‘... urban life would be great if there were no cars and everyone rode bicycles.’ Says the urbanist where everything is a short walk or bike ride away and who has never lived outside a city where everything is miles away and when it rains and snows and is freezing cold, walking and biking is no fun. The Netherlands is flat with a small population. Amsterdam is dreary. Rats when made to live together in the equivalent of cities, start killing each other.
Walking has a limiting mobile radius of roughly a mile. And for the very young and very old this distance is less. Public transportation extends mobility but also restricts it to where service is provided.
Biking works very well for young adults who have superior dexterity and fitness as well as mental judgment. Children lack the experience to safely bike in congested spaces and older adults are fragile - I hear of so many 50+ cyclists breaking wrists in falls.
The carless city, like the carbon-free world is a myth that relies on the advocate projecting a very narrow and ignorant understanding of how modern society actually functions.
The individual car is one of man's greatest enabling technologies. This is especially true in a city, where the car allows you to choose social interactions over a large area, avoiding unpleasant people and bad neighborhoods. The various types of Karen (eco-nuts and fitness snobs) who would take those choices away from us are negative value persons.
"This is especially true in a city, where the car allows you to choose social interactions over a large area, avoiding unpleasant people and bad neighborhoods"
Not a chance. They shine in rural areas - a reliable 4WD truck makes rural living much safer and less of a hardship than it was 80 years ago, for example.
Drivers can't afford to pay their own way for automobiles in cities, so they rely on subsidies. In New York, where I live, we give away the most valuable urban land in the world for free street parking. Other cities do the same.
Many / most urban owners of personal vehicles wouldn't think the technology was so amazing if they had to pay for their infrastructure. Federal and state highway bills are a disaster.
Walking, biking, transit, and density is incredibly efficient. The thousands of dollars I don't have to spend for a depreciating, 2-ton highway missile that consumes fuel and maintenance and land...I can redeploy into food, education, travel, and a number of other life-enhancing things.
With traffic in NYC, subway, biking, and walking is almost always faster during daylight hours than taking a car.
The vast majority of the MTA budget is paid for by taxes rather than fares, so if we eliminated subsidies for that the fares would more than double. And the subways are still pretty lousy despite most of the revenue being subsidies. I can literally bike most places in the city - even in other boroughs - as fast or almost as fast as it takes the subway. And NYC is the most ideal city in the country for trains. For most American cities trains are obviously nonsensical.
Mark - I agree that the MTA is hopelessly inefficient with its spend, but I don’t think this is an indictment of public transit, so much as an indictment of sclerotic / corrupt / incompetent American municipal leadership.
Look at Seoul. Look at Amsterdam. Look at Tokyo. We pay $$$ for a subpar system here, but it doesn’t have to be this way.
No argument from me on bicycles. They are the ultimate in efficiency and speed for most routine urban transportation. E bikes and cargo bikes open up the use cases even further.
All those who want the rest of us to change our lives to match theirs are spoilt, self-centred, superannuated toddlers of limited knowledge and experience. . They don’t care about what others want or need, just me, me, me, me…
" Children lack the experience to safely bike in congested spaces and older adults are fragile - I hear of so many 50+ cyclists breaking wrists in falls." -- Maybe so but they also can't drive. So public transit and density make kids much more independent.
The very old also have to give up driving at some point. When my grandfather couldn't drive safely anymore he gave me his Buick but that also meant I had to schlep him around town because there's no walking in LA. Contrast that with the very old folks I see walking around NY and other walkable cities and I don't quite get why that generation still thinks it makes sense to design cities around cars.
Based on having spent close to two years in Amsterdam, my assessment of the social utility of bicycles is that the reduction in auto traffic they occasion allows for a quieter, more intimate urban environment. More precisely, the effect is derivative of the automobile’s diminished claim on space. The Jane Jacobs intangible that comes from strolling along a busy street isn’t felt by bicyclists as they cycle down that same street. Even with that qualification, the Amsterdam model is way way better than the US norm
I live in the city of Worcester, Massachusetts. It's a city of a little more than 200,000 people, about 40 miles West of Boston.
For several years the city has removed car lanes and parking spaces to add bike lanes. NO ONE uses the bike lanes. I can drive around for days and not see a single bicyclist other than children.
Why?
Because grownups have to go to work. Worcester is one of the hilliest cities in America. Major Taylor, an early bike racing champ, lived and trained in Worcester BECAUSE the everpresent hills made training so effective. They also make you disgustingly sweaty when you show up for work.
Worcester is also consistently the snowiest or 2nd snowiest city in America every year, making the streets completely impassible on a bike for several months out of the year
Marc - there are cities with bad weather and hills that have thriving cycling scenes. E-bikes will also continue to open up opportunities for those who don't want to sweat as much!
Looking at Google Maps, it looks like if you're within 1 mile of the giant interstate arterial that cuts right through downtown (what an unfortunate thing - so many cities have had their downtown wealth destroyed by being razed for freeways...) you can access a functional grid. But how many trips are within that grid?
Looks to me like low-density, SFH exclusionary zoning prevails on all the housing built post-WWII, so population growth has spread outwards, reducing the number of places to live that are close to where people want to go.
On Street View, the area around Worcester Common looks beautiful. Probably the most valuable urban real estate in Worcester on a PSF basis. Go a block or two south, and you have vast surface parking lots. How does that make sense? It doesn't - except there's probably a statutory parking minimum imposed on developers. The accumulation of hundreds of these land use decisions makes cycling that much more difficult. Distances grow, and grow more dangerous to traverse in anything that is not a car.
For whatever it is worth, I've done some riding in a variety of Boston suburbs, and often felt really unsafe on the road.
Street View indicates very little safe cycling infrastructure (protected lanes) on the arterials.
Lets say you wanted to bicycle commute from downtown Worcester to Westborough. A fit cyclist would cover this in ~45 mins. How would you do it? Route 9 is probably illegal / suicidal for bikes. Google Maps would suggest two bike routes, either north on 70 / Main Street, or south on 122 / 30.
Car-dependent cul-de-sacs and subdivisions branch off of 30, what was once probably a low-traffic dirt farm road, is now humming with drivers going to-and-from for every errand or trip outside of the house. No protected bike lane. Speed limit of 40, no shoulder, long straightaways to encourage speeding? Many cyclists don't want to risk that kind of riding these days.
I think the accommodations made for bikes in cities like Amsterdam, Munich, Copenhagen, etc. are remarkable and should be copied. I live in a small town on the edge of Silicon Valley. Weather is great, and a bike would be appropriate for virtually every activity I engage in. Commuting to work is more of an ordeal (about 15 miles), but certainly possible. If we conceived of public transit in layers – local versus long-distance, where bikes, walking, small buses, etc. are prioritized for the former and cars for the latter, we would have much more pleasant cities.
(I suspect the “aggro” behavior of cyclists today results form some combination of selection bias – the certain type of person who’s attracted to road cycling – plus experience of being pushed around a bit by vehicles and surprised by unaware pedestrians. You certainly find a different type of personality in off-road mountain bikers – much more relaxed and friendly.)
Mountain bikers may be more relaxed, but I've been close to being run over by one of them a number of times. They come blasting around a corner and you can't see them until they are nearly on you.
Cars and bikes can mix better when each user is aware of the rules of movement.
Modern bicycling advocacy has taken a negative turn in many areas, becoming less for actual cyclists themselves are more for corporate and government controlled lobbying for flashy expensive projects and fulfilling certain ideology goals. Often they promote the idea that the roads are too dangerous for cyclists by catastrophizing the source of the hazards. And their solution is to completely rebuild cities at great expense. The kicker though is their “solutions” often cause more crashes than no facilities at all.
"Often they promote the idea that the roads are too dangerous for cyclists by catastrophizing the source of the hazards. And their solution is to completely rebuild cities at great expense."
Could you give examples? Here in New York at least, the most prominent organization I am aware of is Transportation Alternatives, and I don't recognize your critique in their advocacy work, at least. I've seen them explicitly try to replicate the success of Vision Zero and cities like Amsterdam. Influence is felt in protected bike lanes (separated from travel lanes typically by parallel parking lane) and reclaiming streets for people (slower vehicle speeds, more speed cameras, safer intersections, etc.).
https://www.strongtowns.org/ has a lot of information on how to make cities and towns better. They take the approach of less goverment planning and more emergent order. Worth reading at least some of it
I love cycling, but unlike Amsterdam which has relatively mild temperatures year-round, much of the US has real winters. I live in Boston and cycle to work when I can, but it's just not feasible from November - March at least.
Bike commuting in the cold is actually not hard and can be the best time because of reduced sweating. The key is the clothing. Layers, including wind/wet proof outer layer. Your local bike and/or outdoor shop has lots of useful clothing for winter commutes. Boston's average low in Jan is 23. That's not a hard temp to ride in with the right clothing. Of course, everyone has their own preferences and tolerances, so I'm not saying you should be riding.
"I bike myself, and I have to work to avoid being rude. Maybe it’s because you are really vulnerable on a bike"
Neal Stephenson's very early career novel Zodiac features an asshole protagonist who rides his black bicycle at night wearing black clothes and with the reflectors removed under the assumption that the only way he can suvive is if he acts like everyone is out to kill him and doesn't ever give himself a reason to depend on their charity or competence.
[All this discussion of urbanism and biking] makes perfect sense as long as one ignores the question of crime. In the absence of that key item, [urban planners like those mentioned by Ed West are] left to think that all these car-centric features are either a mistake, or some weird conspiracy of car manufacturers or road builders. In reality there is massive demand for housing in this form, because it permits the buyers to immigrate into the virtual nation of car drivers.
[W]e now live in a society of pervasive violent crime [and public disorder, which is a kind of lesser degree of violent crime and also very important, as every parent will readily appreciate - C.] I think it is possibly the most important single fact about the modern world. There are vastly more people in our societies today whose behaviour is dangerously criminal than there were when our civilisation was at its peak, which I would put very vaguely as 1800-1939. To the extent that this isn’t overwhelmingly obvious through crime statistics, it is because of the phenomenon I describe here — people are protecting themselves from crime by physically separating themselves from the criminals.
And this is why discussing car usage solely in terms of transport is so pointless. Virtual Nations are in general stupid, but “people with cars” actually do effectively make a virtual nation. To be a citizen of Great Britain you don’t need much paperwork, but to be a citizen of the nation of car drivers you have to register yourself with the bureaucracy and keep your information with them up to date. Because you own an expensive piece of equipment that the state knows all about, you have something that they can easily take from you as a punishment. In fact, they can take it even without going through the endless palaver of a court case. In the last few years, you are even required to constantly display your identification which can be recognized and logged by cameras and computers, so the state for much of the time knows exactly where you are.
I used to find this outrageous, and it is still not my preferred way for a government to govern a country effectively. But it is a way to govern a country, and, unlike Great Britain, the country of British car-drivers is actually governed.
But what about the objection to virtual nations? The virtual nation of car-drivers is not a true province, like Wales or Texas, but it is physically separated from the rest of the nation. That is the point of suburbia, of the windy housing estates full of dead ends, with no amenities and no through roads. If you drive a car, you can quite easily have a home that is not accessible to anyone without a car. When you do have to venture among the savages, you do so in a metal box with a lockable door.
There are reasonable alternatives to cars for transport (in a lot of cases, anyway), but we need an alternative to cars as a safe virtual nation to live in. If you want a society that is not centered on the car, for everyone who can afford one, then put the criminals in prison. That’s it, end of tweet.
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Both Noah Smith and Ed West score some points because they at least _mention_ crime. Noah Smith mentions it only to characteristically dismiss the 'right-wing theory' that diversity causes social atomization - I guess Professor Robert D. Putnam is a rabid right-winger by today's standards - whereas Ed West seems to go on to discuss it some in the paid-subscriber-only portion of his post. Unfortunately I could not read it, not being one.
American cities are bigger and more economically complex than European cities, which probably makes much greater use of vehicles inevitable. There are 3 cities in Europe (including the UK) with >5million people in the urban area. There are 9 in the US, despite Europe being 50% bigger in population and several times as dense. It would be impossible to turn American cities into a bunch of Amsterdams, Munchens, and Dusseldorfs, much as I like those cities.
Drivers are a privileged class in the USA. Vast subsidies exist for their infrastructure, mandatory accommodations for their drivers' needs are enshrined in law (parking minimums, etc.), and we have deformed our cities so that drivers can get through them as fast as possible, consequences and so many deaths be damned.
Cars have a lot of utility in rural areas. I grew up on a farm in North Dakota. A 4WD truck makes sense there. But in any kind of town or city, they don't make sense.
Or rather, they "make sense" because of the distortions of urban land use and development patterns, with subsidized highways and freeways, single-family only zoning with minimum setbacks, sprawling non-grid layouts, and other modern zoning rules that make transit nearly impossible and enshrine car dependency. Perfect for an obese society with 90%+ afflicted with metabolic disorders.
When distracted, drunk, or speeding drivers kill or maim somebody, it's often a slap on the wrist, or summer camp, as a consequence.
I live in NYC (Harlem) and even in this city, a mecca of urban efficiency, transit and density (built before post-WW2 automobile-suburban-ponzi-scheme-socialism took over) I am regularly threatened by dangerous driving. Far more than by pedestrians, cyclists, or the mentally ill / drug abusers that the city allows to occupy the subway and other public spaces.
I find this hard to believe. I also live in NYC and bike all the time, and I am constantly being almost run over by insane bicyclists (especially delivery guys, who are a scourge) going the wrong way and running red lights (or biking 20mph down the sidewalks while I'm walking), often on motorized bikes, or having brainless pedestrians leap into the bike lane mid-block or in front of a green light without even looking. 95% of times I've almost been killed or injured it's been because of a bicyclist or pedestrian.
Quoting selected NYPost stories isn't evidence. There was a case a few weeks ago where a cyclist cut in front of a taxi causing it to swerve onto the sidewalk and hit two pedestrians, each losing limbs. One can find plenty of NY post articles to support whatever one's preferred conclusion is.
If you do bike all the time, how do you feel about the asymmetry where your life is regularly lethally threatened by vehicles who can end your existence at a moment's notice and likely face no legal repercussions for doing so?
The only stats on cyclist-caused injuries and fatalities I found are from another 2019 NY Post article that suggests that "Since 2011, bicyclists have injured more than 2,250 pedestrians — including at least seven who died — according to stats from the city Department of Transportation and published reports."
This compares with 37.8K injuries in just 2022 year-to-date.
Back-of-the-envelope math: (2,250 injuries / 8 years) = 280 cyclist-caused injuries annually, compared against ~45K annualized injuries in 2022. If you assume the remainder of traffic injuries are caused by vehicles, this means drivers have 165x more responsibility for injuries.
With cyclists killing ~1 person per year, cars have the homicidal advantage of more than 200x. Which isn't surprising based on the fact that drivers are much more insulated from the consequences of their actions (both legally and physically) than unarmored pedestrians and cyclists traveling at lower speeds.
Look at the Vision Zero map of fatalities. If you think these are caused by cyclists, I have a bridge to sell you.
"95% of times I've almost been killed or injured it's been because of a bicyclist or pedestrian."
Again, I just don't recognize this experience. Where do you ride? I ride mostly in Harlem, Upper West, Upper East, Midtown, and occasionally down to lower Manhattan and Brooklyn.
I completely agree that there are insane cyclists out there. Delivery cyclists are frequently aggressive and going the wrong-way on streets or on sidewalks. I've seen mo-peds and scooters and motorcycles illegally flying down bike lanes or around the pedestrian + cyclist loop in Central Park.
It bothers me, but I just don't see the same magnitude of mortal threat, and the data bears this out.
I am an ex-cyclist (quit at 81 when I noted that a crash clipped in could do a lot of damage and my reflexes were not as fast).
I visited china in '84 when it was all bicycles and almost no cars on 6 lane highways. However, the passengers per lane per hour were not that high and not much different than the moped scooter dominated cities in other countries.
Bicycles, mopeds, and cars are all limited by human reflexes that are very slow when something is going wrong. What humanity needs is the fast reflexes offered by automation and elimination of steel on steel wheels (they can't stop when things go wrong at high people densities and speeds).
If we rename Tesla as a transportation pod and get the autopilot up to class 5 level, we could drastically increase the lane capacity and speed. The pod could know what is happening 10 pods up the line and follow at 2 cm.
But even 30 seconds appears well beyond the limit of emergency braking. It’s common in gadgetbahn to propose extremely tight headways, presuming computerized control allowing vehicles to behave as if they’re connected by a rod. Personal rapid transit proponents argue the same. In reality, such systems have been a subject of research for train control for quite a while now, with no positive results so far. Safety today still means safe stopping distances.
I suggest you look at the details of control theory and notice how spaceX can balance on its tail and land while thinking of how fast that control system must respond in all directions and end up exactly where they want it to be. No 30 seconds delays allowed.
It's most impressive - I remember well when I watched the first synchronized double landing of Falcon boosters - but... call me back when they land a family with kids on a booster that way. Boosters don't land on top of one another either.
> No 30 seconds delays allowed.
The 30 seconds refers not to delays in the control loop (that's dumb) but to the acceptable headway, or interval, between vehicles in a single lane. The vehicle has to brake to a stop, preferably without smashing its occupants (which puts stringent limits on the magnitude of deceleration - current regulations allow about 2.5m/s^2 with seatbelts), when it detects that the vehicle in front of it is no longer maintaining interval. I'll stipulate that you can detect that with lidar, but then what? What Levy means is that basically the vehicle cannot rely on the one in front of it decelerating at a predictable low rate. If there's a crash, and vehicles go with 2cm headway, the resulting pileup will dwarf any seen with normal vehicles, or you will have to open a canned human jelly factory.
The objective is to minimize the deaths per lane mile and making car trains computer linked together with information transfer along the line, you can have more passengers per lane per minute, eliminating congestion. Yes, when a semi-goes across the lane the whole train of cars will pile up on a low frequency event but the death per lane mile can still be lower because the number of passenger lane miles is so much larger. If the linked trains can communicate over the gap between trains you can prevent spread past one train allowing everything to stop.
Cars in real trains are connected with sturdy thick metal bars for a reason. Anyway, the real point is not the technical details of gadgetbahn/personal rapid transit vaporware (which has been around at least as long as I've been on the internet, i.e. at least 20 years). It's that the demand for car-centric living arrangements which puts heat into all this vaporware is almost entirely driven by the refusal of modern Western culture to enforce law and public order equally on everybody regardless of demographic characteristics. Japan has approximately zero crime and even first-grade kids can and do commute to school unaccompanied on their excellent train systems. Parents don't need or want to drive them around everywhere, as if they were Uber drivers or personal servants.
I assume you moved to Japan so you can ride trains. We will see in another half century whether we have steel on steel trains or more flexible passenger pods going from A to B.
‘... urban life would be great if there were no cars and everyone rode bicycles.’ Says the urbanist where everything is a short walk or bike ride away and who has never lived outside a city where everything is miles away and when it rains and snows and is freezing cold, walking and biking is no fun. The Netherlands is flat with a small population. Amsterdam is dreary. Rats when made to live together in the equivalent of cities, start killing each other.
Walking has a limiting mobile radius of roughly a mile. And for the very young and very old this distance is less. Public transportation extends mobility but also restricts it to where service is provided.
Biking works very well for young adults who have superior dexterity and fitness as well as mental judgment. Children lack the experience to safely bike in congested spaces and older adults are fragile - I hear of so many 50+ cyclists breaking wrists in falls.
The carless city, like the carbon-free world is a myth that relies on the advocate projecting a very narrow and ignorant understanding of how modern society actually functions.
The individual car is one of man's greatest enabling technologies. This is especially true in a city, where the car allows you to choose social interactions over a large area, avoiding unpleasant people and bad neighborhoods. The various types of Karen (eco-nuts and fitness snobs) who would take those choices away from us are negative value persons.
Quite so. It’s not the car they hate, they hate the people who drive them.
"This is especially true in a city, where the car allows you to choose social interactions over a large area, avoiding unpleasant people and bad neighborhoods"
Not a chance. They shine in rural areas - a reliable 4WD truck makes rural living much safer and less of a hardship than it was 80 years ago, for example.
Drivers can't afford to pay their own way for automobiles in cities, so they rely on subsidies. In New York, where I live, we give away the most valuable urban land in the world for free street parking. Other cities do the same.
Many / most urban owners of personal vehicles wouldn't think the technology was so amazing if they had to pay for their infrastructure. Federal and state highway bills are a disaster.
Walking, biking, transit, and density is incredibly efficient. The thousands of dollars I don't have to spend for a depreciating, 2-ton highway missile that consumes fuel and maintenance and land...I can redeploy into food, education, travel, and a number of other life-enhancing things.
With traffic in NYC, subway, biking, and walking is almost always faster during daylight hours than taking a car.
The vast majority of the MTA budget is paid for by taxes rather than fares, so if we eliminated subsidies for that the fares would more than double. And the subways are still pretty lousy despite most of the revenue being subsidies. I can literally bike most places in the city - even in other boroughs - as fast or almost as fast as it takes the subway. And NYC is the most ideal city in the country for trains. For most American cities trains are obviously nonsensical.
Mark - I agree that the MTA is hopelessly inefficient with its spend, but I don’t think this is an indictment of public transit, so much as an indictment of sclerotic / corrupt / incompetent American municipal leadership.
Look at Seoul. Look at Amsterdam. Look at Tokyo. We pay $$$ for a subpar system here, but it doesn’t have to be this way.
No argument from me on bicycles. They are the ultimate in efficiency and speed for most routine urban transportation. E bikes and cargo bikes open up the use cases even further.
All those who want the rest of us to change our lives to match theirs are spoilt, self-centred, superannuated toddlers of limited knowledge and experience. . They don’t care about what others want or need, just me, me, me, me…
Yes, those car drivers are something else again.
" Children lack the experience to safely bike in congested spaces and older adults are fragile - I hear of so many 50+ cyclists breaking wrists in falls." -- Maybe so but they also can't drive. So public transit and density make kids much more independent.
The very old also have to give up driving at some point. When my grandfather couldn't drive safely anymore he gave me his Buick but that also meant I had to schlep him around town because there's no walking in LA. Contrast that with the very old folks I see walking around NY and other walkable cities and I don't quite get why that generation still thinks it makes sense to design cities around cars.
Technocracy is a mental defect
"The most unique thing about Amsterdam’s urban design — and the thing that dazzles American urbanists — is the way the city is built for bicycles."
NO you blithering idiot
Amsterdam wasn't designed or built for bicycles
bicycles are the solution the residents of Amsterdam found to deal with the way the city EVOLVED
An important distinction - visible in the way that modern "designed cities" like Brasilia are so wretched.
Based on having spent close to two years in Amsterdam, my assessment of the social utility of bicycles is that the reduction in auto traffic they occasion allows for a quieter, more intimate urban environment. More precisely, the effect is derivative of the automobile’s diminished claim on space. The Jane Jacobs intangible that comes from strolling along a busy street isn’t felt by bicyclists as they cycle down that same street. Even with that qualification, the Amsterdam model is way way better than the US norm
I live in the city of Worcester, Massachusetts. It's a city of a little more than 200,000 people, about 40 miles West of Boston.
For several years the city has removed car lanes and parking spaces to add bike lanes. NO ONE uses the bike lanes. I can drive around for days and not see a single bicyclist other than children.
Why?
Because grownups have to go to work. Worcester is one of the hilliest cities in America. Major Taylor, an early bike racing champ, lived and trained in Worcester BECAUSE the everpresent hills made training so effective. They also make you disgustingly sweaty when you show up for work.
Worcester is also consistently the snowiest or 2nd snowiest city in America every year, making the streets completely impassible on a bike for several months out of the year
Marc - there are cities with bad weather and hills that have thriving cycling scenes. E-bikes will also continue to open up opportunities for those who don't want to sweat as much!
https://youtu.be/Uhx-26GfCBU
How close to downtown are you?
Looking at Google Maps, it looks like if you're within 1 mile of the giant interstate arterial that cuts right through downtown (what an unfortunate thing - so many cities have had their downtown wealth destroyed by being razed for freeways...) you can access a functional grid. But how many trips are within that grid?
Looks to me like low-density, SFH exclusionary zoning prevails on all the housing built post-WWII, so population growth has spread outwards, reducing the number of places to live that are close to where people want to go.
On Street View, the area around Worcester Common looks beautiful. Probably the most valuable urban real estate in Worcester on a PSF basis. Go a block or two south, and you have vast surface parking lots. How does that make sense? It doesn't - except there's probably a statutory parking minimum imposed on developers. The accumulation of hundreds of these land use decisions makes cycling that much more difficult. Distances grow, and grow more dangerous to traverse in anything that is not a car.
For whatever it is worth, I've done some riding in a variety of Boston suburbs, and often felt really unsafe on the road.
Street View indicates very little safe cycling infrastructure (protected lanes) on the arterials.
Lets say you wanted to bicycle commute from downtown Worcester to Westborough. A fit cyclist would cover this in ~45 mins. How would you do it? Route 9 is probably illegal / suicidal for bikes. Google Maps would suggest two bike routes, either north on 70 / Main Street, or south on 122 / 30.
Car-dependent cul-de-sacs and subdivisions branch off of 30, what was once probably a low-traffic dirt farm road, is now humming with drivers going to-and-from for every errand or trip outside of the house. No protected bike lane. Speed limit of 40, no shoulder, long straightaways to encourage speeding? Many cyclists don't want to risk that kind of riding these days.
I think the accommodations made for bikes in cities like Amsterdam, Munich, Copenhagen, etc. are remarkable and should be copied. I live in a small town on the edge of Silicon Valley. Weather is great, and a bike would be appropriate for virtually every activity I engage in. Commuting to work is more of an ordeal (about 15 miles), but certainly possible. If we conceived of public transit in layers – local versus long-distance, where bikes, walking, small buses, etc. are prioritized for the former and cars for the latter, we would have much more pleasant cities.
(I suspect the “aggro” behavior of cyclists today results form some combination of selection bias – the certain type of person who’s attracted to road cycling – plus experience of being pushed around a bit by vehicles and surprised by unaware pedestrians. You certainly find a different type of personality in off-road mountain bikers – much more relaxed and friendly.)
Mountain bikers may be more relaxed, but I've been close to being run over by one of them a number of times. They come blasting around a corner and you can't see them until they are nearly on you.
Highly recommended read is this history of cycling in context of traffic laws and culture:
https://iamtraffic.org/equality/the-marginalization-of-bicyclists/
And this video (transcript available too)https://thinkbicyclingblog.wordpress.com/2017/02/28/my-bike-or-my-2-ton-land-missile/
Cars and bikes can mix better when each user is aware of the rules of movement.
Modern bicycling advocacy has taken a negative turn in many areas, becoming less for actual cyclists themselves are more for corporate and government controlled lobbying for flashy expensive projects and fulfilling certain ideology goals. Often they promote the idea that the roads are too dangerous for cyclists by catastrophizing the source of the hazards. And their solution is to completely rebuild cities at great expense. The kicker though is their “solutions” often cause more crashes than no facilities at all.
"Often they promote the idea that the roads are too dangerous for cyclists by catastrophizing the source of the hazards. And their solution is to completely rebuild cities at great expense."
Could you give examples? Here in New York at least, the most prominent organization I am aware of is Transportation Alternatives, and I don't recognize your critique in their advocacy work, at least. I've seen them explicitly try to replicate the success of Vision Zero and cities like Amsterdam. Influence is felt in protected bike lanes (separated from travel lanes typically by parallel parking lane) and reclaiming streets for people (slower vehicle speeds, more speed cameras, safer intersections, etc.).
https://www.strongtowns.org/ has a lot of information on how to make cities and towns better. They take the approach of less goverment planning and more emergent order. Worth reading at least some of it
I love cycling, but unlike Amsterdam which has relatively mild temperatures year-round, much of the US has real winters. I live in Boston and cycle to work when I can, but it's just not feasible from November - March at least.
I know a guy (not particularly young) who commutes to work on a bike every day in Finland. So... it’s possible certainly.
Bike commuting in the cold is actually not hard and can be the best time because of reduced sweating. The key is the clothing. Layers, including wind/wet proof outer layer. Your local bike and/or outdoor shop has lots of useful clothing for winter commutes. Boston's average low in Jan is 23. That's not a hard temp to ride in with the right clothing. Of course, everyone has their own preferences and tolerances, so I'm not saying you should be riding.
Its not hard to bike in the cold if the streets are completely clear of ice and snow. Same with walking.
You mentioned the color of the shirts the fighters were wearing but not their skin color. Blacks are more likely to engage in fist fights than whites.
"I bike myself, and I have to work to avoid being rude. Maybe it’s because you are really vulnerable on a bike"
Neal Stephenson's very early career novel Zodiac features an asshole protagonist who rides his black bicycle at night wearing black clothes and with the reflectors removed under the assumption that the only way he can suvive is if he acts like everyone is out to kill him and doesn't ever give himself a reason to depend on their charity or competence.
Slightly rewording from AnomalyUK's post [https://blog.anomalyuk.party/2022/07/cars-or-police/]:
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[All this discussion of urbanism and biking] makes perfect sense as long as one ignores the question of crime. In the absence of that key item, [urban planners like those mentioned by Ed West are] left to think that all these car-centric features are either a mistake, or some weird conspiracy of car manufacturers or road builders. In reality there is massive demand for housing in this form, because it permits the buyers to immigrate into the virtual nation of car drivers.
[W]e now live in a society of pervasive violent crime [and public disorder, which is a kind of lesser degree of violent crime and also very important, as every parent will readily appreciate - C.] I think it is possibly the most important single fact about the modern world. There are vastly more people in our societies today whose behaviour is dangerously criminal than there were when our civilisation was at its peak, which I would put very vaguely as 1800-1939. To the extent that this isn’t overwhelmingly obvious through crime statistics, it is because of the phenomenon I describe here — people are protecting themselves from crime by physically separating themselves from the criminals.
And this is why discussing car usage solely in terms of transport is so pointless. Virtual Nations are in general stupid, but “people with cars” actually do effectively make a virtual nation. To be a citizen of Great Britain you don’t need much paperwork, but to be a citizen of the nation of car drivers you have to register yourself with the bureaucracy and keep your information with them up to date. Because you own an expensive piece of equipment that the state knows all about, you have something that they can easily take from you as a punishment. In fact, they can take it even without going through the endless palaver of a court case. In the last few years, you are even required to constantly display your identification which can be recognized and logged by cameras and computers, so the state for much of the time knows exactly where you are.
I used to find this outrageous, and it is still not my preferred way for a government to govern a country effectively. But it is a way to govern a country, and, unlike Great Britain, the country of British car-drivers is actually governed.
But what about the objection to virtual nations? The virtual nation of car-drivers is not a true province, like Wales or Texas, but it is physically separated from the rest of the nation. That is the point of suburbia, of the windy housing estates full of dead ends, with no amenities and no through roads. If you drive a car, you can quite easily have a home that is not accessible to anyone without a car. When you do have to venture among the savages, you do so in a metal box with a lockable door.
There are reasonable alternatives to cars for transport (in a lot of cases, anyway), but we need an alternative to cars as a safe virtual nation to live in. If you want a society that is not centered on the car, for everyone who can afford one, then put the criminals in prison. That’s it, end of tweet.
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Both Noah Smith and Ed West score some points because they at least _mention_ crime. Noah Smith mentions it only to characteristically dismiss the 'right-wing theory' that diversity causes social atomization - I guess Professor Robert D. Putnam is a rabid right-winger by today's standards - whereas Ed West seems to go on to discuss it some in the paid-subscriber-only portion of his post. Unfortunately I could not read it, not being one.
American cities are bigger and more economically complex than European cities, which probably makes much greater use of vehicles inevitable. There are 3 cities in Europe (including the UK) with >5million people in the urban area. There are 9 in the US, despite Europe being 50% bigger in population and several times as dense. It would be impossible to turn American cities into a bunch of Amsterdams, Munchens, and Dusseldorfs, much as I like those cities.
"My generalization is that drivers are courteous to pedestrians and bicyclists"
What?
https://nypost.com/2022/08/11/video-shows-hit-and-run-driver-plow-into-mom-baby-in-nyc/
https://nypost.com/2021/07/24/cops-rescue-baby-and-mom-pinned-under-car-in-yonkers-video/
https://nypost.com/2022/06/03/la-mom-mowed-down-by-teen-driver-blasts-da-over-probation-sentence/
Drivers are a privileged class in the USA. Vast subsidies exist for their infrastructure, mandatory accommodations for their drivers' needs are enshrined in law (parking minimums, etc.), and we have deformed our cities so that drivers can get through them as fast as possible, consequences and so many deaths be damned.
Cars have a lot of utility in rural areas. I grew up on a farm in North Dakota. A 4WD truck makes sense there. But in any kind of town or city, they don't make sense.
Or rather, they "make sense" because of the distortions of urban land use and development patterns, with subsidized highways and freeways, single-family only zoning with minimum setbacks, sprawling non-grid layouts, and other modern zoning rules that make transit nearly impossible and enshrine car dependency. Perfect for an obese society with 90%+ afflicted with metabolic disorders.
When distracted, drunk, or speeding drivers kill or maim somebody, it's often a slap on the wrist, or summer camp, as a consequence.
I live in NYC (Harlem) and even in this city, a mecca of urban efficiency, transit and density (built before post-WW2 automobile-suburban-ponzi-scheme-socialism took over) I am regularly threatened by dangerous driving. Far more than by pedestrians, cyclists, or the mentally ill / drug abusers that the city allows to occupy the subway and other public spaces.
I find this hard to believe. I also live in NYC and bike all the time, and I am constantly being almost run over by insane bicyclists (especially delivery guys, who are a scourge) going the wrong way and running red lights (or biking 20mph down the sidewalks while I'm walking), often on motorized bikes, or having brainless pedestrians leap into the bike lane mid-block or in front of a green light without even looking. 95% of times I've almost been killed or injured it's been because of a bicyclist or pedestrian.
Quoting selected NYPost stories isn't evidence. There was a case a few weeks ago where a cyclist cut in front of a taxi causing it to swerve onto the sidewalk and hit two pedestrians, each losing limbs. One can find plenty of NY post articles to support whatever one's preferred conclusion is.
Mark - I am shocked you need me to look up stats, but I will!
Before I do, I am going to guess that cars injure or kill somewhere between 100x - 1000x the numbers of people that cyclists do every year in NYC.
Let's see what numbers I can dig up:
"Of around 400 pedestrians killed in collisions in the UK each year, about 2.5 involve a bicycle."
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/mar/08/killer-cyclists-roads-bikes-pedestrian-collision-deaths-britain
"A total of 274 died in traffic fatalities in 2021" in New York City. Shameful.
https://nypost.com/2022/04/09/nyc-traffic-deaths-up-35-percent-so-far-this-year/
How many of these do you think are caused by cyclists?
https://nyc.streetsblog.org/2022/10/14/no-charges-for-truck-driver-who-killed-cyclist-despite-being-on-a-no-truck-route-and-failing-to-yield/
If you do bike all the time, how do you feel about the asymmetry where your life is regularly lethally threatened by vehicles who can end your existence at a moment's notice and likely face no legal repercussions for doing so?
The only stats on cyclist-caused injuries and fatalities I found are from another 2019 NY Post article that suggests that "Since 2011, bicyclists have injured more than 2,250 pedestrians — including at least seven who died — according to stats from the city Department of Transportation and published reports."
https://nypost.com/2019/08/31/nyc-bicyclists-are-killing-pedestrians-and-the-city-wont-stop-it/
This compares with 37.8K injuries in just 2022 year-to-date.
Back-of-the-envelope math: (2,250 injuries / 8 years) = 280 cyclist-caused injuries annually, compared against ~45K annualized injuries in 2022. If you assume the remainder of traffic injuries are caused by vehicles, this means drivers have 165x more responsibility for injuries.
With cyclists killing ~1 person per year, cars have the homicidal advantage of more than 200x. Which isn't surprising based on the fact that drivers are much more insulated from the consequences of their actions (both legally and physically) than unarmored pedestrians and cyclists traveling at lower speeds.
Look at the Vision Zero map of fatalities. If you think these are caused by cyclists, I have a bridge to sell you.
https://vzv.nyc/
"95% of times I've almost been killed or injured it's been because of a bicyclist or pedestrian."
Again, I just don't recognize this experience. Where do you ride? I ride mostly in Harlem, Upper West, Upper East, Midtown, and occasionally down to lower Manhattan and Brooklyn.
I completely agree that there are insane cyclists out there. Delivery cyclists are frequently aggressive and going the wrong-way on streets or on sidewalks. I've seen mo-peds and scooters and motorcycles illegally flying down bike lanes or around the pedestrian + cyclist loop in Central Park.
It bothers me, but I just don't see the same magnitude of mortal threat, and the data bears this out.
I am an ex-cyclist (quit at 81 when I noted that a crash clipped in could do a lot of damage and my reflexes were not as fast).
I visited china in '84 when it was all bicycles and almost no cars on 6 lane highways. However, the passengers per lane per hour were not that high and not much different than the moped scooter dominated cities in other countries.
Bicycles, mopeds, and cars are all limited by human reflexes that are very slow when something is going wrong. What humanity needs is the fast reflexes offered by automation and elimination of steel on steel wheels (they can't stop when things go wrong at high people densities and speeds).
If we rename Tesla as a transportation pod and get the autopilot up to class 5 level, we could drastically increase the lane capacity and speed. The pod could know what is happening 10 pods up the line and follow at 2 cm.
https://pedestrianobservations.com/2013/08/13/loopy-ideas-are-fine-if-youre-an-entrepreneur/:
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But even 30 seconds appears well beyond the limit of emergency braking. It’s common in gadgetbahn to propose extremely tight headways, presuming computerized control allowing vehicles to behave as if they’re connected by a rod. Personal rapid transit proponents argue the same. In reality, such systems have been a subject of research for train control for quite a while now, with no positive results so far. Safety today still means safe stopping distances.
I suggest you look at the details of control theory and notice how spaceX can balance on its tail and land while thinking of how fast that control system must respond in all directions and end up exactly where they want it to be. No 30 seconds delays allowed.
It's most impressive - I remember well when I watched the first synchronized double landing of Falcon boosters - but... call me back when they land a family with kids on a booster that way. Boosters don't land on top of one another either.
> No 30 seconds delays allowed.
The 30 seconds refers not to delays in the control loop (that's dumb) but to the acceptable headway, or interval, between vehicles in a single lane. The vehicle has to brake to a stop, preferably without smashing its occupants (which puts stringent limits on the magnitude of deceleration - current regulations allow about 2.5m/s^2 with seatbelts), when it detects that the vehicle in front of it is no longer maintaining interval. I'll stipulate that you can detect that with lidar, but then what? What Levy means is that basically the vehicle cannot rely on the one in front of it decelerating at a predictable low rate. If there's a crash, and vehicles go with 2cm headway, the resulting pileup will dwarf any seen with normal vehicles, or you will have to open a canned human jelly factory.
The objective is to minimize the deaths per lane mile and making car trains computer linked together with information transfer along the line, you can have more passengers per lane per minute, eliminating congestion. Yes, when a semi-goes across the lane the whole train of cars will pile up on a low frequency event but the death per lane mile can still be lower because the number of passenger lane miles is so much larger. If the linked trains can communicate over the gap between trains you can prevent spread past one train allowing everything to stop.
Cars in real trains are connected with sturdy thick metal bars for a reason. Anyway, the real point is not the technical details of gadgetbahn/personal rapid transit vaporware (which has been around at least as long as I've been on the internet, i.e. at least 20 years). It's that the demand for car-centric living arrangements which puts heat into all this vaporware is almost entirely driven by the refusal of modern Western culture to enforce law and public order equally on everybody regardless of demographic characteristics. Japan has approximately zero crime and even first-grade kids can and do commute to school unaccompanied on their excellent train systems. Parents don't need or want to drive them around everywhere, as if they were Uber drivers or personal servants.
I assume you moved to Japan so you can ride trains. We will see in another half century whether we have steel on steel trains or more flexible passenger pods going from A to B.