This is a well-known principle of urban transport. If driving is faster than the alternative transport mode (whether that's public transport, if any, or walking), then at the margins people will switch to driving, but that means more traffic on the road, more congestion, and slower driving speeds. Conversely, if driving is slower than the alternative, then at the margins people will switch away from driving, reducing traffic and increasing driving speeds. So in places where road space is the bottleneck, we expect driving speed to be similar to the speed of the alternative mode. In central London, for example, travel speed has been roughly the same whether you drive or take the Underground, for more than a century.
Update since some commenters seem to be having trouble: this process depends on the travellers "at the margin", that is, the people who are most willing to switch modes to reduce their journey time. Thinking in terms of the average or typical traveller is misleading.
This is called induced 'demand'¹, and it is why I love biking in downtown.
I like to play a game where I pick a distinctive car 3 blocks ahead, and see if I can catch up to it and pass it. If the car does not turn off the road, I almost always do, and by a wide margin.
I love filtering through traffic on my bike. My favorite hobby while passing cars trapped in traffic is counting how many aren't solo drivers in a given stretch of traffic, excluding work trucks/delivery. Usually it's under 10%. It's fun to imagine how this would look if all these people were on a bike, but 20' x 6' apart like they are currently arranged in these singly occupied cars. Bonkers.
I like your example... I've done the same, but it's important to remember that lots of those trapped people came from far away places on freeways that may not have access to a train... certainly that's true of the delivery trucks, which also couldn't deliver on a bicycle.
The key really is to move the marginal traffic that can switch. The key thing I see reducing cars is the absence of parking. Being at your destination, but unable to park (within a few blocks) is often enough to convince people not to drive.
I changed jobs recently and one of the biggest factors for me was being able to bike to work. 6km a trip mostly through parks circumventing traffic as much as I can. It’s an important life quality factor for me.
I'm not sure this is true in Copenhagen, although I've only visited once and I don't have any data to back me up. There is a huge cycling culture there and it seemed that the bike lanes were often pretty badly jammed up while the car lanes were relatively clear. But perhaps this is more a result of it being impractical to own a car there (eg parking) as opposed to the cost or convenience of operating one.
It would seem to be an outlier so it would be interesting to see some data.
Why do those cyclists stay on the bicycle lane when it is clogged and other lanes are clear ? Here in Paris, I can't imagine anyone behaving in such submissive manner
In the Netherlands, current design calls for three types of streets:
- highways, speed limit >= 100. Cyclists can’t go there (but alternative, cycleable routes always exist)
- main arteries into cities, speed limit 50, with separated cycle tracks.
- ‘last quarter mile’ roads, speed limit 30, where cars and bicycles share the road.
So, if there is a bicycle lane, it typically is separated from the car lanes by a barrier (row of trees, parking spots, etc)
That makes switching from bicycle lane to car lane or switching back to the bicycle lane when the car lane gets busy hard to do.
Also, you may be more likely to get a green light when riding in the bicycle lane, as the the induction loops there are designed to detect bicycles, not cars, and, on top of that, cyclists may be preferentially give green lights on crossings over cars.
I live and bike in Amsterdam, which also gets heavy bike traffic. The thing is, things still work more smoothly if you are in the bike lane. The signals there are tailored to you, and you can get a whole pile of bikes through a light change even though it looks busy because they pack much denser than car traffic. If necessary, bikes will take space from cars, but it's not usually required.
Also, the busier parts tend to be in places where it's not useful to go in the car lanes anyway, or they're already mixed-mode (in which case it's the car traffic slowing everyone down because they end up stuck behind one slow cyclist, but 20 cyclists are stuck behind the car.)
From visiting Amsterdam, the bicycle lanes are well designed for bicycles. Even when crowded, staying in the correct lane seems to work well. Pedestrians on the sidewalk, bikes in the bike lane, cars in the car lane (plus the light rail). Signals and crossing are designed so all 3 user groups can get where they need to go.
In the US, where most bike lanes are half-assed attempts (no physical separation, no signals, poorly conceived traffic crossings at turn lanes), a crowded bike lane quickly becomes unusable and bikes spill into the traffic lane.
On the other hand, I've had good success with driving a car like I ride a bike here in less rule-abiding places to fit in.
Rule-following seems to be a function of the sensibility of the rules. When the rules don't work for you you stop adhering to them, and the rules for bicycles often don't make sense in a car-centric world.
Cologne and Copenhagen both have very strong cultures of abiding by traffic signals, even for pedestrians. One time in Cologne I started to feel awkward that we are all waiting, and suddenly a sports car zoomed out of a tunnel and through a green light. That's why no one was crossing against the light.
No, they exist for motorists' convenience, as can be seen from the example. Cyclists have been brainwashed for the last 50 years to believe that riding on the regular road means instant death, that's why they stay in the bike lane even if the normal road is empty.
It sounds like you're talking about American cyclists. In Amsterdam (and maybe Copenhagen) cyclists are dominant over cars. But it would be pretty rude to ride in the car lane for any distance when a bike lane is available.
Not at all - in many recent renovations they reduce the car lanes from two-way with parking to a single one-way, making room for double wide bike lanes.
The plan is to make it so cars won’t drive through the city, but still be able to reach each spot.
That was the whole point of bike lanes, get cyclists off the roads and leave these exclusively for motorists. So It seems it has worked pretty well. Generations of cyclists fooled by this, it's so sad.
// So in places where road space is the bottleneck, we expect driving speed to be similar to the speed of the alternative mode.
Doesn't this mean, that the real "battle" between the public transportation and cars, should be based on a better experience ?
And since driving a car in traffic, everyday, is a negative experience and will stay so until autonomous driving - in theory, we could create the right public experience, that will win over most drivers ?
Because it would cost too much. About 90% of commutes are driving, versus 5% for transit (mostly buses). But even though transit accounts for only about 5% or commutes, it accounts for 25% of spending at the federal, state, and local levels (combined): https://www.pewtrusts.org/en/research-and-analysis/articles/....
The majority of people, quite reasonably, will not pony up even more money for transit until it can actually improve their commutes. And it can’t, for two different reasons. First, it costs us five time as much money to build a unit of rail as it does say Paris (a city where the majority of people don’t drive to work). That kneecaps your ability to increase coverage of the transit network—making it a viable choice for the majority of commuters. Paris has a dense network of subways and commuter stations, which means that people can take a reasonable walk to a transit station. You can’t build a dense network like that if each mile of track costs you five times as much.
Second, our cities don’t look anything like the cities where most people take transit to work. People are catching on to measuring population density of metro regions in weighted terms (calculating the density in a way that shows the density in the places where most people live, rather than using arbitrary administrative lines). Under those measures, places like Paris and Barcelona have metro are densities of 30,000-50,000 people per square mile. Only New York City comes close. San Francisco and LA are at 12,000. DC, Seattle, Portland, etc. are in the 5,000-6,000 range.
Taking both figures together kills you. When you build 10 miles of subway in Barcelona, you might cover 250,000 people (assuming you get people walking from 0.25 miles on either side). And say it costs you $1 billion. In DC that same 10 miles of subway covers 30,000 people. And it costs you $5 billion.
Oh, there is really a third reason. Because you have to drive everywhere anyway, our job centers in the US are widely dispersed. Google’s main Paris office is in Paris itself. Google’s main Bay Area office is in the suburbs of San Francisco. Google’s main DC area office is in the suburbs of DC. Fixed transit networks are awful for such layouts.
> Because it would cost too much. About 90% of commutes are driving, versus 5% for transit (mostly buses). But even though transit accounts for only about 5% or commutes, it accounts for 25% of spending at the federal, state, and local levels (combined): https://www.pewtrusts.org/en/research-and-analysis/articles/....
That's disingenuous. The driving infrastructure includes both what the state provides as well as what private funding spends (i.e. that cost of the all the cars, fuel etc). The transit infrastructure funding is entirely public in nature.
There are also corridors in L.A. that are very dense and would benefit greatly with transit. L.A. metro is so ambitious because the size of the basin, >500sq miles; you can fit over 20 manhattan islands with room to spare in the basin. Koreatown is the densest part of the town (and very well served by metro rail), and its at 40k per square mile.
Metro is prioritizing building into dense areas and state government and developers want nothing more than to focus new builds around these rails and get these areas one day near ktown density levels. The thorn is NIMBY neighborhood councils and the city councilmen beholden to them that want to plug their ears and hope L.A. gets back to 1960s era population levels by some magical force of collective cognitive dissonance.
The fact is, people are moving to L.A. in droves because they are getting hired in droves, rooting against that is rooting against economic growth of the city.
My intuition says that your 2nd point is, at least in part, caused or exacerbated by how city zoning has progressed from the postwar period to modern day, with large swaths of residences going over here, all the stores and business over there, and industrial going on the other side of the river across a large empty field, because who wants to live or work within smelling distance of the meat processing plant? This seems especially bad in newer sections of the city.
I do have some hope this is starting to turn around. In the myriad construction I've seen going up in my local area, especially near the already-established major transit lines, there's been mixed zoning, with shops at the ground level, and apartments or offices up top, as an example.
Though now that I type that out, it sounds like a chicken/egg problem. Until transit lines are in place and established, there's probably going to be less incentive zone things to make transit worth using. And until things are zoned to make transit worth using, there's probably going to be less incentive to build out transit.
I visited portland recently and was pretty blown away that I could take a train from the departures to my hotel in 20 mins or so, while the city was otherwise choked in rush hour traffic. Transit is always going to loose money, but that's OK. Even for a small city, a good transit network has huge benefits for the environment and just enjoying the city, being able to get around quickly and cheaply.
Google’s main DC area office is in the suburbs of DC.
Google has 2 (or 3?) offices in DC metro. One is on Mass Ave, in the heart of downtown. The 2nd is in Reston, which is suburban (20 miles out of downtown) but is accessible via rail and a 10 minute drive to IAD.
They might have an office in Sterling/Ashburn, but I think that's a data center, so not a huge employment center.
At least as of several years ago, the Reston office was bigger, right? I got the impression that the DC office had more corporate folks while the Reston office is where most of the engineers are.
The Reston office is not accessible by rail. The Reston Town Center silver line station will open sometime this year or next. And even then, it’ll be largely inaccessible by rail to people who actually live in Reston, since the only place the silver line goes is toward DC at one end and toward IAD at the other. From Sterling it’s a 15 minute drive, but an hour and 15 minute trip involving multiple buses. And if you live in one of the Virginia suburbs like Vienna, you can take the train to Reston Town Center, but you have to go in the opposite direction toward DC first on the orange and then switch at Ballston to a silver going back out. 45 minutes or so, versus a 20 minute drive.
I'm not sure about the sizes. I don't think either is a large office.
And you're correct that if you don't live on the rail, nothing is rail accessible. And even if you do, it's hub/spoke, so only useful for going downtown or to IAD, there's no matrix of lines to get from Tysons to Bethesda or similar without going downtown and transferring first.
That said, I think Google is opening a new office at Reston Station (Wiehle Road), which is currently accessible by rail. I don't know if this is an additional office, or if they're moving/expanding the RTC office.
I'm so glad I live and work in Reston, walk to work, and can mostly ignore this stuff. Except for when the weather turns to crap - then I have to deal with traffic on Sunrise and Reston Parkway with everybody else (and it's only getting worse as developers turn all the parking lots into new high-rise developments). I wish Fairfax County's bike lane implementation wasn't so half-assed - many of the areas could be bike-accessible in reasonable time frames (my old Herndon-Fairfax commute was 30 min by car or 45 by bike and saved me working out some other time).
>Oh, there is really a third reason. Because you have to drive everywhere anyway, our job centers in the US are widely dispersed. Google’s main Paris office is in Paris itself. Google’s main Bay Area office is in the suburbs of San Francisco. Google’s main DC area office is in the suburbs of DC. Fixed transit networks are awful for such layouts.
it seems like the government could apply zoning for work places?
It seems like the obvious answer is to consider fixing the "cost disease" of infrastructure as the #1 priority. Not more trains, or faster trains or whatever. Just getting the costs in line with the rest of the world. The extra infrastructure should follow, right?
Okay... and how do you do that? I want to write more here, but I just don't know where to even begin. Where is the money in US infrastructure projects going, and is any of it to things that we can actually agree to eliminate?
A lot of it gets lost to private contractors and consultants. Privatization is nice if you don't have the labor pool to do the work with public employees, but it's very wasteful and costly because everyone down the line needs to get their chunk of the pie. Public can run at cost or over budget and still be a huge success because no one is clamoring for a >30% profit margin. It also invites nepotism.
European cities also generally use private contractors for construction. The Paris subway expansion, which is proceeding at a fraction of the per-mile cost of New York's Second Avenue subway, is being done by private contractors: https://tunneltalk.com/France-25Oct2018-Grand-ParisExpress-n....
This might sound like a cop-out answer, but I think the answer is "nobody knows".
So-called "cost-disease" spans infrastructure, education (public & private!) and medicine (again, public and private). All of these things cost 10x what they used to and 10x what they cost in other countries.
There are a few exposés and studies that try to explain the issue but IMHO none of them are satisfactory:
NYT tries to answer the question for NYC (but then why is cost disease a thing in other cities with different contractor/union/transit authority interactions?)[0]
Alex Tabarrok says it's growth in demand and slowdown in productivity growth (but then why is this a US only phenomenon? Does it really "jive" that infrastructure costs 10x what it used to because of "increased demand and slowdown in productivity?" I don't think it passes the smell test) [1]
I’m talking about the population weighted density of the metro areas, not just the cities. Most people in the Bay Area don’t live in San Francisco (just like most people in “Paris” don’t live in the city itself). So you’ll never move the needle on transit usage if you’re just limited to the city itself. The arithmetic density of the Bay Area is 800 people per square mile. That’s not a very useful measure because that is dragged down by lots of sparsely populated areas where few people live. 12,000 is the population weighted density (basically, the density of the areas where most people actually live). Paris and Barcelona are 3-4 times that.
I visited the Bay Area for the first time (as an adult) a few weeks ago and was astonished by the difference between what I was expecting based on HN comments, and reality.
All I saw of the city made it seem like a giant suburb. BART stations were miles apart and therefore practically useless. It is really not that dense and traffic is not bad.
I am sure some areas are different. I was mainly in the area around SFO, and my conference was not hosted in downtown because apparently the homeless problem is bigger there, but at that level of low density and congestion, I fail to see how public transit is much of a win. People will not realistically take public transit if it doubles their travel time. And this case applies doubly to medium-sized suburbanized cities in the central US.
On the other hand, I can see what people mean about a housing problem when there are virtually no buildings taller than 3 stories except hotels in such an urban area.
> All I saw of the city made it seem like a giant suburb. BART stations were miles apart and therefore practically useless.
While there are multiple BART stations in the city, it is not the main public transit in the city, Muni is. BART is the regional rapid transit connecting suburbs to the city.
> I was mainly in the area around SFO
Then you quite possibly didn't actually see any of the City and County of San Francisco. SFO is operated by the San Francisco International Airport Commission, which is a body subordinate to the government of the City and County of San Francisco, but is not actually within the geographical boundaries of the City (or County, the two being one and the same.)
> Then you quite possibly didn't actually see any of the City and County of San Francisco.
Very possible. I got a good sampling of a 5 mile radius around SFO and sporadic sampling elsewhere. I wouldn't claim to know 1/100th of what a resident does about the area.
However, I was interested in testing to the extent I could the implicit hypothesis often floated on HN, "the Bay Area is borderline uninhabitable". If an area 15 miles away from downtown seems quite low-density, and assuming a 15 mile commute is reasonable (assisted by BART, whose analogue doesn't exist in many comparable cities), I concluded complaints on HN are overblown, especially considering everyone doesn't commute to downtown. For example, YouTube headquarters were pretty close to SFO. Stanford is not near downtown either. Not sure where all the other headquarters are located.
I don't have high confidence in that conclusion obviously because my information is very limited. But I am comparing to cities I know better like DC and NYC.
> it is not the main public transit in the city, Muni is
I assume "Muni" means buses or cable cars, and I will only say that during wandering around for ~20 hours, I didn't see a single bus, so I conclude Muni doesn't service suburbs.
> However, I was interested in testing to the extent I could the implicit hypothesis often floated on HN, "the Bay Area is borderline uninhabitable".
I've seen lots of people claim that about (especially downtown) SF; the normal claim about the rest of the Bay Area is that it's unaffordable because of the people that want to keep it habitable, not that it is uninhabitable.
> I assume "Muni" means buses or cable cars
The San Francisco Municipal Railway operates busses and cable cars, sure, but also surface and subway trains which share several of BARTs dowtown underground stops, but also have a lot more stops in the city that are not shared with BART.
> and I will only say that during wandering around for ~20 hours, I didn't see a single bus, so I conclude Muni doesn't service suburbs.
It doesn't (that I know of, there may be some lines that go out of the city, certainly many non-SF operated lines go into the city); there are many other transit agencies in the Bay Area, many of which have bus lines in the suburbs, including lines that run into the city. The area right around SFO (excluding the airport itself) may be a relative dead zone, I haven't really spent much time there.
I wouldn't generalize about the Bay area from a few days in a particular corner of San Mateo County, though.
> I wouldn't generalize about the Bay area from a few days in a particular corner of San Mateo County, though.
I'm very wary about it too, but the persistent claims that SF/Bay Area has some peculiar kind of dysfunction, rendering it hard to live in, that doesn't exist in other major metros has always piqued my curiosity. It seems like an extraordinary claim requiring extraordinary evidence.
The only real evidence I've seen supporting this idea is very high housing prices. I sat next to a woman on my flight who paid $5K/mo for a 2-bedroom apartment, shared with 2 others. Sounds insane. And of course I've seen more systematic evidence of this.
But after my visit, I wonder whether she, and perhaps others on this board, don't consider the SF suburbs as worthy for a potential living space. Or alternatively whether the claims are true that there is very high demand and these suburbs would be demolished and replaced by high-rise apartments but for zoning restrictions.
This seems like a bizarre data point to extrapolate from. Aren't airports often specifically put away from dense population centers (for obvious reasons)? It's not as if Charles De Gaulle is on the Seine.
It doesn’t. The Toronto and Montreal metro areas are about twice the density of the DC metro area (14,000 people per square mile in weighted terms, versus under 7,000). But about 20% of DC area commuters take transit, versus 22-23% in Toronto and Montreal. (Remember, we’re talking about the whole metro area—in all three places, most people don’t live in the city proper.) In all three places, roughly 70% of people drive to work.
Comments like this make me really wonder if companies like the boring company actually have the right idea, but maybe a slightly wrong implementation. What if the tunnel networks were based on pedestrian traffic rather than vehicle traffic? The tunnels wouldn't have to be exceptionally large, but they could carry a tremendous amount of traffic.
Even better, they would be insulated from the weather, which is by far the worst part of the pedestrian experience in big cities, IMO.
Cars on surface streets are quite probably the worst approach possible from an efficiency standpoint, but they appeal for experience reasons.
Private transportation is fundamentally at odds with public transportation as far as I can tell; public transport campaigners just don't "get it".
In cities where public transportation is a huge success, it's because driving is completely impractical due to congestion.
Even a first class compartment on a train is frankly uncomfortable compared to sitting in a car.
An autonomous car or a chauffeured car beats it hands down, because public infrastructure is never going to be as clean or as luxurious as an individual can afford.
I love public transport and I want it to do well because, well, it's ultimately the only thing that's going to scale. But it's just not acceptable to say "oh well the train is warm and smelly, deal with it". Unless it's a cause that really matters to them, most people who can afford it are going to opt out of that.
Well, it seems to me that you don't get it. In the city where I live, car traffic is not especially impractical, and I drive from time to time. But if I have the chance to go somewhere by subway, I prefer that, since I can read or do seomthing else in the meantime. If I can walk, this is even better.
For longer travels, a train is always better than a car for me: I can read, watch a movie, study. The time of arrival is known in advance unless there are delays and I can just relax.
You seem to assume that everyone prefers to be in a car, but this is just not the case
The thing I'm getting at here is not whether you, or I, personally drive or not.
It's that public transport is built (necessarily) for the public. It's lowest common denominator. Very, very few systems worldwide are actually comfortable places to be.
A car that has air conditioning, your own seat, space, etc is more comfortable than a tube carriage that's crammed to the rafters and is 30+c.
A specific individual might prefer the cost/time/whatever tradeoff of one over the other. But to pretend that cars are just strictly inferior is only true in a situation where public transport actually works properly - which is really vanishingly rare.
Even in a place like London with its' fantastic tube network, it's completely normal for people to stand armpit-to-armpit in a sweltering carriage. A car might be slower, but it provides an opt-out for that discomfort, and some people will choose that unless you literally ban it.
London is particularly bad, and one reason is the insane increase for demand in commuting capacity.
I can't find the source, but in 2010 or so, there were about 250k people traveling to London daily for their work. (That figure was 350k in early 2013.) In 2019, there are something like 850k people doing the same.
Even if the numbers were only vaguely there, that still means >200% increase in required commuting capacity in a decade. Don't know if any transport infrastructure could support that kind of expansion.
I think we agree. I am not sure of the percentages, but there are some people that prefer cars, others that prefer public transport, other that prefer bikes. The way you phrased your comment seemed to assume that car is a preference for everyone, which in my experience is not true (although of course it is for some people)
"Even a first class compartment on a train is frankly uncomfortable compared to sitting in a car."
- So being able to stand up, walk about, have space* is not luxury to you? Could I get those knockout pills you take?
* I have Jeep Cherokee and the space I get is less than first class rail.
> Even a first class compartment on a train is frankly uncomfortable compared to sitting in a car.
I strongly disagree. On a train you can stand up, walk around, go to the bathroom, etc. and the ride is usually smoother than anything short of brand new shocks plus pristine road conditions.
In the US, Amtrak often gets "stuck in traffic", because freight trains have priority. I think a lot of people don't realize this and it contributes to the general opinion that Amtrak just sucks for no reason.
I wonder what percentage of the population could be considered at the margins, as it were - in my city cars very very quickly outpace alternative modes for transportation. I'm lucky to be in a position where transport is the same time as driving, and walking is just the right distance to be enjoyable, but that's incredibly rare.
The average commuter won't carry huge luggage around. But they might spend the time reading or working out they are sitting in a train/metro compartment. And they exercise when using the bicycle, meaning they will be healthier and have reduced health issues and cost. Bicycles are also much less costly and environmentally friendly, don't pollute, are less likely to have accidents (except with cars), ... But infrastructure is much cheaper and easier to maintain then that for cars. Cars on the other hand block the roads not just for each other, but also for public transport, trucks, emergency vehicles, ... They produce co2 and microparticles, take up valuable space when parked, etc. Overall cars have huge externalities.
So no, cars are not the best means of transport just because you can carry lots of stuff which you usually don't carry...
Have you ever lived outside San Francisco or Portland? Here in DC, during the summer (which lasts six months out of the year), the heat and humidity will have people sweating with even mild exertion. So to the speed of walking or biking, you have to also account for the time to take a shower at either end.
The CO2 and microparticles are definitely a problem. One which can be addressed by banning non-electric cars downtown.
It’s very hard to find definite stats on this, but the ratio tires:brakes seems to be somewhere between 2:1 to 3:1. So the overwhelming majority still remains. The other problem that remains is that microparticles that have settled will be pulled in the air again by passing cars.
Hopefully we'll see some more research on this as time goes on. I strongly suspect that there is a tradeoff between traction and microparticle production. Very grippy racing tires tend not to last long.
If you could have some sort of traction assist device like a rubber block on a piston that hit the ground for emergency braking, you could get away with lower traction on the wheels normally, and modern electronic controls could make the whole thing stable and relatively transparent to the driver.
First we'll have to overcome the slow motion catastrophe that is gasoline direct injection.
> you have to also account for the time to take a shower at either end
No need to shower: I just change _all_ of my clothes when I arrive... Cycling clothes on me, business clothes and dress shoes in a semi-rigid pouch in my panniers. Takes five minutes at each end and the total time is still half of what car or public transportation would take !
I guess that depends on how much if a sweat you work up. Personally, if I work up enough whereby I need to change my clothes at he end I am going to feel disgusting if I don't also shower.
I use my commutes as a way to get some hill repeat intervals in and in the summer that means i’m covered in sweat.
There are no showers at work, so i do a couple of things to keep clean.
* Showering before you leave so that the sweat doesn’t smell.
* Chilling our after the ride for a bit to let your heart rate drop back down. This gets you to a point where you aren’t sweating anymore.
* Towel off the excess sweat and put on fresh clothes.
The only real downside is my helmet messes up my hair.
A small towel is part of the kit. Very short haircut too... But yes, at some point it is a lifestyle choice: I quite happily sartorial sophistication (I forego tie and jacket: my office attire is dress pants, dress shoes and a nice shirt - sufficient social camouflage that packs neatly) but I understand that others might prefer the "delicate princess in an air-conditioned bubble" way of living, even though it is harmful to their health.
It doesn't have to be a lifestyle choice. I bike every day, except when my bike is being serviced. I always dress for the destination, and that's what virtually everyone else in this city does.
Yes, my way is what old timers do (I have been urban cycling for 30 years) but we are a tiny minority and the rest of the commuters just use whatever clothes are their daily standard, with maybe a slight adaptation... Still I don't understand how they are comfortable in any but mild weather conditions: specialized cycling clothing is so much more comfortable in heat, storms, snow and anything in-between - and I most people in the office have no idea I commute by bicycle (though they may suspect it when they contemplate my gorgeous ass)...
Even after changing clothes and toweling off not only would I feel gross all day, I think I would get acne over my body if I did this every day. To each their own.
Where I live it can get so hot in the summer that my AC can't cool the car down if it's been parked outside. Opening the windows doesn't even get all the heat out. Plus I have leather seats so my back fuses to the leather. You can get electric bikes that are assistive, so every pedal you do will feel like you are pedaling downhill even if you are going uphill. Combine that with the sweet breeze lapping at your back, evaporating that back sweat, and I can't imagine a better summer experience.
If you need to wear a suit you are screwed either way. Five minutes standing still outside with a jacket on and you will start getting pit sweat. Just walking out to your car will make you sweat.
> But they might spend the time reading or working out they are sitting in a train/metro compartment.
That's a big "might" that is conditioned on having a seat and space in which to do these things, none if which is a given.
> Bicycles ... are less likely to have accidents (except with cars)
After three years as a pedestrian in NYC I have almost been run over by assholes on bikes more than I have almost been run over by assholes in cars.
> But infrastructure is much cheaper and easier to maintain then that for cars.
How do you figure? Paved streets are still needed, arguably maintained to slightly higher standards than they are for cars. Signalling is still needed, unless you want a free-for-all of bike traffic (which I don't).
In general, you seem to be comparing the happy cases of bicycles and public transit to the negatives of cars. It's and unfair and disingenuous comparison.
> That's a big "might" that is conditioned on having a seat and space in which to do these things, none if which is a given.
In the past plenty of people read newspapers while standing on trains. Nowadays we have smartphones and podcasts. It’s even easier.
> I have almost been run over by assholes on bikes more than I have almost been run over by assholes in cars.
Looks like an argument for better cycling infrastructure. Cars don’t really go wild in cities because they have dedicated road which are not shared with larger, more dangerous vehicles driven by people who are actively trying to cause problems to car drivers. If we have the same level of infrastructure for bicycles then maybe cyclists will stop competing with pedestrians for space.
Cycling infrastructure can be cheaper than normal roads because bicycles are lighter than cars. It will also need less maintenance for the same reason. It also takes less space to store bikes than cars.
No, being an asshole is not solved by infrastructure, what you need is education. Cyclists typically don't believe that they are driving a vehicle (which they are). In fact dedicated infrastructure for cyclists only helps keep the myth that bicycles are not vehicles but some kind of toy and that its operators are not responsible adults but kids incapable of learning.
Summary: From 2002-2016 there were 2355 pedestrians killed by bicycle or car in NYC. 2345 of those fatal collisions were car-pedestrian, and only 10 were bicycle-pedestrian.
From mid 2012 to mid 2019, there were 940 reports of a crash with a bike as the primary vehicle and 1+ pedestrians injured. In the same time period, there were 69776 reports of a crash without bicycle as primary vehicle injuring 1+ pedestrians.
Injuries would probably be a better statistic to use, as you much more likely to die being hit by a car than a bicycle. I'd also guess injuries in bicycle on pedestrian collisions are nearly impossible to measure accurately, as most of them are minor and go unreported.
I wonder if the reason for the perception that bicycles are more threatening is because of the sense that they don't respect boundaries. Cars and pedestrians have their separate areas, and I would think accidents in cities happen mostly when they cross paths. But bicycles tend to have to share the path of either cars or pedestrians all the time.
That's deaths. I'm not going to argue that car collisions with pedestrians aren't more likely to kill then. The point was accidents, not fatalities, so I don't see what this statistic demonstrates.
The point is still accidents. Serious accidents. Cars are more likely to kill or seriously injure you. Would you prefer those assholes who almost hit you were driving cars?
I would prefer that no assholes almost hit me while operating anything that can kill or seriously injure me, and the original point was that bicycles are somehow much less likely to do that.
> After three years as a pedestrian in NYC I have almost been run over by assholes on bikes more than I have almost been run over by assholes in cars.
As a pedestrian in Austin, I've been hit by one car and zero bikes. I've been almost hit by many cars; I don't recall any bikes nearly hitting me, but they're less also memorable.
As a cyclist for ~8 years in Austin, I've been hit by two cars (100% their fault) and one bike (100% my fault), and almost hit by many cars and zero bikes that I recall. I've hit zero people/cars and if I come close, it's usually the other person at fault.
Granted, there are a lot more cars to hit me than there are bikes. I'd also say cars are more likely to cause significant damage than bikes when they hit you, though in my case, the 280LB cyclist slamming into me while going downhill got me pretty good. :-)
I think a lot of what makes cycling safe or unsafe is the biking culture. Cyclists are safer when they act like traffic norms matter. I assume they're more likely to do that if the traffic rules are designed in a way that makes sense for them, and when drivers treat them like they belong. (This is, unfortunately, a bit of a catch-22. We might be treated as legitimate users of the road if we acted like it, and we'd act like it more if we were treated that way.)
As a NYC resident and a cyclist - pedestrians are no picnic either.
I mean - NYC has horrible bike infrastructure, street parking(unplanned) and pedestrians that just take over the few bike lanes or wait for the signal in the middle of the damn road.
Bike infrastructure is cheaper to maintain, because bikes don't impact the asphalt as much as cars do. Manhattan's Westside bikeway hasn't been repaved for decades... While most of the roads with similar "body traffic" will deteriorate in 5 years in NYC.
"bikes don't impact the asphalt as much as cars do. Manhattan's Westside bikeway hasn't been repaved for decades... While most of the roads with similar "body traffic" will deteriorate in 5 years in NYC."
You're assuming cars have an impact. Maybe they don't; it may just be heavy trucks.
I don't believe signalling is not needed for bike-only infrastructure. I don't know of any cities that have signals where bikes are separated from cars.
Bike infrastructure is cheaper in other ways. You need a much smaller surface for the same amount of traffic, and paved surfaces degrade at a much slower rate with lighter traffic.
You also don't need the sliproads, the same levels of crash barrier, and so on. It's just not a serious comparison.
> I don't believe signalling is not needed for bike-only infrastructure. I don't know of any cities that have signals where bikes are separated from cars.
Are intersections just a free-for-all then? I find congested pedestrian intersections bad enough to navigate. I would hate to see a congested, uncontrolled bicycle intersection.
> Bike infrastructure is cheaper in other ways. You need a much smaller surface for the same amount of traffic, and paved surfaces degrade at a much slower rate with lighter traffic.
I'll grant that people density is higher and wear is lighter. I don't agree with the "much", though, since bicycles not riding in a coordinated group still need a fair amount of space and, as I said, the road surface needs to be maintained to higher standards.
> You also don't need the sliproads, the same levels of crash barrier, and so on. It's just not a serious comparison.
If I am interpreting "sliproad" correctly, that's only a feature of limited-access roads. Ditto crash barriers. I don't see how that's relevant to cities.
What do you mean "higher standards"? The standards for regular roads are way more than enough for cyclists. Bike paths are not supposed to be racetracks.
You are ignoring heat, cold, rain, etc. A car is a magical piece of insulation from the elements. And depending on where you live that can matter quite a bit during the morning and evening commute.
we are discussing uber here, parking is not generally a consideration here.
as pointed out, the reason that cars being shown to be slower than walking in many cases is moot because cars provide benefits which more than offset.
1. Weather protection
2. Cargo transportation
3. Ease of movement for the disabled
4. Additional safety for those toting along small children
5. Some level of protection/isolation from others
The argument in favor of bicycling in lieu of cars falls prey to the same reasons. There are pro and cons so we must always fairly assess them before standing up and declaring one method worse than another. In fact none ever are all the time
That isn't always true. I commute from a downtown to an office park in a suburb (against traffic when driving). On my bike, it takes about 40 mins (~11-12 miles). The same commute in reverse by car is about 45 mins due to traffic. If I instead lived in the suburb and worked downtown, it would be a tossup travel time wise between my bike and car.
The data from the article is surprising even after taking this into account, since public transport is generally a lot faster than walking. However, I suspect that people who are driving will normally start and/or finish well outside central London thus making the journey worth it.
I had a play around with some travel times in London on google maps (using the look-ahead function by one day):
I think London and New York will be among the few places this bears out. In Seattle many of my trips double, triple, or even quadruple in time if I try to take public transit. EG driving to the Amazon locker for a pickup takes 10 minutes, or 45 minutes by bus. The bus time is for travel time only, and doesn't include time spent waiting.
And trying to get to my SO's house by bus takes a 15 minute trip up to about an hour and a half of walking and transferring.
If they don't also have really bad traffic, driving will tend to be significantly faster for most routes. They don't look like Seattle, but they don't look like NYC or London either. That said it's nice to be able to relax and take public transportation and is often a win even if it's a little bit slower, but there's no need to deny that it usually takes at least 10 minutes longer to take public transportation in a place that has good public transportation but not horrendous traffic.
If you're comparing walking, driving and public transport, then at least pick realistic scenarios.
Waterloo to St Pancras will never be a 12 minute drive, even at 4AM - that's practically impossible with the amount of traffic lights.
Let's presume that you're a wealthy Lloyds Group banker(City of London office) living in Holland Park area. Your commute is 35-1:30 by car or 27 minutes by public transport.
Or you're not so wealthy Canary Wharf worker living in Southwark - stable 20 minutes for PT and 30 minutes driving.
Yeah, but you must also consider that there’s literally nowhere to park you car in St Pancras or Waterloo, and consider the fact that central London is incredibly prone to congestion which gives the driving less predictability.
Right, which makes the data even more surprising! I know I'm reluctant to make a journey by car through central London even if Google maps tells me it's going to be fast.
What ends up being "faster" doesn't just depend on travel speed though. It also depends on startup costs. The startup cost for biking can be higher than a car (if you need to carry the bike out from your apartment) but also the other way (if you need to walk to your parked car and then walk from wherever you find parking to where you're going).
People might also be willing to trade some extra time for less exertion, but this depends heavily on the terrain.
We live in a town in Germany with roughly 250.000 inhabitants, but I grew up in a small village. I always get weird looks from relatives when I tell them that we do not own a car. For some of them, not owning a car is literally equivalent to "cannot leave the house", because buses only serve their village every 2 hours or so, and the service stops at around 8pm.
We use car sharing, but only if we have to buy something that really cannot be transported via bike or public transport, like furniture, or for trips to remote places that are very complicated to reach via public transportation. I tried driving to work a few times (~8 km across town), but it takes me roughly 35 minutes by car, compared to 25 minutes by bike, and is much, much more stressful than using my bike. If the weather is very bad, I take the tram. For groceries, we usually walk to the nearest supermarket.
Truth is, at least in Europe, I cannot think of any reason why you should own a car in a town with an average public transportation network and some form of car sharing.
It's always fascinating how people here generalize an entire continent's major cities by anecdotal evidence from one city. This can also be observed by comments from people clearly living in SV or NYC - none of those apply to suburb-dwelling me in the South.
I used to live in a ~350k city in Germany. It has public transport - given the college in town, probably also one of "average" quality. Unless you live very close to a tram, you are bound to use a bus which will get you into the city center (~3 mi, 10 min by car), which was scheduled every 30 mins and took another 30 mins. From there, you might get a train (or another bus!), often times scheduled in such a way that you'd have to wait another 30 or so minutes for it.
For me, getting to see a friend in the next town over (~15mi) would take me 25 mins by car, including traffic, and 1hr to 90mins by public transport. Going to work, a solid hour by car due to really bad traffic, took 90mins to 2 hrs using public transport (~30 miles).
Not to mention common trips that take me from store A to B and back home - every single stop requires you to wait for a bus and often change lines as well.
Don't get me wrong - I'd love more public transport in the US (we have some, but it is horrendous where I live). But even for Europe, saying you don't need a car is a very narrow-minded outlook.
> It's always fascinating how people here generalize an entire continent's major cities by anecdotal evidence from one city.
I apologize for my misleading post, my experience is based on living in multiple major and / or university cities in southwestern Germany, 3-10 days visits to smaller and larger towns all across Europe and frequent visits to Switzerland.
> But even for Europe, saying you don't need a car is a very narrow-minded outlook.
You seem to confuse me with a no-car evangelist/fundamentalist, because I have never said that. I have merely stated that if you live in a town with some sort of car sharing and an average public transportation system, you do not need to own a car. From what you describe, I would consider the public transportation system in the city you lived in edge-case average for a 350k city, but certainly not optimal. However, a 3 mile distance to the city center (where the train station appears to be) is easily covered by bike.
> For me, getting to see a friend in the next town over (~15mi) would take me 25 mins by car, including traffic, and 1hr to 90mins by public transport. Going to work, a solid hour by car due to really bad traffic, took 90mins to 2 hrs using public transport (~30 miles).
I would also choose a car for visits to your friend. But you do not visit you friend daily, so why would you need to own a car for that? Even if you visit him weekly, car sharing might be enough, and less overhead. Your daily commute may indeed be a reason for owning a car. However, if I would have to choose between a 1h car ride to work, or a 90 min PT ride, I would still choose public transportation, for the reasons stated below (you can do stuff on PT).
> I apologize for my misleading post, my experience is based on living in multiple major and / or university cities in southwestern Germany, 3-10 days visits to smaller and larger towns all across Europe and frequent visits to Switzerland.
In my experience (I'm from the West), the southern cities in Germany have better public infrastructure compared to what I lovingly call the German Rust Belt. I have been to Hamburg and Berlin for work, where using public transport was a lot easier as well, but those cities are not comparable in size.
> From what you describe, I would consider the public transportation system in the city you lived in edge-case average for a 350k city, but certainly not optimal.
It is decent for folks living close to any type of train, as a lot of my friends do who are still in college. Car sharing did not exist when I left, that might have changed. But even if it does, the problem of the famous last mile pertains - if the area where I live is too much of an edge case for any type of public transport, it is hard to profitably provide supply. Here, I can at least get an Uber in fairly remote locations (as the car picks me up wherever I am, albeit for a premium).
> However, a 3 mile distance to the city center (where the train station appears to be) is easily covered by bike.
Not in a suit or when it rains, not to mention medical conditions. However, I agree, that is a good point.
> But you do not visit you friend daily, so why would you need to own a car for that? Even if you visit him weekly, car sharing might be enough, and less overhead.
Yes, that is a good perspective on it. However, this serves as an example - in that region, a lot of the interesting places are fairly spread out, often across cities. This quickly becomes a view of opportunity cost and convenience. As long as public transport doesn't offer enough incentives - reliability, flexibility, quality, and price - I am personally very willing to invest the money for a car, as I generally value time and convince more than money.
Doing anything on PT often proves challenging. I personally cannot read or work on a bus (get horrible car sickness), but I know other people can manage just fine. On a train, it depends on the availability of seating and WiFi - which, in my experience, is a huge gamble. If those were true, see above, one could justify the extra time invested.
But to your point here, yes, need becomes a subjective term in that regard.
Depends how you define 'need', how much you can afford to spend and what your usual routes are, so I agree that generalizing is not that great, but that goes both ways.
Getting anywhere outside the immediate vicinity of your home with small children is incredibly exhausting without a car, even in cities with somewhat decent public transit systems
This is true, I forgot to mention that above, and I do not understand why you are being downvoted for this. We have a small daughter and are planning a 300 km trip next month. Long-distance trains here have special apartments for families with small children, but even with that option we decided to use car sharing.
I've only owned a car for 3 years or so when living in California. For my other locations (university towns in Germany and UK, capital cities in Europe and Asia) there is really no need. (Maybe different if you have kids.)
Well, as I have mentioned above, I don't blame them. It makes a huge difference if it takes you 80 minutes on average to the nearest supermarket via PT (because the bus only runs every 2 hours, and takes 20 minutes) or 10 minutes via car. I would definitely opt for a car in their situation.
(I assume the massive downvotes are from the people that have never lived in the Midwest and/or have never lived anywhere other than 'downtown' in a major city, or ancient city that was built before locomotion, and are wholly unfamiliar with suburbs)
>I cannot think of any reason why you should own a car in a town with an average public transportation network and some form of car sharing.
Because you don't want to waste an hour or more every day standing around waiting on a train/bus? Would like to regularly visit friends and family on the other side of town? Would like to not have to plan your life around transportation schedules?
I could maybe see getting by in Europe, I've one friend in Germany that is quite happy taking the train a half mile or so from his apartment for most stuff but even he still owns a car for getting to work, doing groceries, going to his postal box, bringing home stuff for art, going to the woods etc.
I cannot fathom life without a car. I'd say my closest friend is 10 miles away, two I go to see fairly regularly are 50 miles away. If I want to go see a movie it's 3-20 miles depending on which theater I want to go to, work is about 10~ miles from my apartment with my two gyms between me and work that I'm at 4x a day each and at another a 5th day. All of the performing arts theaters around Indianapolis are downtown, on the east side or north of Indy in Carmel - all of which are a 20-40 minute drive for me probably 15-25 miles.
I can go to these places above in 5-60 minutes in my car, public transportation would require multiple transfers and probably 4-5 hours, with some of them running fairly infrequently, for some of them and a couple of them I simply could not get to with public transportation.
Without a car I'd also have no way to get to the meetinghouse of my Church, or to singles firesides at a meetinghouse on the other side of town.
Without a car in the spring and summer I'd show up to dates, or to hang out with friends, sweaty and smelly. It will be 86F with the humidity reaching a high of 87% today.
Without a car, I couldn't go shooting if I wanted... I can't get on a bus with long arms and a few bricks of ammunition and be like "hey, I know that isn't a stop up there, but can you drop me in front of that range... this stuff is heavy". I couldn't go hunting, I couldn't go fishing, I couldn't go mushroom hunting in the spring, I couldn't go hiking because buses don't go to the woods.
I agree, it may not work everywhere, and this is why I mentioned the precondition of having an average public transportation network and some form of car sharing. You are forgetting that time spent driving is essentially dead time, while you can do all sort of things in a train, and with a bike you get exercise for free. So you cannot compare the travel times directly. For example, my work place is roughly the same distance from our apartment as yours. As I have mentioned, it saves me roughly 10 minutes driving there by bike, and I do not have to go to the gym, because I ride the bike for 20 miles daily.
I'll give you a few other examples:
* If I want to go see a movie in town, I can take the tram (20 minutes, runs every 5 minutes) or the bike (10 minutes), or car sharing (5 minutes walk to nearest station, 10 minute drive, 10 minutes searching for a parking spot in a garage, 10 minutes walking from said garage to the cinema.)
* If I want to visit my parents, it is a 2.5h car drive or a 3.5h tram/train/bus ride with 3 changes. Time lost in car: 2.5 hours. Time lost with PT: at most 30 minutes waiting at stations, the 3 hours in the train can be used for reading or working.
* If we want to visit the parents of my wife, it is a 50 minute car drive or a 80 minutes tram/train/bus ride. Time lost on car: 50 minutes, time lost with PT: roughly 10 minutes.
* If I want to visit someone in a remote village, or take a leisure trip to some remote place, or go hikin, I walk 5 minutes to the nearest car sharing station and take a car from there.
You can certainly listen to audiobooks, music or podcasts in a car. You can also have a private conversation with the passenger. Driving is by no means "lost time" for many people.
Eh. Driving time isn't completely lost, but it is pretty low capacity if you want to study or be entertained. I used my metro commute for 3 years to learn programming languages, take college courses, read stacks of books, nap, learn to cook with cooking shows, and solve technical problems for work. I used my car commute for 3 years to...listen to some light entertainment and music. I managed to get a speeding ticket while listening to a podcast because I wasn't focused enough on driving.
For me, it comes down to this: if I really want to enjoy a piece of music (i.e. close my eyes), or if I really want to commit to a conversation with another passenger, I can do that on a train. In a car, I and/or others will be dead.
The same goes for audiobooks: it may be possible to listen to shallow fiction in a car, but anything that requires true attention and concentration is very hard to follow while driving without putting yourself in danger, at least in an urban environment or at high speeds.
> You can also have a private conversation with the passenger
Depending on how you value your conversation and your lives.
Distracted driving isn't only caused by conversations on cell phones and there are studies behind why many states have limits on passengers riding with young drivers.
If you're the passenger, you should hope that the conversation is vapid enough to not distract.
>You are forgetting that time spent driving is essentially dead time,
Not to me it isn't. I listen to podcasts and/or music and/or YouTube videos I don't need to watch and have saved to my watch later list for listening to. And I'm alone in my car and will occasionally just sit in quiet enjoying alone time where I don't have multiple people blabbing in the background.
Some of the best laughs I've had are from driving and reading bumper stickers and vanity plates.
I don't want to be working on something 24/7/365 like people on HN seem to want to do. There's no exercise I'm going to do on a bus or a train as I don't walk around with hundreds of pounds of bumper plates, a barbell and a squat rack/rig or chalk (I'm a strength athlete so light calisthenics aren't even warming up for me).
As far as biking, yeah good luck riding a bicycle in central Indiana in the summer, you will show up to your destination completely soaked. I don't remember if I said it in this comment chain or another but the temperature today will be in the mid 80F's (29-30C) with 87% humidity. Go stand still outside for 90 seconds in that and you'll be sweating, do physical exertion and you'll be soaked. Want to bike somewhere in the winter? Past few winters the actual temperature has gotten down to -17F/-27C with copious amounts of snow and ice. Compare that to Hamburg which has an average low -0.5C in January vs -7.7C and seems to see an average high of only 22.7C in July vs 29.4F in Indy.
> Some of the best laughs I've had are from driving and reading bumper stickers and vanity plates.
That... seems very specific.
> the temperature today will be in the mid 80F's (29-30C) with 87% humidity
Ice and snow is one thing, but that doesn't sound too unreasonable for casual cycling. You might not want to do it for a job interview but it ought to be viable for many journeys.
Dealing with personal sweating seems like it should be an easier job than dealing with global heating.
> And I'm alone in my car and will occasionally just sit in quiet enjoying alone time
I'm sure that's true, but moving a few tons of environmentally-controlled metal a few kms twice a day seems like a wasteful way to achieve this.
> Because you don't want to waste an hour or more every day standing around waiting on a train/bus?
In the train (or while waiting for the train) I can read, listen to a podcast or audiobook (with full concentration and no interruption), eat, and even work. That is not a waste of time for me.
I think you're misunderstanding the phrase "in a town with an average public transportation network". It's quite clear you don't live in such a place ...
An efficient car sharing infrastructure can easily alleviate the need for the odd drive.
Living in rural area - you need a vehicle and a gun. That's true for people in Europe as well as in US.
The problem with midwest, is that sprawling poorly connected suburbia was a form of social engineering. Most old world cities have grown organically, not with someone's "grand design" in mind. Thus - in US, outside of NYC, you don't have an option to not own a car.
When I'm traveling, if I ask the hotel staff to recommend any restaurants "within walking distance", they'll grimace and say there aren't really any, even while Yelp informs me that there are six within a kilometer.
Yesterday I ended up spending about 15 minutes waiting for a bus that was late. Someone else spent about the same amount of time as me waiting on that normal street corner, and then got back off the bus about 5 blocks later. So, that makes ~15 minutes standing around waiting for the bus and $2.25 spent on a fare, in order to save a 5 minute walk. I assume they're at least as able-bodied as I am, because, unlike me, they didn't opt to sit on the bench during the wait.
I just don't think the US has a culture that considers feet to be a valid mode of transportation.
> So, that makes ~15 minutes standing around waiting for the bus and $2.25 spent on a fare, in order to save a 5 minute walk.
I did something similar the other day, and it wasn't because I was lazy. There's 2 key points that you miss, the existence of monthly bus pass and the fact that the bus was late. If you are close to a bus stop, and the bus is going to be there on time, you could save some time. Let say it takes 5 minutes in bus and 10 to walk, if he is in time, you saved 5 minutes, if he is 5 minutes late, you lost nothing, but if he is 10 minutes late, well, you just lost 5 minutes. The thing is, that's always true at any given point. After waiting 5 minutes, the same rules apply because you still have the 10 minutes walk.
In the end, I started walking about nearly 10 minutes later. I should have done it before because there was others stop on the way (and could have taken the bus at theses stops instead) but I neglected that. I did the right choice by about 30 seconds though, because I reached my final stop just before the bus. It was a 7 minutes walk.
I just don't think the US has a culture that considers feet to be a valid mode of transportation.
In some cases, I've found that to literally be true. I used to live a few miles from a large suburban mall (well, Castleton Square Mall is/was technically within the city limits of Indianapolis). I decided to walk to the mall one day, what the hell, good exercise. There were no crosswalks or signals to cross either the N/S nor E/W roads. No sidewalks. I recall no bike racks once you got there. It was as if (and I imagine literally true) there was no consideration given to any other means of transportation but a car. Other examples abound, but that one particularly stands out in my mind.
The irony of motorists' outrage on small towns banning car parking in the city and creating pedestrian only zones, is that they don't produce enough economic activity to let them park.
There's a reason why the most coveted retail real estate is in pedestrian accessible areas... not parking only strip malls.
I travel a lot for work and hardly ever rent a car, and I'm always appalled by the state of walking in areas around hotels. There may be plenty of restaurants within half a mile, but it's almost impossible to walk to them from your hotel. No sidewalks, no crosswalks, parking lots separated by huge ditches. I've actually ordered Uber Eats from a place less than half a mile away because there was no safe way to walk there.
And right now we're fighting a battle in my hometown (small town) where the city and a developer wants a hotel downtown and a group of citizens are fighting that it should be 5 miles away out by the freeway where there is nothing to do and you would have to drive everywhere. For some reason people actively and loudly enjoy not being able to walk from store to store.
The number of times I've seen people in the US wait for their Uber/Lyft to pick them up exactly where they are instead of crossing a road that would make it easier and faster for the driver astounds me.
People here seem to optimize for low effort more than their time. Same reason why people stand on escalators. If they cared about time they'd walk up it.
There are certain reasons cars are needed: goods transport and people with disabilities for example. I wonder if you could do a general ban with enough exceptions to be okay.
There's be a fraud problem though, and it could make it difficult for disabled people in practice (they may not be able to easily get the right badge, or be believed when they do, they wouldn't be able to benefit from car infrastructure…)
I'm really fond of the areas I've been where the only cars allowed on many streets are things like delivery and service vehicles.
I would expect that that kind of environment is actually a net improvement to accessibility for people with disabilities. It's probably quite annoying for people who use wheelchairs to get around a lot of places without a car, simply because the sidewalks are so frequently blocked off by people who've parked their cars across the sidewalk. There's one man in my neighborhood who frequently has to go out in the street to get around those sorts of obstructions, and is then stuck out in the middle of the road until he can get to the next wheelchair ramp in order to get back on the sidewalk. Limiting private car usage would admittedly only remove a portion of the sources of obstruction, but it would get rid of essentially all of the safety hazard that he has to take on in order to get around them.
And, especially now that cars are going electric and getting quieter and quieter, I would guess that restricting unnecessary car usage could be a big boon for blind people who want to be able to leave the house without a chaperone. I had one acquaintance who would essentially Uber everywhere - at great expense to herself - because she just didn't feel safe even trying to cross the street.
(Heck, I'm sighted, and sometimes _I_ don't feel safe trying to cross the street, especially later in the evening when a sizable portion of drivers are intoxicated and really are not watching for pedestrians.)
A lot of university campuses are like this. Very limited car access on certain roads, but maintenance etc. gets free reign to drive on the walkways even during heavy foot traffic.
That's a non-argument. You could say that about any regulation. I assume regulating transport for disabled people isn't that hard cause we already have system in place that deals with disabilities.
Even for disabled people cars are not a strict requirement. You could build a smaller vehicle that goes walking speed specifically for transporting the disabled & severely disabled.
Able bodied people in wheelchairs are the easy case - just pave the roads with enough smooth transitions.
Many cities in Europe have successfully banned cars in core downtown areas. You can adapt curbs, street crossings, and buses to work for people with disabilities.
In the U.S. priority parking is already given to people with disabilities, so the exception already exists and would just need to be extended. People using grandmas hangtag does happen but it's not all that common (and cities could always issue huge tickets for violators to deter bad behavior).
I would love to see proponents of such bans trying to explain to a random plumber, gas-fitter, electrician, floor tiler, carpenter or other craftsmen, that they cannot use a car to bring in the material and tools they need to do a work with, that the customer is ordering.
Ideally, when the customer and the person doing the explaining is the same person.
Same for gods delivery. You bought a new freezer, washer or other heavy gods? You can pick it in the store in the fringes. No deliveries into the city, you need cars for that.
On this topic I am always surprised to notice, walking around downtown SF on a weekday that literally every single parking space is taken up by a work truck, like a contractor, repair person, plumbers, etc.
That’s pretty crazy when you stop to think about it. The space isn’t actively being used all day, I’m guessing these folks just know the right time to get there early after street cleaning to get a spot they can sit in all day because it’s cheap. Is there really no better use for this public space on some of the most expensive land in the world? Surely they could unload their equipment and then go park in a garage around the corner.
So to your broader point, yes obviously there needs to be some way to get heavy equipment, furniture, etc into cities. But there’s no reason it needs to be the extreme it is today, with so much priority given to private cars and parking.
Craftsmen are private citizens too, their vehicles are their personal property. Many delivery drivers are also owners of their vehicles, and do delivery on contract. Not everyone is employed by huge corporations who got exceptions.
We (me and my wife) were just renovating an apartment in a city center, where the traffic limits apply. The problems the craftsmen had are real, and I speak from my own experience. Many times the solution was be bold and hope cops will be sympathetic. They were, though we got the recommendation to sell everything and move somewhere else, where there are no such problems.
That gets tricky though, Can tradespeople can use their vans to do their food shopping? Can private citizens become a painter/decorator so they are then allowed a vehicle? Can a private citizen have a vehicle if their sister is disabled?
Government can issue permits, on request. If requesting a permit can be done through an app or website, then this could even be feasible on a per-case basis. E.g. plumber needs to visit the city, requests permit, then drives to client.
Doesn't have to be expensive or time consuming, could be something you fill out in 10 mins and drop in the mail/submit online. IRS already knows you are an independent contractor so that could be your verification right there.
As someone that will only have taken his car away from him by prying the keys out of his cold dead hands, car parks really are a sad sad thing, all of that acreage wasted on tarmac that could be community gardens or even just pleasing green grass and local wildflowers.
Increased urban density helps areas reach a criticality, denser accomodation cheaper to service, the trick is as ever to find the optimum balancing point.
Green spaces aren't to be sniffed at though, even for hayfever suffers.
Arriving to your destination not wet/frozen/soaked in sweat? Or with your luggage... through an area dangerous for walking... to a destination you aren't familiar with... because you are old or infirm.
These are all solved problems. Cold? Wear a sweater. Raining? Carry an umbrella, or wear a raincoat. Have luggage? Wear a backpack, or pull a wheeled suitcase. Mere walking makes you sweat? Go see a doctor, that shouldn't happen - you probably ought to do more walking, not less. Too old or infirm to walk? You need a wheelchair or an electric scooter. Dangerous neighborhood? Well, I'll grant that's a trickier one, but the solution certainly isn't to usher the wealthy through it in motorized sedan chairs so they can ignore the problem.
Granted there's some infrequent edge cases where you need to move a sofa. Maybe we still allow occasional delivery vans. And bonus - they'll be able to get there more efficiently, because the road won't be choked with cars.
I think you are oversimplifying things. I can tell you that merely walking in the sun when the temperature is in the high 30s (Celsius), makes me sweat, I hardly think that I should seek medical advice over this, to pick on one of your solutions.
This type of comment really make me think humanity peaked a few decades ago. When did we all became lazy snowflakes that can't handle any kind of hardships ? Humanity spent millions of year hunting shit in the woods and eating raw meat to end with what? People who can't walk in the sun or work in an office that doesn't have AC.
Walking in the sun is too much effort and makes you sweat ? Buy sunscreen, bring an extra t shirt and stop making excuse. Sweat is a perfectly normal response to heat, your body knows how to deal with it. God damn it, some kids in africa run 10km to go to school every day while eating 5 time less food than you and they probably complain less.
Rain is a viable excuse for burning fossil fuel and moving 2 tons of steel to transport a 80kg meat bag ?
Unless you're disabled or commute 30+km a day you're better off with good gear and an electric bike. It's cheaper, better for your health, better for local and global pollution, &c. ICE vehicles have nothing to do in city centers. Good public transport + a fleet of government owned electric taxies would solve every issues.
Because today we have higher standards for how "put together" we appear in public.
I cannot be in the office with pit stains and BO and expect to be treated with respect and have the same career advancement and pay as if I show up fresh, with hair combed and no BO or visible sweat.
Today, our hygiene standards are higher and for many of us, driving to work is part of "the cost of doing business" because of this.
The same goes for if it's snowing..walking around in soggy or salt-stained boots is not a thing I can get away with doing.
People do it, but I have a job where I have to meet certain (yes, partly self-imposed) expectations on appearance and hygiene and I can't meet those expectations if I walk 20 minutes to work in 80 degree, snowy, or rainy weather.
I'm not a dandy or a snowflake or whatever. I love sweating and I love hiking. Being outside in the rain can be a sublime experience. But that's just not compatible with a trip to work.
I don't like it but as I said, it's part of the "cost of doing business" in society.
Um... I know a lot of people who bike to work, including several co-workers. They bring a work shirt, wet wipes, and deodorant with them to work in a bag. Get to work, change shirts, wet wipe the pits and apply deodorant in the restroom. Good as new. I didn't even know which co-workers were bike commuters when I first started.
If you worked in a formal environment you'd probably have to bring extra pants too. But most people bring a change of clothes to the gym anyways, so it's not like it's a completely outrageous concept.
It's really not that big of a deal. In formal businesses ladies have done this forever with having comfortable shoes for traveling and high heels for the office.
> Because today we have higher standards for how "put together" we appear in public
I find this historically inaccurate.
Wool suits were common middle class and upper class wears throughout the 19 and 20th centuries. Turns out that a jacket covers pit stains. Wool is also breathable, moisture wicking, and anti microbial/ anti odor.
And inaccurate by occupation - based off of understanding of clothing. Many landscapers and builders wear long pants and long shirts. In part for the physical protection they offer, but also because of the air volume they hold.
At the end of the day we can rationalise _everything_, even the most insane life styles. If the "cost of doing business" is slowly killing everything on earth maybe we should find a better way.
Do you really have no place to change at work ? No public transport at all ? Not even car sharing ?
I bike to the gym before work, change there and head to work on my bike, I'm perfectly presentable no matter the weather, and that's in Berlin where it rains 50% of the year.
I remember when I first moved to a city with real public transport. I was interested to try commuting by train/bus/bike. But I had lived my entire life up to that point in car-dependent areas and pictured the experience of getting to work without my portable metal shelter to be very close to what you're picturing, a battle with the elements. I figured it would be challenging and may be a bit crazy to live without a car.
To my surprise, it was a total non-issue. Hundreds of thousands of people got to work without a car in my city and still managed to get to work looking perfect. The vast majority of days, an extra 20-30 minutes outside was a blessing. The very few days it wasn't I kept an extra shirt and pair of shoes in the office. And if I got a little wet on the way to work, so did everyone else. And this is was in a city with rain, hail, snow, wind, heat, and humidity. It just wan't a problem and there was no way to justify owning a car while I had 2 working legs.
All that to say, I know where you're coming from. I've been in that head space myself. But if people in NY, London, and Paris can deal with a little weather and still make SVP, so can you.
The core thing is that people don't think about how many assumptions are baked into their "need" for cars. The assumption that you have to live in a suburb, that public transport must needs be terrible forever, that you absolutely must be able to do this or that unnecessary thing at a whim, that nothing about the American car-dependent lifestyle should change.
Don't think about this in terms of your immediate personal situation, think about all the variables that need to change to build a future largely without cars.
>think about all the variables that need to change to build a future largely without cars.
It can be done by changing but a single variable: cost. Make driving more expensive, and people drive less. Make driving cheaper, and people drive more. With a sufficiently high cost, the majority of people will seek alternatives.
> Make driving more expensive, and people drive less.
"If we tax the poor, they'll decide to be less poor"
It won't work. The suburbs are predominantly filled with people who could not afford to live places with functional transit in the first place.
If you make driving more expensive, the few people who are wealthy enough to choose the city, will do so (driving sky-high prices even higher). And for the 99% of suburban people who already can't afford cities, these people will have even less money for housing, so they'll be forced to buy cheaper housing, which will be even further away from the city, and you'll exacerbate even more sprawl than already exists.
It's not so much an "assumption" as a true fact of life today
Suburbs today (not 1950, but today in 2019) exist almost exclusively because of failures of their cities, mainly in housing, education, and transportation. To suggest "people shouldn't assume they have to live in a suburb" is to suggest that people should assume they'll be allowed to live in a city.
And that's simply not true. That's never a safe assumption, effectively that's impossible for most people in the US. Just in housing alone, they're already priced out for at least the next decade or more. (Even in "cheap" cities, even in the South or the Midwest, etc)
> think about all the variables that need to change to build a future largely without cars.
Manhattan residents would have to be ok with all property losing 90% of it's 'fair-market value' overnight. Same for Seattle, and San Francisco, and Boston, and Minneapolis, and every other city on earth.
Oh, no one in Manhattan is OK with that? Then, effectively Manhattan residents are guaranteeing "car-dependent" (read: cheap/affordable) lifestyles for everyone else, are here to stay for a while.
I hardly think that sweating while walking in the sun in 30°+ weather is not being able to handle any kind of hardship. In fact, it is quite the opposite: My better half sweats very little and she very nearly had a heat stroke when we last visited The Living Desert in Palm Springs.
As it happens I commute by bicycle but that's by the by.
I have seen the 'without AC Texas is not habitable' (or a weaker version 'large cities cannot exist in Texas without AC') sentiment, which is somehow related to what you are talking about, many times on this website. It absolutely boggles my mind. The climate of some of the most densely populated places in Asia are similar to Texas. Those places are densely populated before AC became a thing, and even now there are plenty of people who cannot afford AC.
> Too old or infirm to walk? You need a wheelchair or an electric scooter.
The title of this article wasn't "Uber data reveals motoring slower than using a wheelchair".
Even with the most progressive, pro-active/public transport systems in the world, which we should totally aim for, there will be a need for some level of taxi-like service at a minimum.
This is one of the most self-righteous, narrow minded, inflexible, and delusional things I have read on this platform.
I invite you to walk at 1am, everyday, through the dodgy parts of London with your smartphone in your pocket. Please, report your mugged or stabbed rate in a year.
Arguably, when people shut themselves inside their cars for safety, they also become disconnected with the problems their society faces. They will have less incentive to fix the problems, so crime rises, and more people shut themselves in cars. A vicious circle.
Yeah, crimes in London is on the rise. And at the same time, people also keep getting hit and killed by cars. The diesel exhaust is filling people’s lungs, and the constant traffic noise is certainly putting a strain on people’s mind.
And instead asking Londoners to spend lots of money and get a car which they will have nowhere to park, what about reverse the police budget cut that left us with 22,000 fewer police officers?
Again, the solution to "bad neighborhood" isn't "cars". Especially not in London, where it becomes "cars, for those who can afford parking fees and the congestion charge in addition to all the other expenses".
(If anything, by segregating neighborhoods and exacerbating wealth inequality, cars make the problem worse.)
I've done this without being mugged, stabbed, robbed, etc. many times -but- I am a relatively big fella with what has been described as "resting murder face" which really renders my anecdotal experience fairly niche.
I did this regularly for 2 years, with the additional factor of being in varying degrees of drunkness. The worst that happened to me, or anyone else I knew in the area, was dropping my pizza.
I did get beaten to a pulp in London but because I did not wish to have the police do anything I did not get into the papers. Once the adrenaline kicks in you would be surprised by how much blood you can lose and how knives, broken glass, boots, fists and relentless savagery just blur into one out of body experience.
If you get dragged into the dirt between parked cars for some extra brutality then none of those people driving by in their cars are going to stop and intervene. You are hidden by cars and in that peculiar filth that cars bring to the street. Plus noisy car dominated roads mean that everyone in residential housing shuns the street, so there is nobody looking out.
I felt sorry for the gang that picked me off but I felt a lot of anger and resentment thereafter to car drivers that expressed forthright opinions on the matter with an air of 'knowing best'. As if any of them had a clue or direct experience.
If everyone hides in cars because the area they are gentrifying is 'not safe' then you only end up with vulnerable people on the street getting preyed on by the more violent members of society. Everyone ends up terrified. Streets become walled off behind rows of tin boxes and there is no community. Excessive car culture is part of this climate of cowardice.
Bikes, buses, trains would work so much better in London without the tin boxes cluttering up the place. Kids could play in the street. They could know their neighbours. Regular taxis can work fine, there is no need for this gig economy Uber nonsense.
Oh, so what about the disabled? Well, people would be able to visit them for a change. Delivery vans, people moving houses and all those whataboutisms? All that can be resolved easily when we drop the mentality of people having to be in their own armoured tanks for security.
We have gone past 'there is no such thing as society'.
>Arriving to your destination not wet/frozen/soaked in sweat? Or with your luggage
So someone flew me out to San Francisco last June to meet me and have me talk to a few people. I landed during the pride parade at SFO and was staying at the Proper (that place felt decidedly John Wick - the Continental and their chicken liver mousse hnnghh), I'd literally no idea nor did my uber driver that we wouldn't be able to get to the Proper. He got me within about 2 miles before the crowds and road closures and was like "I don't know how long this will take or if I can get you there" so I got out with my suitcase, in a city I'd never been in, with throngs of people.
The road immediately outside of my hotel window was the road the parade was on and was ultimately between me and the hotel. I had no idea there were subway entrances that I could get under the road with. Walking shoulder to shoulder, crotch to butt, butt to crotch, trying to protect my phone, wallet and suitcase, literally stepping over people passed out on the sidewalk (if not overdosed) that were being somewhat trampled. The heat in those dense pockets of people was insane, I had to keep craning my head up to try and get cooler air.
Yeah, even if there hadn't have been so many people, wondering around with a suitcase trying to find the hotel would not have been an enjoyable experience... especially given the alarming amount of human excrement, phlegm, gum etc I kept having to dodge.
I got to the hotel finally, opened the door and was hit with a wall of air con and was like "ughhh yassss" making it to the check in counter with my beard all poofy, my shirt soaked, probably looking like a vagrant and getting a weird look from the person behind the counter until I said I was checking in. First thing I did in the room was peel out of wet clothes, crank the air down and had probably the 3rd best shower of my life while I killed time waiting for the hotel restaurant to open since there was no way in hell I was going back outside into that mess to try and find fast food or a convenience store.
Do they need to bring a ton of steel too though? I've thought it might be nice if we only allowed golf carts for personal use in the cities, even better if they'd be foldable in an upright position.
You shouldn't be dripping with sweat just from walking. I walked several miles yesterday, on a warm day, just for fun - not a drop of sweat left my brow. If you're overheating, wear less clothing. This notion "I need to be ferried around from air-conditioned box to air-conditioned box in yet another air-conditioned box so that I can obey my office's dress code in the height of summer" is not an attitude we can afford to keep, in the 21st century.
Not to say we should abolish all motorized transport. In any modern city there should be half a dozen ways of getting around that are all faster than cars. Light rail, buses, casual bicycles, and electric scooters spring to mind.
I invite you to try different climates around the world. It is not at all unusual to be drenched in sweat from just walking outdoors for most of the year in many parts of the world. I do agree with the rest of your comment, however.
If climates are different in places, solutions should be different in places too. Yes it might not be feasible to force everyone to cycle in Texas, but that doesn't mean that everyone in the US should drive everywhere.
I bike 6+ miles per day, and several thousand per year. I used to run 10+ miles per week, with periods on the order of 40 miles per week. I'm in pretty good shape.
It's going to be 100 Fahrenheit (40C) next week. It's 93 and rainy today. This will continue to happen regularly from now until September or October.
When I talk, I'm going to sweat, especially where there's no shade or if I walk beyond a slow saunter. Being in shape does nothing to prevent that.
People are different. Some will sweat by doing nothing at certain temperatures. Just like there are people that are fine swimming in ice water and others... that are not.
I presume you don't do family shopping (easily 30kg), or +-gazillion of other use cases that your 'solutions' don't cover and would make people's lives measurably worse and more stressful. If I have to carry all my load for weekend adventures to car that is parked 300-500m away I end up properly sweaty even in coldest winter day, and sometimes its just not possible. And I work out hard on average 6-7 times per week.
I love walking, sometimes spend hours on long walks since I live in a very pretty place but forcing everybody to adhere to your own vision of car-less cities without offering a proper alternative (not those you mention in this thread, they are far from enough)... sucks.
How can anyone transport 30kg without a 1500+kg vehicle that destroys our environment? A small folding shopping cart, perhaps? A bicycle with baskets? Your alternative is worse than those you dismiss.
You make this claim like those are the only two options. There is a wide gulf between driving an "environment destroying" vehicle and pushing a cart 10 miles in 100F degree weather.
I might have this wrong but I think it's not a ban but a restriction on driving and only in the centre of the city. IIRC, so called zero emission vehicles can still drive around unrestricted, to give, but one example.
My (completely anecdotal) experience of London, was that having a car anywhere near the city center was close to pointless, as you could easily outpace it on a bike. It's also nice to see a gradual shift towards making the city public-transport- and bike- friendly (e.g. super-highways, but also ultra-low emission zones), but there's a lot more to be done!
I would love Uber to use this data to propose me options for taking a short walk to cut total travel time.
In some places walking a few hundred meters puts you in a much better position for pick-up. Same thing in destination, propose a location that minimizes total travel time.
Uber sort of does this in some cities with their Express Pool option, where they tack a short walk on to either end of a ride to pick up/drop off you and the other Pool passengers at the same spot.
My entry point to Uber is usually google maps, which does show walking time alongside driving, public transport and ride hailing times.
In cities like London, it’s often half an hour for every option, so the decision comes down to whether it’s raining and how well the tube entrances line up.
I once got off a night bus in Asyut, hailed a cab, hopped in and asked to be taken to the train station. The driver pointed out the window to the giant sign on the building across the street reading “Asyut Railway Station”.
Travel wouldn’t be the same without making silly mistakes like this. It’s where our stories come from.
Uber/lyft routing is screwed for this because all too often drivers heading the wrong way will jump on accepting your ride to beat other drivers. There's been times when I've opened the map, saw dozens of drivers orbiting me like sharks just 1-2 blocks out, yet the driver who accepts my request is the one 5 going on 6 miles away on the highway. Then I have to stand there for 10 minutes while the driver pulls off and turns around then battles through the dozen plus drivers orbiting the neighborhood I'm in.
On a bicycle you have options when the traffic is slow, including getting off to walk. But the place would be that densely packed with buses, motorbikes, taxis and actual cars that this was neigh on impossible. If you did walk then you would be waiting for lights, at least by bicycle you have the Highway Code on your side.
Before the top bit of Trafalgar Square was pedestrianised it took 27 lane changes to go from the Whitehall side to the Charing Cross road exit, by bicycle using the bus lane shortcuts.
Even though you could see where you were heading you could emerge from the hell of Trafalgar Square to make it onto easier roads to then see a clock, e.g. Big Ben. Only then would you realise that navigating the square had taken twenty minutes as half an hour had gone by since leaving work.
The other vehicles would take considerably longer. But that is motoring, there is no expectation of forward movement, sitting in traffic spewing fumes and blaming the world for the predicament is par for the course. If you are on a bus you can just dibble with your phone so it doesn't matter. People put up with it.
It would be a waste of time and money to take an Uber to get from one end of Trafalgar Square to the other. But if your destination is several miles away and your route just happens to take you through a busy block, driving will still be faster than walking because the car can reach higher speeds in less congested parts of the route.
Many people who drive around in urban centers aren't really trying to get from one part of the urban center to another; they just happen to be in the same car they just drove in from the suburbs. That trip as a whole tends to be much faster than walking, and it takes quite a bit of time to park somewhere other than your destination. So if you're optimizing for speed, it can still be rational to drive all the way to your destination.
That’s true in a lot of places. Do I get in a car to go 5 blocks if I’m already in a city? Of course not barring special circumstances (injury, heavy packages, etc.)
But if I’m driving in from where I live for dinner and theater in the evening, yes I drive, including through congested areas.
>Uber’s Speeds dataset also shows that exceeding the speed limit on some roads is endemic, but the company says its data is anonymized and cannot be used to track–and sanction–individual speeding drivers.
Yeah, bullshit. Maybe that's true of this particular "anonymized" dataset, but Uber did the anonymizing. They absolutely have the data to track and sanction speeding drivers. They just don't care to. Why would they?
I believe it could open their business to legal subpoenas. Perhaps obfuscating this data in the first place would protect them, as then they can't be forced to program it in.
Or it gets passengers to their destination faster and they can charge less. Lol
Their driver app shows your current speed, and pops up a warning when you exceed the posted limit for the road you're on. Are they seriously trying to tell us they couldn't fire off an API call to report the driver is over the limit at the same time?
Would you want your car to do so completely insensitive to current contexts? Especially if the road data winds up inaccurate in areas. I have had several GPSes tell me that I was "speeding" by going the 45 MPH because it thought it was a 25 road.
There is an expectation of servicing the user - if they did that they would be called Orwellian and lose drivers enmasse. It would also fail to address speeding in general as they would speed without tracking then.
I beat cars all the time on my bike and I'm in the midwest; I go 12-15mph while traffic goes maybe half that averaging for the lights. Splitting lanes means you go the same speed regardless of traffic and therefore I'm always at the front of the intersection at a red and the first to move on green, while that car I passed 200 yards ago has to sit through another light cycle.
Title says walking, not biking. In addition, cycling and walking are becoming less safe in the U.S.[1]. Also, enjoy your 20+ mile bike commute in the summers down here in Texas.
I was at Isla Mujeres (island outside of Cancun, Mexico) a couple years ago and I was walking from the dock to the hotel with my baggage when an American stopped on a golf cart of sorts (they were all over the place) and asked if I wanted a ride. I said "thank you, but I'm Norwegian, we walk". The man looked at me for a few seconds then barked "Well I'm American!", then drove off and we both laughed.
The feet are superior everywhere except highways, especially if you are not known in the area and need to get familiar.
I also enjoy walking, when I am at home I take 1-2 hour walking trips in the forest by the house while listening to audio books almost every day.
Since I currently live in the countryside I need a car for large item transportation and things like that, but I have never owned one when living in a city.
> I said "thank you, but I'm Norwegian, we walk". The man looked at me for a few seconds then barked "Well I'm American!", then drove off and we both laughed.
What a clever, considerate American, making use of energy-efficient transportation and stopping to offer rides to strangers along the way!
> The feet are superior everywhere except highways
Try walking to work in business attire on a few 100 degree (38C) days and then tell me how you feel about that...
> I don't have to wear that kind of outfit very often and the temperatures here rarely reach that high luckily.
I usually grin and bear it but I know plenty of older people who don't tolerate heat well. Men especially seem to suffer since they run hotter and they're not allowed to wear skirts and sleeveless shirts to work (or, if they are allowed, it's still not quite culturally acceptable enough yet...). A lot of "professional" workplaces don't even allow men to wear short sleeves, and they definitely don't allow shorts.
I can tell you i've taken ubers when I could have easily walked. But there are several reasons why my wife and I did not.
Weather/tempature. We live in FL and sometimes walking more than 5 min outside brings you to a full sweat. Conversely you may want it to take an uber because it is way too cold.
clothes - if you're in high heels or a dress you may not want to walk as far.
I know I shouldn’t post this here, but the only reason I got a car and stopped using public transport are ppl who don’t stay home when they have the flu. I’ve been sick 2 months each winter because of it, with flu shots.
Aren’t their ACs which can filter that out?
It's a good point, and one of my bugbears of getting on a crowded rush hour Sydney bus or train. Geez the amount of sneezing. That said Sydney generally has journeys that are way to expensive by car (you need to park) so public transport is the only option and conversely journeys that are epic by public transport but quite quick by car. There rarely feels like there is a "hmm what do I fancy today" kind of choice.
* On very specific routes in high congestion parts of the city. The article and headline reads as if the data says walking is faster - for 99% of journeys this isn't true!
We really need better journalism than using statistics to make up lies to get clicks...
Speed isn't necessarily the reason you take an Uber though. I used to use them a lot more when I worked for a client in London and would have to head back to the railway station after a few days with my suitcase. It wasn't fast, but it did mean I didn't have to drag a suitcase through the London Underground at rush hour (not fun).
If you want to get places fast in London, as the article suggests, you want to be on two wheels. Cycling is probably the best option, but motorcycle or scooter also works well.
There's a subway station 20 minutes away from my work that I take from time to time when I want to go to a specific movie theater. There's a bus that go pretty directly, without much stop, but during rush hour, it takes at least 5 minutes less to walk.
Context here matters. I would uber if I were in work clothes, and its Houston in August in the afternoon. Im not trying to walk 15 minutes and arrive drenched in sweat to a work meeting.
Update since some commenters seem to be having trouble: this process depends on the travellers "at the margin", that is, the people who are most willing to switch modes to reduce their journey time. Thinking in terms of the average or typical traveller is misleading.