At the same time NYC and Toronto, we are removing protected bike lanes. In North America the acceptable amount of lives per year to sacrifice for a little convenience for drivers is above zero, and apparently rising.
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At the height of the killings, 420 Children were killed per year: that is more than 1 per day. 3200 people were killed per year if you include adults. You can imagine that even more were wounded and maimed.
Of course people did not accept that the automobile would destroy their traditional lifestyle and massive protests took place around the country.
As a driver and biker alike I’d much prefer there to be a thick barrier between the cyclist and traffic. It reduces the chances of drivers bumping into or hitting cyclists and ensures that the cyclists cannot unexpectedly swerve into traffic.
It was a bit of a shock cycling in the UK but to be fair all roads were a lot less busy back then. I also don't recall the hostility to cyclists back then that exists now.
A bunch of Dutch hydo-engineers probably (there were rather a lot of skilled folk over there) assisted Somerset back around C17+ to drain and reclaim some pretty large tracts of land in the "Levels". Perhaps we need some cycle lane building assistance.
Cars break the speed limit, look at their phones (easy to see from a cyclist's vantage point) and roll through stop signs, because those things are possible and convenient. Very few drivers are fully in control of their cars in fast, congested traffic, which is why "rear enders" seem to happen frequently.
Bikes roll through stop signs and invent their own shortcuts because those are convenient, but exceeding the speed limit is impossible for most of us.
[1]: https://www.bicyclecolorado.org/colorado-safety-stop-becomes...
[2]: https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2010/may/21/women-cyclists-mo...
So the only thing that bike lanes do is sabotage cars and other ground transit.
As a double whammy, bikes are inconvenient (or illegal) to take onto the most rapid and ground transit. And bikeshares are not reliable enough for daily commutes.
All these factors motivate people to move closer to the downtowns, because it becomes inconvenient to live afar. This in turn increases the price of real estate near downtowns, resulting in real estate developers building denser housing. This in turn results in higher rents, smaller units, more crime, etc.
Yes, I have researched this, and I have numbers to back up my words.
(And, to a large extent, the biggest contributor to it being a good place to cycle is the fact that everyone does it: a whole city's worth of protected bike lanes can't make up for a driver who's not used to driving around cyclists. But it is certainly possible to make road layouts that make safe cycling basically impossible, and American city planners seem to have mastered that)
(That's not to say that the removal isn't shameful and nakedly for hizzoner's political gain; I just think it's not the "big" thing.)
BTW, what do you think about the 5-10 extra lifetimes that people in NYC collectively waste _every_ _day_ in commute compared to smaller cities?
A well-designed car-oriented city will have commutes of around 20 minutes, compared to 35-minute average commutes in NYC. So that's 30 minutes that NYC residents waste every day on average. That's one lifetime for about 1.2 million people commuting every day.
(You've also glossed over the more painful statistic: for every lifetime-equivalent lost on mass transit inefficiencies, there are hundreds lost to gridlock in NYC. That number, already terrible, would be far worse without the city's mass transit -- you simply cannot support the kind of density NYC endeavors for with car-oriented development.)
So in other words, your city made it extremely inconvenient to use anything BUT bikes to get around. Which is exactly my point.
Do an experiment, drop 10 points randomly within your city. Now plot routes between them using various transport modes. I bet that transit will be 3-4 times slower than bikes.
> I have basically zero reason to buy a car: even if there was zero traffic on the road it's not worth the quite substantial cost.
I guess you have zero kids, and your country has a collapsing population? The absolutely telling metric is the number of families with two or more kids, because it's the point where bikes become utterly inconvenient.
> But it is certainly possible to make road layouts that make safe cycling basically impossible, and American city planners seem to have mastered that
Oh yeah. I know that firsthand.
My neighborhood just got bikelaned. Now I have a traffic jam outside of my house half of the day, delaying thousands of people for at least 10 minutes every _day_. The local bus now takes 10 minutes more on average for the roundtrip. And all that for 30 meters of bike lanes. That is almost entirely unused because it ends up against the bottom of a steep hill.
But good news, everyone. Our new housing units are the smallest in the nation and our housing prices are growing fast despite the slowing economy!
So it was able to avoid the effects of the density-misery spiral. But it'll get to experience them soon. The transit will become more crowded, traffic more jammed, the crime will go up, and the housing costs (of course) will skyrocket.
> Cycling and walking infrastructure has been expanded in recent years, helping to separate vulnerable road users from motor traffic.
> Helsinki’s current traffic safety strategy runs from 2022 to 2026 and includes special measures to protect pedestrians, children, and cyclists.
I once saw a biker yell at a pedestrian to get out of the way, even though she was the one who was going through a red light.
More than once I've seen a biker almost plow into someone trying to cross the street.
> You've also glossed over the more painful statistic: for every lifetime-equivalent lost on mass transit inefficiencies, there are hundreds lost to gridlock in NYC.
Here's the thing. A well-designed human-oriented city like Houston has FASTER commutes than ANY similar-sized city in Europe.
The fix for cities like NYC is to stop building them and start de-densifying them.
Said no urban planner in the history of urban planning. Or NJB (https://youtu.be/uxykI30fS54)
> FASTER commutes than ANY similar-sized city in Europe.
Houston ranks 7th worst traffic in the US. The internet tells me you’re boasting of 30mn for an “average 6 miles commute”. That’s bicycle distance and speed that you need to drive due to a broken city.
Wrong. Houston is a great example for planners who care about housing availability and the quality of life for the people. And not bike lanes and road diets.
> Houston ranks 7th worst traffic in the US.
Yes. And the 7th worst traffic in the US is STILL BETTER than any large European city's oh-so-great transit.
Tells you volumes, doesn't it?
And those spandex-wearing road cyclists and commuters that motorists like to bitch about so much? The best law-abiding folks I've seen.
Might be true, but at this point it's an utopian level of fantasy. We spent more than a century with cars in old cities, new cities, smaller ones bigger ones.
The only proven results we've had is reducing cars solveany problems at once.
Objectively wrong. See the Netherlands.
> There are cities with great bike _and_ car infrastructure, and the percentage of bike commutes is about the same as everywhere else.
Even more objectively wrong. See Amsterdam.
No, most cities worldwide are designed to make using anything but a car to get around extremely inconvenient. Best seen in the US.
> I guess you have zero kids, and your country has a collapsing population?
Is there anything about kids in particular that makes them unable to walk and/or bike?
The really young kids go into strollers and bike/cargo bike seats.
> My neighborhood just got bikelaned. Now I have a traffic jam outside of my house half of the day, delaying thousands of people for at least 10 minutes every _day_. The local bus now takes 10 minutes more on average for the roundtrip. And all that for 30 meters of bike lanes.
A narrowing of a single traffic lane on a 30m stretch causes all that? That's obviously untrue.
> And all that for 30 meters of bike lanes. That is almost entirely unused because it ends up against the bottom of a steep hill.
Yeah a bike path that's not connected to a bike path network is of zero use. But then Rome wasn't built in a day was it?
Didn't I debunk your nonsense "data" last time? Why are you repeating incorrect data when you've been corrected? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42648738
"Special measures" is not just code for bike lanes either.
If only. Here roads with bike lanes (protected lanes!) get even more cyclists on the sidewalk. I've asked a few and they seem to trust the sidewalk to be better quality and the obstacles on sidewalk don't need them to slow down often, because people tend to jump out of the way.
The official commute time (one direction) for Houston is in the Census. It was 27.6 minutes in the 2023 ACS: https://data.census.gov/table/ACSST1Y2023.S0801?q=commuting&... (data series: "Workers 16 years and over who did not work from home", "Mean travel time to work (minutes)", restriction by "Census place" = "Houston city, TX"). Make sure you're not looking at "Houston county", which is a small rural area with a population of 20000 people.
And I was talking about the commute time in _large_ cities in Europe, comparable with Houston's population of 7 million. The best is Berlin, with 31 minutes.
So I suppose you're going to apologize for providing the incorrect data?
Time and inconvenience if you're not using a car. It more-or-less requires a full-time commitment from at least one parent. That's why you see a sharp drop in large families in cities.
> The really young kids go into strollers and bike/cargo bike seats.
Try that with 2 or 3 children.
> Yeah a bike path that's not connected to a bike path network is of zero use. But then Rome wasn't built in a day was it?
It is connected. We literally buried about 200 million dollars into building a bike network that spans the city. It sits unused, not even replacing the traffic that it displaced. The percentage of bike commutes is around 2-5% depending on the survey, almost identical to 10 years ago.
But the good news is that our downtown is now full of shuttered storefronts, with most commercial blocks having at least one available for lease.
No, they don't. The majority of people in the US (more than 80-85%) want to live in individual homes in suburbs.
Yet people _have_ to live in dense cities because that's where the jobs are.
Pretty much the only thing is the availability of bars and night clubs. And people past the age of 20-25 are typically not that interested in them.
Anything else: museums, operas, theaters, etc. Take up an insignificant amount of time in the real life. For example, most NYC citizens go to museums exactly 0 times a year.