Quote:
Originally Posted by mrnyc
this is not apples to apples. as london is twice the area of nyc i would imagine if you added the corresponding inner nyc suburbs to even that acreage up it would be identical to london at least.  |
I don’t think you’ve thought this response through; the population of both London and New York is c.9mn. It is people that cycle, not lumps of turf or buckets of water.
I suspect even if you took all of New York’s metro area population you would struggle to discover another 314,000 daily cyclists just because the amount of infrastructure falls away/borderline non-existent, commute distances become longer and the road environment becomes ever more hostile due to the dominance of the automobile.
Quote:
Originally Posted by iheartthed
Whoa lol. The claim was that London, England, has more cyclists than New York, not more people who bike to work. It's plausible that London has more cyclists (I'm skeptical), but this isn't proof. I also don't think London's biking infrastructure was that great. I've biked London pretty extensively pre-pandemic and their bike lanes were nowhere near as developed as New York's.
Also, if we use the public bike rental data as a proxy, New York is quite a bit ahead of London. New York's CitiBike set a single day ridership record of 138k riders in 2022, while London's Santander Cycles also set a single day ridership record of 73k rides.
And I won't even get into the nonsense comparison to London, Ontario, lol.
Of course people don't bike to work from Jersey City. There is a very large river between Jersey City and Manhattan, and there is no bridge. And the biking infrastructure on the Jersey side of the river is far less developed.
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I’ve already posted the official statistics from TfL and NYC.gov, so I’m not sure why there is any scepticism.
As I’ve said, the real test of a city being receptive to cycling is how hospitable the environment is in the absence of segregated infrastructure which can mask glaring deficiencies in the wider urban environment. In my opinion, the 20mph blanket speed limit I raised before is a massive game changer in encouraging active travel in London, but the expansion of pedestrian and cycling-only streets, the Low Traffic Neighbourhoods which eliminate through-running traffic (probably unthinkable even with the New York City grid), reduction in car parking spaces (both on and off-street) and other traffic calming measures all add up to a more conducive environment. Take school streets – where roads are closed off to vehicle traffic outside schools – London has 547, New York just 41.
Bike hires aren’t a good barometer of cycling activity in New York; CitiBike accounts for just 25% of all cycling activity, let alone in London where Santander Cycles accounts for just 8% of all daily traffic. We don’t point to Amsterdam and Copenhagen’s bike hire schemes to gauge activity in those cities. I would suspect that bike ownership is higher in London which probably explains why
London has 3x as much on-street bike parking as New York.
On a personal note, I mention that I cycle a lot, but I’ve only used bike hire twice in my life and my bikes (and those of my mates) are all parked off-street. For reference this is my personal Strava heatmap around Central London.
I was going to bring my bike to New York, but didn’t in the end due to the hassle of having to get out of town and Central Park laps not looking appealing.