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Why is Riding a Bicycle in the City Turning Into a Culture War
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this post was submitted on 05 Jun 2024
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If I had a dime for every time somebody made this reply, I’d have a lot of dimes.
Nobody has ever said that. What people are saying is that the private automobile is the worst way to move masses of people in cities. They command ungodly amounts of space, make everything more expensive thereby, and aren’t even good at moving masses of people.
You want to increase the capacity of your road? You can:
Yes, you are right. You are talking of moving people inside cities. I am talking about a) getting in and out of the city and b) moving goods into and out of cities. None of the usual demands in this group ever even starts to address this.
What usually works better for moving people in and out of cities is park-n-ride setups where you setup a giant parking lot in the suburbs next to a metro station. People can just ditch their car outside the city and proceed using public transit. I often do this in Montreal, for example.
For goods, it's a similar setup but with big trucks transferring cargo to smaller trucks; this is already pretty common.
In theory, P&R is fine.
But my experience with P&R is that they are generally so far out of the city and the bus/tram/tube/whatever connection is a normal "outside the city" link which goes every 30-60 minutes if one is lucky (during the weekdayday, evenings and weekends are way worse), and then stops at every lantern on the way to the city center. And still costs a fortune.
Additionally, the tram stop at our next P&R is not exactly handicapped-friendly. So I have to get my wife somehow into the tram, which involves a number of high steps at the trams' doors.
Yes, of course delivery trucks need access to cities, some goods are not practical to move by cargo bike. As do emergency services and buses. Nobody disagrees with this. The problem in many cities is that streets are clogged with useless private cars. So the obvious solution is to ban private cars.
Just because you have no need for a car, private cars are not necessarily useless.
Private cars in general are not useless, but private cars in the center of cities should be useless if the city is designed well. The space-transportation trade off does not make sense.
...if the city is designed well. You got the problem of the next city right on.
But even if I was living in a well-designed city, I would still use a private car, as moving handicapped people (like my wife) around on public transport is quite a nightmare. Yes, we have tried.