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It takes 160,000 bicycles to incur the road maintenance cost of a single personal car.
Yep, and that’s why most people should ride bikes and then use public infrastructure as needed. But automobiles are still necessary, unless you mean to bike in all the equipment you’d find in an ambulance.
so a post-personal-car future is still viable
It takes 160,000 bicycles to incur the road maintenance cost of a single personal car.
Are we disagreeing here or are you just mentioning a statistic?
I think ambulances and firetrucks should be basically the only automobiles. Even most delivery vehicles should be replaced by either cargo bikes or by spur lines off the railroad.
Also, it’s important to this discussion to draw a clear distinction between streets, roads, and stroads. Streets are destinations and can be made primarily for bikes and pedestrians, roads are routes for cars to go fast from place to place. Stroads are the cursed middle ground common to USAmerican suburbia which combine the width and car friendliness of a road with the density of destinations of a street. I don’t think it’s possible, or even desirable, to get rid of streets, but I think we can and should get rid of most roads and absolutely all stroads. The remaining impermeable surfaces will be drastically cheaper to maintain.
Even most delivery vehicles should be replaced by either cargo bikes or by spur lines off the railroad.
I just don’t think it’d be practical to fill entire grocery stores worth of stuff on bikes. You’re not dealing with a few packages of office supplies. You’re dealing with entire warehouse districts worth of stuff having to move across cities. Even with reduced consumption, the amount of people needed to transport that on bikes would probably be more than the local population.
