Switching to electric cars from ICE cars is continuing to do the wrong thing and make the wrong choices, but doing this wrong thing a bit better.
It's still the same status quo, woefully terrible and unsustainable transportation model.
Automobile oriented transportation doesn't scale, is a huge waste of resources, and perpetuates unsustainable, ultra expensive and resource intensive sprawling urban development patterns.
In contrast more compact cities with bike lanes take CO2 intensive cars off the road, and less cars means less parking, which enables cheaper buildings with less CO2 intensive concrete parking lots. Wins all around.
It's frustrating to see so called environmentalist politicians that go all in with big electric car mandates but can barely put any money toward active transportation and rebuilding our cities to be more space efficient and accordingly use less carbon.
Remarkably former British Columbia Green Leader Andrew Weaver even got on twitter recently to oppose a Victoria area protected bike lane and got into all sorts of arguments with cyclists. Incredible to see an environmental leader do this.
In my experience, most people really do not understand how fundamentally unsuited cars are to solving urban (or dense suburban) transportation problems. Without really staring at the underlying geometry, it is hard for laypeople to understand that automobile-centric development patterns are by-and-large incapable of producing the kind of human-scale, dense, walkable areas that are (1) instinctively pleasing to be in, (2) generators of economic value, and (3) much more environmentally sustainable than the alternative.
All this being said, I find it hard to fault 'environmentalist' politicians for their embrace of the electric car: politics is "the art of the possible", and the conventional wisdom, at least in the States, does not yet recognize automobile-centrism as a key problem. There are a lot of entrenched interests in favor of the status quo - not just the traditional car lobby (auto manufacturers, suburban developers, oil companies), but the ~half of Americans who live in suburbs, hence having their lifestyle and wealth reliant on cars remaining a dominant form of transportation. If the choice is between gas cars and electric cars (as, for a mainstream politician it basically seems to be), I am at least happy we are moving towards the latter, even though neither are the right answer.
Shameless plug: I recently attempted to visually explain the first issue (why geometry makes cars unsuited to dense transportation) on my nascent blog: https://digital-cygnet.medium.com/a-quick-visual-illustratio...
How many people want to live in dense cities without any means of escape? It sounds miserable to me.
But I live in a really small city (< 250k) and drive maybe 3-5k miles a year (mostly to our cabin in a neighboring state) and bike a LOT. It's kind of ironic I am pretty far from your utopian dense dream yet largely living it.
It sounds like you bike for most of your transportation in your city? That's what "anti-car" people (speaking as one myself) want: to emphasize infrastructure that enables and encourages that. The "anti-car" thing isn't "ban cars entirely in all cases", just "stop assuming everything needs to be car-first at the expense of every other modality".
I'm not sure I fully follow "I am pretty far from your utopian dense dream yet largely living it", but I think there are two potential points of disagreement:
1) Living in dense cities is not for everybody, but given that large and (at least pre-covid) growing majority of people in the developed world do choose to live in cities, I think it's safe to say that there is a very sizable demand. For an example of the benefits of density, see [0].
2) I'm not sure exactly what you mean by a "means of escape", but getting rid of cars of course necessitates replacing them with other modalities. If you want to go skiing does it matter to you whether you take a train or a car? Or, for further afield trips, take a train to a car rental far from the city center? (If you mean escape in a literal sense, like "evacuate in the face of a disaster", then cars are clearly not fit for purpose -- if roads can barely handle rush hour traffic, mass evacuation is a recipe for gridlock)
[0] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-11-01/how-densi...
I live in Berlin with 2 little kids and have no car. We bike and take transit (including long-range trains when going out of the city). There's plenty opportunity to escape (corona lockdowns notwithstanding).
Iāve never owned a car. But somehow Iāve traveled all over my country and the world. And Australia isnāt small. Itās crazy, I know.
Nice blog post. It really does come down to just how big cars are and how much space they take up. A car in motion takes up a ridiculous amount of space factoring in stopping distance.
The coming sea change in electrifying transportation will include roads just as much as cars. Right now we are just barely off the bottom of the 'S' curve of transitioning from ICE to electric. But in about fifteen years we'll be near the middle of that curve and that's when we'll realize roads could be much better if the ICE cars where banned. With only electric vehicles the air will cease to be continually poisoned by emissions and then roads and streets will start to move indoors. Covered roads will become practical with electric only vehicles and the majority of those e-vehicles will be a lot smaller than the current average ICE car because electric technologies make smaller vehicles much more practical. The current boom in e-bikes is just the beginning of a major trend to electric smaller vehicles.
A lot more quickly than you expect ICE vehicles will be restricted to the highways and periphery of towns and cities because they'll be too big, heavy and poisonous. In a word they'll become unsafe for urban transport and our cities will become much more healthy and livable.
The trend has already started. E.g. in Germany, some cities prohibit older Diesel engines within city limits.
This has lead especially commuters of low-wage jobs quickly being forced to buy a new, more environmentally-friendly car (and their Diesel car just lost a lot of value in the market), so they have no option other than switch to gasoline engines - which are usually OLDER cars than they used to be with WORSE pollution statistics.
Buying a new car is not affordable to them. Public transportation is a lot better than in the US, but still will not solve the issue completely, and where it is a viable alternative, it's expensive both in time consumption and in money spent.
With a new law that was meant to lower pollution (and the jury is still out on if the goal was achieved, as during the corona crisis, pollution sank overall), we've created worse conditions for the underclass and lower middle class.
This is how you destroy support for ecological policymaking. If you want a better world for yourself and your children, you cannot achieve it by making it worse for others and the present.
>In my experience, most people really do not understand how fundamentally unsuited cars are to solving urban (or dense suburban) transportation problems.
In my experience, most people who are against cars really do not understand how fucking awesome it is to drive a car and how well it works in terms of getting me from A to B in the minimum time with the minimum fuss with plenty of space for my shopping. Nothing else comes close unless you are only going around an uber dense area in rush hour.
Yes, there are issues with cars. I will still rather be stuck in traffic, sitting in my own comfortable indoor seat than riding a bike to work or taking the bus with no guarantee of a seat, nor enough space to sit even if I get it. A little planning and I am at work before rush hour and it isn't even an issue.
If I was to take public transportation it would need to not take twice the time (I measured it from the time I was outside my building to the time I was inside at work), it would need to be far more comfortable and I would need to be certain that there wouldn't be trouble in the bus.
But most of all? I would need to be certain that the people who made the changes were previously happy drivers and are now happy public commuters.
I did just buy a nice bike for the exercise and the ease of parking, but it only makes sense for short journeys to dense places where parking is the major issue.
The key driver of our apparent disagreement is likely the definition of "urban (or dense suburban)" in my post. There are plenty of places and use cases for which cars are magical things, whisking you from place to place with no effort and a minimum of cost. However, the important things to understand are:
1) Many countries effectively subsidize cars over public transit in ways that are non obvious (not charging for externalities, minimum parking requirements, huge comparative investment in automotive public works), so your accounting of the costs you see (insurance, gas, depreciation) will likely underestimate the true societal cost.
2) The problem that cars seem to solve (getting around a sparse world) is also _the problem that cars cause_ (sparsification). If you have to drive three miles to get to the grocery store, you could think "thanks cars for making this drive easy", or "boo cars for making this drive necessary". In the city I live in there are 3 grocery stores within a 10 minute walk of my apartment.
3) Some people truly do prefer the spread out, population-sparse lifestyle enabled by cars. But some other people truly prefer the dense, walkable urban lifestyle that, as I have mentioned, cars seriously disrupt. The damage comes when people in one group try to force the other to adapt to rules that make sense in their preferred environment (e.g., if Urbanite A wants to ban cars while Ruralite B wants to put highways through the urban center so she can get to work via car). I tend to side with the Urbanites on this issue at present, because it doesnt take much to see who has the upper hand in American cities right now. (viz: Rober Mosesization of most major American metros in the 60s-80s)
Most humans enjoy being comfortable. Costs (financial and ecological) ignored, it's safe to say that a large portion of the population would choose to proceed quickly from point A to B in the comfort of a private enclosed vehicle.
Obviously this desire needs to be balanced with environmental protection, practicality and accommodation of those who legitimately want to cycle or walk. There are a few technologies coming down the pipeline that should help achieve a compromise between all of these:
-mass electrification of vehicles
-pervasive small-diameter tunneling: The jury's still out on whether this can be done cheaply enough, but if this works out, it completely solves the urban scaling problem. Passenger vehicular traffic in cities can be pushed down into the ground, freeing up existing space for cyclists and pedestrians. Parallel tunnels can be trivially added when specific routes require additional capacity.
-self-driving vehicles: Self-driving taxi services would reduce the demand for personal ownership of vehicles, thereby reducing the total ecological burden.
I'm in complete agreement with you that automobile-oriented transportation, as implemented today, is completely awful. That doesn't mean we should reject the human element, and force people to do things they don't want to, when technological progress can allow us to satisfy those wants responsibly.
People are only comfortable in cars because they've learned to be. Before I owned a car and cycled every day I didn't once think it was uncomfortable and that I'd rather be in a car. My body was used to it.
I can offer a contrary anecdote. I grew up in a Canadian city, but my family never had a car. I spent my entire childhood bussing everywhere. It sucked. It really fucking sucked and I hated it the entire time. Most journeys across the city required waiting for transfers in temperatures ranging from -30C to +30C. Any kind of irregular or lengthy trip was always an exercise in planning and frustration when scheduled busses arrived early/late or never showed up.
I can safely say that I genuinely didn't enjoy public transit. I wasn't "tricked" or "fooled" or "indoctrinated" by western society into envying the "holy automobile". The mere fact that you used the phrase "My body was used to it" indicates an implicit aspect of unpleasantness that one needs to trick themselves into accepting.
As an adult, I am now fortunate enough to own a vehicle, and the comfort, convenience and empowerment of owning a car is almost incomparably higher to public transit or cycling.
It seems like you are either 1) rejecting the possibility that technological innovation will allow for responsible and scalable use of automobiles and/or 2) rejecting human comfort as a valid argument for doing anything
We should be putting resources into public transit and cycling infrastructure for all the individuals like yourself who want (or need) to commute in that manner. And as long as we can do so responsibly (which I totally see humanity being able to do in the medium-term future), there's no reason not to also appease people who enjoy traveling comfortably.
No.
Cycling is fine until its too cold, too wet, too hot, and oh I am late or I need to carry something else or .. or... or..
seriously all these articles act as if it is a viable solution day in and day out and its far from one.
people like cars, buses, and other enclosed transport, all for the same reason. because it can make the weather irrelevant to the trip
Taxis, small delivery vehicles, utility cars, cars and trucks for countryside use, and various trucks for city and highway use can all be electric, with all the benefits of EVs.
If you want public transit be more popular, build denser cities. E.g. on Manhattan using the subway is a no-brainer, and you are rarely more than two (long) blocks from a subway station. In some more remote parts of Brooklyn, you often cannot reach the destination by subway alone, and you have to take a bus. Even further away, traveling by a bus either becomes too slow, or the bus does not come close enough, and a car is inevitable. I suppose there is no way to make public transit economical or time-efficient in agglomerations like Houston, even though LA manages a bus network somehow.
Cycling such distances us also problematic: you either have to be pretty fit and take a shower when you arrive, or you have to have all the time in the world. Cycling within a dense city is pretty practical, though.
There's a chicken-egg problem at play, though. We can't build denser cities because we need to build 4-lane roads and parking; we can't get rid of these roads and parking because people need cars because the city isn't dense enough yet. It's certainly solvable on the many-decade timescale by smart, consistent city and state governments, but it's going to be a gradual slog of incrementalism (e.g., see all the changes NYC has made to shift from car centrism since the 90s - gradually adding bike lanes, closing Times Square to traffic, closing 14th street to private cars, congestion pricing for taxis,...)
The distance problem with cycling is solvable (though it pains me a bit to say this as a recreational cyclist) by electric bikes and other micromobility solutions (e.g. Citroen Ami). The streets of NYC are chock full of delivery drivers and others zipping along at 25mph on cheap, quiet electric bikes with ranges of many dozens of miles. Once we have a better regulatory regime for these (so people aren't blowing so many lights and hitting so many pedestrians), I could see them being a viable alternative to cars for many-mile use cases, at least during dry/temperate weather.
Indeed, two-wheeled electric transport is pretty great! It's a mix of EVs and bicycles proper.
These devices still need parking, even if they are as compact as a scooter or a bicycle (not like a motorcycle). Keeping them in an apartment is a bit uncomfortable, too, especially in a walk-in on 4th floor, since they are not exactly lightweight.
Electric skateboards are much more compact, but take more skill, and have a shorter range.
All this is totally solvable, but the problems first needs to be recognized.
Step 1: stop subsidizing car travel. Make automobile owners pay their way--to include negative externalities such as noise and pollution.
> be pretty fit and take a shower when you arrive
oh no unsolvable problems
I agree, but I think Vancouver has a pretty good handle on its car/parking situation. That's Vancouver proper, not the suburbs. Most new buikdings that go up have their parking underground, and then drivers in the city are squeezed for the most part in terms of parking options and so on. The parking lots that are still around seem to be from older buildings, that then get replaced with higher density eventually. When I do drive, it's actually still pretty pleasent, because it's for necessarily driving dependant activities.
Even though there's quite a lot of electric cars, there is still a remarkable level of noise generated next to patios along main roads, so improving that would be nice, if we can assume that cars won't go away entirely.
Compare that to the prairies, Alberta, or even the island, and it's a world of difference in terms of surface level lots. Would be curious what your opinion is as (presumably) a bc resident.
I live in Vancouver proper and rarely drive. The city has done a pretty good job on the bike routes; I can get to nearly anywhere in Vancouver within a 30 minute bike ride from my home turf of Mount Pleasant. I think forcing parking lots under ground and limiting parking spaces has been great for the city! It is definitely a trend with new buildings to have limited parking options. My workplace office houses about 60 people but we only have 4-5 parking spots which incentivizes alternate transit modes. Having limited parking options means that many people at my work live local to the office and either bike or walk to get there, which I think is awesome!
Ultimately the city of Vancouver cannot grow out anymore therefore we need to grow up without increasing the amount of traffic on the roads. I think the key to limiting traffic on the roads is to build dense walkable communities connected by solid transit options.
Regarding solid transit options: I think the city desperately needs a broadway skytrain all the way to UBC and a skytrain line which goes from metrotown straight west down 49th avenue connecting with the canada line at oakridge and ultimately terminating at UBC.
Going east-west in the city kind of sucks right now and most of the crappy buses to ride on are east-west due to overcrowding.
Interesting point. I hadn't thought of a SkyTrain to Oakridge from Metrotown. Oakridge is apparently getting a massive redevelopment and that could increase demand, but is it currently busy enough? I guess with the development happening ta Metrotown as well, it would be good to just connect all major centres. I did used to live in Burnaby, and it sucked getting to the airport from there.
Cycling is not only good for the environment, but for cities in general.
During the last confinement, when car traffic completely stopped, I realised that cars are the single biggest reason why living in the city can be unpleasant. People may not realise it consciously, but when they move out of the city, what they are looking for is a place with not as much cars driving around.
Cars destroy cities by making a vicious circle of making it unpleasant to live there, therefore enticing people to move to the suburbs and commute by car, which make the problem worse.
Setting up biking infrastructure fixes this, because it reduces the room for cars used by commuters, while creating room for bicycles used by people living in the city.
With less cars, you can make the city center where people work liveable. You can have offices mixed with housing and have people live close to their work place, further diminishing the need for cars.
If you think that your city can't possibly be a good place to cycle because weather / hills / etc, you are probably mistaken. Electric bikes and the appropriate clothes make biking pleasant in most places. IF there are not too many cars and infrastructure for the bicycle of course, which is probably the thing you don't have
This is something I've been musing over recently as well: cars really are responsible for much of what is unpleasant about city life. When people gripe about cities, their complaints are often around:
* Noise. From where I sit, the only noises that filter into my apartment from the city are occasional laughs or shouted conversations from bargoers, loud trucks grinding gears on the avenues, or honking of desperate commuters
* Lack of space. Basically every city block in the USA is surrounded on all sides by areas where, if you walk into them without your wits about you, you could be smashed by a multi ton vehicle. When streets are closed for street fairs or the like, the "lack of space" complaint often drifts away - the whole city is your space again.
* Danger. See above. There is of course also higher crime in cities, which I cannot find a way to pin on cars.
* Grime/poor air quality - pretty self explanatory
Regarding crime. A huge factor in that is "eyes on the street." Car friendly streets massively reduce the eyes on the street for two reasons:
1. Cars travel fast and they obstruct the occupants' view in all kinds of directions. So the cars themselves don't really count as eyes on the street in the same way a pedestrian would.
2. Streets designed for cars are less pleasant to be in as a pedestrian or cyclist, so fewer people will be out on the street. You only walk on those streets if you absolutely have to be there.
Look at some YouTube videos of "open streets" in New York during covid.
Great points! I am working on a post about this and will incorporate this observation.
Also all the endless roads and parking lots which make the environment much less pleasant, and they exist because of cars.
It still boggles my mind that, with a 15% car ownership rate, how NYC not only still allows cars, but subsidizes them with absolutely free parking on city streets. The real estate price for a single parking spot in NYC must be astronomical.
If you go to any community board meeting, you'll hear old people rant for hours about how their cars are essential and bike are destroying the city. And for some reason, this is who politicians listen to.
Community board meetings in general are a problem that nobody has found a great solution to. Oddly enough, the pandemic has caused most of these to go virtual, which has nerfed a lot of the power of the highly motivated old people with too much time on their hands.
Those are the people who vote.
45% of NYC households own cars, which is probably more indicative of how many people use them than how many individuals own cars.
I found this staggering though it is accurate. It's less surprising (though no less accurate) when you consider how the numbers skew by borough:
"Ownership is lowest in Manhattan, where only 22 percent of households own a car, while ownership is highest in Staten Island where cars are owned by 83 percent of all households. Queens (62 percent) is also above the city average, while the Bronx (40 percent) and Brooklyn (44 percent) look more like the city as a whole."
I've seen various threads promoting bicycles - and my life style is SO different that I can't conceive of using bikes and getting rid of my cars.
I drive 6 miles to church. My kids are in the minivan and can't ride bikes yet. We also have stuff with us: diapers, water cups, snacks.
My work (before WFH), is about 7 miles away. I could bike - but I take kids to day care, and they can't bike. Also, I can't wear "athletic" clothes to work, and I would still want to shower.
My wife goes shopping at garage sales where she frequently drives 25 miles. She often gets large items (ceiling fan, book shelf, art). She can't do this with a bike.
Grocery shopping could be bikeable. Get a wagon behind the bike, only shop when a spouse can watch the kids.
Spending time with friends isn't bike friendly. A 5 mile bike ride, with kids in toe, and all of their stuff won't happen.
Me, at the bar, could be on a bike.
As I look at the list, my kids REALLY stop me from switching to a bike. In addition, I still need a car occasionally (trips, fun restaurants, etc) - so I still NEED a car, I just might not use it as often.
I lived in the Dutch suburbs and everything you say canāt be done on a bike were pretty normal there.
I think people think bikes donāt work because theyāre thinking about the problem, as opposed to trying through the problem.
Ok, I'll bite. How do I get my family to church? 4 kids between 1 and 6. 6 miles from home.
It would be nice if we didn't smell when we arrived.
I have a two part response to this. The first is that the goal of bike infrastructure is not to eliminate the car, but instead to give people the option of riding bikes when suitable. Some tasks (transporting large objects) will always be right for cars. But even getting families to shift to 1 car instead of two or three would be a huge resource saver.
But secondly, I would suggest a paradigm shift in how you think about things. You are probably right that for you, in the environment you live in, a bike is not the right choice. But an urban/suburban environment is not a fixed constant, so the question is why is your environment reliant on cars?
To respond to a few of your examples with this framework in mind.
- If your church and your work were closer, biking might make more sense. Suburban sprawl and zoning laws push things (housing, work, and amenities) apart that could be closer together.
- Your kids sound pretty young, but for when they get older if you lived in a place where it was safe to cycle alone, and their friends were closer to you, they could cycle to friends more easily. Unfortunately, with how things are, I wouldn't blame you for keeping them off the roads, as many U.S. roads are unsafe, especially for young kids.
- Again, it's not relevant until your kids are older, but the majority of Dutch children walk or bike to school, rather than being driven. From what I've seen, even elementary school aged kids will travel to school alone.
Now it could be that you just prefer the countryside, in which case of course bike infrastructure is irrelevant to you. But many people are more motivated only by a desire to avoid big cities in which case building out the "missing middle" between sparsely populated car dependent suburbia/countryside and dense urban centers could be the solution.
Yes there are people with kids who donāt own a car. Madness. I guess they just donāt make excuses.
Well, of course there are. My mom used a bike for her first borne. She was poor. She had a lady in her apartment complex watch her daughter during work. She didn't really go out.
As soon as she could afford a car, she got one and her life expanded.
What do other families look like who have multiple kids and no car?
s/car/bike/ is obviously not the solution. Not organizing your life around cars is. This has more impact on one's life than just replacing a car with a bike, as a comparison between, say, a typical north american household lifestyle and a typical dutch household one readily shows.
I cycle and I agree it's a superior form of transport.
> cars are the single biggest reason why living in the city can be unpleasant
I'm pretty sure rent / house prices are the #1 negative people cite about cities. A relatively new phenomenon. In cities where prices have not risen as much, like Detroit, I doubt people say cars are unpleasant.
Ironically cars are probably depressing prices in the city significantly. For most normal people, a car lets them not overpay for land, by letting them live somewhere far away.
The pandemic changed that calculus. Normals don't work from home though. Normals were just sustained by PPP, until that ran out and they get (or already are) fired.
> infrastructure
The people living in cities with developing infrastructure change faster than the infrastructure gets built.
Let's say we're talking about a place where land values are rising despite no infrastructure changes. There, the people who want to leave rent or sell to the people who want to come, who already find the lack of infrastructure agreeable.
The people who are left over can't afford the higher rents.
So then, what you discover is situations like the Sommerville Green Line Extension. Many residents opposed it. "Gentrification" is a word used to describe the antagonist, for these people.
Why opposition to infrastructure? It raises rents.
It's a little reductionist, to make everything about dollar and cents. We're paying for the environmental and psychic impact of having cars everywhere with too few dollars.
But good luck advocating for infrastructure changes on a timeline faster than the makeup of the residents of the town.
Cars and parking lots take up a loooot of space in many American cities though. Space that could have been used to build housing or businesses or mixed-use instead.
> Ironically cars are probably depressing prices in the city significantly. For most normal people, a car lets them not overpay for land, by letting them live somewhere far away.
A good public transport infrastructure is much more efficient at transporting people in and out of cities.
I live around 20 miles from my the city center and public transport is faster at getting me there than a car and you don't need to search for a parking spot.
Switching from gas to electric is something I can do all on my own. Switching from gas car to cycling is something that would require major investments from my city and developers.
Both are noble goals, but let's not let perfect be the enemy of good. Switch to electric now, and also encourage new roads and new developments to be bike friendly, so that switching to a bike is something that will be viable in 20 or 30 years for most cities in America.
Edit: To clarify, the investment I'm referring to is rezoning entire cities and tearing down single family homes and replacing them with mixed use buildings to bring commercial spaces closer to residential spaces. Most American cities have commercial centers and are then surrounded by residential, with very little mixing of the two. For example the closest place for me to buy food is .75 mile away, but the closest supermarket is 1.5 miles and I have to cross two major roads and a Freeway to get there.
People have been making individual choices to improve CO2 emissions for decades and the only thing that reduced global emissions was a pandemic.
You need structural change or it all really doesn't matter. Now maybe you think that structural change is unlikely to happen, and I agree with you, but then we're in really big trouble.
> let's not let perfect be the enemy of good.
This is not the perfect vs the good, the is that meaningless versus the possibility of having an impact. We need to do so much more than have only bikes in cities that it is almost impossible to image we make the changes necessary to avoid climate catastrophe. If you think even that is out of the realm of possible, then there's no need to worry about what type of fuel powers your car, it quite literally will make no difference. The gas you don't use on your car will just be used by amazon delivery trucks to further reduce shipping costs and increase sales.
But it doesn't require major investments. It's really minor investments compared to other infrastructure projects. The issue is taking away even a tiny fraction of car space basically triggers some kind of political road rage.
They're minor investments practically, and major investments politically.
As you say, for many motorists, giving up space on even some roads to cyclists is treated like some sort of war crime. There's very much of attitude of, "we can't just have a majority of the road space -- we need nearly all of it!"
It can be a real winner politically, depending on the electoral boundaries. Roads have such limited throughput that a new bike lane might inconvenience only a few hundred people in cars, while opening up the city to thousands of people on bikes. Once politicians figure out that calculation, it can go very quickly.
Spoken like someone who's never driven in a city.
City streets are narrow and extremely uncomfortable to drive on as it is.
> But it doesn't require major investments.
Having lived and cycled in Amsterdam to me it did seem like a major investment. Sure if one were to design a greenfield city then itās not a big deal. But to pivot a car centric city to safely accommodate cyclists is a major change. The city residents have to go through the transition process which isnāt going to be fun.
Iāve seen it done half ass way in India and US which end up being deadly for cyclists.
I am all for cycling, I absolutely loved my two year stint at Amsterdam. Itās a life changing experience. But letās not underestimate the costs involved in transition. Also, the city residents have to be onboard with the process, as they are the biggest stakeholders. Otherwise the implementation will get dumped half way through with disastrous results.
The second part there is the key. Bikes work just fine on roads built for cars and building bike lanes is dirt cheap compared to pretty much any other kind of infrastructure project. You do, however, need the political will to actually take that space from cars and reallocate it to bikes and pedestrians.
In urban areas that are already dense this can be done without any significant infrastructue investments by simply changing how the traffic patterns work on existing roads.
A good example of this is Barcelona's "superblocks": https://www.vox.com/energy-and-environment/2019/4/9/18300797...
Amsterdam in the 1960s was just as full of cars as US cities are today. Here's some video: https://www.reddit.com/r/Amsterdam/comments/d3484b/amsterdam...
If we start today and incorporate the lessons they've learned, it hopefully won't take us 60 years to get there.
It doesn't have to be expensive. In Ghent they recently did it on a budget: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sEOA_Tcq2XA
The principle is simple: In designated spots, prevent through traffic for cars while allowing bicycles to go through. This massively reduces car traffic on those streets. In Ghent they did that by simply placing obstructions on the road that only bicycles can maneuver around. Once more people are cycling, you'll have increased political will to spend money on more ambitious infrastructure such as in Amsterdam.
Amsterdam had to figure it out the hard way. When they did it, nobody even knew what to do. Now that they have done the hard work, the patterns can be copied elsewhere. What I am talking about are the junction designs, bike path designs, etc. These need to be taught to every road engineer in the world.
Cycling is suited to distances of a few miles. Within a few miles of a sprawl house there are only other sprawl houses. The mix and layout of buildings and uses also needs to be overhauled so that putting reasonable numbers of hours/calories into a bike gets you somewhere useful.
in the summer i commute to/from work 3 times a week on my bike. It is 50km (31 miles) one way. So i ride to work monday, home wednesday, to work friday type of thing.
This trip takes me around 2 hours and people think i am crazy for doing this.. but those same individuals will spend an hour commuting and then go to the gym for an hour?
Cycling isnt suited to a few miles.. I have never been "athletic" and can do a 50KM ride with a bit of training.
If the ground is fairly flat i'd say 10 miles is reasonable.
In the US nearly 30 percent of trips are a mile or shorter, 40 percent are two miles or shorter and 50 percent are three miles or shorter.[0]
These distances can be easily covered on foot or bike with minimal change in infrastructure.
[0] https://www.bikeleague.org/content/national-household-travel...
Walking is only suited to distances of a few miles. People walk at 3 mph. Bikes are 4-5 times faster than walking.
Yes, single family zoning must be abolished. Doing so will cost governments no money and is among the most effective changes to improve housing affordability and climate change.
>The issue is taking away even a tiny fraction of car space basically triggers some kind of political road rage.
I don't think that's a fair comparison. I live in what many outsiders consider a bike friendly city though in reality it's impractical and unsafe to bike most places. If you're willing to also walk/bus your bike, flout local law on bicycling in pedestrian areas, and bike on major thoroughfares without bike lanes between travel lanes and parked cars then I suppose you'll be happy. That is until you get door checked, run off the road, ticketed, or hit.
Redesigning just the main streets and their auxiliaries would require making tough choices like one way roads that you'll cause you to drive considerably further to your destination. Removing on street parking, when our city already has a parking deficit. Removing the verges where they exist to accommodate bike lanes. On the many streets without verges the options are one way traffic or no parking, mixed use lanes for truck traffic and bicycles is unsafe. I suppose the buildings on one side could be seized under eminent domain, but that just balloons the cost and time scale.
All this is too say that without widespread infrastructure, especially between cities, biking is facing an uphill climb to widespread adoption. People want to be safe on their commutes. They want their bikes and cars safe while they work and shop. Designing And building infrastructure for bikes in cities that have been maximally developed is an incredibly and wastefully expensive exercise in compromise that does little to meaningfully reduce vehicular traffic.
> Removing on street parking, when our city already has a parking deficit.
Building free/cheap parking spaces creates a dependency spiral where there's never enough. Counterintuitively, the best way to meet parking demand is to start reducing the number of spaces and charge more for them.
https://mobilitylab.org/2017/07/19/voxmobility-lab-video-hig...
Doesn't it worry you to live in a city whose infrastructure is not compatible with global emission goals? Within the next decades either of too scenarios will realize: a) your home will loose most of its market value as nobody will be able to live there, OR b) we are all royally f*ked. Neither sounds too good.
> Doesn't it worry you to live in a city whose infrastructure is not compatible with global emission goals?
It does. I'm constantly pushing to rezone the entire city as multi-use and multi-dwelling. The city council has ignored me, and most of my fellow citizens vehemently disagree, as they believe that would devalue their property.
Is moving an option?
It is very hard to motivate people to act on a problem decades in the making. With health problems people will continue to smoke and overeat despite their doctor warning them. Besides the time element, climate change is the ultimate example of private gain (your income and consumption) and socialized cost (literally the entire planet).
Itās worth noting that this is an article written by a U.K. author, and mostly references European cities.
While obviously the same principle applies in the US, achieving higher rates of cycling in Europe is substantially easier, both politically and practically, in Europe than the US. Europe is significantly more compact cities, and public transport is usually very good, additionally many European cities have already invested heavily in cycling infrastructure.
Cities need to build completely separated trails that accommodate both cyclists and pedestrians. Ideally that means providing pedestrians with a raised sidewalk portion.
I've been an avid road cyclist for many moons (hence my username), but I've pulled back on that after my 5th road crash. As I've been getting older, my ability to "bounce back" from serious injury has diminished, and I'm now left with arthritis in my hand from my most recent crash where a motorist broke it by passing too close and hitting me (https://imgur.com/a/LdNQSRT). The difference in speed was probably less than 10mph, but that was enough to cause a lot of damage.
Every bike ride in mixed vehicular traffic is a roll of the dice, and no matter how experienced and defensive you are as a rider, your luck is eventually going to run out. Somebody is going to do something really sudden and dangerous, causing you to crash. When that happens, it's then a question of, "How bad this time?"
I'm fortunate that my commute can be done 80% on completely separated paved trails. These days I throw my bike in the hatchback, drive the 20% of the distance to a park-and-ride by the trail, and ride on the trail into the city.
If there weren't a trail along my commute route, I wouldn't be commuting by bicycle at all. It's my city's commitment to build the infrastructure that makes me willing to do it.
That's great. Assuming the following:
- Your commute is sufficiently short
- You have facilities to shower and dress at work
- You have sufficient time to shower and dress at work
- You don't have to bring kids or sizable cargo
- Weather is sufficiently good
- You're sufficiently healthy
The Dutch have solved the kids/cargo problem. My friend lives in a suburb of Amsterdam. She has an electric assist bike with a cargo carrier. She uses it to carry kids and cargo, like groceries and such.
She used it to carry four kids (her three and one of mine) when we visited. We took the rented car and she beat us there.
In my view, the most striking feature of the Dutch solution is that it's not a type of bike, but a transportation system developed over a span of years within a specific niche of climate, terrain, population density, and so forth. Cargo bikes came after the system was already up and running.
Moving any specific component of that system to another niche might help a little, and I'd welcome any progress, but is not a solution.
With that said, I'm a year around bike commuter. Cargo bikes, trailers, and baekfiets are gaining popularity in my locale, especially the electrics.
People keep hoping for a technological solution to housing and transportation but the real answer is a big cultural and political shift toward apartments and walkable cities. On second thought that may be a heavier lift than self-driving cars.
I actually have a picture of my Opa delivering bread in the 1920s with a cargo bike (bakfiets) in the Netherlands.
How do I carry my kids and groceries in +100F(38c) or nearly freezing weather?
Backpack or cargo storage for the groceries. Kid seats or kiddie trailer for the kids.
I bicycled everywhere with a two year old in a kiddie seat until I was eight months pregnant. In Germany, which was almost as cold as Kansas at times.
Dress for it and strap them on. It's not hard.
Stay hydrated. Wear layers. Spend more time indoors. It's not like driving is a sweat free experience at 38C.
Same way as in other weather.
Netherlands is not a good benchmark for the rest of the World where altitude it's a thing
> The Vaalserberg is a hill with a height of 322.4 metres (1,058 ft) above NAP and is the highest point in mainland Netherlands
before anyone gets the wrong idea, the biggest problem is not going up, but going down (especially with kids, cargo or kids+cargo)
Electric bicycles are a thing now, as are strong brakes.
Wasn't Netherlands where a big accident with many kids happened a few years ago?
I think you're approaching this from the wrong direction (the article's framing doesn't really help). It's about how we allocate funds at a high level, not that every city needs to have an equal amount of cycling. From a climate change perspective, we care little about where we take cars off the road.
So while it's true that Siberia won't ever be bike-first, we should understand that each person we can get to transition to biking is worth 10x the carbon reduction of getting them to transition to an EV. It will also be harder! But the 10x heuristic should help us think about how to balance the increased difficulties against increased benefits.
Also, this is a transition that will eventually involve everyone. There will always be people who can't cycle and we need to maintain room for them to be full participants in a non-petrochemical-based economy. This makes low-carbon personal transport like cycling even more valuable in the context of needing to allow people with more limited mobility options access (they will need the parking spaces we increasingly hope to move away from).
> we care little about where we take cars off the road.
as someone who almost completely abandoned the car, even though I live in Rome, one of the most car crowded cities in the West (and probably the World), if we care about taking cars off the road, we need to make cities walkable
Many areas of Rome already are and have been by design, because pedestrians and cars don't compete for the same space and there are large enough sidewalks
in the city centre where streets are narrow, cars usually drive very very slowly, because the road is occupied by people walking and have precedence
But when pedestrian share the space with other vehicles, like in car restricted areas, that's where things start to get unpleasant if not impossible
bikes, electric bikes, scooters they all make walking difficult to the point that pedestrian need to be careful about them more than with cars
in this covid times with virtually no cars for Rome standards, my biggest concern when I am around is avoiding riders and their bikes, they are everywhere and respect no rule.
I can be relatively sure that on a one way only street no car is gonna suddenly appear from the wrong direction, not so much with bikes (and other two wheeled vehicles) especially because they are extremely quiet
this is my experience after 45 years as a Roman citizen and 7 years without a car
> if we care about taking cars off the road, we need to make cities walkable
I couldn't agree more! IMO increasing walkability will be key to both increasing density and decreasing carbon impact.
The point I was driving at when saying we don't care where we take cars off the streets is that taking 100 cars out of, say, Rome, has about the same impact as taking 10 cars out of 10 other cities. There are places which are more interested in moving away from cars today than others and, while we eventually want to get all of them, we can start where resistance is lowest.
I'm 45, I've been riding bicycles for leisure and competition since I could walk. I've been to big cities on multiple continents, small towns, islands, raised kids, etc, etc. I'd say you're missing "someplace to put the bike at work" and could probably skip the time and facilities to shower for some commutes. But yeah, that's a good list of impediments.
Commuting by car has and creates lots of problems but all of these are ignored because cars are normal and bikes aren't. That's the biggest problem.
For example, driving a car is necessary to be a full member of society in most places in the US. If you can't drive basic things like going to work, buying food, visiting family, seeing a doctor aren't possible or take 2-3x more time without a car. As a result people are very hesitant to take away people's licenses, even if they really shouldn't be driving.
> - Your commute is sufficiently short
This is the most important one. Most people would be happy biking 2mi/3.25km to work. I like biking a lot so I would bike up to 10mi/16km.
> - You have facilities to shower and dress at work
I commuted by bike for years in hot, humid climate without showering at work. Consider all of the remarkable achievements of humanity. You could figure out something that could work for your situation.
> - You don't have to bring kids or sizable cargo
Places where cycling is normal have various solutions for this.
> > - You have facilities to shower and dress at work
> I commuted by bike for years in hot, humid climate without showering at work. Consider all of the remarkable achievements of humanity. You could figure out something that could work for your situation.
It's called a shower. I weigh 300lbs. Trust me, I am going to be sweating like I was sprayed by the grossest stink hose of all time. Sure, I'd love to believe I'd be closer to 200lbs than 300lbs after a year or two of riding, but that's a year or two smelling like a rank asshole. On behalf of myself and everyone around me, hard pass.
In that case I prescribe an electric assist bike and baby wipes in a bathroom stall. ha!
But I really don't blame anybody for not wanting to cycle in the US. It's legitimately dangerous and unpleasant in a lot of areas. It doesn't have to be that way but that's the world we have.
This is the most important one. Most people would be happy biking 2mi/3.25km to work
2 miles is around the lower end of what I would consider bikeable, much less than that and I'd just walk.
I've recently discovered Not Just Bikes channel [1], and can't recommend it enough.
He is Canadian, commuter, not a cyclist [2], yet he found that in Netherlands are the most livable cities, to the point he's decided to rise children there [3]. He answers all the critique raised in this thread. And describes how Netherlands achieve its goals - bike paths are on another level there, they are specifically organized on different routes [4].
[1] https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC0intLFzLaudFG-xAvUEO-A
[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vMed1qceJ_Q
I used to live in Europe, and a bicycle was my primary mode of transport. That was when I was a single man with no children. However, I can't see how I could possibly use a bicycle for really any transport at all today.
Advocates of cycling, I would be genuinely interested in how you would logistically achieve a typical weekend day in my life, which might consist of:
- Transporting myself, my wife, my daughter, my dog, and (say) 3 large bags full of the stuff that they require from my house at the rural/suburban boundary to the part of town where the hardware stores are - about 25km away, with about 600m elevation change.
- At those hardware and big box stores, I'll need to buy (say) 300L of sand (bagged) for the sandpit, a new powertool, a bag full of clothes, and a new bed for the dog.
- We then need to have some breakfast at a cafe, and transport the whole lot home.
- We have to do all of this in the rain or in the very high winds that my city is famous for.
- Total time to achieve all of this has to fit between my daughter's naps, so we have about two and a half hours all up.
Some version of this is my life almost every weekend.
Now, I would genuinely like to hear how I could achieve anything approaching this using a bicycle. I'm not being facetious - I don't know how it would be possible at all - but cycling advocates seem determined to assume that I somehow can, so I'd love to know how.
You get one of these: https://www.wired.com/gallery/best-electric-cargo-bikes/
On the occasions you are moving something larger than can fit in the bike you can take a cab/rent a car or truck. If you are regularly transporting things larger than the cargo bike then perhaps you need a car but I guarantee you 99% of people are not moving 300L of sand every weekend.
Also adults and people older than 10 can ride their own bikes.
Wear a cape and some rain pants: https://cleverhood.com/
The Netherlands is also notoriously rainy and windy.
The point is you can replace 90% of your trips with a bike, not that you can never have motorized transport. 90% of car trips in America definitely do not need to be in a single occupancy vehicle/only need to be because we've put everything so damn far away from everything else to accommodate cars. The latter part of the second statement does not apply if you live in a pre mid 50s city
Personally I'm not a cyclist, but I would order most of that stuff on line and not spend tons of time schlepping my entire family+dog on exurban shopping adventures. One huge side benefit of COVID has been that the big box stores in Australia have finally started doing deliveries; the only thing on your shopping list that I would do in person is clothes (which usually need to be tried on).
Partly it's because I live in a city with rubbish traffic on weekends, so a weekend like you describe would be full of crawling traffic and hunting for parking spots.
Having a weekend like you describe - which I remember more from other cities - is something that you can do because of the ways cities are designed (big box stores!). Not wanting to be a moral scold, but a lot of cycling advocates would just say "spend your weekends differently". That's not what I'm saying - and elsewhere I complain that a lot of cycling advocates seem to assume everywhere is already set up like Amsterdam in terms of population density and flatness. However, spending every weekend piling into a vehicle to schlep around big box stores is a choice, just like living in some dense area and cycling everywhere in a cutesy whole-family cargo bike.
You use the word 'need' a lot, even for stuff like "breakfast at a cafe" ('mom: we have breakfast food at home', as the meme goes). A lot of this stuff is choices.
It doesn't have to be an all or nothing situation, you could rent a car once or twice a week for the larger tasks.
There are different types of bicycles, and different types of carriers you can attach. For example there's a cargo bike [0]. In a bicycle focused city you'd perhaps be able to borrow/rent a bicycle for specific uses.
I guess the rain can be a bit of a nuisance, but from my understanding it becomes a non-issue once you've got the proper gear for it. Plus if you were bicycling to work for example, you could have a change of clothes there.
By the way mrmoneymoustache.com has some blog posts about his primarily-bicycle lifestyle in Boulder, Colorado if that's relevant to you.
[0] http://greenlivingideas.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/05/cargo...
I live in a developing country. There are 13 million people in the city I live in. While it is starting to change, effectively nobody but the pretty rich owns a car. (A car is $20,000 and up, whereas average annual salaries are more like $7,000.)
Yet somehow those millions of families get by just fine without cars. I'm not sure why you think it is complete impossible.
> colleagues and I reveal that people who walk or cycle have lower carbon footprints from daily travel, including in cities where lots of people are already doing this.
Not to disagree with the broader point, but I think it's worth distinguishing "travel" from "transportation". I don't have a car, and I bike and walk for almost all of my daily personal "travel". But, I think this also makes me more willing to use delivery services, in which case I'm offloading some carbon footprint to trucks and vans which might not be counted as part of my "daily travel". Part of the appearance of reduced emissions can come from sweeping some emissions into a different category.
You might be offloading some carbon onto delivery service, but those services are almost certainly more carbon efficient and you using a personal car to go shopping.
A delivery van might do 200+ deliveries in one trip. Compared to a single delivery in your personal car. That a huge number of people to split the carbon cost between.
You might argue that delivery can travel further, but that would just be ignoring the carbon cost of have goods delivered and stored in a grocery store.
I think almost certainly deliveries are more carbon friendly, after all the goods are coming from the same source, but with delivery every step the carbon footprint is shared with 10s to hundreds of other people. The only exception to this is probably takeaway food, in which case I recommend that you cycle to restaurant and eat there.
I'm willing to believe that a delivery service is more efficient than me personally driving an empty car to pick up something and bring it home. I'm just saying, depending on how stuff is tabulated, one could systematically over-state the emission reductions associated with being a daily cyclist.
I routinely take my ebike to the pharmacy, get takeout, even some groceries. I have cheap pannier bags that can hold a couple bags of groceries: https://banjobrothers.com/products/market-pannier
I've very pro-bike but this is a pretty good point.
That said, with big panniers or a cargo bike, it's pretty easy to take care of daily needs with a bike. We have an electric cargo bike, and it's somewhat uncommon for us to feel like we need a car for something.
The marginal cost of you using those delivery services is much smaller than you personally driving a car to the shop, though. Delivery companies can very effectively minimise the amortised cost per delivery.
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