My my all the hating on bikes here. What gives? Have any of you actually commuted on a decent bike-- not one of the cheap $300 Walmart ones? It's glorious.
Is it wrong for Denmark to impose such a high tax? There's probably better economic means to accomplish the task. But the hating on the bike counter? Now that's just silly.
If you're in SF South Bay, there are plenty of low-traffic roads where you will beat the cars back home and be much, much less stressed out from not needing to jockey in traffic-- at least if you could give up your prejudice for a moment. It also does your burn rate well for those of you doing startups.
I commute on a bike that's several levels below a cheap $300 Walmart one -- and it's glorious. Every day, I get to work in a better mood than when I left home. I defy anyone who drives to work to make the same claim honestly.
I agree completely -- 5 days ago my bike commute took me through 6 inches of snow. The day after, -25°F (-31.6°C) windchills. Your body gets used to the cold if you bike every day as winter sets in. There really is nothing like putting on the thermal underwear + face mask and pedaling home. Keeps one's spirits up during these short winter days.
If anything, hot summer days are harder. After all, you can always add layers if it gets colder, but public decency suggests that removing layers caps out at shorts and t-shirt.
I build myself a fixie (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fixed-gear_bicycle) from an old bike last summer and I now always take a longer way home because it's really fun to ride. The bike did cost me under 100 euros :)
Northeastern rustbelt city. Hot and muggy in the summer, freezing cold in the winter (it's raining today but last Thursday and Friday were baltic), soggy the rest of the year.
Oh, yeah: and hilly. And there are almost no bike lanes.
So shower when you get to work instead of before leaving for work. Or, don't bike. There is no magical thing that is going to prevent you from sweating.
Bike or car, I can only conclude that you enjoy being at work more than being at home. I can't think of a single incentive that would cause me to arrive at work in a better mood than when I left home.
Home is where my "life" is. Work is where... well where I work
I'll take your word for it that biking in California is glorious.
However, biking in the rainy, cold, northern Europe is anything but glorious. Yes, it's very nice in the summer, it's the remaining 9 months that are bad. Let's just say that the overwhelming majority of the people I see biking in Copenhagen don't seem to enjoy it very much. I bet the majority of them would really want a car instead, but chose not to get one because of the very high price due to the extra tax.
>>biking in the rainy, cold, northern Europe is anything but glorious.
Let us not exaggerate. Biking in northern Europe is OK -- if the roads are ploughed, you have the right clothes and winter tyres (2 * 60 Euro for my bike, shudder. Damn thieves.)
The "right clothes" is admittedly a bit much this week, when it is below minus 10 Celsius. Sigh, maybe I should look for a job down south, in warm and sunny Copenhagen.
>>I bet the majority of them would really want a car instead
I bike because I need the exercise. I won't get a car until I live so I get enough exercise anyway.
I wouldn't call this exaggerated. Biking to work in anything below 0°C isn't what I'd call safe or comfortable. The winter tires available for bikes are ok, but cycling outside in a huge winter suit is everything but.
This wouldn't work in Norway. Only 35% of the population live in the larger cities, I know lots of people who have a 60km (~35 miles) commute. Hell, I even know people who get on a plane daily to go to work.
Denmark is also damn flat, at least compared to Norway, which is more "mountainy", like Switzerland.
It does work in Norway for a lot of people. I used to bike to and from school through most of winter, and most of my friends did the same. If you need a "huge winter suit" you're not dressing properly.
Maybe it won't work for as many people as in Copenhagen, but that doesn't mean it doesn't work and wouldn't work for a lot more people than presently.
I think you have the right idea: if you need an environmental bubble (a car) to get between your larger environmental bubbles (home, work), the problem may not be you, but rather your environment. Live somewhere you could [theoretically] get by without clothing, insulation, or electric heat/AC, and I guarantee you a better life.
I don't know, but any half-decent front wheel (hub, spokes, inner and outer tire) will already set you back at least $50. And there are lots of different other parts on a bike.
Even in the Netherlands where we have a mass market for cheap bicycles they still cost at least €200 (new).
Sounds like relying more on a gas tax would have been the better way to go. Distortionary taxes really need to be careful they are distortionary in the desired way.
A family with both parents working, living economically ie. not in an urban center, needs to drive a car to make ends meet. You can't do shopping for a family, and definitely not in economical sizes, on a bike or in a bus. They are hit hard by high gas costs, while a well-off urban professional takes his SUV to go skiing in Italy because it's still cheaper than flying+renting a car when he gets there.
You need a pretty big family before doing shopping by bus is not feasible.
I'm 34, Norwegian, have lived most of my life in Norway and England, and have no drivers license. Never learned to drive, because I've never felt the need to.
I do the family shopping for my small family of 3 on my commute home. I rarely need to pick anything up more than 2-3 times a week, and usually I only need one "big" round of shopping per week. It's never so much that I can't take it with me on the train, then walk to the bus stop and take it with me on the bus, in addition to my fairly heavy bag of gym shoes + clothes. If we had another child or two I might end up going to the shops once more a week, or my wife might end up having to help out with the shopping more often.
While I might've saved a little bit here and there on buying larger quantities, not having the cost of car makes up for it many times over.
For that matter, not having a car saves us so much that we can easily afford delivery charger and/or taking a cab back if we ever want to do really large amounts of shopping, and still save money.
In other words: Apart from a really small number of people that live in so rural areas that they are not properly served by public transport (I'm talking about Europe here) and are too far away to walk, it's not about needs but about perceived convenience.
But I don't even want a car. Apart from the cost, there's all the hassle of keeping it in a decent condition. I'd rather just pay for the service on the rare occasions I need it. Though I may consider getting a drivers license to at least have the option of renting a driverless car now and again.
This is really interesting, because I think a lot of cycling advocates in the US believe that Europe is some sort of utopia where this sort of situation just doesn't exist. The images most of us see from Copenhagen or Amsterdam are filled with families in bakfiets and beautiful people dressed to the 9s on their city bikes.
Has anyone (without an agenda) actually run the numbers on whether having a smaller number of older cars is actually less environmentally friendly than having a larger number of more regularly renewed cars with more modern engines (and more scrapped cars)?
I can easily get behind encouraging people to replace 10 year-old central heating boilers with more efficient models, for cars it seemed more like a bizarre industry specific subsidy.
Mainz, Duisburg (Germany), Oslo, Trondheim (Norway) are not flat cities, but you see bikes everywhere anyways. It's a cultural problem, not a geographic problem.
The difference between Denmark and the US is that the US would never implement cycle infrastructure that could possibly increase travel times for cars. Denmark is willing to reduce the convenience of roads for motor vehicles, and that makes for a vastly better cycling experience. (Actually, cycling is fine in the US, but you have to be brave when you are just starting out. Copenhagen has designed in features that makes the roads very newbie-cyclist-friendly, so people don't get scared off the first time they ride on the street.)
Anyway, if the US ever wants to see cycling adopted by the average person and not only people who have already made the decision to commit, we need to: reduce the speed-limit in city centers to 20mph; have bicycle-only light timings; and start selling bicycles that are useful, not just "cool looking".
My guess is that this will not happen in my lifetime.
My ER doctor friend says urban cycling is idiotic.
I do it all the time but you're kidding yourself if you don't realize it is extremely dangerous.
The more important issue in the US regarding bikes is the lack of density. It's simply not feasible to bike the kinds of distances most people need to go.
My ER doctor friend says urban cycling is idiotic.
A friend of yours said something, so it must be true...
Most accidents are due to people driving their bicycles unsafely. If you drive safely, urban cycling is not dangerous. If you drive like a maniac and disregard traffic controls (running lights, riding on the sidewalk, going the wrong direction, etc.), then yeah... it's dangerous. Just like it would be as a pedestrian or motorist.
(Despite this, I am in favor of laws and regulations that make the roads less dangerous. Cars should not go faster than bicycles in cities. If you need to get somewhere fast, use rapid transit.)
> If you need to get somewhere fast, use rapid transit.
I have a hard time believing anyone in the US (except maybe New York) could say this with a straight face. Where do you live that rapid transit is so rapid?
Chicago. It takes me about 15 minutes to get to work on the train. Driving would probably take a bit longer, and would cost about $40/day. (Not including the cost to get a car and a driver's license; neither of which I have.)
I agree. Mostly. In this economic environment, you may not have the choice.
Personally, living within a bike-able distance to the office is critical. One employer moved nearly 20 miles from house. I tried doing the commute three times a week, and that extra two hours was just not worth it. Fortunately, the tech sector here is pretty robust, and it didn't take much to find work closer to home.
Nice cycling lanes and impressive statistics, but I don't get the impression that bicycles are as ubiquitous (yet) as they are in Amsterdam.
I wonder how they handle bicycle parking in Copenhagen, because that's a real problem in most Dutch cities. Especially those cargo bikes take a lot of space.
It's a bit weird how the short description of just about every photo ends with "... on a bicycle, in Amsterdam" or some close equivalent. Either the author is just completely freaked out that all these things happen OMG ON A BICYCLE IN FREAKING AMSTERDAM, or it's some sort of attempt at SEO, hoping that Google will place this page really highly for people searching for <<<bicycle amsterdam>>>.
If it's the latter then it seems to have worked; the page is the top organic Google result for those words, at least for me at the moment. I do hope that isn't because of the clunkily repetititititive writing style.
Stealing an image from the other person replying to you it pretty much looks just like this: http://www.ski-epic.com/amsterdam_bicycles/pm3s_amsterdam_bi... in many places. Block after block with bicycles although there is room on the sidewalk for people to at least in the parts I've been in.
The most frustrating thing about Copenhagen is all the bicycle repair shops take up the business locations that should be small food places. :P
It's thanks to a lot more than just that infrastructure.
1 taxes, cost of fuel
2 culture (USA views bikes as for kids and tree-huggers)
3 density of urban areas
4 layout/zoning of urban areas (i.e. no ring of suburbia, shopping/strip malls around cities)
5 probably others that I'm not aware of
The infrastructure doesn't work without 3 and 4, and probably doesn't work without 2.
No, in the same way that people will not start smoking if they have to use mandatory safety goggles. Of course this kind of method depends on two things:
1) how critical the activity is to people's lives (cycling: low, driving: high)
2) how funny you look with the safety item on (...)
After living in Copenhagen for 1,5 years I think I can add some info to this.
First of all, biking is the only reasonable way to commute in Copenhagen. Car traffic is big, but the most discouraging factor for me is the parking fees. During business hours, paring in the red zone, which is the city centre, is $5.50 per hour. And you have to be lucky to find a spot, and you still have to walk a significant distance to your destination. Whereas when you take your bike, you can leave it just outside the place you're going to (bike parking spots are everywhere).
There is a lot of people who live in Greater Copenhagen (Cph and cities around it) and commute to the centre by S-trains. This creates the problem of having to either pay extra for taking your bike on the train, or having one bike for home - train station and one for train station - work. The attempted solution for that was the city bikes system, free bikes you could rent, in theory everywhere. In practice however, these bikes are nowhere to be found or somehow broken.
So, what Copenhagen really needs is a decent bike sharing system. A friend of mine conducted a survey for a university project, and there is a huge interest in this kind of system. People would gladly pay a monthly fee to be able to get off a train and pick up a bike that's waiting right next to the station.
I see this as a big idea for many cities. More people would use bikes if they didn't have to actually own and maintain them, and care about theft. Someone make this into a startup please? :)
This already exists in the Netherlands, called the "OV-fiets" (public transport bicycle). You take a subscription (€10 a year), and then using a card you can rent a bicycle at almost any railstation for a little less than €3 for 18 hours. You can rent them longer if you want, and even return them to a different place than you got them from (for a fee).
Most of these places have manned bicycle storage facilities where you can rent them, but they also have some in automated lockers in lesser frequented locations. They're now also starting to put these in commuter parking spots at edges of cities.
I think a good way to bootstrap the stuff is the rental bike program like Lyon then Paris. They just put a lot of bikes at once in the city.
There's a lot of friction in the beginning (you know how car drivers always think pedestrian and bikes are dangerous, when the kinetic energy computation tell another story) but I think it's efficient.
But you need strong political will, I mean you'll have stories dead bikers in the news, you'll have to cope with the bike-unaware traffic rules and stuff like that.
First, the über-fancyness reported is purely COP-15 show-off and nothing else. The bike-counter, for an example, serves no practical purpose. I don't even know what the reported LEDS are.
It's true that it's very nice to be a biker in Copenhagen, but I believe that it's a case of chicken-and-egg: I think most of the amenities are there because Danes enjoy biking in large numbers, and not the other way around.
Fairly certain the LEDs he was talking about were the turn-lane indicators, that warn a turning car if a bicyclist is on the way. That's kind of amazing, and would potentially do wonders in a city like NYC. We already have some separated bicycle lanes (with obstructions between the cyclers and the autos), separate bike traffic lights, but only in a very few spots (8th avenue has a large stretch).
One of these days I'll get one.. :)
Also, if you watch the video he mentions that it's taken thirty some odd years to build out this infrastructure, and that it used to be a much more car-centric city.
The other thing that NYC would do well to implement was the so-called "green highway". I bike to work every day and find that our separated bike lanes have longer and more frequent red lights than the lanes given to cars (we have a red light when they have a green light + left turn arrow). Most of the people who bike frequently in the city actually avoid the separated bike lanes because of the poor traffic light timing.
Yes, that I think is the best of the social engineering ideas presented in that video, its also one of the easiest for the city to implement in terms of infrastructure.
You would make a lot of people mad by doing it though.
Most of the people it would effect are cab drivers/drivers-for-hire and delivery trucks/vans. Everyone else who drives daily in the city is, imho, an asshole ;)
> it's taken thirty some odd years to build out this infrastructure
Exactly - but the story is framed like "look, this city built this for a purpose, and it worked, now you do the same in your cities" when I believe the real story is that a bike-happy population worked with a willing city to slowly evolve an infrastructure with mutual benefits.
The bike counter serves merely to feel like you're making a direct impact -- "hey, I made that counter go up. Cool!" It just needs to make people feel good about biking, so they're more likely to do it in the future.
The claim for having the busiest bicycle street of the west is frankly ridiculous. The guy must never have been to the Netherlands.
I myself live in Utrecht, and we have streets that see more than 2000 bicycles at 8:30am, let alone at 11am (yes, even on weekends).
Is it wrong for Denmark to impose such a high tax? There's probably better economic means to accomplish the task. But the hating on the bike counter? Now that's just silly.
If you're in SF South Bay, there are plenty of low-traffic roads where you will beat the cars back home and be much, much less stressed out from not needing to jockey in traffic-- at least if you could give up your prejudice for a moment. It also does your burn rate well for those of you doing startups.