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  #401  
Old Posted Jun 22, 2022, 7:05 PM
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Originally Posted by Crawford View Post
OK, but, again, basically the entirety of Germany is connected via bike. Every tiny settlement.

In the U.S. there's almost no bikeability, except for recreation (state parks, shorelines and the like), a few big cities, and college towns. No way people are regularly biking between two random towns in Ohio or Texas.
Germany is relatively small, densely populated and most of the cities are compact...and developed when people had no other choice but to commute by means other than motorized vehicles.

Texas and Ohio are thinly populated outside of the big cities and have shitty winters (OH) and summers (TX). I was in Germany one winter and seemed mild compared to northern winters here. A good chunk of Rhode Island (also shitty winters but dense and older) is bike-able and I could ride from Bristol up to Providence.
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  #402  
Old Posted Jun 22, 2022, 8:34 PM
edale edale is offline
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Texas and Ohio are thinly populated outside of the big cities and have shitty winters (OH) and summers (TX). I was in Germany one winter and seemed mild compared to northern winters here. A good chunk of Rhode Island (also shitty winters but dense and older) is bike-able and I could ride from Bristol up to Providence.
Can we stop blaming weather for any and everything on this forum? Germany does not have significantly milder winters than Ohio. Cincinnati's average winter temps are higher. The difference is culture and infrastructure. Germany (and much of Europe) has a culture that embraces cycling, and has for quite a while. American culture prioritizes the car above everything else in all but maybe 3 central cities.

I will say, though, that there are some long-distance cycling trails in Ohio. The Little Miami Scenic Trail is a rail to trail project mostly built in the 80s, I think. It goes from Cincinnati to Springfield, OH and connects many towns along the way. 78 total miles of trail, and people definitely cycle between towns. Cincinnati to the little hippy town of Yellow Springs (NE of Dayton) is a popular route either for day trips or overnights. NE Ohio has a trail between Akron and Cleveland, too (the Towpath). That one is 80+ miles. It's not Germany, but Ohio actually has some pretty decent intra-city cycling infrastructure.
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  #403  
Old Posted Jun 22, 2022, 9:16 PM
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We're clearly not comparing rural Ohio with bike lanes in German Alpine towns. The context of this conversation is about biking infrastructure in American cities vs European cities.
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  #404  
Old Posted Jun 22, 2022, 9:23 PM
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The main difference is that biking (and walking, for that matter) appears to be a recreational/fitness activity in 98% of the U.S., while in Europe, it's a common daily activity, for work, taking kids to school, going shopping, etc.

Outside of NYC and a few other cities, and some hippie college towns like Boulder, Ithaca, etc., bike riders tend to be fitness buffs or families on an excursion. You don't typically have moms with baby traveling to the supermarket and the like.
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  #405  
Old Posted Jun 22, 2022, 9:49 PM
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Originally Posted by Crawford View Post
The main difference is that biking (and walking, for that matter) appears to be a recreational/fitness activity in 98% of the U.S., while in Europe, it's a common daily activity, for work, taking kids to school, going shopping, etc.

Outside of NYC and a few other cities, and some hippie college towns like Boulder, Ithaca, etc., bike riders tend to be fitness buffs or families on an excursion. You don't typically have moms with baby traveling to the supermarket and the like.
That may be the case, but we're talking about bike lane infrastructure. America has installed a LOT of bike infrastructure in a very short timeframe. Not just NYC, but even in places that you typically don't get recognized for it, like Detroit.

Detroit has bike lane infrastructure that is light years ahead of what it was just five years ago, even if it is mostly unused. Detroit's bike lane infrastructure today can hold up favorably in comparison with many European cities.
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  #406  
Old Posted Jun 22, 2022, 9:49 PM
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Outside of NYC and a few other cities, and some hippie college towns like Boulder, Ithaca, etc., bike riders tend to be fitness buffs or families on an excursion.
The bike-riding working class Latinos of California would like a word.
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  #407  
Old Posted Jun 22, 2022, 9:56 PM
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Originally Posted by iheartthed View Post
That may be the case, but we're talking about bike lane infrastructure. America has installed a LOT of bike infrastructure in a very short timeframe. Not just NYC, but even in places that you typically don't get recognized for it, like Detroit.

Detroit has bike lane infrastructure that is light years ahead of what it was just five years ago, even if it is mostly unused. Detroit's bike lane infrastructure today can hold up favorably in comparison with many European cities.
...and clearly bike lane infrastructure alone is not enough to entice more people to bike as a regular mode of transportation. If Detroit has such great bicycle infrastructure, why is it mostly unused, as you say? Almost like culture and development patterns play a big role in determining bike-friendliness...

Putting bike lanes on quasi-freeway city streets through urban prairie neighborhoods doesn't exactly make a place bike-friendly.
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  #408  
Old Posted Jun 22, 2022, 9:59 PM
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Originally Posted by iheartthed View Post
We're clearly not comparing rural Ohio with bike lanes in German Alpine towns. The context of this conversation is about biking infrastructure in American cities vs European cities.
I was responding to this. Keep up!

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Originally Posted by Crawford View Post
OK, but, again, basically the entirety of Germany is connected via bike. Every tiny settlement.

In the U.S. there's almost no bikeability, except for recreation (state parks, shorelines and the like), a few big cities, and college towns. No way people are regularly biking between two random towns in Ohio or Texas.
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  #409  
Old Posted Jun 22, 2022, 10:03 PM
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Crawford mentioned people in Germany biking from town to town which is almost impossible for most places around the US. Coastal CA and the northeast for example.
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  #410  
Old Posted Jun 22, 2022, 11:09 PM
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Crawford mentioned people in Germany biking from town to town which is almost impossible for most places around the US. Coastal CA and the northeast for example.
If/when you move to the Bay Area, you should check out the regional bicycle network. You can bike from one town to another (and another, and another) across vast swathes of the region. I did that hundreds of times up there. If you stick to routes that pass by BART or Caltrain stations you can go 40, 50 miles one way and take the train home.
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  #411  
Old Posted Jun 23, 2022, 2:06 AM
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Originally Posted by craigs View Post
The bike-riding working class Latinos of California would like a word.
I was gonna say; on my drives to and from work, I see the same Latino bicyclists on what I presume are their own commutes to and from work. And the times I've taken the bus to/from work, there are those cyclists that also take the bus, loading/unloading their bikes at the front of the bus.
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  #412  
Old Posted Jun 23, 2022, 3:12 AM
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If/when you move to the Bay Area, you should check out the regional bicycle network. You can bike from one town to another (and another, and another) across vast swathes of the region. I did that hundreds of times up there. If you stick to routes that pass by BART or Caltrain stations you can go 40, 50 miles one way and take the train home.
East Bay too?
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  #413  
Old Posted Jun 23, 2022, 3:38 AM
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East Bay too?
Hell yes, especially the East Bay!

Go to Google maps and click the "Biking" layer, and you'll see a significant network of bike routes not only in the bay-side East Bay cities (including Fremont), but also the inland East Bay ones as well. For recreation, I recommend the Iron Horse Trail. Because there are BART stations on both ends, you can take your bike on BART, hop off, ride for 20 or 30 miles one way and take BART home, no matter which direction you choose to ride it.

Also, as a years-long participant in East Bay Bike Party, I have ridden in just about every East Bay city and had a blast doing it. I recommend the party--it's more fun than it sounds and it always ends at a BART station in time to get you home. At one point circa 2010, we had something like five current or former forumers partying at EBBP.
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  #414  
Old Posted Jun 23, 2022, 9:12 AM
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That's a hot mess of a road network, and most of those aren't dedicated bike lanes. You're still sharing lanes with cars on narrow, traffic-choked roads.
The purpose of the map wasn’t to show dedicated cycle routes (I’ll come back to that point in a moment), but to demonstrate how entire swathes of London have been remodelled to neutralise the flow of vehicles through neighbourhoods and make them cycling and pedestrian friendly without completely abolishing vehicle access which would be impractical. By reducing short/unnecessary car journeys and increasing walking & cycling (alongside public transport use), journey times reduce for other car users. Examples of modal filters creating LTN’s:
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This is a proper dedicated bike lane: https://www.google.com/maps/@40.7671...7i16384!8i8192
The New York example is not a dedicated bike lane; of the two in view, one has partial segregation, the other is right in the door zone.

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This is not, it's just some paint on the pavement: https://www.google.com/maps/@51.5145...7i16384!8i8192
The Bury Street (London) example you give also isn’t a dedicated bike lane, but it is a bike adapted road that was previously two-way for vehicles (now one-way) with restricted (trade business) parking and counterflow for cyclists. Dedicated (segregated) cycle lanes (many with their own traffic light look like this:
Video Link


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And outside of NYC most people just ride in the slow lane or the sidewalk. It's nice when sidewalks are wide enough for two cars to pass: https://www.google.com/maps/@34.0450...7i16384!8i8192
As a cyclist that manages a silly 15,000km per annum on average, personally I wouldn’t necessarily be deterred by that sort of road, but you’d struggle to get kids or the elderly to cycle on that road due to the variety of hazards present. Cycling on the pavement in the UK is illegal, but as would the case in the US, it would be completely impractical and dangerous. Yesterday, I averaged 27kph on my 28km commute and that was a low-effort with bags; cycling on the pavement would be insanity.
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  #415  
Old Posted Jun 23, 2022, 4:06 PM
iheartthed iheartthed is offline
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Originally Posted by edale View Post
...and clearly bike lane infrastructure alone is not enough to entice more people to bike as a regular mode of transportation. If Detroit has such great bicycle infrastructure, why is it mostly unused, as you say? Almost like culture and development patterns play a big role in determining bike-friendliness...

Putting bike lanes on quasi-freeway city streets through urban prairie neighborhoods doesn't exactly make a place bike-friendly.
It takes time. New York's bike lanes also went largely unused when they first starting to appear. If Bloomberg weren't such an asshole they might not have survived long enough to flourish because there was a lot of criticism about the lanes taking space from cars for parking and vehicular traffic.
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  #416  
Old Posted Jun 23, 2022, 4:27 PM
homebucket homebucket is offline
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Originally Posted by badrunner View Post
And outside of NYC most people just ride in the slow lane or the sidewalk. It's nice when sidewalks are wide enough for two cars to pass: https://www.google.com/maps/@34.0450...7i16384!8i8192
That's not true.

https://goo.gl/maps/vdTJcXMP8MV6yUAZA

And you should never ride on the sidewalk unless you're parking or you really have to.
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  #417  
Old Posted Jun 23, 2022, 6:22 PM
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Originally Posted by nito View Post
The New York example is not a dedicated bike lane; of the two in view, one has partial segregation, the other is right in the door zone.
Those are both considered dedicated bike lanes, and they are few and far between in London.

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The Bury Street (London) example you give also isn’t a dedicated bike lane, but it is a bike adapted road that was previously two-way for vehicles (now one-way) with restricted (trade business) parking and counterflow for cyclists.
Most London bike lanes are like that. That's my point. London has terrible connectivity with its dedicated bike lanes: https://www.google.com/maps/@51.5124...a=!5m2!1e4!1e3

Compare to Amsterdam: https://www.google.com/maps/@52.3461...a=!5m2!1e4!1e3

And NYC: https://www.google.com/maps/@40.7428...a=!5m2!1e4!1e3
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  #418  
Old Posted Jun 27, 2022, 12:07 PM
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Those are both considered dedicated bike lanes, and they are few and far between in London.
If vehicles can access a cycle lane at will then it isn’t a dedicated cycle lane. I’ll expand upon what I stated previously, but your example are nicknamed ’murderstrips’. They offer no protection from a vehicle exiting/entering the parking space, doors opening unexpectedly, double parking and other obstructions, or more importantly from vehicles straying into the lane. They also give a false sense of security to both drivers and cyclists which leads to an increased level of accidents, hence their nickname and why in the UK they’re being replaced by more substantial infrastructure. Interestingly, as of today, where these sort of lanes remain in London, if you block or drive in them you’ll be liable for a $200 fine.

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Originally Posted by badrunner View Post
Most London bike lanes are like that. That's my point. London has terrible connectivity with its dedicated bike lanes:
https://www.google.com/maps/@51.5124...a=!5m2!1e4!1e3

Compare to Amsterdam: https://www.google.com/maps/@52.3461...a=!5m2!1e4!1e3

And NYC: https://www.google.com/maps/@40.7428...a=!5m2!1e4!1e3
If we went just by the green lines on the Google Maps, you’d think New York had a more comprehensive cycling infrastructure than Amsterdam. Yet a lot of those green lines in New York, the ‘dedicated bike lanes’ that you refer to, are trash, as the following examples demonstrate:
That isn’t to say that London doesn’t have dodgy cycle lanes, because it does, and it still has a massive way to go until it is anywhere near the level of bike adoption and quantity of infrastructure present in Amsterdam. Indeed, in terms of active modal share, whilst London might be nearly double that of New York, it is 28th out of the 40 largest cities in UK.

New York is of course at least trying to make cycling more attractive to people, and it is an outlier relative to the majority of North American cities. There are even some actual dedicated (i.e. segregated) cycle lanes in New York that you could have highlighted, e.g. parts of the Hudson River Greenway, and there are even some roads where bike priority lights exist, but they are far and few between. Hence the comparison with London is a bit peculiar when you consider the far broader dedicated cycle network, lower speed limits, pedestrian/cycle-only roads, school streets, and prevalent use of traffic calming measures. London then has a massive number (hundreds?) of modal filters (to reduce vehicle through-running) and LTN’s that I couldn’t see present in New York, despite the more simplistic grid layout that would make it pretty easy to implement

Talking about LTN’s, this is my neighbourhood. The London Borough of Waltham Forest closed a few roads to vehicles (but accessible for pedestrians and cyclists) and made other road layout modifications to create a neighbourhood more conducive to pedestrians and cyclists. An interesting side effect wasn’t just reduced traffic, or the corresponding decline in noise and air pollution, but a reduction in crime, which is why there are now so many LTN’s being introduced across the capital. Note: the below map is slightly out of date as they’ve since closed some other roads.


Image sourced from Walthamstow Village Review: https://www.enjoywalthamforest.co.uk...port-FINAL.pdf
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  #419  
Old Posted Jun 27, 2022, 2:57 PM
iheartthed iheartthed is offline
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Originally Posted by nito View Post
New York is of course at least trying to make cycling more attractive to people, and it is an outlier relative to the majority of North American cities. There are even some actual dedicated (i.e. segregated) cycle lanes in New York that you could have highlighted, e.g. parts of the Hudson River Greenway, and there are even some roads where bike priority lights exist, but they are far and few between. Hence the comparison with London is a bit peculiar when you consider the far broader dedicated cycle network, lower speed limits, pedestrian/cycle-only roads, school streets, and prevalent use of traffic calming measures. London then has a massive number (hundreds?) of modal filters (to reduce vehicle through-running) and LTN’s that I couldn’t see present in New York, despite the more simplistic grid layout that would make it pretty easy to implement

Talking about LTN’s, this is my neighbourhood. The London Borough of Waltham Forest closed a few roads to vehicles (but accessible for pedestrians and cyclists) and made other road layout modifications to create a neighbourhood more conducive to pedestrians and cyclists. An interesting side effect wasn’t just reduced traffic, or the corresponding decline in noise and air pollution, but a reduction in crime, which is why there are now so many LTN’s being introduced across the capital. Note: the below map is slightly out of date as they’ve since closed some other roads.
Unless something has radically changed in London since 2019, I think NYC is quite a bit ahead in terms of protected bike lane infrastructure. 2019 was the last time I biked extensively around London, and there definitely wasn't the level of protected bike lanes there that you find in NYC today.
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  #420  
Old Posted Jun 28, 2022, 10:21 AM
nito nito is offline
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Unless something has radically changed in London since 2019, I think NYC is quite a bit ahead in terms of protected bike lane infrastructure. 2019 was the last time I biked extensively around London, and there definitely wasn't the level of protected bike lanes there that you find in NYC today.
At first I actually thought some of those (like Kent Ave and Allen St) were pretty decent, the others have a myriad of issues (parked cars, lack of bike-level traffic lights, lack of segregation, etc…). Yet if you go 200m up the road on Kent Ave, the segregation ends completely and it becomes a murderstrip, or on Allen St if a cyclist wants to turn right there are no bike priority traffic lights, so a cyclist would have to rejoin the highway or use the pedestrian crossing which is just sloppy design.

There are conflicting claims when it comes to cycle lane network size. New York would appear to have a larger overall network (i.e. paint on the ground), but London has a far larger (260km vs 64km) segregated priority network. The number of traffic calming measures, modal filters and LTN’s is orders of magnitude greater as well.

What we do know is that cycling fatalities in New York are 50% higher than London, and that is despite, i) the modal share of people walking/cycling in London being nearly double, and ii) London’s larger population and larger area. New York roads are generally quite unsafe, because when you factor in population and mode of travel, you’re 5-6x more likely to be killed on the streets of New York as a pedestrian/cyclist than you are in London.



I'm off cycling in France for a week (doing the Marmotte) so I'll be able to report back on the quality of the roads
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