Well, in the city centers, bikes are a LOT faster than both cars and pedestrians.
Within cities, bikes should share the road with motorists.
Outside of cities, they should share with pedestrians.
In a nice designed city, getting to the destination with public transp is faster compared to cars, due to dedicated lanes, more direct paths, semaphore priority (Amsterdam for example) and this is applied to bike paths too. Car infra is designed in a way that it exists but is not optimal/as fast as possible, they optimize for ways to transport great amount of ppl as fast as possible and cars can't do that
Adding more bike paths to reach city center from suburbs and locking down city center for cars should follow next. There are plenty of research which shows that slow traffic brings more business to shops
Bike lanes can handle more traffic per surface area than car lanes. Utilization is unfortunately low in most areas, but capacity wise it’s a clear net gain for city centers.
Oddly enough, sidewalks are the most efficient use of space, but require good public transportation and extreme density to reach that threshold.
Transitioning to bike-centric urban transit takes decades. The best cities in the world have roughly equal bike and car traffic (and a big chunk of transit), but it's taken decades to get there.
Cars moving over the next 15 years to be much safer for pedestrians/cyclists could be a big shortcut on this path.
I think this covers a lot of good points and I'm happy to see it, but the final section seems like a just-so. I've wondered if the difference in bike-induced-demand=good;cars=bad follows these lines:
- Roads/cars often leads to the phenomena of something like grid-lock. A network might be able to throughput 100 cars a minute when only <=100 cars are trying to get through, but try 101 and it starts dropping: If 120 cars attempt passage at once, congestion actually causes the throughput to drop to like 80 (think of those backward-propagating traffic-wave videos). If 150, throughput drops to 70 etc.
- You can add more roads/highways but if it doesn't address certain chokepoints, that throughput will still start descending at some point (though maybe a bit higher now like 110 cars/minute).
- Sometimes you can address the chokepoints, but after some expansion the remaining chokepoints are essentially having the buildings and city intersections themselves, at which point you can only address the bottleneck by rebuilding buildings further apart, which leads to a cycle of worsening pedestrian access, local-depopulation, and more cars.
- And then finally, maybe bikes are different in that they are small and agile with a congestion-failure-mode of being walked. It's hard or unlikely to get to a bike usage level that would lead you to want to move buildings very far apart to support them.
- Or maybe bikes are just simply so small that the preferred distance between buildings anyway (for sun light, privacy) can support most realistic biking numbers (which would be limited by density limits anyways: elevators only practically go so high, commuting biking trips can only be so far).
- Ultimately I wish there as a bit more explained here, maybe by someone that designs traffic/city simulations if that's how the best cost/benefits are tested now. It's really confusing that urban planning advocates concentrate on the un-improving car-trip-time/congestion KPIs like it's a dunk when it really seems some throughput-capacity utility metric would be more important.
TLDW: A city that is less reliant on cars actually reduces congestion and makes it more pleasant to drive in a city.
Fewer cars on the road means less competition.
Bike lanes have more capacity to move people.
Well designed intersections and bike lanes mean that you aren't competing against cyclists and pedestrians for road space you're coexisting along just fine.
Sure, this doesn't work everywhere. But think of Los Angeles. Very high population density, apart from a few hills it's mostly flat and the climate is nice. To get to any place 1 mile away I'd have to go by car. Often there is congestion and I have to wait in traffic. Plus, there is no direct route to the place so have to go a huge detour - perhaps even shortly on a highway.
This could be so much easier and healthier by bike - if the city was built for this.
Bottom-line: some cities can never be be great for bikes. But most can but just aren't.
Totally agree. Where I live I can't go anywhere in a timely manner via bike. Most places are just too spread out. But I love the idea of making downtown areas totally car free (or with the exceptions you mentioned).
cycling isn't space efficient and doesn't really scales that good. It is a luxury ttransportation mode for low/mid density US cities not capable/not willing to build true mass transit modes. Look at the packed subway in say Moscow (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GCZKXHsZo68) and compare to the best possible bicycle situation - mid-80s China http://www.theurbancountry.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/02/83... - around 10 times density difference :) Take that photo, cut 1/5th in height (2-3 abreast) and put large distance between very enthusiastic riders (incl. speeding electrics) - such modern bike lane shows very low efficiency of space utilization/bandwidth and very insufficient capacity to move any significant number of commuting bodies.
To me the answer is making dedicated travel roads for bicycles and pedestrians. This idea is ok, in that it slows cars down, and maybe that's enough, but what I'd love in a city like San Francisco are dedicated roads that allow bicycles to safely travel across the entire city without having to worry about getting run down at every intersection.
There are some streets that are safer than others, but what would be great is if say Valencia, Cortland, Market, Haight, Cole, Columbus and some other roads through downtown (like minna St. and Stevenson) were dedicated to bikes. Some have main bus lines, so maybe allow those to continue to operate as mixed use with bikes and buses. The intention is to make bike thorough fares which are safe from collisions with cars and especially delivery trucks.
This in my mind is the fastest way to transition from a car gridlocked city to one where alternative things like bikes, and battery assisted bikes, can operate safely. Most travel in cities is under 2 miles, perfect for biking (I have a bike that has seats for both my kids, which makes it great for families too).
Safety is probably the largest reason why more people don't bicycle, and targeting main shopping districts would encourage their use to get to those places, while also increasing the general enjoyment of those areas, with the added benefit of increasing traffic to businesses in those areas.
This kind of information is easy to google and also easy to prove to yourself by just making an honest attempt to get places by bicycle. But here is one example of a study:
I am not a traffic engineer but I think if you know a few simple numbers like average travel distance, average car size, bike size, etc. you can see how it will be difficult to design any system where cars will beat bicycles. The only conceivable way for this to work is to space everything 20 miles apart with 8 lane highways connecting them and even then you still have last mile problems in such a system that necessarily slows things down. Even the freeways themselves can be bumper to bumper at rush hour, just look at the Katy Freeway in Houston.
Basically, there are already bottlenecks in car traffic systems and there is no way to avoid them because of induced demand. Adding cycling infrastructure will not hurt drivers but would help get more people on bikes.
For masses, bikes work great if the daily operating radius where you go about is something like five kilometers. But in Silicon Valley, except for some minor villages in between, 5 kilometers is only a couple of blocks. And instead of snaking through traffic in a city for five kilometers at slower speeds with your working clothes on, you would be sweating on your bike beside fast-going cars in a very much grueling environment of noise, heat, and an endless stretch of road. And then you would need to take a turn and do another five kilometers along another road.
I could see it working somewhat if you diverted all the bike traffic through the residential areas and punched the isolated culs-de-sac via bike paths so that bikes, not cars, could take a shortcut through the whole block instead of going along by the car routes. This kind of approach is very common in Finland: you can't always drive from one suburb to another but there's always a bike/pedestrian path that cuts through all that extra distance; here's a typical traffic sign denoting that: http://savepic.ru/7576556.png
But in general it's hard to see bikes becoming the popular vehicle for masses in Silicon Valley until there are enough towns the size of Copenhagen downtown and built with similar density, and where people commute locally.
Heavy car traffic is a stable system that's actively unfriendly to pedestrian and bicycle uses. You need to slowly claw away space for bicycles and increase ridership; and then work to densify and intermix commercial and residential for things to work well.
It takes decades, and the initial steps make things worse even if the new equilibrium is better.
There is new urban planning that focuses on bike/ped travel and reduces vehicle use, and planners are doing that right now (superblocks are just one example). This is expected to reduce pollution and traffic congestion, and make urban areas more walkable/bikeable, as well as better looking. Positive messages with creative solutions are out there for people who look.
Do you have any data showing cycling gets people to their destination faster and more efficiently? That sounds like a nightmare to me if implemented in large scale and will always be hampered by the low top speed of a bicycle.
You want to reduce congestion and make mobility improvements for many? Look to cities that make cycling a way of life through infrastructure, planning, and design.
To be clear, I don't want to displace public transit -> bicycles. I was talking about cars -> bicycles. Densest cities are best served on foot - the places nobody would dare convert to car transit.
As I emphasized, cars -> bikes is not 100 -> 60, but 100 -> 10. Meaning not 1.5x nor 2.5x but 10x density. A moderately priced double-decker staggered height bicycle parking comfortably fits 20+ bikes in the place of a single car.
The only places that require comparatively large bicycle parking areas are large transport hubs, and in the example, the added distance for pedestrians is less than going between platforms, if any at all.
In a typical not-overly-dense places, bike travel is technically faster than foot if you're going more than about 50m + about 120% of distance to parking (if not along the way).
> U.S. solution .. 157 acres of free parking
That is truly foolish, and would fit over a million bicycles even without racks.
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