I would just like to point out that public transit does this part better.
It also takes far more cars off the road. Leaving more rooms for bikes. I think we too often hear this pitch backwards. That bikes are the solution to cars, the environment and everything. That assumption being too often at the root of the attitude many are miffed about here. But bikes are pretty poor solution to how to move lots and lots of people and things around.
In this country the sort of biking we’re talking about is essentially a luxury, and trying to wedge it into heavy automobile traffic that can not be practically displaced or replaced without something else is a fair bit of the problem with regard to US bike infrastructure. The other countries we point to, particularly in Europe tend to already have awesome public transit.
You aren’t really getting more and better biking infrastructure without better public transit, and it’s long struck me that the focus on bike lanes and what have is pushed by those with means. And picked up as a cheaper easier sell. You can kind of see that in the City Bike program and it’s ilk. Which are chiefly used by white tourists in very particular parts of very particular cities.
When I was in Brooklyn I took the subway across the Delancy street bridge and into the financial district daily. It took about 30 minutes, the same ride by bike was over an hour. And each car on that subway had around 80 to 100 people in it during rush hour. A typical train being 8-10 cars.
I agree it’s not an excuse. But like with cops, to a large extent the problem is institutional and can only be fixed at that level. The problem in NYC is not a few bad apple messenger cyclists ruining it for the other messenger cyclists. It’s messenger cyclists ruining it for all the rest of us normal cyclists, and there’s something at its core that’s problematic.
What an asshole. I’m about 3 minutes into it and I’ve seen several pedestrians curse and scream at him. These people don’t know how “skilled” this biker is. They are seriously scared for their lives. It’s not cool at all.
It’s also terrible that the video glamourizes this ride. This gives a bad name to bikers everywhere.
It can be a problem. Rear-wheel-only braking is extremely ineffective. Smart cyclists always have a front brake, for emergencies. A rear brake is optional on a fixie.
As braking force is applied, the effective weight distribution shifts toward the front wheel. At some point the downward force on the rear wheel gets low enough that it loses traction and skids - while the front wheel gets more traction under braking. When braking as hard as possible without going over the bars, the downward force on the rear wheel is zero and so it can contribute nothing to slowing down the bike.
Depends where in Brooklyn, but it’s about five miles from mid Brooklyn to the Financial district stop. Would be about a half hour if you had a fairly direct bike route. Bike commuters have slightly lower incomes than commuters who go by car, though I don’t know the comparison to those who use solely public transportation. https://cityobservatory.org/who-bikes/ City Bikes are used by rich tourists because if you bike for as short as a week, it’s cheaper to own your own used bike than rent a city bike, they don’t replace cars or bike commuting or mass transit.
Mass transit is great, it should always be used (other than during a pandemic) Mass transit moves most people, then bikes, then cars. https://www.theurbanist.org/2016/05/26/the-supply-and-demand-of-street-space/ So, yeah, getting more bike lane space in the city moves more people than cars. I’m in DC where we may, one decade, have the Purple line. Or our children will. Or our children’s children… So, I’d love to have more, but I’d die if I was holding my breath waiting for good mass transit. Any space you can pull away from cars is better. Also, unless you’re peddling the subway car, you’re not getting the same exercise benefit of biking. In some mass transit, you can take your bike on the train or bus, so you’ve additionally flexibility. And mass transit is going to burn more greenhouse gases than bikes. The existence of mass transit is not a reason to not better incorporate bike travel into city spaces.
Well, that might be taking Bruce Lee’s advice a little bit too far.
It was mesmerizingly beautiful but terrifying to watch, and I’m glad a/f that I don’t live in the same city as that guy. I was walking and got clipped by a messenger in SF once. Not fun.
Also that kind of luck can’t last forever.
For as fleet as he is, eventually one day he’ll miscalculate an angle or something, and that’ll be all she wrote.
If anyone ever wonders why the BBS’s ‘wrath’ category incongruously includes ‘cycling’ along with politics and religion, they need look no further than this thread.
In case you didn’t catch it. From where I lived in Brooklyn it took an hour for me to bike it.
The article you linked takes the maximum capacity of vehicles per square foot of pavement usage, and tries to extrapolate out to practical numbers of people. It’s not looking at a mixed, fixed amount of real space or the actual numbers of people moved in an actual location. Neither does it look at whether the sort of usage involved is practically shift able to bicycles. Nor does it address the moving stuff part of the equation.
It also appears to be based entirely a West Cost city or two, and the public transit included is existing light surface rail in those states plus buses.
I don’t think it’s neccisarily accurate or applicable. It certainly doesn’t address my concerns that cycling is an amenity for the white and well off. Nor does it answer whether biking is actually capable of displacing car usage in practice, or if it does real world. Bussing is often dismissed as an inadequate solution based on these sorts of numbers, and it’s beating bikes in that napkin math. This is exactly the sort best case scenario take I’m talking about.
Meanwhile in real world New York. We got a tourist focused bike share program sponsored by a bank, and expanded bike lanes in the central, expensive parts of the city. At the same time that the public transit system came to the point of collapse, and most working people in the city were pressed out to areas beyond a bikeable distance. NYC currently has the longest average commute time of any US city, and the commute time by transit is double the city’s average.
I explicitly said I don’t think you can better incorporate bike travel into city spaces without improved public transit. Not that it’s a reason you shouldn’t. Though I think there are good reasons you shouldn’t prioritize it.
Bikes are only a suitable replacement for simple transport of a person. People living centrally enough to be working bike distance, carry light loads, and not moving passengers. And in a lot of the city the bulk of the cars on the road are not residents of the city center, travelling within the city center. But workers commuting in from outlying areas, working by car, deliveries, etc.
I do not think there is a easy displacement from car usage to bikes given the reality, where each bike added is one less person on the road. So if adding bikes does not remove cars, or does not remove cars at the rate you add bikes. You’ve just put more stuff in a fixed amount of road space. Which is already the problem.
Many of the uses for motor vehicles (especially commuters) can be provably be offset to mass transit. Doing so will open up some of that fixed space.
Maybe for bikes.
And in the offing it benefits underserved outlying areas where it is notably difficult to get around, areas that are typically beyond practical biking distance. Benefits commuting workers, mostly of the sort that don’t have the disposable income to debate this or that derailleur.
I believe this is one of those situations for which the phrase “Christ, what an asshole” was intended. I wonder how many people this idiot leaves injured behind him?
I was a daily bike commuter for about 13 years. Since moving to Seattle in 2003 it’s a been a mix of bus and car. In 2015 I got rid of the car completely. For the last 2 years I have lived downtown and walk everywhere. So please don’t assume we are all drivers.
Previous to this thread I have thought some on why cyclists can generate such strong reactions. First I think they suffer from the middle child syndrome. On the one hand cars are a real risk to a cyclists safety and cars get more respect in this culture. So cyclists often become apoplectic in threads about dangerous drivers and how the rules of the road are sacred for the safety of us all. And then on the other hand these same cyclists do a big flip when the thread is about reckless cyclists putting others at risk. Suddenly rules are a suggestion that they can chose to ignore and people that don’t leap out of their way are the real assholes.
You would think that people complaining so much (and reasonably so IMO) about bad drivers would in turn show the same respect for other cyclists and pedestrians but instead like to brag about how thoughtless they are for the safety of others and then play that off as being cool. It’s being an asshole. Same as bad drivers are being assholes. Same as pedestrians that step into the bike only lane without looking are also being assholes.
Everyone, in every mode of transportation, can choose to be responsible for themselves and look out for others or they can can be reckless and expect others to get out of the way and blame the world for their fuck ups.
Personally, having been a strictly pedestrian living in a downtown area, I have not had a single incident with a bad driver but have had more close calls with bikes nearly hitting me than I can count. But of course I have lived other places where bad drivers were a regular problem. And I will l will never forget the time time I was riding over the Hawthorne bridge in Portland and came within a few inches of a bus driving over me when it cut across two lanes (and me on bike) without signaling to reach the exit ramp on the right side of the bridge.
Most pedestrians, cyclist and drivers do their best to be safe. Sometimes they fail at that. And then there are some people that are purposefully reckless. And then there are some that are purposefully reckless and want to play the victim. I reserve my rage for this last group, regardless of their mode of transportation. I hope that helps clarify for you @Aeroplane
Completely agree, with one caveat: a reckless, selfish driver is far more likely to kill or seriously injure someone than a reckless cyclist.
The cyclist in this video is a fucking asshole and nobody should have to worry about someone crashing into them while they’re just walking down the sidewalk. But I’ll reserve my full rage for the asshole who pulls this kind of shit behind the wheel of a two-ton SUV, kills someone, and gets away with a slap on the wrist. That’s far more common in the United States than getting killed by a reckless bike messenger.
(And, in the rare cases where a reckless cyclist has seriously injured or killed someone, they’re immediately vilified in the press - while car drivers are given every possible benefit of the doubt, with car crashes universally labeled “accidents” and described in ways that ignore the driver’s agency - “was hit by a car” etc.)
So I’m sympathetic to @Aeroplane’s frustration with what often feels like disproportionate outrage over unsafe cycling vs unsafe driving, when the latter is actually among the leading causes of death and yet is generally accepted without any outrage, except in the most extreme cases (e.g. drunk driving).
Welp, you lost me when you called New York the real world. What’s true for NYC is very true for NYC, and is not representative for the rest of the world. Mass transit is finicky, if you live in the right spot, great, if you had to take two trains, not as fast. The touristy bike share program you keep bringing up matters into this equations as much as the tourist segway does for cars or the duck boats does for mass transit. Technically the segway is a powered wheeled vehicle and duck boats are privately owned mass transit. But they’re for tourists, that’s not how people who live in a city get around. When you build subways and elevated trains, you can also build ground level bike paths. Or elevated bike trails, on top of whatever is there, whether or not you have mass transit.
It certainly doesn’t address my concerns that cycling is an amenity for the white and well off.
Bike cost to ownership is about 350-400 per year, car ownership is about 700 per month. If you’ve read anything about bikes in China, you should be aware bikes are an Asian thing more than a white thing, that they went away from, and are now returning to. Bikes are culturally more common among white people at this point, so were cars once. More people of color use bikes now than they once did, there’s been a rapid rise in usage among non-white people. Yes, there are ostentatious rich white people who are very obvious about riding their bikes, and who own $10,000 bikes. So? Most people in the US own a bike costing between $300-700 that they ride for several years. Lower income people can often afford a bike before a car. It’s also the well off that can more likely to own a car, or multiple car, and who don’t care about the cost of mass transit.
29% of people in the US commute 1-5 miles. 51% commute 1-10 miles. We’d have less of a carbon footprint, less health costs if more of those people biked.
As far as “the bike only moves one person”, a car on average holds 1.59 people. Most people can bike with groceries/lunch/briefcase. Much of the space in a city is taken up with parking. A considerably smaller problem with bikes.
I agree that cars have a seriously increased risk and with that goes an increased responsibility. Hard stop. No excuses for reckless or inattentive drivers. The potential dangers of cars doesn’t absolve cyclists from being responsible any more than tanks absolve cars just because cars don’t have giant guns.
Also, just because pedestrians pose less risks than bikes doesn’t absolve them from being responsible for their actions. Before covid, downtown Seattle got swarms of tourists that are often drunk. They often meander without looking into the bike only lane where cyclist are riding fast and close together. I’ve seen a few multi bike crashes happen due to this and while no one was seriously hurt I don’t think telling the angry hurt cyclist that it was their fault because they are more dangerous than pedestrians would go over well. Everyone was super lucky that no one swerved into traffic to be struck by a car. So just because a pedestrian is less generally dangerous than a high speed bike doesn’t mean that through reckless behavior that they could not cause serious harm to others. Same goes for reckless riders causing larger accidents than can get people killed.
Bottom line: Regardless of mode of transportation, don’t be an asshole.
I said real world New York. As in the real world rather than napkin math. New york as the example. Not that New York is definitional of the real world.
If you’re going to insist on misinterpreting plain language I don’t think there’s much point in continuing.
This is the thing I am talking about fixing.
It was pitched as a transit solution. Modeled on similar supposed transit solutions in Europe.
How are you going to build them along with transit if you do not build transit?
And why would you build bike lanes instead of transit?
And how will the bikes work without transit? (The answer on this one is cars.)
In Asia.
I’m also aware that as standard of living and income rise in Asia, people move away from bikes and mopeds. That lack of access to transportation for middle and long distance is heavily associated with lack of upward mobility and may be a causative factor.
There’s a significant time sink involved vs cars or transit on getting places beyond the close in. And as a commuter option there are necessities not everyone can access. Not everyone can have a seperate set of travel cloths, or has a job where being sweaty and covered with road goo is appropriate. Commutes for lower income people are larger in terms of distance often precluding cycling. And lower income people tend to work longer hours and multiple jobs.
More over the comparison point is not bike vs car. It is bike vs bus pass. Which can take you farther and often be free or subsidized. A lot of people can’t or would prefer not to purchase a bike that will not do much more for them than get them to a store already usually walk to.
But a bike is not going to take you to an outlying neighborhood to do a months worth of shopping for 10. A bike is not going to take you out of state for a family funeral on short notice.
More pertinently to the social mobility end of it. Bikes do not allow you to relocate for better work. Probably one of the key things that leads to bikes tapering off in Asia. Cars can do that, public transit can do that.
And those kinds of concerns are absolutely critical when it comes to urban development that is fair and equitable. Increasing income equality and generating social mobility. Public transit is a huge part of that particular discussion. Bike tend not to be.
Three kids and groceries for a month? Across the city line? Cause you live in one of those “tricky” spots without good transportation, and where they forgot to put a grocery store?
And coincidentally where all the brown people happen to live?
Further out from the city center where you work than is practically bikeable?
And neither of your two jobs there involve briefcases.
Member how it took me an hour to commute from Brooklyn to the Financial district? But it took you 30 minutes?
That’s cause I couldn’t afford to live in the part of Brooklyn where it was 30 minutes by bike to the financial district.
Funny, I used to take my bike from Wooside Queens to a Trader Joe’s that was I think in Middle Village… I needed waterproof paniers that I had from a cross country bike ride to do it. I still didn’t carry my groceries for more than 2 weeks, and I think since this was the shittier part of Queens I was crossing (and was totally unfriendly to bikes) that I stopped wanting to do it by December. Snow biking across things like steel plates that you can’t see because of the snow sucks.
I used to participate in the monthly Friday night Times Up bike parade from Union Square to raise awareness of bikes as traffic and the need for more bike lanes (which we did mainly by pissing off the police and immobilizing traffic in Manhattan with 4-500 bikes.) Among that group, bikes were the answer… the only answer… and when talking to those folks I’d ask “what do you have in mind for my 70+ disabled dad?” The idea that the city reaches out as far as Bellerose or Bayside or Canarsie or East New York was not a real concept for most of them… because most of these summer anarchists weren’t actually from NYC originally and the areas outside of the hipster zones were terra incognita.
There’s large sections of outer Queens and the Bronx and to some extent Brooklyn where there’s really no practical trains without taking a bus first, and just try commuting from any outer area to any other outer area without going through Manhattan. But you can build basically all of the bike lanes NYC has now, including the new ones on the bridges, and throw in anything else on the bike wishlist like the proposed ribbon east river bridge and you’re still in for about the price of 2 stops of the 2nd Ave subway.
Huh? Sorry, but that’s just an odd construction. I took the B over the Manhattan bridge? Financial district? Would that be the HSBC / PE zone in the 50s or wall st or rather the back office in LIC?
Former NYC, De Martini with that horrible yellow liner purchased in a basement from Frank and picked up the next day, bike messenger kid turned I don’t care to share exactly what here. Guy in the video is what he is, but man the editing really is choppy. In the edit, he loses his bag, maybe he’s slow, rides like a used sanitary napkin and doesn’t appear respectful of the community. It ain’t even an alley cat, more like a dead cat bounce … but how many days are in that film? Did I miss Kevin Bacon’s appearance?
From a mythic bridge on Delancy to the horrors of cyclists raging in NYC, this thread truly delivered the quicksilver.
Adding bike lanes is cheap and doable and should be done.
Incorporating mass transit will ultimately be cheaper, but requires orders of magnitude more investment and decades to institute. Mass transit as is reduces greenhouse gas usage by 30% over cars, but 70% of current levels is unsustainable. So extant mass transit should be rebuilt and all future mass transit should be redesigned with minimal carbon footprint. I think mass transit should be built, but it’s a massive undertaking compared to bike lanes.
Bikes and bike lanes don’t increase the carbon footprint significantly.
Car rentals exist, owning a car because you may have a sudden funeral in another state is not a good reason.
Bikes are not tapering off in Asia, they’re getting more popular again, as they’re being seen as better for the climate, and smog is horrible in many areas.
Average number of kids is 1.93 kids, so not sure where you’re getting that 1.07 kids from. Kids, famously, ride bikes. Tagalongs and kid seats also exist.
But a bike is not going to take you to an outlying neighborhood to do a months worth of shopping for 10
That’s wacky. If you are doing a month’s shopping at one fell swoop, you should probably be renting a car instead of owning. Are you suggesting it’s easy to do a month’s shopping and taking it home on public transportation? Or is this just an example to point out how bikes are not useful? Would you rather carry thirty pounds on the subway, or on panniers on your bike?
