apparently my city literally literally banned public rail funding, and people online love jerking off about how good biking is, so i figured might as well try. I have come up with:
pros:
- good for mental health / exercise / endorphins
- arguably quaint
- feel like an old timey guy taking his wares to market
- feel european
- can annoy others
- less of a police state around them vs cars
- more flexible parking, routes
- capacity to be peaceful
- nice in summer
cons:
- look like an annoying dork (esp w neon - which also hurts the quaint factor)
- have to wear a helmet (^)
- getting sweaty, potentially “unpresentable” for work
- still have to find safe parking
- still takes a while
- have to find new routes to places
- can’t listen to music or might die
- little meaningful protection against severe injury
- can only carry so many groceries/etc
- sucks in winter
I tried biking in a city awhile back, and someone actually tried to hit me with their door.
Any city that thinks its a great idea to share the road on a bike has never personally tried it.
Thats why cities should build seperated lanes so cars and bikes mingle as little as possible
I sorta agree and sorta don’t, all streets should be 30km/h or less and shared traffic, everything else should be with bike lanes. Streets meaning a piece of infrastructure that provides access to places lining it, not a piece of infrastructure for longer distance travel.
The Netherlands is good not because there is a bike lane on every street but because all the streets with destinations (private homes, business, schools)are connected by bike lanes as well as roads, often more and more direct bike lanes.
There are a lot of areas where cars bikes and sometimes pedestrians share the same space both in inner cities and in residential neighborhoods, it’s just that they aren’t through roads for cars or at least very very slow ones, while they are often through roads for bikes and peds.
I see where you are coming from there. My comment is mostly concerned with north america and our street/road design and layout is awful. There are many school zones where cars could easily exceed 100km/h if the driver wanted to. Because of these deisgns I think it is best we keep cyclists and pedestrains as seperated from cars until better street design and traffic calming can be massively implemented. The scale of the street redesign is massive and would have to be city wide to be truly effective.
An easier and cheaper start to pitch politically would be proper bike lanes along major corridors. A few years down the line streets along those lanes would improve and the city could slowly redevelop.
I wish I could just snap my fingers and have safe streets but stroads and the attitude of driving is so bad in much of north america we are going to have to fix it in stages. We can’t just convert our stroads overnight unfortunately.
There are plenty of protected lanes in my city, but they just hide bicycles behind parked cars, making it less safe at every intersection.
The only way I can think that might work better would be to convert a 3-lane road (with suicide/turn lane in center), into a 2-lane road. The center lane gets converted into a two-way bicycle road - raised up like a sidewalk with curved curb. No left turns allowed for cars, only right turns. This way bicycles are visible and protected.
