced widely varying amounts of power output with the local bikeshare bikes, their varied condition and assisted vs non-, I don't have any illusions here - it's just a different experience to be able to spin it once and feel the bike boost you up to max effort. Even the heavily built bikeshare frames can easily outclass a road bike, if there's no mechanical issue. Although there often is - the chains, gears and tires really take a beating.
The e-bikes here are generally quicker off the mark at lights but that lasts like ten seconds before a decent road bike or legs zips by them because they’re limited to 15kmph
I tried my friend's cargo e-bike for 20 minutes in Edinburgh - I didn't even notice that lag. As i turned up the dial for the motor, it just felt like I was turning down the physics! Everything just got magically easier.
> So I think we will see a shift in where people settle, where they will no longer base their lives around owning multiple cars.
Magical thinking will not make it so. My partner and I moved further away from the city where she works because we wanted to move in together and we can't afford rent or property where either of us used to live.
I work from home so most the time my car sits charging the driveway. However, all of my doctors are at least a half-hour drive away, my dental clinic is a 50 minute drive, my hobbies are anywhere from 30 minutes to an hour half drive away. The rest of my family is an hour away so no amount of moving will change these things without making the rest of them worse.
But bicycles will work fine for 10% of my travel except for there being no infrastructure supporting bicycling.
Sure but like.........people always say that (for example) in London you can't live closer to work because houses/flats are too expensive. Ok, I mean that's true, but how are you going to solve that? It's a gigantic city which is already full to the brim, with literally 1000+ years of building on top of every single square inch of land available. You would probably have to demolish large areas of London and replace them with high-density housing to match demand - but obviously that's never going to happen. What other options are there? Maybe the only inevitable conclusion is that not everyone can live in London(or any other major city). You can't fix expensive housing in them by just wishing they were cheaper, or with regulations(or I'd love to hear how any regulations would help, beyond banning things like AirBnb).
The population is only 20% of the problem -> look at Berlin, it's population has grown 0.3% over the past 30 years, but the house prices have gone stratospheric just like they have in every other major city.
40% of the housing problem is whatever the fuck is going on in the banking system -> it enables us to commit all of our life savings for the rest of our productive lives to pay for a roof over our heads. It's like a hostage situation with the highest bidder.
> You would probably have to demolish large areas of London and replace them with high-density housing to match demand - but obviously that's never going to happen.
So true, my friend is not even allowed to raise your roof by 20 cm to create an extra room in the loft.
The planning system here is so crazy, I am confident it's like 40% of the problem.
Pointing to low growth and high prices tell us that isn't simple supply and demand pushing the prices up. Berlin even more as large swaths of the city are still underdeveloped after losing 2 million inhabitants since the 1940s-1950s.
How can Berlin, a city with ample free space and free buildings still see a massive increase in housing prices if it was a simple issue of supply and demand? There's undoubtedly something else much fishier going on.
Here in most places it is because supply is suppressed by government policy and the planning and approval process. Want to add a room to your house? That could be 10's of thousands in planning fees if it is even allowed and it still could be denied. Want to turn your laundromat into an apartment complex? Denied: the proposal will cast shadows across a lot where the city is thinking of building a playground for a local school[0].
Overall its very much in the interests of those who own property to keep more from being built and they naturally act for those interests.
I would also not trust that number of 0.3% population growth. Were did you get it from? There are a lot of refugees from Ukraine, for example, which may have given prices another boost in the last year.
Lol Tokyo and many other mega cities in the world are great examples how none of those things are actual barriers. London's issue is political will, because too many wealthy and politically connected people currently profit from the current status quo at the expense of the exploited supermajority.
Just saying "look at Tokyo" doesn't mean anything.
How exactly would you change London to be more like tokyo? As the simplest question - which areas of London would you demolish to make room for high density Japanese housing? Alternatively, if you're going to build wide, how would you connect those areas with the centre, if building new metro lines is pretty much impossible in London for historical reasons?
"London's issue is political will, because too many wealthy and politically connected people currently profit from the current status quo"
That just sounds like saying "it's the elites fault, dude". Like, sure, but please propose any actual solution.
You adopt the housing law of japan, which is set at the federal level and not the local level, where zoning is set in large regional areas, where if something is zoned for a 'high nuisance level' you can build anything of a lower nuisance level inside of those zones.
You don't need your neighbors permission to build, everything is basically by-right where you follow well a well defined housing code vs. needing special approval for every little thing. Just get out of the way and stop needing a license to do anything and you will see how quickly the market will sort it out in London. The people of London will decide THEMSELVES, what to demolish or not once given permission to do so, no central planning needed.
But it doesn't because the current system benefits those elites. Any time large amounts of special permission is needed to get anything done, creates the space for corruption in which a bureaucrat can benefit through bribes of one form or another.
What your basically acting like is acting like you can't exercise and eat right to lose weight while you have no mental issues, financial issues, health issues, disability or age issues blocking you from doing the basic things. London has the money, ability and ground where all this is possible. It's a form of learned helplessness in front of a system that has given you no way out.
Mate there is no other group campaigning harder to relax building requirements in London than the elites. There are so many rich people complaining they can't add another conservatory or floor or dig up a basement in their Victorian mansion in London. If you made it easier to build you'd basically hand a giant fat present to the hands of the elite. The idea that the elites keep the status quo by making bureocracy complex in London is almost naive.
This seems pretty silly to me. 30 story blocks of flats tend to be prevented by the planning permission system (potentially before they are proposed as developers may know what won’t succeed) which is roughly a combination of local government and local residents. There are other things which may make building difficult – historical preservation (eg listed buildings) applies to much of the more central parts of the city, construction can be expensive, etc.
Perhaps the real London elites are the clay underneath the city which makes tall buildings more expensive.
I'm sure everybody would like the right to build on their property as they see fit. That doesn't mean that they would want to grant their neighbors the same privilege.
Have you heard the expression cutting off your nose to spite your face? That's exactly what you're doing here.
Yeah, maybe some elites will get to renovate their houses. Who cares. Large apartment buildings would get built with huge numbers of units to help drive down rent.
I think you’re not accounting for the density of Tokyo dropping. By the 4th millennium there will only be five Japanese people left, two of them catgirls.
Fairly cheap. A guy working in a convenience store can afford his own apartment.
The problem is that housing in Tokyo is very small, and most Westerners (particular Americans) simply can't fathom living in it, and it would never be allowed to be built there. Westerners need to change their expectations.
> "You would probably have to demolish large areas of London and replace them with high-density housing to match demand - but obviously that's never going to happen."
Nah. There's still many areas of fairly low-quality, low-density housing near the centre of London. In fact, just about everywhere you look there are residential towers under construction: there must be hundreds of them going up right now! There is still plenty of scope to greatly improve the quality and efficiency of housing in London without sacrificing open, green spaces.
London has really good public transportation and, as this article mentions, lots of people in London do cycle to work (half of all the offices I’ve had in London has had an on-premises bicycle “shed”).
In fact I’ve met so many Londoners who never even bothered to learn to drive.
In my experience, it’s generally American cities that require a car rather than European cities. Generally speaking of course, you get good and bad city designs in all countries.
of course, which is why a staggering 1 million of people commute in and out of london every day. But again, I'm just asking how exactly can we address the high price of housing near workplaces in London specifically, if London is already full to the brim and new housing isn't happening not because of regulations or lack of political will - there's just no space to build any more.
I think the main drives are real estate investments and centralisation... Tokyo doesn't really have these issues in part due to cultural differences but also due to better regulations on urbanism. []
Depends on the city but generally what you’ve described is completely untrue. Usually European cities try to pedestrianise their centre as much as they can and have all sorts of public transport schemes from Park and Ride to regular underground and overground rail services.
I live miles out of from London and get the train in. Almost nobody I work with live in the city and none of them drive in. In fact you wouldnt want to drive in London.
This has been true for so many European cities, Cambridge, Chelmsford, York, Amsterdam, Paris, Berlin, etc. all are very accessible for non-car owners.
Anyone who claims you need a car to live in a European city is someone who hasn’t experienced many European cities ;)
The first three, so literally half that list, are relatively small cities. Certainly not “capital sized”.
I’ve noticed this trend you have of defining things in absolute terms despite the evidence being transparently not. Which I normally make an effort not to reply to your silly comments however on this occasion didn’t check who the commenter was before responding. Which is basically a longwinded way of saying I’m not going to continue on with this absurd exchange any further.
I live in the countryside now. I’m not oblivious to the benefits of driving. What I’m doing is providing counter arguments to the ridiculous absolutes you’re coming out with. Comments like “only” are simply bullshit.
But I suspect that’s intentional behaviour. You don’t want people to agree, you are actively seeking out an argument. Because if you wanted a sensible discussion you’d see that our two points were complimentary rather than contradictory.
I lived in the suburbs of a medium sized city. Everything was easily accessible by bike, but of course many people still preferred the convenience of a car. It took about 25 minutes from my apartment to the city center.
My wife grew up in the suburbs of an even smaller city. It took about 10 minutes to reach that city center by bike, but almost everybody drove because the road connecting the suburb to the city center feels very unsafe on a bike.
Two anecdotes, plenty of European cities aren't as fortunate, specially in southern countries.
Many cities are only city in name, and in practice more towns aspiring to be cities, specially in southern and eastern Europe.
Here is one anecdote, Portalegre might be a nice city, as Northen Alentejo capital in Portugal, yet those 20 km on average from the neighbouring villages aren't that nice to do on bycicle specially during Summertime with temperatures up to 45 degrees celsius. And if you're thinking about taking a bus, better save money for a taxi, unless you're willing to spend the whole day in the city, as there is only one bus into each direction connecting the neighbouring villages to the city.
How can they rent cars when they don’t have a driving license?
And no, they weren’t all capital sized cities.
I also don’t understand what vacationing has to do with anything when I was talking about backpackers, nomads and expats. Basically the polar opposite of people who vacation.
But this conversation is about people who don’t drive. Not people who do.
You’ve warped the discussion so far off it’s original topic that your entire premise here is now just one stupid straw man argument.
To get back on topic: nobody is disputing that there are people out there with driving licenses (well durrr!). It was to explain why some people (ie not all) are content without learning to drive.
It seems so bizarre that an adult would never learn to drive. Like you might not need to drive for daily city life but it really limits your options if you ever want to travel.
I agree. I know it's complete herecy, but I've done Europe-by-train and Europe-by-rental-car each many times, and I much prefer the latter. If you're talking about travel in America it's not even a question. You learn how to drive or you're going to be stuck in the same 10 mile redius for the rest of your life.
I'm one of the no-license London populace, and travel more frequently than most. I don't find that it has limited me at all. On the occasions when I absolutely need a car instead of the existing options, taxis are available.
That seems like a very limited perspective. I've been to many places in the world where taxis don't run. Being able to drive is a basic life skill, like knowing how to swim or cook a meal.
Many of the people I’ve met who cannot drive are actually some of the most traveled people I know. In fact spending short periods in lots of different countries makes it a whole lot harder to learn to drive.
I didn’t learn to drive until I was in my 30s and used to spend my 20s travelling the length and breadth of the U.K. and Europe. I even had a long distance relationship at the time too. A long distance relationship that worked because we are now married.
Sometimes I might have to plan a journey in advance (to figure out the route) but there were plenty of times I just went where the wind took me (proverbially speaking). And frankly even after learning to drive, smart phones weren’t invented yet and satnavs were luxuries, so you’d often still need to plan ahead even if you could drive.
So no, driving needn’t be an essential life skill for everyone. And that doesn’t mean they have a limited perspective either. On the contrary, if you cannot imagine life without driving then it is your perspective which is limited.
Learning to drive in some countries and for some individuals can take months, be hugely costly and still only result in a license that isn’t immediately transferable to other countries (eg you have to hold a license for x years before you can drive abroad and/or older than x years old).
Other countries might not even allow you to apply for a learners licence unless you have a specific visa.
So if you’re a young adult and travel a lot, it might not even be possible, let alone practical, to earn a license.
Which is precisely why I didn’t learn to drive until I was in my 30s and ready to start a family.
The what now? Please name a single country where you can't just enter and drive with an international driving permit straight away, I can't think of one off the top of my head. If you are going to live in a different country that's a whole different kettle of fish, but typically you can use your international permit for anywhere between 6 months - 3 years depending on the country. And the problem doesn't exist at all anywhere in the EU/EEA/UK, the licences can be used in any country without any time limit, or can be exchanged for the local equivalent without re-taking the exam.
You’re solving the wrong problem. The problem we are discussing is the difficulty of learning to drive when you’re travelling. If you already have a driving license then this entire discussion is moot because you don’t need to learn to drive if you can already drive. Pretty obvious stuff I’d have thought but a few on here seem surprised by this fact. Go figure.
"be hugely costly and still only result in a license that isn’t immediately transferable to other countries (eg you have to hold a license for x years before you can drive abroad and/or older than x years old)"
So I'm going to ask again, what kind of countries issue you with a licence that isn't immediately transferable to other countries? You can get an international driving permit literally the same day you pick up your regular licence, there is no time limitation on that - or if there is where you live, please educate me so I know better.
Maybe the rules had changed, but when I was considering learning to drive in the U.K., I couldn’t use that driving license in the EU unless I had been driving for more than 5 years (or something in that region) and was over 25 years old (again, something in that region).
So you couldn’t pass your driving test then immediately drive abroad.
Edit: I cannot find any detail on that so maybe this isn’t the case any longer. Learn something new everyday :)
What? Most countries support an International Driving Permit [1] which allows you to drive there on a tourist visa if you're licensed to drive in your home country.
I know. I already addressed the issues with that in my post. In short, your suggestion only works if someone has already had a valid driving license before travelling. Which plenty of people who travel lots (and I don’t mean holidays but backpacking for months/years on end or constantly moving from one country to another for work, moving on whenever they get bored) don’t have licenses.
Okay, so "short periods" that add up to significantly more than half the time? Since even if you spend every other week or every other month in another country that leaves you plenty of learning time if you want to.
That scenario adds up, it just wasn't what I thought when I saw "short periods".
“Travelling” in this context means people who spend months or years away from home. Or don’t even have a fixed place they call “home”. A bit like nomads, backpackers, etc.
Sure, some of them will drive. But I’ve also known plenty of people who cannot drive because they spend their time backpacking or who work a couple of years in one county then move to another.
But a couple of years is a huge amount of time. If you put in just 4 hours a week you'll be done in no time. Not knowing how to drive in that situation is because of not caring very much, not because of moving around. And the vast majority of what you learn stays relevant when you move.
> But a couple of years is a huge amount of time. If you put in just 4 hours a week you'll be done in no time.
Sure, if you put 4 hours a week into any activity you’ll soon get good at it. But the crux of the issue is whether that activity is seen as a priority or not.
> Not knowing how to drive in that situation is because of not caring very much, not because of moving around.
They didn’t care because they were moving around a lot.
And frankly it doesn’t really matter what the reason is. Regardless of whether it is a practical or preferential justification, the end result is the same: plenty of people manage just fine without learning to drive.
I find it weird that this concept is so alien to some people. But I guess that’s a good example of the diversity of the readership on here.
You can take a car with you when you move. And leases exist.
This doesn't seem to be about travel at all. It's just that some people don't get a license.
It's not that the concept is alien, it's that the justification you gave isn't really true. It doesn't make it a "whole lot harder to learn to drive". Moving around has almost no effect on getting some driving lessons.
> You can take a car with you when you move. And leases exist.
But you’re not going to have a car if you haven’t already learnt to drive.
> This doesn't seem to be about travel at all. It's just that some people don't get a license.
They don’t get licenses because they’re travelling.
Time is finite, not everyone wants to use it learning to drive.
> It's not that the concept is alien, it's that the justification you gave isn't really true.
It was literally the reason I learnt to drive so late in life. It was the reason many of my friends either learnt to drive later in life or still don’t even drive now.
You might not relate to us but that doesn’t make it untrue.
> It doesn't make it a "whole lot harder to learn to drive". Moving around has almost no effect on getting some driving lessons.
It does if you don’t have a fixed residence. What address are you even going to put on your provisional license?
And if you’re going to spend 2 years max in any one place then you’re there to soak up experiences, not spend it learning to drive.
Look, I get some people see driving as a priority. But not everyone is programmed that way and not every place on earth requires a car to get around. You say this isn’t an alien concept to you yet you fail to accept that people like me exist. So I don’t really know what I can say further
Different perspectives, perhaps. I'm sure it is a basic life skill if cars are necessary. For me and people around me, they aren't, and so it isn't. Any places without taxis have their replacements, or - much more likely - aren't suited for car travel at all. Swimming and cooking are skills of far greater necessity. It's strange to me to see driving compared to them.
Woodworking and the wiring of houses are also basic life skills, I imagine. I'll try to learn them when I get there. But so far, I've never wanted for the need to drive a car.
Traveled all over the world. Lived in 8 different cities. Never needed a car.
I am confused what you think you need a car for?? It is such a strange stance. Where have you gone that I can not go? Public transport exists. So do private tour buses.
There might be a survivorship bias here. You will have travelled to large cities with public transport because those are the most viable places to go if you can't drive. If you want to go to places that are remote/not got tourist infrastructure with buses (e.g Vietnam et Al) then you'd seem somewhat stuck. TL:DR A lot of the world is not located in metropolitan cities.
40-year Londoner here. The truth is that commuting costs compensate for cheaper rents. And where there is a difference you can also factor in the extra “work” time from spending 3 hours commuting every day. This changes when you work from home, but even then there are few places in suburban England where a decent cargo bike can’t replace a car. England isn’t like America where the towns were built around cars. Our towns pre-date them . (Except Milton Keynes)
Also, re-property costs. It’s mostly speculative. If we banned foreign non-resident buyers and disincentivised buy-to-let landlords then prices would be much lower.
You probably aren't renting further out. Owning a place versus just renting it changes the calculus quite a bit, and you are coming out ahead compared to paying 25% more to live closer in. Working from home also makes a huge difference. A longer commute is tolerable if you only have to do it a few times a week. The days where you don't commute add up to pay rise.
The problem is everyone else realises this too. Pricing in the south east of England is based around proximity to London commuter lines. You can go a huge distance to Southampton and you're still paying a large premium on housing because it's on an express line to London. Or the tiny town of Fleet which is in Hartley Whitney but has some of the highest prices and desirability in the country, again it's on an express train route to London. Ticket pricing works by marking up prices on these commuter routes to London and using those to subsidise the rest of the customers. The model somewhat falls apart as the wealthier commuters were far more likely to be in jobs that moved to flexitime/remote hence the scramble for revenue now post pandemic.
To answer your point to "live further out" as in actually pay enough for housing that it covers the ticket costs you're talking about Birmingham and beyond hour commutes.
In terms of regulations, I'd propose we bring back bigger down payment requirements (20%) and end the infinite availability of artificially low-interest debt. The absurdly cheap debt has driven speculation by bigger entities on housing, driving up the prices, and eased lending standards have just attempted to give individuals and families a fighting chance at competing for homes, also driving up the prices. I'm not sure how financing of homes in London compares to the US, but the effect of near zero interest rates (which is behind us at the moment but I wouldn't hold your breath) have been global. I don't know how you encourage mom and pop landlords while cutting out a lot of the wild speculative money looking for a home in real estate, but it seems pretty important to figure out.
Tax the undesired behavior. Using housing as an _investment_ should be heavily taxed based on the behavior's negative impact to society.
Live somewhere for at least 35% of a year (more than 1/3rd), then most of that tax goes away since it's a 'primary residence'. (35% to allow for moving as well as possible 'sunbird' / 'winter/summer homes', while still catching anyone who treats housing as an 'investment' (a tax upon the poor))
Landlords don't provide housing, buildings do. If they are taxed out of owning the building, they'll sell it to somebody who can live in it.
Yes, the world needs some amount of rented housing, but a huge percentage of people renting now want to own, just to have stability and control over their living environment.
They don't reduce housing supply. The same number of people are living in that building as would be if the building had been sold to them.
If you want to get to the root of the problem, look at the development process. Start with your local zoning laws. It is insane how tightly prescriptive they are, usually, and they generally have lots of density-limiting provisions like mandatory parking, maximum floor to area ratios, maximum heights, minimum setbacks, etc.
They don't reduce housing supply for living, but they do reduce housing supply for owning. Normal people being able to own the house that they live in seems like a reasonable societal goal to me, but the current economic climate is making that harder and harder as houses move into the hands of landlords (private and commercial).
Hotels, apartments, etc; things designed for such rentals should be in an entirely different category than (intended as single owner / dwelling) housing.
Regulatory structures and methods of oversight differ. It also impacts civic planning, and as we're seeing in real time, inelastic market needs as the basis of an ''investment'', cause extreme inflation.
There are ways to fix it, but none of them are politically palatable - for a couple of generations now, homeowners have come to believe their house is an investment. If you propose any action that will reduce the value of their "investment", you will be voted out at the earliest opportunity.
Unfortunately, I can't see a way this gets fixed under the current political systems in the West, so it will eventually be fixed one of the more old-fashioned ways.
It always comes down to two things: Land cost, and building cost. You get those two down and you'll see housing costs come down.
Land cost can be brought down by building furthere away from the center or in the countryside -> have smaller villages or towns outside of london.
As for building costs. How about we talk to developers and ask them what the biggest building costs are? Often times, it's regulation, regulation regulations. Get rid of all the ones that are causing high prices: at least this should be done in certain areas to allow those who want low cost housing some options.
200 years ago, Henry david thoreagh built a cabin for 28$. That's about 3000 dollars in today's cost. and back then the average person was able to pay off their house in just 10 years! The average house cost about 800$ which was about 800 days of unskilled labor (1/5th of what it is today if you include prop taxes) If it could be done then, then why can't it be done now? why has our standard of living dropped so much, that it's actually considerably lower than it was 200 years ago?
You say he built a cabin but it was basically a shed. One room, one floor. No insulation against noise or heat loss, no electricity, no running water, no toilet.
Our standard of living had massively increased since Thoreagh's shed, in part because of regulation requiring it. I'd be surprised to learn you can't build a shed for $3000.
One problem is huge swatch of premium land being dedicated to cars (parking lots, wasted whole floors of residential building for parking, huge highways through the city etc.
How much of a problem is this in London? New towers sometimes have parking underneath (ie where people don’t really want to live), others don’t; lots of the suburban part of the city has driveways or garages. I’m curious which huge highways you’re talking about?
> we can't afford rent or property where either of us used to live.
I’ve never seen this not be the case.
Are European cities organized differently or something? I’ve never see affordable living within biking distance of a business district, in the US. Prices are usually double.
Some European cities with millions of citizen can have a similar footprint of North American cities of just hundreds of thousand of people. It's more dense.
Sprinkle a bit of mixed used zoning, bike infrastructure and public transport on top.
I live in the outskirts of a city of almost 300 000, and can be in city center by bike in 20 minutes. I'm at work in 10 minutes.
Copenhagen:
• City 183.20 km2 (70.73 sq mi)
• pop 1,366,301
• Density 4,417.65/km2 (11,441.7/sq mi)
Kansas City, Missouri:
• City 318.80 sq mi (825.69 km2)
• pop 508,090
• Density 623.31/km2 (1,614.38/sq mi )
Yes. European cities were, in general, well-developed before the car was invented.
US cities are built around the car. This means more space dedicated to parking, which means less space for homes and businesses, which means things are farther apart, which means people need cars.
You can observe this very well in Germany. You have many cities that were destroyed during World War 2, and rebuilt around the car. You can compare them to the cities that were built before, and not destroyed. Nowadays, the latter are typically those cities popular with tourists and inhabitants due to their lively and walkable city centers, while city centers of the further category are oftentimes abandoned and avoided areas during the evenings and weekends. Impressive to see how the car-based city concept has failed for the inhabitants, and how hard it is for those cities to adapt to the post-industrial era.
Of course, failure is subjective: car-based cities have been essential for the car industry because many inhabitants are completely dependent on having a car.
> You can observe this very well in Germany. You have many cities that were destroyed during World War 2, and rebuilt around the car. You can compare them to the cities that were built before, and not destroyed.
I think that’s more likely “and rebuilt according to the old plan”. Very few German cities escaped with limited bombing damage.
There is a tremendous gap between "limited damage" and "destroyed", and in most of that range you wouldn't have much opportunity to change the layout despite the damage being "significant".
I don't think this is quite true. To nitpick. My knowledge is that European urban planning was very similar and car centric until the late 60s. At that time things diverged, US stayed the course with car centric split zoning where Europe shifted away from car centric design and heavily favored mixed zoning
Eg, in many US cities, it is illegal to have a bakery on the ground floor of an apartment building.
Though, bottom line, my point is US and EU cities were designed very similarly from 1940 until 1970
> My knowledge is that European urban planning was very similar and car centric until the late 60s
There was and is scarce 'city planning' in Europe because there is scarce planning that can be done. The majority of cities have emerged in the middle ages at the latest, and there is nothing that can be done to 'plan' them. Even for the peripheries (as they are called) this is so: They formed around the villages or remote settlements in the peripheries of the cities, so there was no planning there at all.
The closes that can be said to be built 'around cars' would be the urban construction of gated communities or high rises in the peripheries. But they still were not built around cars - those communities can still perfectly live within their own locale by having access to everything. The only difference that requires a car would be those people having jobs in the city and having to drive 20-30 minutes every day to the city and back.
> Though, bottom line, my point is US and EU cities were designed very similarly from 1940 until 1970
I agree that most European (and many ancient) cities had no city planning and grew organically. Though, this is not what I'm talking about. Yet, there are still quibbles around this as many European cities were rebuilt many times. Sometimes this reconstruction was the result of war, sometimes it was sheer reconstruction out of Urban planning. "The city [Paris] is one of the most striking examples of rational urban planning, conducted in the middle of the nineteenth century during the “Second Empire” of Napoleon III to ease congestion in the dense network of medieval streets." [1]
Though, the reason why 1940 - 1970 is so important is because it is post-war and a lot was rebuilt in Europe while at the same time there was a lot of growth in American cities (the baby boom; federal investment in roads, etc..), and both European and American Urban growth and reconstruction were heavily influenced by "Modernism" [2][3]. "European engineers were sent in flocks to the US to learn from the environments in which these revolutionary ideas were playing out, returning with tabula rasa development plans to realise their own modernist dreams." [4]
Modernist Urban planning ideas started in the 1910's and on, but it wasn't until 1940 that there was the mass of opportunity for rebuilding and the funding to implement those ideas. "Modernist principles have shaped city-building since the beginning of the
twentieth century. Numerous authors draw a connection between modernist discourse
within planning practice and the rise of the Fordist paradigm (Irving 1993; Calthorpe
and Fulton 2001; Sandercock 1998). In following these principles, the North American
built environment has taken the form of low-density sprawl. This development pattern
is characterized by a dominance of single-family housing, a reliance on automobile
transportation and a strict separation of land uses." [5]
A key difference is that US civil engineers still are quite influenced by Modernism. For example, US traffic engineers continue to optimize for the throughput of vehicles on city streets rather than the throughput of people [6].
On the other hand, around the 1970s affluent European urban planners pushed back on "Le Corbesier" style planning and "Modernist planning fell into decline. "By the late 1960s and early 1970s, many planners felt that modernism's clean lines and lack of human scale sapped vitality from the community, blaming them for high crime rates and social problems.[59] ... Modernist planning fell into decline in the 1970s when the construction of cheap, uniform tower blocks ended in most countries" [7]
Beyond the above, the more extended exerts below I believe make the same point I made. I would find it interesting where these are patently false and do not support the assertion I made earlier:
> "Modernism: In the 1920s, the ideas of modernism began to surface in urban planning. The influential modernist architect Le Corbusier presented his scheme for a "Contemporary City" for three million inhabitants (Ville Contemporaine) in 1922. The centrepiece of this plan was the group of sixty-story cruciform skyscrapers, steel-framed office buildings encased in huge curtain walls of glass. [....] He segregated pedestrian circulation paths from the roadways and glorified the automobile as a means of transportation. "
> "Reaction against modernism: By the late 1960s and early 1970s, many planners felt that modernism's clean lines and lack of human scale sapped vitality from the community, blaming them for high crime rates and social problems.[59]
> Modernist planning fell into decline in the 1970s when the construction of cheap, uniform tower blocks ended in most countries, such as Britain and France. Since then many have been demolished and replaced by other housing types. Rather than attempting to eliminate all disorder, planning now concentrates on individualism and diversity in society and the economy; this is the post-modernist era.[59]"
"Modernist principles have shaped city-building since the beginning of the
twentieth century. Numerous authors draw a connection between modernist discourse
within planning practice and the rise of the Fordist paradigm (Irving 1993; Calthorpe
and Fulton 2001; Sandercock 1998). In following these principles, the North American
built environment has taken the form of low-density sprawl. This development pattern
is characterized by a dominance of single-family housing, a reliance on automobile
transportation and a strict separation of land uses." (page 3)
"A significant individual embracing these values was the Swiss architect Le
Corbusier. Beginning his practice in the late ‘10s, he wanted to correct the ‘chaos’ of
the city and create an ideal order. His impact on modernist planning thought is
incalculable, and his ideas were widely applied in cities during the 1950s and ‘60s." (Page 4)
"Following a 1926 US Supreme Court decision to safeguard property values
from noxious land uses and neighbours, zoning became accepted as the principal
planning tool (Hall 1988). The result was the strict separation of work, home,
marketplace and social life. This move to create areas dedicated to specific purposes,
and to remove uses that conflict produced single-use central business districts,
uniform housing tracts, and dispersed shopping centres and recreational facilities." (Page 6)
"Transportation policy during the 1950s and ‘60s focused primarily on increasing
vehicle capacity on roads. Analytical tools considered highways and cars only, while
ignoring community design and public transit considerations. Instead of deciding
where development should go, engineers just looked at projected traffic trends and
designed infrastructure in an attempt to accommodate them" (Page 7)
"Inherent in the modernist project was a belief in the ‘tabula rasa.’ As a result,
enormous areas were cleared with completely new environments inserted. Again, Le
Corbusier led the drive with his unrealized 1925 proposal to demolish historic Paris
north of the River Seine (except selected monuments that would be moved), and to
replace it with eighteen 700-foot towers (Moe and Wilkie 1997)" (page 12)
> Yet, there are still quibbles around this as many European cities were rebuilt many times.
Thats not correct. Some noticeable percentage of German cities and some cities of the war-affected regions were rebuilt. And most partially. The re-architecting of Paris does not have any relevance to cars since it happened in 19th century.
> Beyond the above, the more extended exerts below I believe make the same point I made
They actually invalidate your argument - including the earlier excerpts: Modernist architects adopting car-centric ideas and high rises does not mean that they got to implement what they wanted to do in Europe. There is no such case of large-scale reconstruction of any European city around cars except the war-affected ones (and most partially), and all your excerpts just confirm that. They talk about how (the part of) a generation of European architects adopted modernist car-centric ideas - not them actually getting around to implement them. Its Le Corbusier proposing to demolish part of Paris in a furtive attempt, or him planning a high rise somewhere and whatnot.
Aside from that the excerpts explicitly demonstrate that car-centric cities were a US phenomenon. Not European.
Normally so. Because even the mere act of buying any zone in an average European city to demolish it would cost !enormous! amounts of money that nobody would be willing to spend. Leave aside the reconstruction. This is why the 19th century reconstruction of parts of Paris is the sole incident of this.
All of this, before the fact that most European cities do not have space - nobody can imagine demolishing an entire city to rebuild it with less density so that more cars could be used in sparse urbanization. Europe does not have that much space.
>> Yet, there are still quibbles around this as many European cities were rebuilt many times.
> Thats not correct. Some noticeable percentage of German cities and some cities of the war-affected regions were rebuilt. And most partially. The re-architecting of Paris does not have any relevance to cars since it happened in 19th century.
You stated that there was not a lot of urban planning in most European cities as they grew organically. My point is that many (over their _entire_) history were rebuilt many times, and in some of those instances with explicit urban planning. The example of Paris is to simply demonstrate this, not only was the city rebuilt several times, but once for the sheer sake of urban planning. This contradicts your statement: "There was and is scarce 'city planning' in Europe because there is scarce planning that can be done", Paris is _one_ (extremely prominent) counter-example.
>> Beyond the above, the more extended exerts below I believe make the same point I made
> They actually invalidate your argument - including the earlier excerpts: Modernist architects adopting car-centric ideas and high rises does not mean that they got to implement what they wanted to do in Europe.
I don't think that is correct, and hence it does not at all invalidate the argument. I'm not sure if you read all of the important quotes and the references. With the benefit of the doubt, I think proof by contradiction can demonstrate this. If modernist urban planners had no sway, and were not at all influential, then these quotes would make no sense (these are referring to Europe & North America):
- "Modernist principles have shaped city-building since the beginning of the twentieth century."
- "Modernist planning fell into decline in the 1970s when the construction of cheap, uniform tower blocks ended in most countries, such as Britain and France. Since then many have been demolished and replaced by other housing types. "
> “There were these big freeway people, and then there were the counter streams that happened between 1960 and 1970 ... One group was pushing cars out of the city, while others were trying to push them in.”
If Copenhagen was _not_ built as a modernist, car centric city (during the 1950's-1960's), then why would there be a group pushing back against car centricism in the 1960's at all? What would they have been pushing back against? Were they pushing back against how cities were built an ocean away in North America? No.. they were pushing back against how Copenhagen was rebuilt with car-centric, modernist urban planning. I mean, the title of the article is: "how Copenhagen rejected 1960s modernist 'utopia'"
> Aside from that the excerpts explicitly demonstrate that car-centric cities were a US phenomenon. Not European.
Not quite, the excerpts show that there was a lot of influence back and forth. European city planners went to the US and were influenced, and vice versa. Corbusier even designed several blocks of NYC, and the influence was reciprocal, see quote:
- "European engineers were sent in flocks to the US to learn from the environments in which these revolutionary ideas were playing out, returning with tabula rasa development plans to realise their own modernist dreams."
> Some noticeable percentage of German cities and some cities of the war-affected regions were rebuilt. And most partially.
Considering the war effected huge regions of Europe.. that would have been: nearly all of Germany, the Netherlands, Poland, a third of France, and countless more as large areas were flattened several times over. Practically every German city alone was carpet and fire bombed many times. Hence, these are very, very large reconstructions, all at a time when Modernist urban planning was the dominant style of urban planning.
> Because even the mere act of buying any zone in an average European city to demolish it would cost !enormous! amounts of money that nobody would be willing to spend.
I agree... to some extent. That is why the post-WWII reconstruction is so significant. Further, there _was_ also significant outward expansion during this time as well. Here is a quick example that Paris saw large expansions: "These large housing projects, known as the "Grand Ensembles," were constructed by the French government from the 1950s through the 1980s to help ease the housing problems that were prevalent throughout the country. Many of these high-rise buildings and communities still exist today" [1]
In sum:
- It's a straw argument to suggest what I'm saying is that every city was rebuilt in a modernist way.
- Though, WWII presented an opportunity for incredibly large reconstruction
- Post-WWII, there was also a lot of new construction for outward expansion
- During this time, the late 1940s to late 1960s, the dominant urban planning style of both NA and Europe was modernist car-centric (and so these constructions were similar from that perspective).
To refute, please give citations of what the dominant Urban planning style was for post-war Europe. I would love specific citations around this, as I have given you to support my claims (and even most of what I have wrote are direct quotes and references)
@unity, my original statement was this:
"My knowledge is that European urban planning was very similar and car centric until the late 60s."
I think the citations quoted above from multiple sources generously support this. Again, that is not at all saying that all of Europe was rebuilt in the 1950s-1960s willingly and entirely to be car centric. But, the _planning_ of new construction/reconstruction were similar during that period in both the USA & Europe (and Europe by-and-large stopped their new constructions in that style around the early 1970s while the USA by and large did not). There is even a mention in one of the quotes of a lot of that construction having been torn down.
I'd say Warsaw, Prague and Paris are all great examples. Warsaw was completely rebuilt and downtown is car centric (looks very much like an American city). Prague was somewhat unscathed and has a very historic layout, Paris is a mix of reconstruction and historic urban planning. The point remains that there was a pretty specific car-centric urban planning style that dominated in Europe in the late 1940's-1960s.
All that is to say - European urban planning was also, at one time somewhat recently, largely car centric. It is really notable that stopped being the case and is an example for US cities - that they can also transform away from being fully car-centric.
> But, the _planning_ of new construction/reconstruction were similar during that period in both the USA & Europ
That's where you go wrong. There isnt 'urban planning' in Europe because there isnt any space to plan anything. What could be called 'urban planning' in Europe is laying out subway tracks, maybe demolishing a run-down shanty neighborhood to build apartments. Thats it. Naturally there is no way to plan anything around cars. The most you can do is to eat up a little sidewalk in the biggest avenues in the biggest cities to make one more lane for the main street. And that's what was done for ~80 years.
> I think the citations quoted above from multiple sources generously support this
They dont. You moved on to 'urban planning was like that' argument from 'built like that'.
> European urban planning was also, at one time somewhat recently, largely car centric
Repeating it wont make it so. It wasnt, and still isnt. Aside from some part of Germany that rebuilt its destroyed cities and built autobahns, entire Europe was about tiny cars and tiny streets, leave aside any phenomenon like suburbs.
You cannot extrapolate from 'Le Corbusier and his friends liked cars and wanted to demolish cities' to 'city planning was like that'. If city planning was really like that (if it actually existed that is), then Le Corbusier and his friends would get their way and entire cities would have been rebuilt.
European cities are much less affordable than US cities. Just look at the data, compare average household income to average rent or purchase price.
It blows my mind that people here put Europe as some kind of affordable walkable alternative. Some places are indeed walkable, but affordability is utterly atrocious by US standard.
You might consider getting a velomobile. Slower than a car, but a lot faster than a regular bike. Eg I am currently considering a job that is about 50km away from here, one way times are: public transport 1h50m, car 50m, velomobile 1h to 1h30m depending on effort.
> So I think we will see a shift in where people settle, where they will no longer base their lives around owning multiple cars.
Not if real estate in cities remains as expensive as it is now. That's one of the main reasons why so many people move out and choose to spend so much time commuting.
Cars are just a means to an end, which is not living in a one-bedroom apartment as a family.
Ah that's a bit of a false dichotomy though. In between a rustic rural house on several acres down a dirt unpaved road unsuitable for bicycles, and a tiny, loud, one-bedroom downtown apartment condo in a highrise, or worse - one bedroom in a shared flat, in a superurban locale,
say Hong Kong, right above the nightlife or red light district, trying to raise a family of three or four; somewhere between the two extremes is a livable medium. Maybe a three-bedroom condo with a shared yard and pool raise a family in. A nestled away cute 2-bedroom cottage with a tiny yard at the edge of the city, but still within subway distance.
Now, I'll concede that most cities in the US aren't designed this way. I'll go further and say that most cities in the US lack the density to deserve being called cities, they're
just large swaths of adjacent suburbia with a tiny downtown district that most people drive to in order to access, which has huge implications on traffic and parking.
What recent changes in society has enabled us to see is just how much we were sold a crock of shit while on our way to buying 5-bedroom McMansions with expansive yards for hosting dinner parties. If the cost is a one hour each way commute, people are starting to see it's not actually worth it.
So I agree/you're right - real estate prices have to fall dramatically in order for things to be accessible to the non-rich households who aren't on dual tech worker salaries, and who can't afford a reasonably sized (2+ bedroom) urban apartment. But for better or worse, HN skews affluent, so there are undoubtedly readers here able to afford a 4-bedroom apartment in one of the nicer neighborhoods of San Francisco where you'd want to raise a family. Pretending otherwise does no body any favors. The only question is how do we get from where we are today, which is that it's unaffordable to all but the upper-middle and upper class, to a place where is affordable on a single wage earners salary? The only answer to that is to build more housing. Stopgap measures like rent control don't work. It may be anathema to some, but part of that may include the government stepping in to make that happen.
Ebikes allow us to get from here to there, as an ebike allows a slightly more sprawling city design, due to the added range enabled by an ebike vs walking+non-existent public transportation, which means we can get a lot of mileage by repainting and modifying existing roads to add bike-safe infrastructure without ripping out and replacing buildings, which is basically impossible.
Sadly this rings somewhat true, I'm trying to make the maths work on moving from my house in the horrible Irish countryside (horrible if you don't like profound isolation and car-dependency, that is) and move to Utrecht or Houten, or Freiburg, and it is challenging, to say the least.
It's excellent. Gigabit fibre. I mapped out the rural fibre routes (along with other infra) and current real estate listings. Threw it up at gaffologist.com if you're curious. Note that I am not a front-end dev and it shows.
I'd rather rent somewhere I can walk to the pub then live in my current paid-off house where I'm just lonely all the time. It's beautiful but that only goes so far.
Ireland is horrible at everything. The health service is in collapse, the immigration bureau is incompetent, crime is legal (the garda told me not to vote Green... now remember they're the ones enforcing environmental laws), transport is a joke, the bike infrastructure is 30 years behind the continent, and for all that the taxes are quite high if you make anything resembling a decent salary. But if you DO have the gall to earn gasp over 50,000 a year, you're a fat cat with "notions". And imagine you build a house and at some point need to rent it out? You're a monster landlord scumbag - might as well be from the plantations and evicting those poor poor people who trash your house and don't pay rent for months on end!
Yeah, unfortunately it seems very much like we're heading the opposite direction. People largely congregated in cities because of proximity to work, but as remote work increases that's becoming less of a factor. As people try to find cheaper property and more land, they're going to end up in places where bikes are a whole lot less practical.
Even if proximity to work were to be completely irrelevant for everyone, a lot of people (most?) would want to be close to something, be it their hobbies, hospitals, restaurants or at the very least shops. If your hobby is growing groceries and something outdoorsy (including road/gravel/mountain cycling!) and don't mind doing big shops/having to drive when you open a drawer and you realize that you ran out of oregano, then living in an isolated area is a valid choice (despite it increasing your individualized carbon footprint; if you fly more than once a year then that will dwarf almost any other lifestyle choice you make on that front).
I live in a city despite working remotely since the pandemic started, not because of proximity to the offices I might have to go back to, but rather because I can walk a block to buy groceries. I know people that live <.5 mile away from a Safeway in the peninsula that drive there because the streets are not very pedestrian or cyclist friendly.
I mean the reality of it is that cars are damned convenient and it's way easier to drive, even for three minutes, than walk for 15 minutes, especially if there's a suburban parking lot at the other end. Getting people out of that habit is an uphill battle, and I'd be lying if I said I've never driven those three minutes to Safeway vs walk. Especially if I'm grabbing a months worth of groceries for the whole house.
What's different now is ebikes/related which allows those three minutes to be done via bike. Dean Kamen claimed that cities would be redesigned around the Segway. He was too early, and only half right, but I think his claim was more prescient than we give him credit for. Ebikes, as we're hearing about here in London, really are enabling a new kind of city design that takes advantage of this semi-new technology.
> bikes are a whole lot less practical
I'm sure you meant as daily transportation. As a non-daily, I bike several times per week even if I drive daily.
If I had my choice, I'd rather ride horses every day.
bikes are great in small towns with decent infrastructure. the range from 20k to 100k people is kind of perfect for biking because they are a bunch smaller than big cities. in actually rural and suburbia they aren't as good but small towns are perfect.
There's a middle-ground between suburban sprawl and one-bedroom-apartments in highrises. Dense old-fashioned streetcar suburbs that predate the invention of driveways do a great job of being cyclist and transit friendly despite the fact that every home is a detached SFH.
Yeah, the american streetcar suburb truly is a gem, doesn't really exist on that scale in Europe. Lush, spacious, and verdant, but also walkable, with city feel and city amenities. Always great architecture. Mix of home sizes makes them naturally mixed income. Commercial corridors often preserved their function. So awesome, if only more newer suburbs were like that.
> Mix of home sizes makes them naturally mixed income.
Sadly, I don't think this will last if current trends continue. The town next to mine has a ton of duplexes but it's all zoned single-family now, so you couldn't build those today if you had to.
I know, because I grew up in what I consider the pinnacle of urbanism - the humble commie block.
Unfortunately even commie blocks nowadays are either becoming too expensive or get "densified" - new blocks are built in between them, often without much of a plan.
This appears to be due to induced demand - especially now that so many apartments are bought as investments and never rented out.
This bothers me because I'm in the market for an apartment and it's becoming a race against time due to rising prices.
Hah, yeah. We're in a terrible housing crisis here in Ontario (houses around Toronto are now worth over a million) and tent-cities are cropping up everywhere, and "commie blocks" are what anti-urbanists point to when they complain about the new housing going in to meet demand, and all I can think is that I'll take Khrushchyovkas over tent-cities any day of the week.
> This appears to be due to induced demand - especially now that so many apartments are bought as investments and never rented out.
This is always the question. If even half of them are getting rented out, then at least new units are adding to the market and helping to battle rent... but it seems like governments are so crippled in their ability to know for certain how many people live in how many units.
This sounds like Yogi Berra's complaint of "Nobody goes there anymore. It's too crowded."
Real estate in cities being expensive is evidence that people really want to live in environments like that.
Will be interesting to see if other municipalities try to build similar housing and work environments (more walkable, less parking lots) to attract the people looking for a city life style.
A bit of refinement on that thought. In America, inner-city schools are mixed bag. If you live in someplace like Cambridge, schools tend to be good. Boston is a mixed bag. Same is true for other adjacent cities. However if you go to places like Westford, Newton, Wellesley which are very high earner high value properties, the schools tend to be consistently very good. Then you start moving into more rural places in Massachusetts like Pepperell, Townsend, Athol and again the schools are more like inner-city schools, underfunded and not very good quality.
I think the best way to judge the quality of schools by the opportunities the student's have as a result of going through the schools. The Westford, Newton, Wellesley schools are for winners of the birth lottery. Leominster, Townsend, Athol are for us birth lottery losers.
>A bit of refinement on that thought. In America, inner-city schools are mixed bag. If you live in someplace like Cambridge, schools tend to be good. Boston is a mixed bag. Same is true for other adjacent cities. However if you go to places like Westford, Newton, Wellesley which are very high earner high value properties, the schools tend to be consistently very good. Then you start moving into more rural places in Massachusetts like Pepperell, Townsend, Athol and again the schools are more like inner-city schools, underfunded and not very good quality.
How much of that is the quality of the schools and how much of that is just richer parents who can/will pick up the slack in the event that the school system doesn't do the job as well as they want it done?
If stats on median and per capita income are to be believed then the kid from Wellsley has a huge leg up on the kid from Athol even if you assume they get the same education.
For better or worse the quality of public schools depends far more on crime rates and income levels of the surrounding community than on school funding levels. There's very little that schools can do to to help pupils who are growing up in a difficult environment. By all means let's fund schools appropriately, but that's only going to make a marginal difference in outcomes.
Parents with kids move to the suburbs for schooling, parents that are mobile and move for schooling bring to the suburbs things that make schools better (taxes / school meddling etc) which makes parents with kids move to the suburbs for schooling which ...
As a parent myself who has always had a car but has aspired at times to go car-free, I think the whole "semi-frequent short term car rental" thing only really gets realistic when the kids are old enough to just need those tiny Mifold booster seats / seatbelt adjusters.
Conventional UAS-attached car seats are just too bulky and troublesome to be installing and uninstalling all the time in cars you only rent for a few hours at a time.
I think the key there is "all the time" - when we lived in the middle of a European city we used car-share, and the car seat was a bit annoying but since we were using it maybe once or twice a month tops it just wasn't that big a deal. Though we were using the seatbelt mount, and not ISOfix.
I looked into carseat rentals about ten years ago, and it sounded like it's only really common at the agencies located around airports. Overall, I got the sense that there's a lot of fear and liability tied up in it— that giving someone the wrong seat or installing it incorrectly or not cleaning it adequately were all potential landmines waiting to happen.
You live in a city bubble. I have three kids and live in a suburban town about 40km away from the nearest big city.
No way i can live without a car. I do have bikes and use them often to bring kids to school. But many friends and family are scattered arround the country. Many places i go to with my kids can only visited by car. And i find a car often very useful during a period of reconstruction of my house or garden. Or when i pick up big stuff from somewhere. Nah i couldnt live with out it
Yes I am, but you're similarly in a suburbian bubble, where you get the benefits of living remotely (silence, big house, lawn etc), but also expect to get easy access to everything by driving everywhere. The latter of great cost to society both in dollars and other external factors.
All your usecases could be served with a rental. Where I live I can rent cars on hour basis with an app. Need to haul something big? Rent a van for a few hours. Want to visit family in a remote city? Rent a sedan for a day or two. Need to get a cat to the vet? Rent a small city car for two hours.
This is why cities are better for the environment. I don't think rural car usage has nearly as much negative impact as driving in a big city though, so this shouldn't be a strong policy focus. Awesome that the kids can ride to school!
I think the rural/city better for the environment is a bit of cherry picking of statistics. It's important however to respect what's good for each of us. For me, living in the city meant shitty health outcomes, spending way too much money on rent and food, way too many people trying to stick a hand in my pocket for entertainment etc.
For me a good life means dark skies, green trees, a chance of dying every time I go for a hike, and a garden in my backyard.
If you are a city person, that's great, fantastic and I hope that you can stay there but if you have to move out to suburban/rural spaces, don't bring the city with you. Leave the light pollution, the noise, and all those urban attributes in the city.
> Leave the light pollution, the noise, and all those urban attributes in the city.
"The noise"... are you advocating for a rural setting without cars here? Most of light pollution and noise in the cities comes from cars and car infrastructure.
> Most of light pollution and noise in the cities comes from cars and car infrastructure.
While I love cities, I think that's not really the story. Cities would light up their streets with or without cars. Could you imagine if New York, somehow sans cars, with pitch black streets at night? The crime fear is way overdone - cities are very safe these says. But I think I still prefer streetlights.
There is no bubble, only a lack of desire to seek out knowledge about other lifestyles. The problems with car culture were not surfaced until the rise and dominance of the internet.
When people are accused of living in a bubble, it's usually because they show a strong universalist desire to expand their lifestyles to others, without consideration for the others' preferences. The opposite of humanist liberalism that was foundational for Western liberal democracies, or 'live and let live'.
If we taxed suburbs what they actually cost us as a society, no one would want to live in suburbs. The land use is abysmal compared to cities. Suburbs are effectively subsidized by the cities they are near, and those living in suburbs get off way too easy. That's a good thing if you have an extractivist, individualist mindset, but if we are to continue functioning as a whole society, something needs to give.
We love our farmers. Keep the fields going. But this business with allocating half-acre lots per 4 people (lots which are empty for literally 1/3 of the day) has got to end, or else local utilities should stop servicing those far-flung places. You want to be without the burdens of living in a society -- fine! Figure out water and power for yourself. It's easier than ever and there's still federal- and state-level rebate programs for renewables.
Farmlands and suburbs are completely different things, especially in the context of urban development.
Industrial zones are also a completely different category entirely.
Living in Germany, most German cities do not have anything that is comparable to a U.S. "suburb". Building codes demand a quite high density, even for single family homes for new developments and older developments have the tendency to get denser as the demand for housing in a city rises.
German planning law specifically aims to concentrate development as much as possible, to limit encroachment on agricultural lands and nature. Doesn't always work out, but we have very little of the "urban sprawl" that is so characteristic of U.S. urban planning.
Yes, farms need market access. But that market does not have to be a sprawling suburb, it can be a decently dense town or city. Also, market access is relative depending on product. Farmers concentrating on crops like wheat and corn don't care about the distance to cities, as their product is traded globally. For fresh produce, distance is a real concern, but on the other hand you don't need a lot of land to fulfill the need of even large cities. You could conceivably provide most fresh produce from inside city limits if urban planning would see this as necessary. Production/acre for something like tomatoes is really huge, depending on the methods used.
I get your point about small cities, but suburbs? They are attached to larger cities, so they may take the drive down from 10 hours to maybe 9.5. How does that make that much of a difference?
Except that in most German towns outside the tiny center where almost everything closes between 4 and 6 pm with exception of supermarkets, everything else seems to require a car or at least 30 minute cycling, with most buses ending at 8pm.
Nonsense. Farms obviously predate suburbs, for one thing: nothing resembling the modern suburb could exist without steam power or something newer than that. There's never really been heavy industry in the suburbs: the modern suburb exists because people didn't want to live near the heavy industry in the cities.
The North American suburb, which is what we're discussing here unless I misunderstand, more or less came about in the post-war era. It would really be an extraordinary claim that farms and heavy industry couldn't exist in North America until the 1950s...
The poorer denser city centers (in America) subsidise the wealthier, less dense suburbs. "Suburbia is Subsidized: Here's the Math [ST07]" - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Nw6qyyrTeI
I knew before watching it that it was Strong Towns propaganda.
They keep ignoring that without those suburbs you won't have rural farms. Without those suburbs those "productive" cities will have nothing to eat, and nothing to buy.
They measure productivity in terms of dollars - but all cities do is services, they don't produce goods. That's left to those places Strong Towns hates.
If people actually implemented what Strong Towns wants, people would starve.
Try the math again, but completely exclude services and let's see where you end up.
The video points out cities which aren't bankrupt, do you think the people in them are starving and the farms near them are gone?
The video says that Canada has laws which stop cities paying more than 25% of revenue on debt payments, so they are much less bakrupt than USA cities. Do you think all Canadian cities have starving people with nothing to buy, and failed farms?
What about European cities which aren't suburban car dependent sprawl and still have food?
What about the explanations in the video (and the related ones on the channel) on why the suburbs are so expensive - you can't handwave away thirty six billion dollars of due road maintenance in a single city with "rural farms need it", even if true it's unsustainable.
> "all cities do is services, they don't produce goods."
Yes, fintech nonsense has eaten London, and services are its most profitable sectors these days, but that's not /because it's a city/, it was a major manufacturing center and a city.
Suburbs are the places where what used to be productive farms are paved over with asphalt. Few cities rely on them for anything except maybe cheap labour.
Please think about this a big more - cities do not have industry or agriculture in them. They need those suburbs to provide that. You can't just dismiss it as "cheap labor" - what exactly do you plan to eat or buy?
Most American incorporated cities are subject to zoning. In the US, most zoning codes define the following: minimum setbacks (how far from the edge of the lot the building line begins at, aka the buffer between the home and the street for residential zones), minimum lot sizes (what's the minimum size a lot can be parceled out into), and maximum FARs (Floor-to-Area ratios, the maximum amount of floor space buildable in a given area.) This is true in most zoning codes across Residential, Industrial, Agricultural, Commercial, and other zones.
The "suburbs" are generally Single Family Home (SFH) zoned areas (the name of the zone differs per-city) defined by a requirement to have a single dwelling, a large minimum lot size, large setbacks, and low maximum FARs. Nothing mandates that SFH zones need to be adjacent to agricultural areas. In fact most zoning codes detail a long list of uses allowed within the zone and a buffer between zones. For example, most zoning codes require a larger buffer between industrial or agricultural zones and residential zones. By definition how much "closer to the rural area" suburbs are is defined purely by how much SFH housing there is, nothing more.
The reason why most US suburbs abut dense inner cities is that historical US city development occurred densely before the automobile and then postwar development happened according to zoning codes which carved most new residential areas into SFH zoned areas. Cities were grandfathered into the new zoning codes. The codes themselves developed slowly and only started mandating huge minimum lot sizes in the last 30 years or so. This is why suburban development tends to form around a city.
That's maybe a cultural difference. For example I know of no such place in Belgium even if I'm quite well travelled in it. So it's a least really not common to have suburbs as you describes.
Although you didn't imply a preference one way or the other, this made me think: if policy that is driven by suburbanite lifestyles leads to the destruction of the planet, is it truly "live and let live"? A more accurate description of the US ideology as someone who has lived in both ultra-rural and urban environments in the midwest and west coast is: "I want to do whatever I want/believe is best, regardless of the impact it has on people outside of my circle."
no-one is arguing you should cycle 40 km - but that doesn't mean we live in a bubble.
That distance is more than the radius of the largest city in Europe -> it's 25km from Heathrow airport to the Buckingham palace.
I don't think having a car is a big problem, I think we could hand out free e-bikes to every family and reduce amount of cars of the roads, because for ~50% of journeys, they make sence.
We're not all not arguing that though. On an ebike powered to 30km/hr, that's an 80 minute ride. If their small town supplies most of their needs and they go into the big city once a month, that's quite feasible... lots of people do a 90+ minute drive once a month for something or other. 1-2 hour rides aren't exhausting or requiring special fitness on an e-bike, and can be very pleasant (if they had nice routes).
Now if they mean they go 40km to take the kids to school every day, that's a different matter.
Does your large suburban home improvement shop not offer delivery or rent out work trucks/vans for hauling your DIY catch of the week?
Consider the cost of ownership with maintenance, depreciation, loan interest (if applicable), and insurance compared to renting. Depending on the frequency and distance of your long trips you may actually save money by renting.
> You can no longer expect to move out of the city and still get a short way to everything by using your car
E-bikes could actually improve rural life as well (the example I read about was Spain). If you live 10km outside a village and can do your normal shopping by bike instead of car, that can really make an impact. Won't work in really sparse areas of course.
Unfortunately the big front-loaded cargo bikes are, well, big. Almost as long as a car, if not as wide. You need to park them somewhere and they're definitely too big and heavy to carry up any stairs. They're also expensive, like mid 4 figures USD. This starts to look like a similar problem to car ownership and parking. (I say this all as an avid cyclist -- my household has four bikes and one car.) Rentals seem like a good fit for some users so I'm happy to see someone trying it as a business model.
I own a bike with a big box in the front and parking has absolutely not been an issue for me. In the last six months I rode > 2600km in and around one of the densest European cities and parked in many different places. I have yet to find a place where I cannot park the bike . You can use regular car parking, but you will always find a dead corner, bike rack, big sidewalk, etc where you can leave the bike. And to be clear, I don't block the sidewalks or otherwise selfishly get in the way of other city dwellers.
My bike is an urban arrow, so one of the bigger two wheelers. ~7500€ new with all possible add-ons and a €150 annual insurance that covers the bike in full if ever stolen or damaged in an accident, so I also feel safe parking in rough areas with it.
In your case, a Tern HSD/GSD longtail may be a better option. It’s not quite as convenient as a long John, but much more compact and parks upright, so it fits even a small apartment.
Transport capacity is still great and the bigger version can seat two passengers, but the kids need to be old enough to sit and hold on themselves.
I got an e-Muli, which is a sorta “short john” but where the front basket folds and handlebars pivot 90° so parking it is a bit more slim, more or less the footprint of a normal bike. It’s amazing — a little heavy so probably not luggable up stairs, but small enough when basket is folded that I prefer it even on errands where I don’t need the cargo space, just cause it’s electric (nice to throw a backpack in the front basket and close it, too. A little pricey since it’s made in Germany, but absolutely worth it:
https://muli-cycles.de/en
Glad to hear it. The biggest barrier for me is parking it at home. I don't have an indoor space big enough for a cargo bike and don't want to leave a $8-10,000 bike exposed to the elements and thieves (regardless of insurance).
A coworker of mine has a cargo bike from a company called Tern. I thought that is was the GSD but looking at their website it's different than the one he rides. Nevertheless, a neat feature is you can kick the bike backwards onto its own cargo rack, and the bike stands on its own vertically. He rides it to work and it fits in his comically small office; the footprint is about the same as a vertical filing cabinet. I'm told several of the newer cargo bikes have this feature.
I feel it is useful to provide actual numbers on conversations like this.
On some brand I quickly googled[1], the bounding box that covers all of their models for electric bakfiet's size is 253cm x 95cm (with no individual bike being both that long and wide). Comparing them with a Fiat 500 and a RAM truck[2] (just for kicks), that bounding box is 1 meter shorter in both dimensions than the Fiat. And their classic model is 228cm x 63cm.
Long tail cargo bikes like the Tern GSD avoid those issues of the bakfiets style ‘wheelbarrow’ bikes. They’ll take two passengers, and there’s plenty of less expensive options as well.
I agree, I think they're an interim solution for not-very-bike-safe societies. (And bike-safe societies for people who are actually carrying cargo and have to use a big vehicle one way or another).
I've read that in the Netherlands, they aren't as common as you'd expect, because kids just ride their own bikes almost as soon as they're able to walk, because school, sport etc is nearby and on a safe separated bike path network. While younger babies are carried in those little seats that mount on the handlebars or racks of regular bikes.
I don't think ability to be carried up stairs easily is a good criteria for the practicality of any bike though, or it rules out many ebikes too. Just need secure parking at the ground level.
I had my mind blown about Dutch-style cargo ebikes, bakfietsen. The cool thing is that you can use the bikes to haul cargo, or put three kids in the front in special harnesses when you need to:
If they don't have to deal with cars, perhaps it's ok - but yikes. Helmets for everyone because even at 20kph someone could get a nasty/fatal head injury when they're yeeted out of the cargo area.
It's all in a combination of infrastructure and riding style. If you're forced to ride with car traffic you have to go fast, which predisposes you to an aggressive road biking style. But if you do that then you also have trouble with stops and starts, which creates additional risk.
If you can go slower like a Dutch commuter, then you can also ride like them, using a step-through frame and a lower saddle. That keeps your center of gravity down and allows scooting starts. All of this adds up to a substantially smaller risk of going head-first in a fall.
In Amsterdam if we see adult cyclists with a helmet we'd guess it's probably a tourist or new expat. For children most parents only bother with helmets until they're six years or so.
We live in a very small town and I built a cargo bike from scratch to drive my (disabled) son to school. Excellent experience, despite not having motor assist. We still own a car, but we can easily make do with that one car now, where we would likely have had to buy a second one without the cargo bike. And having built it myself, it cost below 1,000€, including the welder I used to construct it.
My sister lives in Berlin, has a very young child and just bought an electrified cargo bike. She is not a bike rider, never has been, but loves it. Great alternative not only to a car in a crowded city, but also to crowded public transport if you are transporting a small human.
You can also just put seats on a normal bike. I have two kids seats on my bike, front and back, and take my 3 and 6yo to kindergarten that way. It's cheaper than a cargo bike, and much less likely to get stolen.
I am dismayed but not surprised at just how much money people will spend on e-bikes to avoid exercise.
There are literally millions of decent analog bike frames bouncing around in various corners of <your city here>. Getting one up and running, and strapping a seat to the front and back as you have done, would be about 10% the cost of a new e-bike, and maintenance would be negligible.
Plus, you get to eat whatever you want guilt-free!
> I am dismayed but not surprised at just how much money people will spend on e-bikes to avoid exercise.
I am dismayed at how much people spend on plastic coffee pods just to avoid making a proper coffee!
Before I got an ebike, I didn't have confidence of riding on the road proper- > now I know I won't be slowing down to 5 MPH on an uphill, with someone behind me honking incessantly or overtaking dangerously.
I installed nice bright lights powered from the central battery, mirrors and a horn. This makes a world of difference.
There is a lot to be said for shitty bike infrastructure causing confrontations like this. Yet somehow I've never been hit except once in a right hook, so I'm sure you can pull it off too if you dedicate yourself to it.
I'd like to point out that the carbon footprint of a used bike is a negative number and the out-of-pocket cost is laughably low. I love when people can reduce their emissions by replacing a car with something with much less impact like an e-bike, but those are the exceptions statistically speaking, and it also doesn't delete that car from existence but rather brings about more demand for mining and materials. Buying used e-bikes is also a fine option.
Actually this is not accurate and somewhat bad advice. A normal bicycle frame is designed for... normal use.
No need for ebikes but child seats should be used on reenforced frames such as what the Dutch call "Moederfiets", you can also use a 'Transportfiets' frame.
You are adding an extra 5 Kg to your front steering tube and another 20 kilos to your back cargo loader. That is not what most frames were designed for.
Secondly things like double leg kickstands and steering stem lock are really important to load kids in and out of seats safely, which again don't exist in 'normal' bikes.
My point is you don't need an ebike but you should definitely not be using an off the shelf thin frame to carry kids around everyday.
I regularly load 40kg+ on a steel touring frame (a remarkably "normal" bike by all accounts) and it's lasted 12 years so far.
Yes, you shouldn't use a department store bike. I (mistakenly?) assumed this is obvious to this reading crowd.
You sound like you have never worked on a bike before. It is not difficult to add different kinds of kickstands to existing frames. I believe you are quite under-informed on bicycle capacities.
Your regularly sounds like something that happens on the weekends. My regular is taking 2 kids to school everyday and leaving my bike parked out in the rain year round. Not all bikes have enough trail room to fit a double legged kickstand and I have never seen a stem lock fitted on anything other than a moederfiets/transportfiets (not a lock smith 'key and lock' but a 'twist' lock to lock the stem to take your kid out of the front seat without the front wheel spinning around on you).
My point is just that if you're planning on replacing a car with a bycicle there are already solved problems for kids transportation.
Exactly. Weight distribution makes a big difference to how the bike handles. If you put a lot of weight on the back without balancing it with weight at the front you'll lose grip on the front wheel easily, which can be dangerous. Front wheel skids are almost impossible to control.
That would be a good example of something we call "user error". I am also not surprised that the first instinct of the risk-averse is "make it heavier", but look where that's got us with cars?
It's true that you'll get more exercise if you do the same trip on a regular bicycle. But according to [1], e-cyclists cycles more and longer than regular cyclists. End result is that they exercise about as much.
I loved biking into work when I lived close enough (7mi) but honestly I would never have done it if I didn't also have shower access (was a small company but the business park had a shared shower).
Doubly so if you're doing any hills with a passenger on board.
pretty narrow to view ebikes solely as a means to avoid exercise. The list of benefits is long and proven. Regardless, suggesting someone simply dredge up a used bicycle and strap their child to it after a bit of maintenance is unrealistic
> The newer style of cargo bikes can for many families replace a car
This very much feels like "in addition to" rather than replacing a car, at least in the US. My wife and I (without kids) tried living without a car in one of the largest, most walkable cities in the US and it was doable, but it's just soooo much nicer to have a car. Coordinating rentals or even ride shares are a lot more tedious than jumping in a car and driving, and even if ride shares are cheaper than car ownership, I would often find myself not doing things because of the cost of ride share / car rental / etc. Further, I would have occasional ride share drivers blow me off when I really needed to be punctual, and I also had some fraudulent experiences with car share companies (upcharging me for services that I've explicitly declined and not correcting it via customer support channels).
There's also public transit, but that takes wayyyy longer to get around and it's also really dirty, crime-y, and otherwise uncomfortable at least in the cities I've traveled around in.
Lastly, cycling is probably always going to be less safe than getting around by car (we can and should improve cycling safety, but I don't know that we're ever going to get to parity with driving) and I don't know that very many people are going to want to subject their kids to that risk as their primary form of transit. I probably wouldn't, realistically.
> Lastly, cycling is probably always going to be less safe than getting around by car (we can and should improve cycling safety, but I don't know that we're ever going to get to parity with driving)
I think you're biased towards where you live. Where I live, cycling is definitely not considered risky, there are plenty of bike paths, and many people do indeed let their children bicycle as their primary means of transportation. One of the benefits is that the children can get around on their own and be more independent.
And yes, 30 years ago there were far fewer bike paths here. So things can change.
EDIT: cycling in the netherlands is about 685% more dangerous than driving per https://www.cbs.nl/en-gb/news/2020/31/decline-in-road-fatali.... Of course, this isn’t a like-for-like comparison since the distance traveled by car skews more toward the more dangerous highway miles while cycling skews heavily toward the much safer local/city streets—if you account for that, the difference becomes even more pronounced.
> The newer style of cargo bikes can for many families replace a car.
Absolutely! My wife and I have a 6yo, and we take him everywhere on the back of our Kona Minute.
He's big for his age (65lbs) so we're looking to move to a ebike sometime this year, but up to now it's been great! Literally the only time we need to use a car is when we go out of town.
I used a bike trailer and child seat when my twins were young, I could drop all 3 kids off at nursery, unhitch the trailer and leave it at the nursery, cycle on to work from there. On the way back I would hitch the trailer up and go in and collect them and cycle home. Trailer was around £150 and I only had to tow it when necessary.
Why is no one talking about the safety of hauling kids on a bike? It's incredibly dangerous compared to a car.
In my city, it's not if but when you'll get hit by a car on a bike. Yet I see parents increasingly think it's okay to haul their children on their bikes.
Because it should be okay, and it's a societal failing that it currently isn't as safe as it should be. Cars are always safer for their occupants, but using them puts vulnerable road users at greater risk of serious injury or death. In my city I love to see more people on the road with their kids on e-bikes. It shouldn't be a moral failing on part of the parent to be doing that. OTOH, just this morning one of the A*Hole parents back her SUV out of a parking space in a day care parking lot while on the phone and holding the phone to her ear. When I motioned for her to get off her phone in the DAYCARE PARKING LOT she shrugged and sped off.
Cars regularly mount pavements/sidewalks as well, and kill pedestrians who are not even in the road.
The correct response to "cars make cities unsafe for everyone" is of course to ban all but the most essential cars from cities. It is not to suggest that the _other_ forms of transport (including walking on the pavement/sidewalk!) are so unsafe as to be irresponsible, in the presence of cars.
So it’s not the bikes that are dangerous but the cars around them. Shouldn’t the solution be about how to keep cars away from bikes, not ditch bikes and drive cars?
In Japan I once saw a woman bike to the grocery store with 4 children on a regular mama-chari. One seat in the front and back, and one child strapped each on her front and back. The most bad-ass mom I ever saw.
what do people do that have kids between the "too big for cargo bike" and "too young to drive their own car" category?
I used to take my kids all the time on my e-bike with a burley bike trailer. Now I have a 13 year old and a 10 year old. I'm pretty sure the middle schooler would get made fun of if his friends saw him showing up to school or soccer practice in the cargo bucket of my bike.
For people that have hit that milestone before me, what do you guys do for your older kids?
Sounds like it's time for them to get their own bike to ride to school?
You can ride with them on a few practice runs on a weekend and then continue to do so on a weekdays. Once you're both comfortable with the route and their ability to navigate it safely you can cut back on how much of the route you do together or just let them run it on their own. That last bit is a call to be made based on a lot of factors including your kids desire to ride with you.
Our 9 year old has an electric scooter. I didn’t really want to get it for him, because I’m an old school analog bike guy myself, but I have to admit it is convenient. It has around a 15 mile range and keeps up with a comfortable cycling pace, so my wife and I ride our commuter bikes and he cruises along next to us.
He also has a bike and he’s a pretty strong rider for a kid, but it’s still a bit much for him to keep up on longer trips, so the scooter helps there. I expect in a couple of years or so it will break or he will outgrow it, but by then he should have no trouble keeping up on his own bike.
My children ride their own bike to school at age 6. I bought light-weight bikes (like Frogbikes or Woom, they keep a great resale value), and accepted that it takes a bit more time.
There's a certain joy in being propelled by your own muscles. But of course it depends on the distance.
My 11 and 13yo happily ride on the back of my cargo bike (Extracycle). Some of their braver, bike riding friends, do ask "Why don't you ride by yourself?"
I used to have a burley before the cargo. I think the cargo upright position makes it feel a bit more grown up. Plus, it is so fun.
The highschooler absolutely refuses to ride the back of the cargo, and insists on being driven by car. It takes so much longer with all the traffic, but he is willing to suffer to avoid looking uncool.
This is the case in Hong Kong when I visited my extended family who live there a decade ago.
Powered walkways/escalators/elevators everywhere, metro came every 2-3m, shopping/city offices/food courts connected to it all and you did a LOT of walking.
That was the closest to Trantor I'll ever be in my life. Sigh.
Can't understate the temporal dimension to owning a car. When dropping and picking up a kid at daycare, you want to move fast, if you work for a living.
I was recently obliged for the first time to drop my son off at school by car. It took 50% longer than cycling. I can't understate the temporal dimension of using a car. When dropping and picking up a kid at school...etc etc
You mean the long rows of cars queueing one constantly see outside US schools aren't representative? I'd say it takes far longer to pick someone up in a car than a bike..
If you're in the US, it's likely that you either don't drive by schools when they're letting out, or you live in a place that has the right combination of density and poor kids to limit the driver pick-ups. None of the 5 places across 4 states where I've lived in the last 10 years have avoided the pickup line phenomenon.
You seem to have missed that this comment chain focused on daycare to begin with, not school. There's no bus for that.
Daycares vary in size. You can opt for institutions that watch after 30 kids at a time, or ones run out of houses, but one way or another if both you and your spouse work for a living, you need someone to watch your kid, and it will probably require daycare and by extension commuting. If you live in the suburbs, you drive.
This depends very much on local circumstances. In our local daycare in Amsterdam, probably 3/4 of dropping and picking up was done by bike. Even at that level, using a car is often slower due to tightness of parking space.
Eh. For all my kids' daycare career I dropped them off by bike. Given the distance and route it was faster than driving. It really depends on the distances involved, road layout, cycling infrastructure, geography, weather, etc... Not many universals here.
About not killing someone if you ride after drinking, Obviously it is ver difficult for a bike to directly kill someone other than the rider (as opposed to a car, where this is very easy), but a drunk cyclist can still hurt other people directly or indirectly (causing a bigger accident by forcing someone to avoid them).
Even on a city free of private cars, you’d still share the road with pedestrians, other cyclists, and public transportation.
And even if you really don’t hurt someone else, it’s terribly hard on a bus driver if they kill someone, even when it wasn’t their fault (my wife saw this first hand when someone committed suicide by throwing themselves under a bus).
So no, if you drink, just walk, take public transportation, or get someone else to take you home, but don’t ride a bike.
I see lots of folks in the comments assuming what would happen when you bike drunk, seemingly not ever having done so themselves or seen it.
I live in a student city in the Netherlands (Groningen), where most students go out on the town by bike. It's really not much more dangerous than walking drunk. And it's very much preferable to driving drunk.
Thousands of students park their bikes in the city's central underground bike parking spots every weekend. I have never heard of someone dying because biking drunk. The biggest danger for any bike, drunk or not, remains the car.
This is also reflected in the enforcement of laws by the police. Although driving drunk, and being drunk in public is not allowed, fining cyclists for this is rarely enforced. Partially because the consequences are not too bad, and partially to make sure people don't drive home drunk instead to avoid a fine.
According to the Dutch central bureau of statistics in 2021, out of all deaths of cyclists 34% are due to losing consciousness, getting a foot stuck in the wheels, making a wrong movement, or due to bad road conditions and slipperiness. Out of this 34%, 72 % is over the age of 70. https://www.cbs.nl/nl-nl/nieuws/2022/37/meer-fietsdoden-na-e...
Hitting a pedestrian when riding a bike at 25 km/h has life threatening consequences for the pedestrian. Pedestrians do die when hit by bikers. Especially elderly which have worse awareness around them and are more fragile.
Where do you think cyclists are going 25 km/h while interacting with pedestrians? If it's on a shared pathway they should be going more slowly, if someone fails to do that that's as much their failure as if they hit someone with a car. And if they're on a road/cycle lane and they fail to respect a ped crossing, that's again the same.
I'm sure flying a plane with 300 people on board while being drunk is worse than driving a car drunk. But that doesn't mean it's now OK to drive under influence, because there is something even worse out there you could do while being drunk.
It depends on how you get hit and how do you land. Cars builders have pedestrian safety in mind as they get NCAP ratings for it. If you are lucky, maybe not that much damage. On the other hand full frontal collision with a bus is probably not good for you as there is nowhere for you slide or bounce off to lose some of the energy. Bike is similar to bus as there is no way for you to 'gently' (no 'soft' metal to bend or curves to steer you off it) lose some of the energy.
A friend of mine in college drove down a (very) long flight of stairs with his bike while being (very) drunk. He was severely injured and I very much doubt based on his recollection of what happened that he would a) have injured himself at all if he was on foot and b) even if he had fell on those stairs, he would have had much less serious injuries.
Sure, but you are comparing statistics for an entire country to a specific incident. Of course there's a non-0 risk, but when it's about traffic and safety it's about acceptable, not complete elimination of risk.
It's still illegal in the Netherlands to bike drunk. I'm sure this would be aggressively enforced in cities like Groningen if statistically there were major safety issues Thursdays and Friday nights with drunk cyclists, but this is not the case.
Not to say that your friend shouldn't have walked instead though. Drunkness is also a sliding scale. Luckily with cyclists the chances are way lower of murdering others.
Nice suggestion, but drunk-cycling is self-limiting in a way that drunk-cycling is not. Drunk-driving you are seated, and only need to be barely conscious. for drunk-cycling, you still must be sufficiently functional to balance on a bike, which puts a bit of a floor on the level of perceptual and cognitive function available, in addition to the far lower bike vs car ceiling on available momentum to do damage.
Not recommended, but cycling is a very substantially less-worse choice, absent getting another ride.
> which puts a bit of a floor on the level of perceptual and cognitive function available
Absolutely. I cannot believe people are actually equivocating on this. A drunk driver is hundreds of times more dangerous than a drunk cyclist, it's a categorical difference.
That's correct. Drunk drivers are frequently completely unconscious by the time they crash a car, and can have been for quite a distance down the road. Can't happen on a bike.
One could envision that last beer or shot not having taken full hold when the cyclist gets on the bike. One could also envision balance being sufficient but reaction time not.
Have I crashed my bike at the bottom of a hill while drunk? Yes, yes I have.
I think "self-limiting" is a key point here. People who are moderately drunk are not very dangerous, and people who are very drunk are just not capable of cycling - it requires a certain degree of coordination.
I cannot believe this is getting downvoted. The reasons cars are inherently dangerous is 99% because they are heavy and fast. Everything we build around that (traffic rules, dedicated lanes, buffer spaces, ...) is purely to deal with this fundamental physical reality.
With great power comes great responsibility. Whether you take that perspective in Joules, Watts, Newtons, kg.m/s, the conclusions are roughly the same. Drivers needs to be hundreds of times more responsible than cyclists or walkers.
“The preferred walking speed is the speed at which humans or animals choose to walk. Many people tend to walk at about 1.42 metres per second (5.1 km/h; 3.2 mph; 4.7 ft/s).”
“The results show teenagers walk at an average speed of 1.45 m/s, young adults walk at an average speed of 1.55 m/s, middle age pedestrians walk at a speed of 1.45 m/s, older pedestrians walk at speed of 1.09 m/s, and elderly or physically disabled pedestrians walk at a speed of 1.04 m/s.”
5km/hour is about 1.4m/s; the fastest of these speeds is 5.6 km/hour.
Initial kinetic energy is not the right physical quantity to look at. Most of that kinetic energy will remain in the car/bike/…, i.e. it doesn't tell you much about how much energy will get transferred to the victim – it merely gives you a bound from above.
No. The kinetic energy of the car/bike/… doesn't tell you anything because you don't know how much energy gets transferred to the victim until you have applied momentum conservation to the elastic/inelastic problem. So, the right approach would be (in this order): Calculate momenta, calculate how much momentum gets transferred to the victim via momentum conservation, deduce the resulting change (increase) in kinetic energy of the victim. This kinetic energy will be converted into heat (= damage/injuries) in one way or another, so it's the relevant physical quantity for our considerations.
Finally, in case of an inelastic problem (likely with cars, not so likely with bikes or people), you also need to consider the energy loss during momentum transfer. Once again, this energy will become heat (= do damage), so it adds to the aforementioned increase in kinetic energy when we're interested in how much damage will be done.
The argument above was that you can still hurt a bus driver psychologically by having them kill you. So it doesn't really matter that an ebike is heavier than walking.
The argument above was that you can still hurt a bus driver psychologically by having them kill you. So it doesn't really matter that an ebike is heavier.
Literally just being drunk enough can end up in you being dead or maimed.
From a harm reduction perspective, Drunk Driving -> Drunk Bicycling feels like it reduces the capacity for damage roughly proportionally to Drunk Bicycling -> Drunk Walking. At a critical level, the speeds you can comfortably achieve are reduced at each step, thereby increasing the amount of reaction time available to avoid an incident, reducing the ramifications of an error, and reducing the amount of damage your body has the capacity to do (by nature of the amount of kinetic energy you are attempting to control).
Not sure if this is an example of anti-fragility, but it made me think of that. there's def something diff about bikes for this. Get too drunk as a cyclist and you remove yourself from the situation in relatively safe way, just by not being able to stay in control :)
That's true, but most fatal car crashes happen for people who are very drunk https://crashstats.nhtsa.dot.gov/Api/Public/ViewPublication/... reports that in the US, of the 2019 crashes of drivers who had a BAC above .01, 68% had BACs of .15 or higher (and about half were .20 or higher). That's a group that would have a pretty hard time riding a bike at high enough speed to do much damage. None of this is to say that biking while drunk is a good idea. It probably at least triples your likelyhood of being hit and killed by a car. Defensive riding is one of the things I would expect to be significantly impaired by relatively little alcohol, and it's probably dark out which makes everything riskier.
We a friend do this, they didn't hurt anyone but themselves, and not too badly. And they did hit their head when they fell off , but were wearing a helmet (thus becoming a advocate for helmets..). Still pretty scraped up.
It's a bad idea, but orders of magnitude less of a bad idea than drunk driving. People ditching cars means less drunk driving (even if it means more drunk cycling), as well as less road deaths in general. That can only be a good thing.
If you kill yourself while cycling then you were almost certainly hit by a car, which is probably more likely if you are drunk cycling. But this is also the fault of bad cycling infrastructure and arguably the driver who cannot avoid another road user.
Pretty sure it’s illegal to operate any kind of vehicle on a public street while over the limit in the US. No different than a car. Except, if you get in a wreck you’re almost surely dead.
I once had an office in an only somewhat renovated area of mill buildings in an old mill town in New England. One building always had a number of down at the heels looking bicycles parked outside. Eventually I found out it was an addiction rehab.
There was no public transport in the area. I'd rather have them getting to rehab on a bike than not going at all.
Correction: it's illegal to bike when very drunk. In the moderately drunk range, German law is surprisingly reasonable in acknowledging that drunk driving would have been much worse.
Germany has a BAC threshold where acting stupid while being slightly tipsy is considered worse than acting stupid while being perfectly sober and that is indeed quite low (0.3). This entry level threshold does not distinguish between car and bike at all (pedestrians are fine). That level basically means "go for it, but at your own risk, and if someone else fucks up, you are partially responsible because might very well have have saved them if you had not been drinking".
But the "folk wisdom" of drivers completely ignores that threshold and only considers the next stage relevant (BAC 0.5+, used to be 0.8) and this only applies to motor vehicles. For cyclists, the next threshold does not happen before BAC 1.6. I suppose that wouldn't exactly be allowed in the UK either?
> Not in Sweden and we have less accidents than Germany.
I don't think you got the memo where everyone seems to think getting blind drunk and then getting on an electric scooter is totally ok "in Sweden".
I've had a few near-misses myself with crazy drunk riders on pedestrian streets in central Stockholm; I once interviewed a job-candidate with a cut-up face who laughingly told us he'd crashed a scooter with two(!) friends on the back after a drink night; a friend of mine smashed their hip after a night drinking and then jumping on a scooter.
The rules may be there. The actual reality is different.
You can not be convicted for drunk cycling, but you can still be stopped for recklesness in traffic. Same goes for e-scooters. As long as you do not cause problems there is no legal or social taboo.
However, there's a good incentive to not hit pedestrians. In collisions with pedestrians, cyclists often get more injured and surprisingly, pedestrians are more likely to be to blame for the collision (e.g. stepping into a road or cycle lane without looking).
I'm drunk biking and thought about if I should stop.
But I have never hear about anyone having an accident related to drunk biking. In theory I could run head first into oncoming biker. But I never felt being that drunk in a way that would lose control. That would also make it illegal where I live.
Very similar impressions after years of biking (and having switched to an E-bike about 2 years ago).
I bike year-round in Warsaw, Poland, even though most people consider winter to be "off-season". Don't really understand why — they do go skiing after all, so cold must not be the problem? The only days I don't bike is when it's raining heavily or when it's really slippery (lots of snow, freshly frozen sleet, etc).
There are days when I don't ride a bike, and on these days I can really tell the difference: I feel much worse.
I found that what I miss when switching to a car is the sense of freedom: on a bike, you can stop pretty much anywhere, while in a car you need to follow the road in the traffic and are generally stuck. No way to stop quickly, take a phone call, or admire the pretty passers-by.
Also, switching to an E-bike was a great idea: it doesn't take away the exercise (as most people tend to think), it just makes biking more pleasant and extends the max distance I can go. And in summertime I can set the assist to max and not worry about arriving all sweaty.
If you live in a city, I'd highly recommend getting a city E-bike. Not a mountain bike. A city bike with proper mudguards, upright posture, and a large basket in front. Don't be that guy in lycra pants on a mountain bike, with a backpack on his (sweaty) back, taking the full additional weight of the backpack on the narrow seat, and with a mud stripe on his back. Enjoy life!
Apart from the air quality, Warsaw is great for cycling. It ain't hilly and there's enough bike lanes. Also Veturilo is pretty good with its dense network, especially in Spring before the bikes start breaking :)
Agreed about terrible air quality in winter. As to "great for cycling", I think it has a long way to go — there aren't that many bike lanes and there are parts of the city which are split by huge car-only high-traffic moats. But it isn't terrible either!
As the Dutch like to say: there is no such thing as bad cycling weather, only bad cycling clothes.
I would strongly recommond a pair of water/wind proof trousers to go over your regular trousers, if you don't already have some. This has lead to a much more pleasant riding experience, especially in winter. They aren't very practical on a regular bike as they make you uncomfortably hot, but on an e-bike, it's much less of a worry.
>> As the Dutch like to say: there is no such thing as bad cycling weather, only bad cycling clothes.
Easy to say in a country famously flat, small, and with a relatively narrow weather window. I welcome any Dutch person to attempt a 15+km commute during a rocky mountain winter. I know of driveways in US/Canada with more vertical than any Dutch commute.
The trick is to build your towns and cities such that 15km is longer than most people would need to commute by bike, except perhaps as part of a bike->transit mixed-mode commute.
There are places with wintry weather that are good for biking! Oulu comes to mind
> if the weather is too bad to bike safely in, it's probably too bad to drive safely in.
I am sceptical of this assertion. For starters, if you have poor traction in a car you can always slow down, and the risk you face is sliding. In a bike, you need to have a minimum speed to actually bike, otherwise you can't stay upright. And your failure case is no longer sliding, but it's toppling over.
To say nothing of what happens if you throw wind into the mix.
You can calculate the approximate speed a vehicle will start aquaplaning at based the vehicles tire pressure (V = 10.35*sqrt(psi) ) [1]. A car tire is usually inflated to around 30-35 psi, which give an aquaplaning speed of about 61mph.
A road bike tire is inflated to 80-120psi which give an aquaplaning speed of about 92mph.
A hybrid tire is inflated to 40-70psi, which gives an aquaplaning speed of about 65mph.
Bikes aren't know for traveling above 60mph, so wet roads don't pose much of a problem for bikes. Their tire pressure is so high compared to their normal speeds, that an unassisted human would really struggle to make a bike aquaplane. Additionally bikes can easily be ridden stably at walking speed. Unless you're riding on ice, going slower simply doesn't pose a problem.
As a result slipping on bike, because you can't cycle slow enough, just isn't a concern. In the only situations where it might be a problem, simply walking would be challenging, and driving would be idiotic.
While interesting, this is almost completely irrelevant to bikes: The problem is not primarily water but wet ice or fresh snow.
Wet ice is especially dangerous because it can be pretty much invisible and you can transition directly from normal road surface to essentialy ZERO steering ability (and immediate crash if you initiate a turn or anything). There is pretty much no avoiding occasional crashes from this, the only way is to leave the bike at home when conditions are wet and close to freezing.
Ok, fine. But the argument above it that somehow these issues affect bikes, but not cars. Last I checked black-ice is just as much of a problem for cars.
And what about everyone else? Going sliding on a bike isn’t great, but it’s unlikely your bikes gonna put it self through the front of a shop and kill someone.
Your car on the other hand, you lose control of that, and bystanders are in real trouble. Not to mention there’s plenty of incidents everyday of people loosing control of their car because they’re not driving to the condition (presumably because the big metal box makes them feel much safer than they should) and killing themselves and others.
Much less likely that a bike rider is going to ignore the prevailing conditions and injure themselves or others, and if they do, the impact is substantially lower. Adding more mass and speed to an out of control situation never improves the outcomes.
I cycle in areas with ice and snow have done so all my life, all I do is lower my speed and my saddle. That means when there is ice I can always use my feets. This is more stable than walking, in wintertime I will stop and help pedestrians over vast swaths of ice.
I have managed to skid out once and that was with studded tires.
I’ve fallen off my bike in ice. I’ve also skidded in a car on ice.
While the fall on the bike hurt me more, I can easily see how much more dangerous the situation in my car was. Blind luck saved me (and the car in front) that day.
The worst weather when riding a bike is the wind (trust me: I live in the Arctic circle, we have snow or black ice on the road half the year and it’s routinely -25ºC; bikes handle both fine).
The Netherlands has more wind than anywhere on land. It can be literally impossible to bike against the wind without the local training when it’s strong enough. If they can do that, I doubt a mountain pass would scare them.
And it rains, a lot. Which is fine if it’s vertical and you have a rain coat, but Dutch people made windmills, the Netherlands and horizontal rain. No coat can protect you from that.
The weather band is indeed narrow, but half of that band is terrible.
I did a fair amount of winter biking in Boston. Good clothes really help. For me wool socks really help.
You do tend to warm up when riding a bike (pedal assist bikes might take longer). For me the issue is fingers, but with good gloves and a less than 45 minutes ride for me it was be ok. Ice and wind are issues too. But taking it slow and my glasses help a bit. The snow when plowed makes the roads narrower which can be an issue.
I always wondered why there were so many outdoor stores in the City.
Minneapolis is one of the top US cities for cycling mode share. You can bike in snow+ice with proper studded tires. With a fat bike, you'll do better than any car or truck in deep snow.
It's implied, but to be clear: ebikes make it comfortable to ride with 4+ inch tires for absurd distances. An ebike with studded fat tires will make you feel like Legolas in LoTR.
The quick takeaways are that there are cities in Finland that are colder than any Canadian city where 50% of the kids rides bikes to school. Also, a test project in Montreal gave a bike path a dedicated snow removal budget and ridership was up 30% in one year.
I'm not from Netherlands. What I have learned biking in snow blizzard is that it is good to have gloves and glasses. Everything else is just getting used to things.
I have a close friend who lives in Edinburgh (Scotland) who has an electric cargo bike. Edinburgh is full of very steep roads, lots of them cobbles rather than tarmac. It's also cold and wet in the winter (although nowhere near as snowy as the rockies).
The electric cargo bike works well there - the hills make electric an absolute necessity, but once you've done that it works very well.
How many people live in the Rockies though? And how many live in relatively flat cities. You're not wrong I just think that this is akin to saying EVs aren't practical in the US because of Alaskan winters.
On a grand scale, sure, but even those places aren't necessarily super hilly. There's a reason towns and cities exist mostly on relatively flat terrain.
I would add boots that are high enough that there is no gap between the rain pants and the shoe. An old pair of "hiking" boots did the job for me. Riding through a puddle and getting your socks even mildly wet feels terrible.
> As the Dutch like to say: there is no such thing as bad cycling weather, only bad cycling clothes.
The Dutch also like to drive, with 588 cars per 1000 people, higher than Denmark, Ireland, Sweden etc, and more miles per person than France, Spain, Italy, Poland, and 14% higher than the EU average
Not sure where your stats are from, but they probably include Dutch people driving abroad: they can easily take the train and bike anywhere in their own country, so I suspect most of their driving is to go on holiday in Europe. They are famous for being a small country with surprisingly large number of caravans near every beach in Europe.
Memphis is full of underutilized 4 lane roads--remove 2 lanes and add a bike path + trees. The difficulty is that unless there is a bike network, it will get limited utilization. Need to build out a way to get places and people will use it.
It’s easy enough that children can do it. Cycling on hard-packed snow is not particularly hard, less so than sand, I’d say comparable to gravel. Ice is a problem.
Convenience is relative. Sure, cycling in winter requires a good pair of mittens, and a warm hat, but all in all, it seems that a lot of people prefer it in Oulu over driving.
And the thing here is that it’s not the weather that’s stopping people from cycling. It’s shitty maintenance of the cycling network. Slush and ice, being forced into the same space as cars.
And that’s the newsworthy part - how does Oulu manage to maintain a cycling network in winter where most other cities fail. The answers include things such as priorities, dedication, investment. Oulu dedicates resources to the problem. Most towns don’t because “no one cycles in winter” - which then becomes a self-reinforcing prophecy.
It's fine as long as bike paths are physically separated from cars and are maintained to the same standard as roads. My college had a network of pedestrian/bike paths that they plowed in the winter, and I and many others had no problem biking year-round.
There's a difference between riding on hard pack with a bike, and driving a car over it. I have no idea why you think an experiment with hard-pack snow on automotive roads is in anyway indicative of what works on cycle lanes.
In Reykjavik they used sand at first because pedestrians prefer that but that is pretty dangerous for cycling so they use salt on designated cycling paths and sand everywhere else.
It depends.. salt works down to -18C on cycle paths as long as you maintain it snow free and do not have big puddles of water. Brushing the snow away down to the asphalt is my preferred surface condition for cycling.
Amazingly, there is a city almost as dominated by cyclists in Finland (don't remember how it's called atm). The city is plowing and de-icing all the bike paths on regular basis. They're also well-lit, as people's commutes during winter months are often in the dark.
It’s not just Oulu, though: any city with students in the North has a lot of bikes, Umeå in Sweden has 40k students almost all on bikes; Vaasa (opposite Umeå, in Finland) also has a lot of bikes. Uppsala, Stockholm, Malmö, Göteborg, Eppo, all have a lot of bikes—and just as many in winter and summer.
Another interesting fact is that at least some of the cycle lane markings are projected rather than painted because otherwise they would be covered by the snow.
Not that often anymore (most winters there's at most one or two weeks with snow cover), but when it does, in many municipalities cycling paths get priority for snow removal.
Don't have to worry about theft?! Wow, Europe must be so different than North America. I'm much more worried about my biker being stolen (has happened about a dozen times in my life) than my car. If the former happens you get absolutely zero support, while if the latter happens the police will actually try to do something.
I have a nice ebike I use daily in Europe, and I'm also much more worried about getting it robbed than my car.
I only park it in fairly secure locations if it's for more than a few hours (ie. not in the street), and I put 2 of the most secure bike locks I could find, 1 wheel lock, secure bolts on wheels and saddle, and light locks on big accessories like the child seat. Plus an Airtag hidden somewhere.
Indeed. Though to be fair, having a bike is so much cheaper than a car that even if it did get stolen it'd still be cheaper to replace it than run a car.
A year of public transit in my city costs $1200, which is commensurate with the most I've spent on a commuter bike. I've had 7 bikes stolen in a quarter century of commuting, and I feel like I'm getting a pretty great deal when it comes to transport costs.
bike thefts happen in the Netherland (once I saw a 50+ year old guy walking around inspecting bikes in a student neighbourhood + multiple bike thefts in that area). Also in Bulgaria where I am from :) but I can't say where it happens more or what the chances are.
Not really. I've never had one of mine stolen, despite usually using a fairly crappy lock.
The trick is to have a bike which stands out. If you can recognize your individual bike from across the street, people won't steal it. Bonus points if it looks crappy despite being well-maintained. Beyond that it is mainly a matter of parking in bike garages with cameras where possible, and using a chain lock to fix it to an immovable object otherwise.
> If the former happens you get absolutely zero support, while if the latter happens the police will actually try to do something.
The sad thing here is that it's not even triaging by property damage. Your €1000 fifth hand car will get more police attention if stolen than a €3000 ebike.
lol yeah. I live in a city where practically nobody bikes, and bikes get stolen frequently. Nowhere near as bad though than European city.
Bike theft is so rampant. It's just so easy, throw it in a truck, or pedal away with it. Since I live in a redneck place, I ride a step-through woman bike in pastel color now, after two previous ones got stolen, and that genuinely helps. People may make snarky comments, but the bike has remained untouched for a decade now.
Some time ago I was surprised how fast these e-bikes are compared to my motorcycle. In Belgium we have plenty of roads where bikes can go but not cars & motorcycles.
One morning I overtook a colleague on an e-bike (max 45km/h) with my motorcycle. A few streets later I overtook him again, since he took a shortcut that I was not allowed to take.
A bit later I overtook him again, since I had a red light and he again took a shortcut.
Are you sure your friend was actually allowed to take that shortcut with an e-bike going 45 km/h?
AFAIK, these are considered "light motorbikes" (or something) and require the same paperwork (aside from an "easier" license) and gear as regular motorbikes.
More importantly, they are specifically not bikes and aren't allowed to ride on bike lanes any more than a fat liter+ bike is.
You are correct, but for those shortcuts it was allowed.
There is however a grey zone when going on bicycle lanes next to the rivers, because you can go max 30km/h there. But when nobody is there, I'm sure most e-bikes just go max speed.
Are you sure your friend was actually allowed to take that shortcut with an e-bike going 45 km/h?
If it looks like a bike and you ride it like a bike, you're not going to have any problems riding it where bikes are allowed. It sounds like you envision this person riding at absolutely maximum possible speed at all times.
How many times have you hit someone while riding a bicycle? I never have.
How much harm do you suppose it would do, leading to "massive legal trouble"?
Incidentally, 45kmh is 28mph, which I was just barely able to maintain on level ground on my road bicycle when I was fit. The "speed pedelecs" laws seem a bit silly rather than simply enforcing speed limits and penalizing reckless behavior.
>>How many times have you hit someone while riding a bicycle? I never have.
I suppose I should stop paying for car insurance then, since I never had an accident either. Or maybe more accurate example is that I shouldn't worry about the safety of my car, since I never actually hit anyone with it.
>>How much harm do you suppose it would do, leading to "massive legal trouble"?
There was a cyclist in london recently who ran into a woman on his modified bicycle, she tripped, hit her head on the pavement and died - he was subsequently found guilty of manslaughter and sentenced to prison for many years.
You could run into someone at 5mph, they could hit their head on something and die. There is another case exactly like this going on where a person hit their head on a bollard and left him permanently disabled for life.
The entire point is that if you are on a path specifically forbidden for cycles, and an accident happens while you are cycling, you will be found guilty and will have to face consequences, most likely much harsher than if you weren't doing something forbidden.
I suppose I should stop paying for car insurance then, since I never had an accident either.
Ah, yes, because cars and bikes represent totally comparable risks to others.
Now you can go cite some more wildly improbable anecdotes, notable entirely because of how exceptional they are, as a response. I'll be over here looking at the 1.3 million people who die in car accidents around the world and not caring about e-bikes at all.
>>Ah, yes, because cars and bikes represent totally comparable risks to others.
The point is that "I don't see a point in doing X because X has never happened to me" is not a good argument.
Let's try a better comparison then - maybe I should cancel my cycling liability insurance, because I never hit anyone with my bike then?
>>I'll be over here looking at the 1.3 million people who die in car accidents around the world and not caring about e-bikes at all.
I don't see how that's relevant to what I said - you will be punished more harshly if you cycle where you shouldn't. The number of people who die in car accidents bears no relation.
I've seen someone on one of those e-scooters going like 40km/h. It looked terrifying. I'd be worried doing that much on bicycle but on tiny scooter wheels anything bad and you're catapulted into pavement.
I have some experience with these and 40km/h (just under 25mph) is roughly half what some will do [0][1] and with full-suspension you wouldn't necessary be catapulted with a small bump.
But when going above bicycle speeds, I do tend to wear increased safety gear. My biggest concern is always being t-boned by a car.
1 car/household is still entirely feasible with children (and the norm for many lower-class in Europe).
We live with 1 child and no car and it's been working fine thus far. You have to be careful about where you live and work though, but I'd say the added quality of life of living car-free (in a car-free city) is all worth it.
I live in London. We have three kids, no car and an electric cargo bike which they can all fit in. It's brilliant and all we need for getting around London. I've also used it for picking up furniture and building materials - such a versatile vehicle and much more enjoyable to use than a car.
Aren't you wary that the bike doesn't offer almost any protection at all when an accident happens? Something that causes minor or no damage when inside a car can easily cause serious injury on even death when on a bike.
- Planning routes that avoid particularly risky roads or junctions and take advantage of separated bike lanes where possible. This is trivial in a city as there's hundreds of possible routes between two places.
- A cargo bike itself is a much larger and more visible presence on the road than a regular bike. That combined with the visible children on board usually means motorists do a better job of staying clear than they do when I'm on a regular bike.
- Staying well clear of HGVs in ALL circumstances. Once you start cycling in a way where you treat any HGV as imminent death on wheels, you notice how many potentially dangerous situations you avoid.
More generally, I find cycling in London feels quite safe. This is because drivers in London are mostly used to cyclists and generally act appropriately around them. Also traffic speeds are generally 20mph or less.
The problem is not what happens to a bike or a car in a comparable accident. The problem is that some car drivers somehow believe that bikes don’t belong on the road.
They display two very distinct and easy to notice behaviour:
1. They deny bike presence on the road: They refuse to yield, don’t check their mirror, and run them over as if the bike is not there. When you point out the discrepancy, they just affirm that cyclists have to yield to more important traffic no matter what the condition.
Another symptom of that is drivers thinking that bikes should not be on the road and harassing them with honks, and revving their engine. When they pass them, or on-line, they loudly claim that bikes are not allowed on the road or have a (non-existent) obligation to move away of a far more important car drivers threatens them. In that process, they speed (which is illegal), pass dangerously (also illegal) and threaten people with bodily harm (again, illegal). Retraining, license ban and jail sentences are easy ways to get dangerous people like that to not put people’s lives in danger.
A third symptom is that they claim that “no one” is using bike infrastructure (in spite of evidence like what we see in London) because they refuse to see it. They see no issue with routinely parking on bike lanes or blocking bike-only passages.
This complete denial of another humanity is hard to imagine if you haven’t witnessed it, but it’s very common.
2. They have a cop-out of thinking that bikes are “dangerous” because they project their own dangerous and unhealthy driving habits as “normal” and impossible to modify——denying that those habits mean they break the law in several ways. Crash don’t just happen: drivers choose to not pay attention. Actually supportive drivers are not pretending they care: they are enthusiastic about cycling because when they are around bikes, drivers don’t honk, threaten or put cyclists’ lives in danger. And they can’t imagine that anyone would.
It’s very simple for cyclists to be safe: drivers should look at them and thing “This is a human, going from somewhere to somewhere else, like me. I should not kill them.” If they don’t, the cyclist is not the one in danger: the driver is.
Yes. But that doesn't change the fact that given current reality the safety of moving in a car is higher than when using a bike. How it could and should be is a different matter.
How is looking at reality and making choices that based on that analysis are best for the safety of you and your family self-defeating? You're putting activism into the mix and if you're willing to put more risk on yourself and/or your family to prove a point then it is your choice to do so.
It's not "activism" or "proving a point", it's the prisoner's dilemma. You maximize the global reward (fewest accidents) by putting yourself on the most risky position.
As I state in a sibling above this is not the case it is just how we think as humans. You do a lot more harm to you kids and family by driving them in a car.
No so clear cut. I almost every city in the world cycling rather than driving will increase your life expectancy. Even when factoring in risks associated with not moving around inside a 1 ton metal box.
If you live within London transport zone 1, it's quite likely to be a zero-car household, simply because of the difficulty in keeping the car somewhere.
That doesn't quite make sense, "it's difficult to avoid having a car because you can't store it"? Can you elaborate? I'm interested what life is like in these cities that charge drivers so as to reduce cars in the road.
I think you misread GP: he's saying that in inner London it's difficult to have a car, not to avoid having one, mostly because parking space is very limited.
What exactly are you interested in, about life such cities? I live in Amsterdam, haven't owned a car for over a decade (which doesn't mean that I never drive one), and haven't really missed it (even with a primary school aged child).
Sorry, just saw this. I do some sports that are 50 miles from the city, and there's no public transportation, not even any private transportation. Skiing is one such activity, but hiking and camping in the summer time. I do recognize that I'm using energy to do these things. I'd love to take a bus. Actually in my west coast city, during the summer they have bus service to a number of area hiking trails, within 10 miles of the city. But these other farther away activities are out of that reach.
It's expensive to have a car in central London because of the cost of parking. It has basically been unbundled from housing; garages sell for upwards of £100k, guaranteed parking spaces somewhat less, on-street parking is either banned, charged for, or very heavily competed over.
As a resident you get a 90% discount on the congestion charge, so driving it will cost you £1.50 per day. I'm not quite sure whether that applies to parked cars as well.
Car parking for residents is heavily subsidised by London councils, a policy which encourages car ownership. Residential parking permits are very cheap (often as little as £100 or so for a YEAR of parking), where as outsiders coming in to park will be charged a small fortune. [1]
This system discourages schemes that could reduce car ownership, like car sharing, car rentals, etc, because residential parking permits must be linked to a particular plate number.
[1] It's true that some newer housing developments have been approved on a "no parking" basis, which means if you live in that building you can't apply for a parking permit. But these developments are still the exception, not the rule.
Congestion charge makes car ownership easier in that area it is pretty cash anyways. The land is so valuable that you rather fit other things than cars there, e.g. apparments with even more people.
From my limited knowledge and viewpoint, there is a generational divide, a regional divide, and a class divide. When everything is averaged though, the household income is still the strongest indicator of how many cars you own, and most national statistics prove it.
True, class divide is a real factor: The upper class doesn't own cats (aside from "fun" cars for collecting) but leases them.
Somewhat more serious: Especially here in Germany there is a strong incentive to give cars as a job benefit instead of a pay rises as there is less social insurance to be paid. Thus there is a strong motivation for anybody in a well paying job to get a car. This directly leads to that class divide.
Growing up my family was mostly a one-car family. I was homeschooled so that made it a lot easier since nobody had to pick me up at school, and my mom was stay-at-home. I totally understand why a public schooled family where both parents work might need two cars though. It would be a pain to drop your kids off at school, drop your spouse off at work, THEN head on to work and then pick them all up at the end of the day when traffic is clogged.
It depends pretty heavily on family situations and all
Cars are a poor mans choice in Europe you only have to have a car if you are really poor. Europe is more mixed economicaly so this isn't true everywhere. Sure if you are rich you are also more likely to make life choices that make car ownership "a must", when you can buy cars like toothpicks it does not really matter.
Are you locking your bike to something angle grinder resistant when out and about?
The last bike I had stolen was from an underground bike store, behind two armoured locked doors and locked to a permanent bike-rack embedded in concrete. Thieves didn't cut a single lock, instead they cut all the bike-racks and emptied the place.
As with nearly all security, nothing is perfect. You are just raising the bar high enough to lower risk to an acceptable level. Cutting an entire row of racks and hauling off all the bikes is a bigger, noisier, longer job, requiring more coordination, than taking one. It presents more risk to the thieves themselves, which means there are going to be fewer thieves willing or able to take it on.
The concern I have (in NYC FWIW) is that someone will see they can’t steal the bike and will instead just trash the thing while it’s still locked. Maybe I’m too pessimistic.
That's pretty much my experience in the city where I used to live. I'd regularly pass bikes securly locked to some post or other but with the front wheel stoved in and bent. I always assumed a would-be thief had done it in a fit of pique, after failing to get the lock open.
These days it seems worth it to get a folding bike. I am currently trying to get one myself so I don't have to worry about it getting stolen OR trashed. I just fold it up and take it inside where nobody will touch it
My car is insured, and I'm not sure how you would steal it given that when I lost my key to a cheap car from the 1990s about 15 years ago it cost a fortune to get a new key made which would actually start the engine thanks to the immobilizer. The majority of car thefts are stealing the keys.
It absolutely amazes me that places like Amsterdam, London, etc build so much safe bike infrastructure when the weather is so dreary. And despite the weather, of course people will use it because it feels great and is so fast!
And yet, here we have California (especially LA) with the best cycling weather but barely any safe cycling routes. LA is laughably bad with tons of "bike routes" that are just the rightmost car lane shared with bicycles.
In Scandinavia the attitude is "there's no bad weather, only bad clothing" and going outside and feeling the seasons change is awesome. I find it kind of funny when people in Florida or California will have all this great weather but then end up spending so much time in indoor climate controlled environments from their house to their car to their office.
The weather in the Northern Europe really doesn't stop you from being outside any more than the weather elsewhere does (counting forest fires and hurricanes as things that'll keep you indoors).
it's one of our greatest tragedies in the U.S. that the region most suited for walking/cycling/"active transit" is also the region completely obsessed with appearances and specifically with appearing like you just stepped out of the makeup trailer and onto the set for each scene. I honestly think that the social faux paux of looking like you might have been exercising, or exposed to wind, or the hair and clothing style limitations imposed by arriving via bicycle are major factors for SoCal, moreso than in many other parts of the country and world.
For ~6 years my wife and I lived in Santa Barbara without owning a car. We'd occasionally rent one to get out of town - there were a couple times I left my bike locked up at the airport for a long weekend.
I used to fantasize about making a documentary called "the disappearing bike" where you would video somebody cycling around town but every time the bike lane disappeared and then reappeared a quarter mile later, you'd show them just gliding across the street without their bicycle.
Even in SB, which has a much more chill attitude on the roads than anything south of Thousand Oaks (as you head into the LA metro area), some drivers would be bizarrely unsympathetic to the fact that you were traversing a short strip with no bike line in order to connect two bike lanes, with reactions ranging from honking, yelling, revving the engine to loudly pass, "buzzing" you by passing much too close, ... but I think it generally follows that rule that most of us are kind and some small constant percentage (5? 10%?) of the world is jerks.
I live in big-ish EU city (Warsaw, Hamburg/Glasgow level of population) and have been cycling for 10+ years, moved to car for various unrelated reasons.
But car commute is still faster. I can get from home to work in ~35 minutes at lower traffic (say 10AM, blessed be flexible work hours) and in MAX hour in more of a rush traffic. Best time by bicycle is around 1h10m. I do park at work building so that's 5-10 minutes of looking for parking saved there. Technically I can get there by 50 min if I get with bike to metro but that's pretty much possible only on off hours.
It's definitely pretty nice way to keep in shape, now with more remote work I just use the time saved to do some cycling. Did it pretty much "from when it stopped snowing to when it started", 20km a day (I went via metro in the morning, came back cycling, just didn't wanted to do all the mess with arriving sweaty and having shower at work every day), including few in pouring rain at near-zero 0C which was.. experience and I have now learned to stop shivering by force of will alone.
Thought I'd get less fat but it didn't work, tho I did get more healthy overall. Diet is the key in the end.
> - somewhat dangerous when the infrastructure is lacking.
Yeah I try to not share any road with cars as much as I could. For 10 years I don't think I had a day where I didn't saw some car doing something sketchy or just driver not paying attention. Not that cyclists were holy here just... much less potential for damage.
> - you will not kill someone if you ride after a night drinking;
It takes longer than continuous biking in a city would make one think, for the same reason driving does: you have to stop at red lights, yield, wait in traffic.
Living in a small city (or large town may be a more accurate way to put it) with lots of greenways, I feel like I get the best of both worlds. Before my office re-located I could go 6 miles (~9.5 km) to/from work on a bike in between or around corporate campuses and subdivisions and only deal with a few intersections, while in a car I'd have to deal with traffic and traffic lights regularly most of the way.
Bakfiets[1][2] FTW!! I lived with my two young (under 10) children in Amsterdam for one year without car relying 90% on Bakfiets and occasional Uber rides. After a brief period of teething issues it worked out perfect, even in winters/rains. I used the non-e-bike version as I didn't want to splurge on Urbanarrow about which I kept hearing raving reviews.
I live in Berlin, within the Ring (for those familiar with the city). I don't own a car, I have multiple carsharing subscriptions and I have two children, 1 and 4. We have a cargo bike to move them around and do groceries, almost in any weather (as long as it doesn't rain), otherwise we have public transport as a backup.
It absolutely is more safe to put a child in a car in a car seat than to put them on your bike. I wouldn’t even do that outside a city, on a quiet paved bike path.
The Berlin S-Bahn Ring is a looping railway around the city center. It excludes some higher density areas in the north of the city and includes some less populated areas in the south of the city, but being inside the ring is the most accepted benchmark of living in the city core.
Biking and drinking (in excess) — probably not the world’s best combo in general, but on the bright side it is just your own life at risk, and there’s a built-in coordination challenge, so I guess it isn’t possible to get going while truly hammered!
Eh what? You can definitely kill someone with your bike. Also if you kill yourself in traffic you will raise the risk of traffic related deaths for the responders. Many places in the world riding a bike drunk is as illegal as driving a car drunk.
> Many places in the world riding a bike drunk is as illegal as driving a car drunk.
Even if you assume the the risks outlined in your comment as relatively high likelihood (which I don't), it still makes 0 sense to think it's anywhere near as serious as driving drunk.
Riding a bike drunk is asocial and a danger to yourself and others. You might like to think of it as less serious, just like people thought of drunk driving as okay if you were careful. It's a judgment call you make, but it is objectively more dangerous than when you are sober.
All motion is more dangerous while drunk, but how drunk you are matters, how fast you're going matters, and how dense traffic is matters. I'm not convinced of how much more dangerous biking is while mildly drunk than walking, or biking very slowly while very drunk, especially at night when almost no one is walking.
It‘s definitely possible and happens regularly. But statistically speaking, it‘s a freak accident compared to car vs. pedestrian. It‘s orders of magnitude less likely.
What is your point then, if not “cycling drunk is as likely to kill somebody else as driving drunk?” If it is “it’s technically possible to kill somebody cycling drunk” - then yes, I concede the point. But it’s not a useful point in this discussion.
In the Netherlands driving a bike under influence is technically illegal. But nobody gets caught for it, and it's the much preferred alternative to drinking & driving.
I live in NYC and love being car free. But with two kids that within a few years will be attending two different schools the pull of car ownership gets stronger and stronger. It’s depressing, especially as there is so much the city could do to encourage bikers but never does.
It's weird dissonance, here in rural village I cycled a lot to school during reasonable weather (from like age of 8, around ~10km), and outside of that school bus. Of course not really a option in unsafe spaces or younger kids.
I'd add to your list: No stress of driving in traffic. Imagine your ride home is pleasant personal time and exercise in the fresh air, not cars honking in a standstill in traffic. You feel better after riding.
I've had bike shops apologize for a $20 charge. :D They are thinking in a different context; I'm comparing that to my alternative, a car and its repair bills.
> significantly faster if parking is taken into account for most trips. The bike is faster for any < 10 km / 7 mi trip;
I don't think many people realize it: It's far more practical and efficient to ride. When you start doing it, driving (those distances) becomes frustrating and tedious, an odd choice given one that's faster, cheaper, and much better in all the other ways you listed.
At an easy pace, a bicycle goes ~16 km/hr (10 mi/hr). Especially in a dense city, think what's within 5-10 miles of you. Imagine very little traffic and then parking for free, without looking for a spot, within probably 20m of the door (depending on the city and bike parking rules).
> about €300/month in additional disposable income
And how about the cost of the bicycle? $250-600 for a good one, used or new. I own several for different purposes, guests, etc. That would be pretty expensive if it was a car.
And if it's stolen or damaged, buy another.
> Cons:
Also, not an option for those without the coordination to ride safely or durability to fall safely. Everyone falls. Elderly people can easily break bones.
> I'd add to your list: No stress of driving in traffic. Imagine your ride home is pleasant personal time and exercise in the fresh air, not cars honking in a standstill in traffic. You feel better after riding.
I imagine you have never cycled across London during peak hours, depending on the day some of the most nerve shredding cycling you can imagine; some of the angriest motorists in the world running people off the road (even squeezing me into the curb in a cycle lane, before threatening to kill me after I knocked on the back of his van) in their metal boxes completely oblivious to safe driving around cyclists and how defensive you have to be to be seen and yes sometimes get in the way of vehicles. Once some moron on the Kings road swings the door of his Lexus into the road (only cars exist right?) and I career into the opposite lane managing to just about stay on my bike and avoid the on rushing car beeping his horn at me as if I was cycling on the wrong side of the road deliberately. A near death experience I'd say.
But yes cycling can be relaxing on occasion, just not on the roads motorists use and not in London during rush hour.
I have to say having cycled across France the motorists there are absolutely amazing and give you loads of space when overtaking.
Sorry, good point. I generally don't ride in traffic (defined as multiple lanes with lots of cars moving quickly); I almost always find other routes without much problem. Do you need to ride in traffic in London? See this post for what I mean:
I live in Toronto, Canada, and in the Before Times I cycled everday between ~April and December, rain or shine. The simplest solution is to just always have bad weather gear: it's like and doesn't take up much volume. Having it in a pannier means you always have it and don't have to think about it. The simplest solution for rain is a poncho, though I went with jackets and rain pants.
I found the threat of rain is more of an obstacle that actual rain. If your commute is <40 minutes, odds are pretty good it won't actually rain during your ride. It's the possibility of it that tends discourage people, in which case some gear works to counter it.
That said, if you ride >80% of the time when the weather isn't too bad that's still a good improvement over not riding at all.
> - do not have to worry about car maintenance, parking tickets or theft;
While significantly less of a hassle than car maintenance, if you are riding a bike daily, you do now need to consider bike maintenance. And theft remains an issue in many cities for bikes as well.
I used to cycle daily and as far as maintenance went, it was mostly: bike tyres once a year, valves, chain lubricant, bike repair toolbox (purchase once), drum brake maintenance. All in all it would be about £100 per year on average and I'm being generous.
I've never owned a car, but the cost of replacing a lost bike (mine cost around £600) plus its maintenance (let's say £200 per year to be generous) sounds cheaper than what I'd pay for car insurance, petrol, and maintenance per year in UK/Europe. I also live in London where public transportation, even with its aging infrastructure, is wonderful.
I'd definitely get a car if I was living outside of a big relatively city, especially if it isn't planned for walking and cycling.
One big con you missed is "where do you keep it?" Cargo bikes big enough for (say) one adult plus two large children basically take up the space of a small car. I have room for bikes (and cycle to work myself) and a car in London (and I need my car for journeys outside London) but no way I would have room for a cargo bike as well.
> - might be impossible depending on work or children;
I can only speak for Austria and Germany, two countries that have the Pendlerpauschale, a tax rebate for those with a long commute and motorists far too much from this, it's even worse in Austria where high-income earner profit more from this than lower-income earners. Would that be dropped people would finally move closer to work (or work closer to them) and a lot of traffic into the city I live could be avoided (which would possibly lead to city residents using their car more often...)
> - significantly faster if parking is taken into account for most trips.
Fun fact about this: If a city reduces free/cheap over-ground parking and builds a few more parking houses, traffic can increase because straight driving to a parking house makes parking easier because they stop bothering looking for the few remaining overground parking spots.
In most places, not only do parents with children need to use something other than a bicycle for transportation because of inconvenience, but many have to quit using them because the children depend on them and they shouldn't be taking unnecessary risks with their lives.
>- might be impossible depending on >work or children;
>
>- weather might make the ride >unpleasant;
>
>- somewhat dangerous when the >infrastructure is lacking.
None of those things are so bad once you get used to them, except perhaps the 3rd.
I've used a bike for commuting for years.
Since having kids I now have a seat on the back and one on the front to drop them to childcare.
The city I live in rains a lot! And it is quite hilly, and this is a normal bike, not an ebike.
But I still prefer it much more than driving, I just have the waterproof gear at hand.
The infrastructure and weather was a lot better for cycling in the city I just moved from, but I think even without good cycling lanes etc, if you are vigilant, signal well, and be assertive when needed it can still be fine.
>- might be impossible depending on work or children
The public (media) conversation has largely focused on whether people give up cars entirely, but at least in America, the norm is for most families to have two cars, if not more. Walking that back to one car would meaningfully reduce the design constraints on medium-density housing — you can build a neighborhood of small houses with only street parking, for example, which is basically impossible when people need two cars — and therefore it would also reduce housing costs in urban neighborhoods.
Ebikes could significantly help with that even if they don't lead to the car-free future envisioned by some techno-urbanists. For example, your girlfriend has a car.
Yeah, that's one of the big problems with bikes. People want all the benefits of using them everywhere (pedestrian only pathways, on roads, on bike lanes), but none of the responsibilities (don't drink and drive, right of way, traffic lights, traffic rules in general). People just don't see them as a serious thing, so they use bikes without any rules, getting themselves and others in danger, minimising the risks.
Not to mention, you could easily kill yourself. If you're biking on the roads (especially in the UK where they're extremely narrow), you better recognize you're partaking in a dangerous activity and take it seriously. At least wear a helmet.
Also, cycling drunk is illegal in many jurisdictions and can get you a DUI in the same way as drunk driving a car. If you're on an e-bike, it's almost certainly illegal, since you're driving a motorized vehicle.
Also noting on drinking and riding, in Switzerland, it's possible to lose your drivers license if caught doing it, I kinda think thats unfair and not very sensible at all as a policy.
The amount of expensive add-ons I see on the bikers and their bikes suggest to me it's good business. Helmets, clothing, and electronic add-ons are likely adding around £1,000 per annum to the cost of ownership.
Bikes prices are a bit silly though. Expensive bikes (those in the £3,000 range) are ~25% of the price of a new Dacia Sandero.
Bike theft is rampant in London, so the insurance premiums are high, too. It can cost £300 per year.
I assume you can store your e-bike somewhere safe when commuting. Imo theft and complete unwillingness shown almost universally shown by police to do anything about it is a major obstacle in wider bike/e-bike adoption. If it wasn't for theft I would do 0 trips with my car within a city. As it is I can't even go shopping to the supermarket as my bike will be gone sooner or later.
> - do not have to worry about car maintenance, parking tickets or theft;
I'm glad you're in a city you don't have to worry about theft, but this is one of my biggest issues with bike ownership. You basically need to get a shitty bike to not worry about it being stolen or hope there's something adequate to firmly lock it to at the destination in my city.
I always hear people make the argument that cost savings is the biggest benefit of ditching a car and living in a city with good public transportation.
Then I look at NYC and it's $5k to rent a 1 bedroom and everything as soon as you walk out the door is 30-50% more expensive than most other cities.
No one is saving money not having a car in NYC when everything else is so much more expensive.
>- Immediately stopped having insomnia. Better feel overall;
It's interesting you mention that. When I took up cycling to work in Manchester, I started struggling to fall fully asleep because I'd have short pseudo-dreams about the POV of cycling on wet, dark, busy roads & jerk awake, scared that I was falling asleep at the handlebars.
It goes away after some time. It's almost as if you unlock a lot of stored energy just by moving. After a while the extra energy is gone and you will sleep right away.
> you will not kill someone if you ride after a night drinking;
You definitely can still kill someone.
In at least some countries an 'e-bike', depending of exactly which type it is, may be motor vehicle that falls into the exact same laws as drink driving a car. If not it may still be illegal to ride a bike on the road while drunk.
"might be impossible depending on work or children"
I'll note that getting rid of a lot of cars would be nice for safety and pollution reasons, but many proponents underestimate how difficult the kid situation becomes, especially after having more than one. People tend to move their families to the suburbs for a reason.
significantly faster if parking is taken into account for most trips
This sounds unlikely for the average cycling commuter if parking alone is making the difference- cyclists (as motorcyclists) need to change (at each side) and shower etc; I think that is often forgotten in these calculations.
I could probably count the number of times I've changed or showered after cycling on one hand, and cycling has been my main mode of transit for 10 years.
When your trip is like 3km you don't even have time to work up a sweat, especially if you're limited to just going at the speed of traffic. (Yes, on my own I could probably ride faster, but I'm limited by car/infrastructure speed)
When your trip is 3km you can easily walk. Bicycle commuting is very hard in warmer climates, because you will get sweaty. But motorcycles solve that problem at least. Then you have those cold climates with awful weather, where bicycle commuting is pure misery, compared to riding a car or bus. So it is all very location dependent.
Bike commuting during winter is fine as long as you have the right clothes. I have commuted in a -55F wind chill in perfect comfort. I will concede that it takes a few weeks to calibrate clothing if you're not used to it, but it's not some huge barrier if it's something you're interested in
Snow cover can make it impossible. Frozen rain means you need somewhere to store your wet clothes, and they will not be nice to put on when going back. Somebody who isn't a huge biking freak will prefer the car.
Sure, there are always going to be anecdotal exceptions ("parking isn't an issue for me, I just park on site"), but I think fans on either side can have quite rose-tinted views when assessing the pros and cons; I was just pointing out an omission in one of the examples.
I live in the highest density cycling city in North America (Montreal) and this is not anecdotal. A huge portion of my office cycle-commutes to work, and the vast majority do not shower. This was doubly-true before I worked at my current company, where there weren't showers, and still most people used bikes to commute.
At what point do anecdotes from people who actually live this experience day to day become more useful to listen to than theories from people who don't?
Do a google image search for 'Dutch on bicycles'. None of those people in the pictures need to change or shower after their ride. Same thing were I live. We only wear special cycling clothes if we go out cycling on a road bike or mountain bike in the weekend. And of course then you need to shower afterwards.
I have to shower at least once a day anyways, so it doesn't really make a difference if I do that before or after my commute. In fact when I drive to work I usually spend the first couple minutes in the shower just staring at the wall waking up- when I bike to work I'm much more efficient.
The only downside is that on warmer days if I have something going on in the evening I'll sometimes need to shower again when I get home, but IMO it's still worth it considering that my roundtrip commute is maybe 60 minutes by bike vs 50 minutes by car, and if I commute by car I don't get the free workout
I have an eBike but rarely use it. My main concern is theft. However, I frequently use Lyft eBikes to get around town (SF) but I don’t have the same concern for my car getting stolen if on the street for an hour (or all day at our offices in a locked room).
I was at my local bar here in Ontario and a gang of older fellows (boomer/Gen X) roll up on electric stand-up scooters.
Some drunk zoomers started laughing and giving them shit and flexing their trucks but they just ignored them, had their 3-4 beers and said they were going to <fancy uptown bar> which would have been at least 45 minutes to walk.
Worth noting that most car drivers have insurance. If you carelessly run over a child, you'll feel bad, but the insurance will pay for all the court cases.
If you run over a child on a bicycle, most cyclists don't have insurance, and there is a reasonable chance you'll have to sell your house to pay compensation to a child who is now in a wheelchair for life.
Car insurance liability limits will be insufficient if you kill someone, and you’ll be on the hook for the remainder. Umbrella will cover you in both scenarios.
> Chart 4 shows that, again, in terms of absolute numbers, cars are the vehicle type most often involved in fatal collisions when others are killed, followed by HGVs and Light Goods Vehicles (LGVs). Very few other road users are killed in collisions with pedal cyclists or pedestrians (5 and 6 respectively in 2021).
Why be angry about it; they are just scared of cars like the rest of us, I live in a neighborhood where the cyclepath just merges into the pavement. The cyclepath actually continues on the pavement if you look at the papers. My point is that we have pretty heavy traffic of inexperienced cyclists, and I never have an issue with them.
As a cyclist I avoid pavements, the are very seldom the best route anyways. I do understand the fear that make them seem like the best options.
I use the pavements to walk on, and I don't fear cars, they tend to keep on the road. In the UK it is a criminal offence to ride a bike on the pavement, and with reason: the elderly, small children should have some safe means of getting from A to B. If these selfish criminal cyclists are so scared of cars then they should get off their bikes and push them along the pavement.
Until it happens, and then what say you? And faith? In a secular religion with a shaky track record of alarmism and embarrassingly failed predictions, and then using them to corner companies and individuals into an unhealthy guilt complex about... existing?
I really dislike cars in cities, but equally I dislike cyclists and cycling myself for the following reasons:
> do not have to worry about car maintenance, parking tickets or theft;
Not sure where bicycle theft is not a thing, I've not encountered this, even in Vienna, one of the safest cities in the world. You still need to lock your bicycle safely.
> you will not kill someone if you ride after a night drinking;
In London I see plenty of irresponsible cyclists badly harming pedestrians.
> amazing when the weather is great;
Or you end up drenched in sweat wherever you go. Personally I hate cycling for that reason as a way of commute in the city.
Other reasons why I hate cycling and cyclists:
- Uneven roads, pot holes, getting splashed by cars who drive through puddles
- Inflexibility. You go somewhere, meet someone or your group of friends now spontaneously decide to move on to a different place and you'll be the loner who has to split from the group and meet them later again or you have to abandon your bicycle and get back the next day to pick it up. Sod that.
- Helmets. I can't stand helmet hair. Also how fucking annoying is it to have to carry your helmet everywhere even after parking your bicycle.
- Dirty clothes. You always end up with muddy splashes on your trousers. If you cycle then better not wear nice shoes or light trousers, which again limits where/when you can effectively use a bicycle as a way of commute.
- Male genitalia. Cyclists completely kill off their male reproductive parts. If you cycle your whole life for daily commuting to places then you'll certainly end up with fertility issues and probably require assistance to get erected in older age. No thank you lol.
Cycling is hugely overrated and I can't find anything nice about it to be honest. I rather have cities be transformed into amazing public transport systems so that I can go to places without a stupid castration apparatus.
> Male genitalia. Cyclists completely kill off their male reproductive parts. If you cycle your whole life for daily commuting to places then you'll certainly end up with fertility issues and probably require assistance to get erected in older age. No thank you lol.
This is mostly an urban legend. I am a amateur cyclist and during my testicles checkup I asked to my andrologist if it's better to stop while I am looking for a son. He replied that there is no any scientific evidence about damage on testicles by bike and that I can continue without worrying about them. Other factors like smoke are a lot more risky
> You always end up with muddy splashes on your trousers. If you cycle then better not wear nice shoes or light trousers, which again limits where/when you can effectively use a bicycle as a way of commute.
Surprisingly, it hasn't been that hard (my GF kept her car, and I have a car-sharing subscription):
Pros:
- Immediately stopped having insomnia. Better feel overall;
- about €300/month in additional disposable income. That's basically a free lunch everyday!
- significantly faster if parking is taken into account for most trips. The bike is faster for any < 10 km / 7 mi trip;
- do not have to worry about car maintenance, parking tickets or theft;
- you will not kill someone if you ride after a night drinking;
- amazing when the weather is great;
- (almost) no emission.
Cons:
- might be impossible depending on work or children;
- weather might make the ride unpleasant;
- somewhat dangerous when the infrastructure is lacking.
I'm pretty sure I'll never own a car, unless absolutely required by work. Improving the infra and the car-sharing network would be awesome.