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The right answer is the tool for the job. Chances are you don't need a huge pickup truck when you buy $200 of groceries. I can do it in a bike with some panniers so that means everyone can do it with an ebike. Need more than $200? Just take multiple trips a week and cancel your gym membership. Need to haul a few hundred pounds of manure? By all means take the truck. It's just when you look around at the modern world today, a lot of people are sitting in traffic by themselves in a vehicle on their way to work less than 10 miles away, or buying a few things from the store less than 2 miles away as soon as the need arises. Its a lot of wasted vehicular capacity. If you were a business buying a machine that you only used a fraction of its capabilities, you'd consider getting away with a leaner machine for most use cases.

For a lot of people I talk to about getting around when it comes up, the major stopping point with biking is just the lack of infrastructure and feeling afraid of cars. Most people aren't comfortable taking the lane while biking so it becomes a dangerous experience when they don't. As the saying goes, though, if you build it, they will come. Any city I've been in that has built out a gridlike network of bike lanes seems to have a lot of people riding around. Once you build them that network you enable a lot of trips for those people uncomfortable with the existing road network.



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Are there any good examples of how to do this infrastructure? In my neighborhood they took the major street in the neighborhood and took one of the lanes and painted it to be a bike lane mext to the sidewalk, and parking spots further out. No physical median, just white paint on light concrete. No one parks in those spots, they would get demolished by cars. And no one bikes there, they bike on less busy streets one block in either direction. Also, at every intersection the parking spots disappear for a right turn lane. The bike lane doesn't, but it is hard to see so the cars go over the whole way.

A nearby neighborhood did something similar but with physical medians. Much better, but still people just use less busy streets mostly.

My main issue getting to work is not those streets, but post ww2 neighborhoods that have one entance and exit forcing me on to highways with glass covered shoulders and speedlimits over 55. That is what I want them to fix. But that would actually involve earth moving and eminent domain, not just a bit of paint or concrete.


I think Irvine California has done a good job adding bike lanes to that sort of suburban design

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