Lands of two wheels

My primary conclusion here is that Denmark's cities must be more walker-friendly for him to have fewer bikes *and* cars.

@stewy497 Been to Denmark capital Copenhagen, can confirm. While I was there, something nagged at me at the back of my mind til I figured out what: there were hardly any parking spaces but a lot of parks and public spaces.

And the sidewalks were wide and bikes had their own lane on the driveway. Overall, I liked being there a whole lot more than in my car filled home city.

There have been over a hundred pedal-powered aircraft, aka, flying bikes. None have been built in Denmark. Denmark, you gotta step up your game.

Meanwhile in the US

"I swear guys, just one more lane on the stroad and we'll fix traffic this time. Just one more."

For people from the USA who look at bike infrastructure like that of the Danish and the Dutch thinking it's basically magic and you'll never get it;

It *is* possible. But there are a lot of things baked in that prevent this. Think lots of zoning laws; Euclidean zoning (land may only be used for 1 and 1 specific thing only as if it's a DOS adventure game item), minimum parking requirements, house needs to be a minimum away from the street (and sometimes other directions). But also think about the aversion to traffic calming in *any* way even if it makes things safer and faster even for drivers. The overabundance of traffic lights and stop signs. The fact that roundabouts are avoided better than the plague. Oh and no more turning right on red.

On top of that the flawed belief that adding more lanes fixes things even though every time a massive highway is widened it takes only a few months before travel times are longer than before the widening (i.e. Induced Demand). Plus the fact that there's profit to be made in car dependent infrastructure by multiple industries. Like those that build the infrastructure and those that sell the now 'required to live' cars.

If you were to ask me what had to change in 1 word, I'd say "culture" but personally I think that the 'culture' will follow once the changes have been made. As good infrastructure has shown us time and time again; build and they will follow. If your good infrastructure doesn't draw more people on their bikes; it wasn't good infrastructure.

@tiaxanderson
A good deal of that difference also derives just the AGE of these cities. European cities originally built 1000 years ago are designed around foot-traffic, with some larger lanes for horse-carts that at most, equate to a 2-lane road of today. There's a limit to how many 8 lane highways you can put through a city like that without demolishing half the existing buildings (which are, you know, currently occupied).
The oldest North American cities are at most a few hundred years old; much of their current sprawl was built after the invention of the automobile, and some cities today were founded entirely after; built from the first paved road with car traffic in mind. The suburbs (low-density residential neighborhoods, built to provide middle-class (and higher) living areas away from the high-rises of the inner cities) are practically inaccessible without owning your own car. Nothing is close enough to walk to from there.

@Hinoron

> "Nothing is close enough to walk to from there."

Agreed, sort of. That's why bikes would be used. :-)

Bike commuting is pretty easy for anything up to about 15 km/9 miles (On flat roads, obvs). That's 30 minutes of fairly leisurely biking, at 10-18 mph. I would regularly bike for up to an hour when I lived in the Netherlands. (Which in the Netherlands means being able to ride to another city... :-) )

Nobody's saying that someone living 50 miles away should be riding their bike to work.

But within the city, building bike infrastructure does a lot of good beyond just letting people bike. It means there will be a buffer zone between pedestrians and cars, it means there will be more space for kids to play (You take the space for bike lanes away from the cars, not from the pedestrians! The sidewalk should not be touched).

It makes the city nicer. Yes, a lot of US cities don't have people living in the center (Downtown) area, but not everyone lives in the 'burbs. They could easily go to work by bike if they felt safe enough to do so.

Your argument is basically "but no-one will use it" but it seems to be a chicken or egg situation. Biking in Lisbon, where I live now, has taken off because they built the bike lanes.

@tephlon "Flat roads" is a pretty important qualifier where I live. My office is only a few kilometers from my house but there's more than a hundred meters altitude difference. Bicycling to work would be easy; bicycling home would not.

@westofEden

I want an e-bike for this reason. Where I live is pretty flat, but there are a couple mild hills, mild to experienced cyclists at least, between me and work, about 6.5 miles away. That alone puts me off of the idea. I know I'm being a wimp, but having the OPTION of a power-assist on the uphills would go a long way towards turning me into a regular bicycle commuter.

Mind you, I don't want an electric moped. A class 1 electric bike would be more than enough.

@tephlon

It's prohibitively difficult to bring home six bags of groceries on a bicycle. Also, in Canada and a good portion of the more northerly US states (and many other places I'm sure) there are months where bicycle riding is unsafe on many days, or even weeks if the paths, bike lanes and sidewalks are covered in irregular ice, or if the bike lanes are obstructed by heavy plowed snowdrifts on the roadside. Even in warmer weather, I found biking in the rain made my brakes very unreliable.

Basically, I'm saying you could use the bike sometimes, but you'd still need to own a car, because there's a significant number of days when biking is unsafe/impossible... and you probably still have to go to work or school regardless of if the paths are icy or not. I can't see any employer accepting "it's too cold, I'll come back to work in Spring" as an excuse.

@Hinoron What you're saying about the "limit to how many 8-lane highways you can put through a city like that without demolishing half the existing buildings' is correct. Painfully so for the USA. An *enormous* section of USA cities were bulldozed for all those highways. Tens of thousands were displaced and all of the problems I mentioned above were put in place.

The USA *had* walkable cities and no good reason to get rid of them.

@Hinoron
Sorry, but that doesn't follow.
The town nearest me did grow up in the age of the automobile, but there are plenty of broken teeth along the areas that predate it. Buildings ripped out for parking and drive-throughs. I've seen old photos of the downtown area, and it looked much better before. Especially one bank at the corner, which, back in the 70's I'd guess, a fine old brick building was replaced with a modern monstrosity, with fake (painted steel) windows looking out onto the street, setbacks on one side giving up enough room for a whole additional building, and a LOT of lanes of drive-through to cross to stay on the sidewalk on the other side.

There is at least one city in the Netherlands that was famously bombed flat in WWII. They rebuilt in the US style, all multi-lane highways, and then rebuilt that into something that is more bicycle-centric.

Modern development, in the US, is built with the car in mind, but many of the older suburbs were built around the streetcar. In many cases, highways HAVE been bulldozed right through the center of existing cities, splitting those cities in half, displacing hundreds of (mostly poorer and less politically connected) families, and reducing the quality of life for those who remained.

I say the first thing to do is recode zoning. Allow shops in neighborhoods, (but put the onus on them to control their parking situation, maybe by eliminating on-street parking; most places don't need more than a few spots at a time anyway). Allow apartments on Main Street, (and encourage them). Automatically allow more housing units, by predicating automatic permission on it not being TOO much more than what already exists. 30% of houses in the area are 2-storey or larger? You can build a 3-storey. 30% have 4 storeys? 5 storeys are now on the table. There are 2 households per typical lot in 30% of the spaces? Triplexes are now pre-cleared. No paperwork. No variances. The next step is automatically available when a threshold is reached.

@tiaxanderson A better solution in the US is to require the cities to include sidewalks. Seriously, there are cities where there aren't sidewalks in the residential areas, and it's been proven there's a correlation between the age of a neighborhood and the obesity rate for this very reason. Any 'murrican moving to Italy gorges themselves on pasta but loses weight because for perhaps the first time, they are walking everywhere. It's also why NYC is so thin compared to any other city in the country, because of all that walking.

@tiaxanderson The older the city, the less likely you're going to have room for a proper roundabout. In more rural areas, they're being dropped all over the place, especially on the off ramps because they save taxpayer money (not that the taxpayers see that money back). They got a holy mess of a double decker roundabout on the south side of Madison, WI - or at least that's where it was heading when I left. A poorly lit mess of epic proportions.

Bicycle culture in the US is a hot mess as well. No one outside of bicycle heavy areas enforces the existing bike laws so bicyclists get away with practically any irresponsible behavior until they actually get hit by a car.

@GyreBrillig

|Car culture in the US is a hot mess as well. No one outside of speed-trap cities reliably enforces the existing car laws so cars get away with practically any irresponsible behavior until they actually get in an accident. |
FIFY

Off-panel is Iceland washing his cars while listening Björk :P

Thought Denmark was going to win with the “cars cost 300% of their value in Denmark” argument.

If there were one thing I wish I could take from the Dutch and the Danes, it'd be the pro-cycling infrastructure. It is simply the most efficient way to get around a city -- lowest tax base needed for public infrastructure, keeps healthcare costs low, and so on.

Meanwhile my fellow countrymen drive their V8 oversized Cowboy Cadillacs to the gym to get on a treadmill, because apparently 93 in the shade is hot or something.

They nearly look like cousin's or twins with the beards

Denmark, I must admit that you are wheely, wheely cool. (And bad puns aside, that IS pretty incredible.)

I can only imagine America's reaction to this conversation is one of abject horror and pity XD

@Callid Look at him there, on the corner hugging a blanket and sucking on his thumb, the poor guy.

@Callid As an American who owns a bike but not a car, I can attest that not *all* of us are bike haters. Unfortunately, far too many are, especially those with full-sized pickups who feel the need to prove that their vehicle can emit copious amounts of exhaust every time they pass a cyclist.

@dtilque
I meant the character America, i.e. brother America, not Americans in general. Obviously, not all Americans dislike bikes, bot typical American culture (especially the parts of it brother America represents) and urban planning are not exactly bike-friendly :x

@Callid
Worse. We have this aversion to trying anything that's not pre-cleared. If some city planner were to build something out of spec with their big book, even though that big book is full of dangerous mistakes, they would be liable for any accidents.
Think about that for a minute. It's our litigious society that is keeping us using dangerous designs, because those dangerous designs have been approved.

I know of a (former) engineer who is being raked over the coals, because he didn't catch his renewal in time and didn't remove notice of him being an engineer from all his promotional materials by the time his license lapsed, all because he's VERY anti-status-quo. Google "Strong Towns" and visit their YouTube page.

@Callid
American cycling culture is a regional thing. Most of the candidates for most bike-friendly city are in the North.

Southerners like to make illegal modifications to their trucks to blast cyclists with smoke. General Sherman should pay them a visit.

@Callid Nope, some of us Americans are both envious and delighted that in *some* places bikes are used that much. That said, I live in a city that hosts a charity bike ride every November that raises a big chunk of cash for youth groups, hospices, Alzheimers' research, etc.-- this year they're expecting over 7,000 riders and in the past they've raised over 100 million US dollars. So hey, we're not all barbarians! https://eltourdetucson.org/

@Ysabet
I'm well aware of that
(See also my reply to dtilque above)

@Callid Be nice and tell them that those "ISS bicycles" are NOT supposed to replace the Soyuz.
(Or whatever the plural of "Soyuz" is ...)

@Callid Haven't Americans provided all the cars in space?

@Louhikaarme
Even more of a reason to pity those who can only provide bikes! XD

@Louhikaarme
All the cars in space have been EVs. Very unAmerican.

@Callid ,
In America, the bikes have air conditioning, power steering and a gun rack. The trailer hitch for the boat is optional.

@Callid When the pandemic hit, I gave up riding my bike because I didn't want to risk an injury requiring hospitalization (it happened once already).

Where I live, when I'm out walking, it's difficult enough to get fellow pedestrians to share a *sidewalk* let alone get a motorist to put down their phone, put down their Starbucks, take the buds out of their ears, and share the road with a little old bicyclist trying not to get killed on her way to work on a thoroughfare that never got the memo that bicycles exist and have a right to the road.

But to be fair, the most visible type of bicyclist near me is the pack of bored and undersupervised fourteen-year-olds who weave all over the road as if they're immortal.

@Gnomon
That matches what I've heard about the state of urban planning and typical attitudes towards bikers in the US.

Fun side note:
I moved to a new town a few years ago, and had been very annoyed by the state of the bicycle network here. I mean, sure, we have bike lanes, but they cross streets *without* having right of way! And when they cross a major street, yes, they get a bicycle crossing (including right of way) and a speed table, but why have a level crossing at all?
Then I learned about how things are in the US, and now I'm a lot more content with things here :x

@Callid Allow me to sum up typical suburban US attitudes regarding cycling:

Motorist:
How DARE you ride on MY road! Ride your bike on the sidewalk with the other toys!

Pedestrian:
How DARE you ride on MY sidewalk! Ride your bike on the highway with the other vehicles!

Cyclist:
Rules? WHAT rules? Wheeeeee!

(And I say this as a motorist, a cyclist, AND a pedestrian. Needless to say, I try not to be "typical".)

@Callid As an American who proudly doesn't own a car, and bikes 8km every day (2km home to work, 2km work to library, 4km library to home), these two look simply precious.