It was kind of funny there was a company a few years ago that occupied some prime Market St. retail space in SF that sold "Dutch Bikes". Dutch bikes are pretty huge and make no sense in SF which has, you know, hills. They didn't last long.
I think he means the Dutch bike style that encloses the chain and single-speed drivetrain inside a case. Great for durability and enduring harsh weather, bad for hills where you need gearing.
The third graph showing the % of trips by foot, bike and car is amazing. Almost 50% of trips .6 - 1.6 miles in NL are by bike and the percent falls fairly gradually for longer trips. I wish I could see this data for other countries.
It would be interesting to split out the results between regular bikes and electric ones, now that they are becoming very popular. On an electric bike, distance is much less of threshold for choosing bike over car, and e.g. weather or ‘amount of stuff to take with you’ become the main deciding factors. Maybe electric bikes could bring opportunities for US cities where everything is far apart?
The main advantage of an electric bike is less about distance and more about terrain. The distance is nice too, but while electric assist it might have some impact on how long a trip you're willing to make, it'll have a huge impact on your willingness to take trips through hilly areas. This can open up whole new parts of the city for accessing casually by bike.
Of course, we're talking about the Netherlands here... the country is mostly flat.
Sure, there are some places with hills, but the majority lives in the flatter-than-pancake flat part.
Where e-bikes can really shine, is increased speed. If you can do 40 an hour (km's), biking becomes a viable alternative to traffic jams. And that's happening already in NL.
I thought electric bikes and scooters was going to be the "secret". They are abundant in Netherlands bike lanes and apparently controversial.
It's a good thing since smaller vehicles are replacing cars in many places, to make it more accessible to people who can't ride a regular bike, but has some safety and regulation issues to iron out.
I personally hate these very polluting moped abominations on the Dutch bicycle paths. They should’ve been banned (or heavily taxed) a decade ago when the Greens asked questions in parliament due to appalling emissions findings of a Dutch research institute. But, the coward politicians pointed to the EU and implicitly said the health of our bicyclists need to be decided in Brussels.
Is 2.5km a day really hardly biking at all? When you consider the fact that Dutch cities are so compact and densely populated, 2.5km of biking gets you a whole lot further than it would in the US, where there is little bike infrastructure and you might need to drive 20 minutes just to get to the grocery store.
I wonder what other national biking averages are? Probably much lower than the Dutch national average.
I probably bike around 2.5km a day as well. I live in the Netherlands, and I don't even own a car. My bike gets me to most of my regular and daily destinations faster than a car would. Partially because I can take faster routes as a cyclists, and partially because in a car I would have to wait for traffic lights more often and be stuck in busy traffic during peak hours.
The only reason why I would use a car, is to get to family that lives further away. But even that stays within 50km. So the dutch public transport system fully satisfies that need for me as well.
Many people consider it a walking distance. If you go on foot both ways but sit 8h at work you can still find it dificult to hit 10k steps per day (WHO recomendation IIRC).
I'd consider it walking distance. Unless I was planning on carrying enough stuff to warrant the use of a bike trailer, I wouldn't bother getting my bike out for a trip that short.
Neither to me. Perhaps the elderly, mopeds and weekends might bring the average down, but still. We regularly go on long bicycle trips of +30km. Some of my coworkers regularly race +80km.
I was recently staying with a friend in a suburb of Amsterdam. One night we decided to go to dinner. She has three kids and I have two. She piled four of the five kids onto her bike (it had a basket for kids) and headed over. My wife and I and the baby rode in my car. She only got there one minute after me despite it being a few miles away.
I think the reason is because she was able to take the inside passages that are only for bikes, so her trip was much shorter than mine.
So not only are their buildings close together, but they are built around walking/bikes, such that those modes of transit are actually shorter.
In the city where I live, Deventer, at least for the inner city, walking even outperforms biking. I recently got a bike again, but I only use it for going places that would take me 20 minutes or more on foot.
Of course, I haven't got a car, have never had a car and haven't even got a driver's license.
Cyclist here. I've told people that this can be true in the US as well (taking the exact same route even). I picked my current apartment because it has a relatively short bike commute. Going from my current apartment to where I work takes about the same amount of time by bike or car because the car is at best 5 minutes faster to the general area but that advantage is quickly lost when one has to park and walk to the building. With my bike I park 100 feet from the door.
Some drivers might say that counting time to park is "cheating", but I strongly disagree. Time from door-to-door is what matters.
I live a lot closer to work - 4.5 miles straight down Central Expressway. Even though my route is no better than what I could do by car, both my average and variance are much better by bike than by car. Typically 15 minutes door-to-door by bike. I can't touch that by car, with evening commutes often taking 45 minutes. I wave at my coworkers when I bike past them.
In La Jolla, I had a bus pass because I had been running errands. I was tired and we had more stuff to do, so I took the bus since I already had a pass good for the whole day. It didn't cost anything.
My sons walked to meet me somewhere midway to where we were going. They arrived about the same time I did.
I would get ahead of them because the bus is faster -- when it's actually moving. Then we would sit at a light or get stuck in traffic, and I would watch my sons pull ahead of the bus.
When we first gave up our car, it took no more time to pick up groceries on foot than by car. The same scenario often took place, where a car would zoom past us, then get stuck trying to turn into the parking lot. We were going into the store while they were looking for a parking space.
Cars on the open highway going long distances are absolutely much faster than someone walking. But for many local trips, they aren't as advantageous as many Americans assume them to be and will vociferously argue they are when presented with such stories.
I live in a suburb so I have to drive to many places but I have started to notice that even if I can't walk to the store in less than 20 min it feels a ton less stressful than driving for 3 and parking for 5. I should probably get a bike as this is the perfect distance for it.
Absolutely. When I was biking in college, I could reliably beat my driving friends to any destination within a mile or so. Which, given that we all lived in the middle of a college town, covered most of the places we wanted to go.
I currently live about 1.5 miles from work, and I'd love to bike it, but this suburb has no bike lanes, sidewalks, or shoulders, and intersections that are terrifying even in a car. :(
This is also true for my commute in Palo Alto, even without the “door-to-door” qualifier. I don’t even particularly like biking, but I’ll gladly bike when it’s significantly faster + cheaper.
True for me, and like many posters I'm also in the Bay area. Even though my commute is tiny (3 miles each way), the time it takes is a wash. By bike there's a trail I can take which is nonstop. By car the variance is much higher, depending on traffic, which stop signs are red, etc.
I suspect that the bike would win for my old commute (5x longer), where I'd hit congested highways every single day. Slow and steady beats stop and go.
The city I lived in prior to my current location was much larger. My commute was about 5 miles each way. Driving it would take between 1.5 and 2.5 hours (more if there was an accident)! I could bike the same distance in about a half an hour.
Same with me in Calgary, AB, a big, spread-out city by Canadian standards. My daily commute is ~5km each way and it takes 12-20 minutes depending on weather, type of bike and how energetic you're feeling. Visiting my family is 25km each way and takes about 60-70 minutes. Driving time would be 15-40 minutes for work (depending on time of day) and 30 minutes to family with no traffic. My takeaways:
* for shorter urban distances the bike is way faster almost all the time
* for longer suburban distances it marginally slower but not as much as you'd think
* The quality of the time on a bike is much greater up to ~20 minutes, then tapers off rapidly in poor conditions; even riding in the rain or cold snow is preferable to sitting in traffic if you're not out for too long.
* My trip is typically short enough that it takes longer to get ready to ride than to actually complete the ride
I ride a bike for very selfish reasons; the shared benefits are just a nice bonus.
In Baltimore, bikes routinely will pass cars driving inside the city because cars stop at all lights (well, they should anyway), get stuck in traffic, and have to circle for parking. That said, it feels unsafe and the number of bikes is still low.
Speaking of kids, the distribution and location of schools is a huge factor in where people choose to live in the US, relative to where they work. It would be interesting to also look at statistics on school sizes and locations relative to other countries.
Northern Sweden is interesting because there's a ton of space, but really nothing outside of the cities. I've just finished up a job in Luleå and effectively everyone seems to live either in the city or in suburbs that are about 10 minutes drive away.
If you gave that sort of space over to the Americans you'd have little towns _everywhere_.
The Germans are slowly taking over the North so mabe ;)
Bikes are well used here and 3-4 km is no problem to bike on flat land, not even if you're untrained. Bike roads are usually straighter to goal and plenty of parking in front of all doors.
The reason - bikes can 'filter' up to a set of lights, whereas a car in heavy traffic might take 2 or 3 rotations of the light to make it through a junction.
The same is certainly true in Portland, especially if your origin and destination are on or near greenways. At rush hour, a trip from, say, 52nd to the river will take forever in a car accounting for traffic and parking, but is like 10 mins on a bike.
I'm in Boston and even here my bike gets me places faster than my car, at least between 8-10am and 4-7pm. Traffic is such a killer to car speed.
Right now at 3pm, Google Maps tells me that my 6-mile commute home by car would be 32-39 minutes. By bike it's 39-41 minutes for a 7-mile ride. During rush hour, the bike really wins.
What makes biking uncomfortable here is that you really have to be alert. A lot of roads don't have good space for bikes and cars can be really aggressive, even if they're just racing toward the next light.
Cars just don't move through cities fast when there's traffic. Plus, parking here is just a nightmare.
This is one of the most infuriating parts about the road layout where I live now.
Everything is built as small residential cul-de-sacs without any access except the entry from the main street. I can look at my neighbor's house 100ft away but there's no way to get there, even as a pedestrian, except walking out on the busy main street (with no sidewalks), walking half a mile down the road, and then walking half a mile back up their residential street.
It's like they actively try to discourage any mode of transportation except driving.
The point of cul de sacs is to discourage people who do not live there from passing through. They are there to discourage all driving except your driving.
That used to be my pet hate on trips to the US - it definitely felt like active discouragement - finding the pavement would just stop with no warning, or being able to see and almost touch the place I wanted to get to next block or lot, but getting there was a major hike. All that lovely California sun, why on earth would I want to be in the rental car for only a mile or two? :)
Cul-de-sacs are fairly popular in current UK estate designs, but usually - not always - include footpaths to link the obvious places. Mostly goes with shopping areas too - if you have walked, you can usually shortcut most of the road routing. That said, UK cycle friendly is mostly tokenism - a few efforts, a few half hearted painted lanes, but it's inconsistent. Pedestrian friendliness is usually pretty good.
I live in LA. I'm not sure if it's just my changing age, but my perception is that, due to traffic and parking, people now do much more business locally than they did in the 1990s. This implies more biking, walking and alternative transportation.
By locally, I mean "within Silver Lake" or "within Echo Park" -- shopping, groceries, and especially casual dining. My belief is that pockets of density are slowly emerging.
The city of Groningen had a great idea in the 70s.
They wanted less car traffic in the inner city. So now there is a ring road around it, and the center itself is divided into four parts, with one-way streets laid out so that if you want to go from one part to another, you have to go to the ring road. Cars can't travel through the center, they have to go around it. In the center you only get cars that have that as their destination.
But, all these one-way streets are marked "except for bicycles". None of the above applies to bicycles.
So for even quite long trips, say from the north of the city to the south, bicycles beat cars because they can just go straight through the center and cars have to take the long way around.
I wonder what the average trip is for Americans in large cities. For me in Brooklyn, it's about 4 miles to my office in Manhattan. Even in an ideal world with no cars, I still wouldn't really be able to bike to work (in terms of my desire to bike that far). If I'm going out to eat in my neighborhood, it's much easier and safer to just walk up to about a mile. So, there's not really much use for me to bike anywhere other than purely for recreation. Maybe I'd bike between a mile and four miles, I'm not sure. But it definitely would be my least-used form of transportation.
Obviously this is anecdotal, but I am skeptical how useful a focus on bike lanes will be to the general public in American cities as compared to things like buses.
There's definitely a middle distance where biking is the easiest way to get around. Particularly in Brooklyn, if you're traveling perpendicular to the direction of Manhattan you're almost certainly not served by transit anyway.
This is certainly a case where the small size and compact nature of European cities give them advantages over American ones. Forget four miles, I have drive forty each way for prior commutes. Biking is great if you're a yuppie making six figures a year at a cushy, white-collar tech job. Not so much if you have to go to a client, have to do something physical, or even work in an office in the rest of the world. Let alone if you are a blue-collar worker, and possibly have to bring tools, equipment, etc.
Telecommuting may mitigate this problem, but only for a small sub-set of workers for now, and even long term the fact remains that people still need to go into an office at least occasionally, and a good number of people can't get to work feasibly by bike. Plus, most people want to go somewhere after work, to the store and to church once a week, etc. This is orders of magnitude larger than a mile and a half (apparently the dutch average).
I don't see why electric cars can't accomplish sustainability goals without trying to force a demographic shift of that scale (which is very unlikely to happen).
I'm not sure if the average European city, or the city/town the average European lives in, is smaller or larger than in the US (in terms of population).
I live in Berlin, with the population only slightly smaller than Los Angeles, and about 30% of the people regularly use bikes. Almost all trips I take somehow come out to about 4-6km, or 20 to 30min.
L.A. isn't even that much larger (1300km^2 to 900km^2). But anecdotally it seems to me like long commutes across metro regions are far more common?
As for blue-collar workers, I just recently saw a local plumber had switched to one of those cargo bikes. He said he had customers mostly within a 2x2km area, and was spending 20% of his days searching for parking spaces before.
> I don't see why electric cars can't accomplish sustainability goals
Because anything resembling a personal automobile is
1. Still enormously dangerous to everyone else on the same road;
2. Takes up a ridiculous chunk of space;
3. Doubly so when parked/not used;
4. Does not navigate nimbly in traffic;
5. Rips up tarmac and damages road surfaces;
6. Makes a fair amount of noise still;
I could go on but I think you get the point. It's not only about CO2 emissions, it's also about its place among the humans it shares living spaces with.
Congratulations, you just described what the article found, which is that biking is preferred for trips of a certain moderate distance (roughly 0.5-2 miles).
Yes, and moderate-distance trips are the least-common trips that I tend to take. Plus, those would probably be better-served by better bus service anyway.
I hate the buses in NYC. They're tremendously slow.
I bought a One Wheel, comparable an ebike basically, and it's awesome for the 0.5-4.0 mile range. Plus, it's more fun than the subway or a bus so I'll even take it over the subway when practical.
Yes, we need to clear certain streets for primarily bus usage. This recently happened on 14th street to humongous success. The hope is this can extend to other heavily-trafficked routes in the near future.
4 miles is not much on a bike if you have a safe bike way. If you need to do it on the street with cars it's a different story. It's less than 30 minutes ride for the average cyclist. (assuming it's pretty flat)
Honestly if you just get out and do it every day a 4 mile commute on a bike is a breeze. I'm not a Lycra clad sports fanatic - I just started riding to work and got into a routine.
4 miles is absolutely nothing in terms of biking distance. In high school I (and a lot of the other kids in my village) used to bike 11 miles to school, and then 11 miles back again at the end of the day. Took about 45 minutes if I was hasty.
Now, if it rained or was very windy it was pretty bad, but it was very doable :)
Manhattan is unique in having everyone at a trivial walk from their nearest subway stop. Most people are going to need a 1-5 mile trip to their train station. Very good local bus service might be on par with walking (after factoring in average wait time), but not even close to competitive with cycling.
I don't know what the average is, but I've always made it a point to live within 5 miles or so of where I work. Life's too short to spend too much of it commuting.
Like you, if my destination is with a mile or two, I'm probably walking (unless I'm pressed for time or have to carry a bunch of stuff).
I do bike to/from work, though (about 5 miles each way). I sold my car a few years back, and a bicycle is the only transportation I own.
I really enjoy being car-free! I didn't realize how much of a burden and hassle owning a car was until I got rid of mine. It seriously improved my standard of living. When I'm in a situation where I really need a car, I either rent one or (more often) hire a cab. This happens about once per month.
Big gains for biking "occur when you go from detatched houses to two-story attached townhouses on side streets and four-story walkups on bigger streets. In other words, the big gains for biking occur when you reach the density of Europe’s famously beautiful and livable cities."
Also, it's only partly about density in terms of population but also how far you have to go to get to stuff. Which is to say, mixed-use neighborhoods with shops and restaurants nearby are going to be more ped/bike friendly than 'bedroom communities' where everything else is far away.
Wasn't clear to me from the article, but taking an average of "bicycle miles per day" is always going to be greatly skewed toward 0 if it includes people who never or rarely bike.
Would be much more interested in the average bicycle miles per day of only people who take at least, say, 3 or 4 trip a week by bike.
>This level of urban development isn’t just unusual in almost all of the United States. It’s illegal.
Bang. In much of America, it is against the law to build dense cities where people are statistically close to work and the grocery store.
Why do we have low density residential zoning in the first place? Preferring a large yard is one thing, but how did it come to be that America legally required houses to have yards?
This is just a spit take, but American culture is a bit more independent-minded and always has been since the founder. Having your own property is part of that identity. That's why many went west rather than build up in cities.
Moving west and building up happened at the same time, and western city centers are just as dense as eastern ones.
The rarification of US cities happened in the 1940s and 1950s, when entire neighborhoods were bulldozed to make room for highways and parking lots that idealistic modernists and self-serving auto lobbyists believed were the future.
This argument really bothers me. "Having your own property is part of that identity" makes sense, but that is pretty much the exact opposite of "agreeing to collective laws that limit what you are allowed to do with your property."
I tend to interpret independent as "I don't want other people to determine what I have to do", but yeah, "I don't want other people to intrude on me at all" is another possibility.
I understand what you’re saying but “in much of America” really means California and maybe Seattle. There a lot of comments on HN about a national housing crisis but the South, North East, and Midwest don’t have the same problems.
I live in Atlanta and fail to see your point. Compared to other cities it’s much better.
When I worked in Midtown I saw 3 high rises go up. 1 for GaTech students, another for apartments, and another for condos. Brookhaven was pretty crazy when I lived there but they have tried to combat the problem with better zoning.[1]. Chamblee added a bunch of new high density housing.
I live in metro Atlanta as well. Look at the actual data instead of cherry picking examples. Housing prices and rent increases have outpaced inflation for years.
Also the city added only about half as many new units last year as it did the year before.
And yes Atlanta is cheaper than other much higher density cities, that's why I said we have the same problem just not on the same scale.
There’s a difference between cherry picking and picking the places you’ve lived or worked.
If you own a house you wouldn’t want the value to meet inflation every year. You want it to gain value. Atlanta is a very affordable city by any measure.
Then you can't use those places to generalize Atlanta. The fact is Atlanta isn't adding housing fast enough to keep up with demand. That is the same problem San Fransisco has. It's just not nearly as bad.
>If you own a house you wouldn’t want the value to meet inflation every year. You want it to gain value.
Of course. That's a huge part of the of the problem. Housing can't be both a good investment and affordable. You've basically summed up NIMBYism in 2 sentences.
>Atlanta is a very affordable city by any measure
It is currently more affordable than some cities less affordable than others. But if housing prices keep outpacing inflation and more importantly wage growth, it won't be affordable for long.
Provide some sources about Atlanta not adding housing fast enough I’d love to read it. A recent AJC points out lower interest rates helping out especially in the sub $300k range. This range was the most affordable for first time home buyers. The article points out recent buyer who got a 4 bedroom house in Snellville for $210k.[1] To your point wages haven’t grown as fast as housing costs. Atlanta is also right behind SF in median wage growth.[2]
There’s only one time in the past 30 years where housing prices dropped and people lost money. It wasn’t because of NIMBYism.
Housing prices (both buying and renting) are rising faster than inflation or wage growth and occupancy rates are high. That means demand is outstripping supply. We aren't adding housing fast enough to keep up with demand.
And Atlanta added far fewer units in 2018 than 2017 (you can Google the numbers) so we're actually slowing the rate at which we're adding housing.
>There’s only one time in the past 30 years where housing prices dropped and people lost money. It wasn’t because of NIMBYism.
When did I imply that NIMBYism caused housing prices to drop. I said the exact opposite.
Low density != housing crisis. A 3bed with a pool on a golf course can go for like ~$200k[0] there, which is more than affordable on the florida median income of $52k. Compare to San Francisco where a starter home regularly goes for a million+, and it's not like the commute is any easier.
"America" doesn't legally require houses to have yards. People have voted for laws locally in some municipalities that require yards, or minimum parcel sizes, or other standards, in order to preserve their neighbor character/culture/quality of life/environment.
In my opinion, those constituents have a right to do that (localized decision-making). I see a lot of comments on HN that deride arguments made for neighborhood character or quality of life, but it is a very real thing that is important to lots of people. Not everyone wants to live in a dense city. Most of the consternation against the less-dense areas are from people who want to live in those areas because they are attractive, but they also then demand it change to accommodate them on dimensions like zoning, which I don't think is fair.
Also there are interesting things that can probably be studied from that, like is that healthier or better for the environment than living in packed urban areas?
Maybe if you're worried about CO2 emissions having those CO2 eating beings in your backyard could be a better option.
Neither is living in a crowded urban area or riding bikes.
But OK let's not nitpick, I'm not talking about only regarding CO2, it was just an example of something that is relevant these days for a lot of people.
My point is that would be interesting to study this as matter of what kind of life would be better, given different metrics.
But not everyone wants to live in a sprawling suburb, but we've engineered financial and educational systems and property rights norms that make it difficult for even those who wish to live in a dense city to choose to do so.
I would call it a flaw in America's democracy. In which only the current land owners get a vote and have unchecked power. You are right, it is not fair, but a fairer solution is not quite clear either.
I always thought it was from nimbyism, but that's an assumption. The biggest resistance to new housing or denser housing in an area that already contains housing often comes from residents who think it'll decrease their property values. So they push back on it as much as possible.
On the other extreme, you have people up in arms about gentrification, where they oppose new or better housing because they're worried it'll increase their property values. But in both cases, it's the people who already live there that push back on more and/or denser housing.
"Sure, my house is valuable now, but if I could also walk to a grocery store, a barbershop, a coffee shop, an electronics store, a beer pub, a few restaurants, and a few other kinds of stores, AND get on public transportation that would take me to local hubs and office spaces -- surely my house would drop value like crazy then!".
Greater logic: people looking to rent a small, inexpensive apartment are clearly the same people looking to buy a house with a backyard, so increasing the supply of the former would decrease prices for the latter by the law of supply and demand.
Exploding brain logic: ignoring property values going up every time the subway/local rail starts expansion into an area. Also voting against public transport expansion because nobody is using it anyway. AND also voting against constructing dense housing, because it will increase traffic.
Note that all three are required to block mixed-used dense walkable developments on the premise of "my property value" --- and that all three currently apply to the Bay Area.
> "Sure, my house is valuable now, but if I could also walk to a grocery store, a barbershop, a coffee shop, an electronics store, a beer pub, a few restaurants, and a few other kinds of stores, AND get on public transportation that would take me to local hubs and office spaces -- surely my house would drop value like crazy then!".
In many cities, the logic of opposing transit is pretty explicitly racist. In Atlanta, I would hear MARTA derided as being only for black people, and in Baltimore's suburbs in 2018 there was a stink from suburbanites who live on the light rail route complaining that the train was "bringing in crime".
Oh also in DC, there was supposedly a crime wave where hoodlums would take the subway to get away. I thought this was incredibly dumb because just post a cop at the station if it happens more than once? You literally have ten minutes to half an hour for the cop to get there. And yet the media reported it as fact.
It’s the law too. Zoning generally prohibits putting stores and houses together. The law also requires that developers build a minimum amount of parking. Even Houston, reputed to be a zoning free for all, has mandatory parking minimums, which guarantee sprawl and car centric streets.
I live in the plateau neighbourhood of Montreal and as far as I can tell it’s one of the few in north america that doesn’t require any parking. Travel is more like the dutch. You walk, bike, or take a short metro ride and it’s not terribly slower than a car for most of your daily trips, if not faster.
Where I live the areas closer to downtown are still zoned mixed-use. The houses are mostly offices for lawyers, therapists, etc. or are some sort of boarding house/apartment situation which has driven rents/property prices beyond what a family can afford, especially for smaller, older houses. I think most people would like to live in such an area, which is why most can't afford it.
People choose a method of transportation based on personal convenience, moreso than cost, sustainability, safety, etc. Dutch citiies make parking inconvenient enough that biking wins out for short trips, and they're dense enough that many trips are short.
What's the lesson here? It seems to be saying that no amount of new infrastructure will make people ride bikes.
Nowadays a whole new trend is arising in the Netherlands. By introduction of the electric bike the cut-off for taking a bike vs. car is much less steep. Regular electric bikes (max 25km/h) make people bike to work for ranges 5-10 km single-trip now, speed pedelecs (45km/h bikes) are extending it as far as 35km single trip. Bikes are becoming more popular not only because people like to live healthy but also because our roads are clogging up (again). Combined with high-speed biking lanes being added to our infrastructure this drives adoption.
I expect these graphs to change in the coming 5 years.
P.s. Our today's issue is having speed pedelecs which are not allowed on our biking lanes in cities/suburbs/villages (big speed difference) but are just about too slow for the regular 50km/h roads :).
P.p.s. Electric bikes are around 2000€ on average. Speed pedelecs start at 3500€ but quickly go to 5000€, and 8000€+ for premium brands is not uncommon. We still love our bikes ;).
Nearly every electric bike in the Netherlands is pedal-assist, not pure electric.
When you see Pedelec, it means S-Pedelec, which is more powerful (45km/h), helmet required, basically a moped. Mostly used by older folks and weekend long-distance cycling groups.
In the Netherlands there used to be electric bikes that go up to about 25 km/h, mostly for the elderly, but in the last few years there are also "speed-pedelecs" that go up to 45 km/h and are popular with commuters.
Count as mopeds, and controversial because they are more dangerous (partly because they look like normal bicycles and the rider is sitting upright but they're going much faster than normal bikes, other traffic doesn't expect it).
But they do make it feasible to use a bike for longer commutes.
In the Netherlands non-assisted electric bikes are not allowed, which is why you don't see them (except the occasional violation). In other countries you have bikes with throttle, essentially an electric scooter.
I’m in that demographic. Started doing my 15km (each way) commute on an electric. It’s even faster than public transport, and the bike should pay for itself in <2 years.
This is consistent with my use of bikes: if it requires any special equipment or preparations whatsoever, I'm not really that interested. Helmets, special clothes, water, locks, repair gear, whatever. That means short rides only. Anything beyond that transitions the use case from "average, practical users" to hobbyists.
Unless you're doing a biking marathon, the only equipment you really need are a bike lock and helmet. Even the bike lock can be dispensed with if you have another means of securing your bike.
Special clothes are entirely unnecessary unless you're racing.
I remember when I spent a few days in Utrecht: It was so dense that the walk to the supermarket was about as far as walking across a typical American Walmart parking lot.
>Is this an error? I asked around for a comparable estimate at the national level. As of 2017, that estimate is 2.5 km. So, 1.5 miles per person per day. Either way you count it, the Dutch hardly bike at all.
An average of 1.5 miles per person per day sounds huge.
What's the American average? 0.05 miles?
What's the baseline from where the author justifies the "hardly bike" line?
There are 17 million people in Netherlands, and 800.000 in Amsterdam.
If half of the people in Amsterdam go about 5km per day (they wouldn't need much more, it's not a huge city, and they'd mostly go to/from work/school/home) that's 2.5 km per person per day -- the number they post.
Half of the people of a city biking everyday is HUGE, and dwarfs any US town 5x easily.
Heck, merely 10% of the population biking every day would be huge, and that's easily within the number given.
I'd say the same holds for other Dutch cities and villages.
Yeah, those are my thoughts exactly. The relevant measure is what fraction of adults bike for travel every day (or close to it). Pretty sure the Netherlands crushes the US by that metric.
In the Netherlands that difference isn't that huge, there are 17 million people, 13.5 million of those own bicycles (there are about 23 million bicycles total).
Not really. It would be tiny if it was describing hobbyist biking fanatics etc (who are expected to bike much more).
But when the "per cyclist" is used to describe regular people who bike to home/work/etc (because the country has a bike culture), as a per day number it's big. Because then it can be compared to the tons of regular people who don't bike at all in other countries.
In other words 2.5km per day "per capita" and "per cyclist" could be equally huge, when the percentage of cyclists is big in the population, because the "per cyclist" suddenly doesn't mean:
"Bike fans in Netherlands do an average 2.5km per day"
but:
"Shitloads of people in Netherlands have a bike and do an average 2.5km per day on it"
You're comparing the average Dutch person vs a hypothetical average American to say it's a huge difference, but obviously the "average American" is going to be orders of magnitude lower as the vast majority of Americans don't bicycle regularly.
The article already points out that a much higher proportion of people in the Netherlands bike.
"The Dutch hardly bike at all" refers to an individual cyclist compared with an individual cyclist in the states. To someone who does bicycle regularly, 1.5 miles is, indeed, hardly anything at all. I bike 1.5 miles in each direction to my train each day (so twice that average) and don't consider myself to bike far at all.
I guess at worst you can say it's a click-baity title, as it's appearing to go counter to your expectations of a heavy biking culture (which it is) to say that any one cycling individual doesn't actually bike far, but that shift in perspective is the point of the article.
That still doesn't give you a 3 mile daily average. You have to discount weekends, holidays and bad weather days.
You also cannot compare average biking distance for a whole population with the average biking distance of the biking subset of another population. That is like comparing life expectancy of musical conductors with the life expectancy of the general population.
> I guess at worst you can say it's a click-baity title
> You have to discount weekends, holidays and bad weather days
That’s part of it, in the Netherlands you might cycle even more on weekends and holidays to go somewhere, and there is no ‘bad weather’ (it’s already bad most of the time).
If the Netherlands were known for being "a country of musicians," because almost every Dutch person played the piano, would that be a fair stereotype of the country?
If, on average, they only played the piano once a week, just to play a single scale, would it be fair to have an article whose title was "The Dutch barely play at all"?
All three things would be true:
1. The Dutch were famous because most of them played the piano
2. The average Dutch person plays significantly more scales than the average American (who probably play <0.005 scales)
3. The Dutch "barely play at all."
Honestly, I don't see why this title is bothering you so much. Most people's image is of the Dutch biking everywhere.
You've completely missed the point of the article. The point is that the Dutch use bicycles a lot because their urban infrastructure means many of their trips are the right length for a bike to make sense over either walking or driving.
The Dutch are not insane fitness nuts biking 25 miles to work daily. They just have a built environment where taking a bike actually makes sense because they aren't going terribly far, just far enough that the hassles involved in taking a bike (like locking it up) are worth it.
I assumed before reading the piece that the entire point was that miles traveled by bike were low on a per person basis.
The point of the title is PR. It's an attempt to rebut the assumption that this is hard, so fat, out of shape Americans have no hope of aspiring to create a bicycle culture like the vaunted Dutch, who must all be super athletic as one of their many godlike virtues.
There's nothing all that special about the Dutch people. They aren't all Olympic athletes. They aren't all brainwashed hyper virtuous types making hyper virtuous choices at enormous personal expense and suffering.
They just have a built environment that helps make it easy for little old grandmas to take their bike somewhere.
If you want to argue that it's a bad title for HN, sure. I totally agree.
But the title wasn't written for HN and it's a perfectly fine title for it's intended purpose for most audiences.
The title is incredibly bad at anchoring this, selling the dutch as biking less frequently than other cultures rather than comparing average biking distance to average biking distance.
Even in those parts of the US where we live at similar or higher density versus the Netherlands, biking is far less common because the motoring community has seized most of our streets for car storage, crowding out the kind of bike infrastructure that's required for most people to feel comfortable cycling short trips.
(Banning cars would also be a solution, as 'bike infrastructure' is really infrastructure to protect bikes from cars, but it's not necessary when there's large amounts of street space that could be repurposed from car storage)
US rail stations also generally have less, and less secure, bike parking versus equivalent stations in the Netherlands, reducing their catchment areas to a mile-wide 'walkshed' rather than a few-mile-wide 'bikeshed'.
I live in Baltimore and for many of the trips in my daily life a bike is faster than a car because I don't get stuck in traffic and I don't have to look for parking, but biking has other disadvantages. Most seriously, the safety of biking is highly questionable, since there are very few bike lanes, so you end up weaving among cars that do not give one crap about your safety. In addition, since Baltimore is harbor town, there's a pretty good slope and going up hill is no fun. That said, I see a fair number of rent-a-scooters every day. It seems like they could become popular enough to force the creation of more protected lanes.
In San Francisco there's a good chance your destination will not have a safe, designated place for biking. That increases the chances of it getting stolen by quite a bit.
I am in San Francisco, last mile vehicles are a good solution to the theft problem since you are going to carry them with you.
It does nothing for the fact that the roads are often in a pretty bad state and more importantly that you share the streets with cars.
I already had an asshole bump his car on my legs apparently voluntarily. I know that some riders wear gopro constantly in order to document this kind of occurrences.
And even aside from these extreme morons, inattentive drivers are pretty dangerous.
I can't wait for the day where there will be a dedicated segregated bike lane on market. That will be a good start.
> so you end up weaving among cars that do not give one crap about your safety
Well it's not really possible for cars to give a crap. It's the drivers we need to point out here. And drivers are people. People who are literally okay with other humans dying from the one tonne machines they drive around at high momentum and with recklessly little attention (texting, etc.)
This behaviour should be rightfully vilified as psychotic, rather than normalised through statements about "cars". The media almost always uses language that absolves humans of their chosen actions that lead to tragic incidents.
This is not an either/or problem. Obviously, you need many pieces of the puzzle to come together to get the kind of results the Dutch have.
But this piece highlights an oft overlooked piece of the puzzle and it's a critical element. You can willy nilly add all the bike racks and other infrastructure you want, it's not going to result in people flooding out onto the streets on their bikes if there's nothing within a reasonable distance. American policies actively make it outright illegal to build the kind of dense urban fabric crucial to the Dutch success with fostering bike culture.
> American policies actively make it outright illegal to build the kind of dense urban fabric crucial to the Dutch success with fostering bike culture.
This is changing. The last three cities I've lived in had strong growth boundaries specifically intended to prevent the cities from sprawling any further.
An urban growth boundary is not a policy that fixes this problem.
We require streets to be very wide to accommodate car traffic.
We require homes to be a certain minimum size.
We mandate lots of parking.
We have minimum lot sizes.
We have set backs from the lot line. This means you can't build row houses. We have places where if you buy an empty lot, you can build a row house matching the ones on either side. If you buy an old building, you can't tear it down and build new because it is grandfathered in and a new building would have to conform to a different set of rules.
We do seem to be lightening up on parking requirements in some cities, but many of these other issues are not being aggressively addressed.
You mostly can't build walkable neighborhoods in the US. This has been true a long time. The New Urbanism movement was about trying to do exactly that and they frequently had to do a lot of research and find loopholes to try to create anything akin to their vision. Their plans were usually denied the first time they were submitted and then they would go through zoning codes very carefully and start renaming things on their drawings to a conforming use that largely preserved their intended layout.
I wasn't claiming that UGB were a solution, only that they are an indication that the tide is beginning to change. For the record, over half of the other issues you've raised have been, or are in the process of being, addressed in my current city.
I know some things are changing, but we still have a long way to go. We've been building a certain kind of urban fabric a long time and it will take time to remedy the problems that have grown out of that fact.
I agree entirely. What I've seen count as "baby steps".
As I tell myself when something is taking far longer than it should, at least the trend line is pointing the right direction. A small amount of progress is preferable to none at all.
This only works if you live, work, and shop in a few mile radius.
I commute 30 miles a day each way (60 total) from my house to work. Even a crazy fitness nut likely wouldn't cycle that many miles every day. My commute isn't even long compared to some people's...
Trains aren't the answer either. The US is just too spread out on average. Yes, they'll work in dense cities... but not in the suburbs or rural areas - ie, where majority of the country lives.
People living in big, dense cities are too quick to forget most people don't live that life. Out here, a car is pretty necessary.
> Here lies the danger of arguing from a position of zero knowledge.
> 30 miles is my warm up/recovery distance
That's absurd and you know it. Possibly spoken from someone that doesn't actually cycle, or is greatly exaggerating. You ride 1-2 hours for a warm-up/cool-down? You expect regular people to ride 1-2 hours to work each day?
You expect to maintain 20-30mph pacing with stop signs, street lights, riding on regular city streets? Completely absurd and out of touch with reality. That's insane pacing - that's race pacing.
Most cyclists will do 20-30 miles for an entire ride. Sometimes exceeding that, but certainly not doing 60 miles a day (3-4 hours a day) 5 days a week. That is, unless, you're training for something... which a daily commuter going to an office job isn't.
Not to mention if you're someone doing that kind of mileage, you likely own a bike that costs as much as a car, but is far harder to "park" securely, doesn't work well in the rain, and requires you to carry work clothing, laptops, paperwork, groceries, and more on your back.
> 80% of the US population lives within an urban area.
Source? If you're citing the WaPo article which cites Census data - they're lumping Suburban and Urban together and calling it just Urban - that's super disingenuous.
Most people live in suburban areas. There are certainly dense population areas in true urban areas (SF, NY, Seattle, LA, etc), but that's not 80% of the nation. Not even close.
> I live in the suburbs. When I have an early meeting, I ride to the train station.
You probably work at an area near the train station then - perhaps a Downtown location or similar. What if this commute required multiple trains hops, with distance between the train stations because you're commuting 3 cities over for work each day? Feasible? Sure... but now you've taken an hour long commute and turned it into 3 hours each way. That's not feasible for most people.
This narrative falls flat when faced with actual working circumstances for many people... outside the ideal "just take the train" scenario. What if there's not even a train?
That is wilful rejection of facts. You defined the upper bound of possibility by invoking crazy fitness nuts - well, here I am to tell you how wrong you were.
> You expect regular people to ride 1-2 hours to work each day?
I know many people (who would not describe themselves as "crazy fitness nuts") who do just that. Yes, they do rely on high quality end-of-trip facilities, but many of our urban employers and councils now offer these.
I also know people who commute in a car for longer than that. As commute durations go, measurement in hours is far from unusual.
> Completely absurd and out of touch with reality. That's insane pacing - that's race pacing
It's true. I won at least one nationally sanctioned bike race every year from 2011-2015. Sorry, what was your problem with that? You invoke crazy fitness nuts, we show up like Candyman.
> Most cyclists will do 20-30 miles for an entire ride
Again, I was speaking to your incorrect claim of the upper bound of the possible. But sure, move the goalposts if you like, because:
> You probably work at an area near the train station then - perhaps a Downtown location or similar
I simply live in a country and a state that didn't pathetically lowball its rail infrastructure and intermodal transit options.
> actual working circumstances for many people
You get what you voted for, based on what you believed was possible, and suggesting things are impossible is just wilful, pig-headed rejection of what can be achieved if the people actually want it, with the simple evidence that it's been achieved elsewhere.
Cars are a useful tool, but the claim that they simply are an essential element of a functioning modern society begs the question of why certain societies are so automobile dependent, and wilfully ignores those that aren't.
> You expect regular people to ride 1-2 hours to work each day?
Why not? In the city I used to live in, my car commute was 5 miles one way, but took 1-2 hours because of traffic. Thousands of others had the same situation, and they all did it too.
>You expect regular people to ride 1-2 hours to work each day?
Don't know about you, but I have friends who cycled around 30-40 mins to work each day and back (so 1 hour total), and they were regular people (not even particularly young, like 30+).
> You expect regular people to ride 1-2 hours to work each day?
I did pretty close to that for quite a while when I lived in NYC and I'm very, very far from being a fitness nut. I biked from Brooklyn up to Morningside Heights and back every day. 12 miles according to Google Maps and took me about 45 minutes each way. Taking the subway would normally be slightly faster, but not by a lot. And despite the crappy weather, physical exhaustion (really just going over the Williamsburg Bridge,the rest of the ride was pretty flat), hassle of locking up and maintaining a bike, and the distinct feeling that cabbies and truck drivers were actually trying to kill me on a daily basis, it was still much, much more pleasant than cramming myself onto a crowded subway train during rush hour.
"Everyone talking past each other because of unclear articles" stifles creativity too. And HN isn't mutually exclusive with reading Reuters and BBC (at least if you plan to go to the links being discussed here):
>The Dutch are not insane fitness nuts biking 25 miles to work daily. They just have a built environment where taking a bike actually makes sense because they aren't going terribly far, just far enough that the hassles involved in taking a bike (like locking it up) are worth it.
Is that the whole story though?
The Dutch are much more fit in general than the median US population (regarding obesity, etc). So them biking more is not necessarily only due to better cities.
Also, their cities are also not an accident of nature they had to make do with: they built them that way, like the US cities were built for cars. So their biking more is not a mere accident of how they cities are. Rather both their cities and their biking are intentional.
Third, even in places with similar population density and distances, the US has let bikers as several people have mentioned. So while "it's more convenient to bike" is part of the explanation, it doesn't tell the whole story.
Nowhere have I claimed that it tells the whole story or that there aren't other factors. The whole story isn't going to be told in a single article. It's unreasonable to expect that it should be.
This article has a particular point and I think it's a good point. It actually has two main points:
1. The built environment is a large factor.
2. The high numbers of cyclists in The Netherlands is really a whole lot of people making fairly short trips on a regular basis.
The first is a big problem that will take years to remedy. The second is about an erroneous impression that serves as a psychological barrier to adopting better policies.
A lot of Americans tend to be all "Why bother?! It's hopeless!"
It's not hopeless. Even your average fat American can probably bike a mile or so.
Biking regularly is no doubt a very large part of why the Dutch are healthier, not the other way around. You need biking infrastructure to help foster a healthier lifestyle. You don't need to wait until Americans all magically wake up one day with super athletic physiques before you biking more is viable in the US.
Did you read the rest of the article? The entire point of the article is that by one measure, the Dutch hardly bike at all, while by another measure, the Dutch bike all the time, and that the difference is that there are destinations that makes a mile or two round-trip plenty in Dutch cities, but not in American cities.
You're totally missing the point of the above comment. The entire article is premised on "by one measure, the Dutch hardly bike at all," but 2.5 km/day/capita is fucking huge.
> An average of 1.5 miles per person per day sounds huge.
I thought that it sounded really small, but my point of comparison is my own personal bicycling habit -- my daily bicycle commute is about 10 miles round trip. Yes, I'm an American.
I agree, 2.5km is great considering not everyone needs a bike to commute without a car, not everyone rides every day, only able bodied people can ride, and not all people who do ride have far to go.
It's surprising because the number of bicycles in the Netherlands is easily larger than the number of citizens, and the country is famous for being bicycle crazy with really great infrastructure for cycling. Given that, 0.75-1.5 mile per day doesn't sound like a lot.
Of course the US cycles far less, but it's reputation is of being the most car centric country in the world.
> merely 10% of the population biking every day would be huge, and that's easily within the number given.
The US city I live in is far more bike-friendly than most, and I assume that it has a higher percentage of bike commuters than most (but that's my personal assumption).
The city has automated bike counters scattered around, and annually does a manual bike count where they tally the number of parked bikes that are publicly visible, in an attempt at estimating the percentage of commutes that are done by bike.
The most recent figure they published (last year) put their estimation right around 7%.
>Summary: Dutch biking rates are highest for trips of about 1 mile, and when trips get longer than three miles, bike trips start to fall sharply while car trips rise.
The summary and the graph supporting it are startling. I think in my city you see a very exponential increase in car transportation starting past the average distance we cross the parking lot, about 500 feet.
I was astounded when I mapped out a transit ride from a suburb of Amsterdam to the city center - and discovered it was 15 minutes long. I'm not a fan of compact European living (washing machine in the kitchen?!), but that's a hard advantage to ignore.
That might be the source of the Statista data, as it too only goes back to 2010. The data on km traveled by bike seems to agree with the 2.5 km figure in the original article.
The question is where the black-background graphs came from, as they have data from 2006. Particularly the first as the 1.5 km average is very different from the 2.5 km national average.
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[ 0.14 ms ] story [ 272 ms ] threadSure, there are some places with hills, but the majority lives in the flatter-than-pancake flat part.
Where e-bikes can really shine, is increased speed. If you can do 40 an hour (km's), biking becomes a viable alternative to traffic jams. And that's happening already in NL.
It's a good thing since smaller vehicles are replacing cars in many places, to make it more accessible to people who can't ride a regular bike, but has some safety and regulation issues to iron out.
I wonder what other national biking averages are? Probably much lower than the Dutch national average.
The only reason why I would use a car, is to get to family that lives further away. But even that stays within 50km. So the dutch public transport system fully satisfies that need for me as well.
Right now, I am living in a city and working from home, so the 1.5km / day figure seems to apply to me.
But when I was in school, many many moons ago, the roundtrip to school was 14km and I had a newspaper delivery round adding up to about 20km.
So basically as a teen, I did 20km a day, about 6 days a week.
disclosure: I am Dutch, living in NL
disclosure: Dutch myself
I think the reason is because she was able to take the inside passages that are only for bikes, so her trip was much shorter than mine.
So not only are their buildings close together, but they are built around walking/bikes, such that those modes of transit are actually shorter.
Of course, I haven't got a car, have never had a car and haven't even got a driver's license.
Some drivers might say that counting time to park is "cheating", but I strongly disagree. Time from door-to-door is what matters.
"our city is just as big when you count the suburbs!"
but by that standard you have to count the bigger city's suburbs too
I live in San Jose, a morning car commute on the 101 is ~30mins, return is ~50-60mins. Riding my bike is 45mins (43-48) each way.
It's a complete wash and I get 90mins of exercise per day.
If you don't want exercise, get an e-bike and go faster for less effort!
My sons walked to meet me somewhere midway to where we were going. They arrived about the same time I did.
I would get ahead of them because the bus is faster -- when it's actually moving. Then we would sit at a light or get stuck in traffic, and I would watch my sons pull ahead of the bus.
When we first gave up our car, it took no more time to pick up groceries on foot than by car. The same scenario often took place, where a car would zoom past us, then get stuck trying to turn into the parking lot. We were going into the store while they were looking for a parking space.
Cars on the open highway going long distances are absolutely much faster than someone walking. But for many local trips, they aren't as advantageous as many Americans assume them to be and will vociferously argue they are when presented with such stories.
I currently live about 1.5 miles from work, and I'd love to bike it, but this suburb has no bike lanes, sidewalks, or shoulders, and intersections that are terrifying even in a car. :(
It's certainly true where I live. My daily commute is ~10 minutes faster on a bike compared to driving, even ignoring time needed to park.
I suspect that the bike would win for my old commute (5x longer), where I'd hit congested highways every single day. Slow and steady beats stop and go.
* for shorter urban distances the bike is way faster almost all the time
* for longer suburban distances it marginally slower but not as much as you'd think
* The quality of the time on a bike is much greater up to ~20 minutes, then tapers off rapidly in poor conditions; even riding in the rain or cold snow is preferable to sitting in traffic if you're not out for too long.
* My trip is typically short enough that it takes longer to get ready to ride than to actually complete the ride
I ride a bike for very selfish reasons; the shared benefits are just a nice bonus.
If you gave that sort of space over to the Americans you'd have little towns _everywhere_.
Bikes are well used here and 3-4 km is no problem to bike on flat land, not even if you're untrained. Bike roads are usually straighter to goal and plenty of parking in front of all doors.
Car = 35-40 minutes on average, sometimes more.
eBike = 30-35 minutes consistently.
The reason - bikes can 'filter' up to a set of lights, whereas a car in heavy traffic might take 2 or 3 rotations of the light to make it through a junction.
http://www.aviewfromthecyclepath.com/2010/07/not-really-so-g...
I don't know how other European cities do it.
Right now at 3pm, Google Maps tells me that my 6-mile commute home by car would be 32-39 minutes. By bike it's 39-41 minutes for a 7-mile ride. During rush hour, the bike really wins.
What makes biking uncomfortable here is that you really have to be alert. A lot of roads don't have good space for bikes and cars can be really aggressive, even if they're just racing toward the next light.
Cars just don't move through cities fast when there's traffic. Plus, parking here is just a nightmare.
Also consider that you no longer have to take extra time to exercise, it's now built-in to your commute. At least the cardio side.
Everything is built as small residential cul-de-sacs without any access except the entry from the main street. I can look at my neighbor's house 100ft away but there's no way to get there, even as a pedestrian, except walking out on the busy main street (with no sidewalks), walking half a mile down the road, and then walking half a mile back up their residential street.
It's like they actively try to discourage any mode of transportation except driving.
Cul-de-sacs are fairly popular in current UK estate designs, but usually - not always - include footpaths to link the obvious places. Mostly goes with shopping areas too - if you have walked, you can usually shortcut most of the road routing. That said, UK cycle friendly is mostly tokenism - a few efforts, a few half hearted painted lanes, but it's inconsistent. Pedestrian friendliness is usually pretty good.
By locally, I mean "within Silver Lake" or "within Echo Park" -- shopping, groceries, and especially casual dining. My belief is that pockets of density are slowly emerging.
They wanted less car traffic in the inner city. So now there is a ring road around it, and the center itself is divided into four parts, with one-way streets laid out so that if you want to go from one part to another, you have to go to the ring road. Cars can't travel through the center, they have to go around it. In the center you only get cars that have that as their destination.
But, all these one-way streets are marked "except for bicycles". None of the above applies to bicycles.
So for even quite long trips, say from the north of the city to the south, bicycles beat cars because they can just go straight through the center and cars have to take the long way around.
Obviously this is anecdotal, but I am skeptical how useful a focus on bike lanes will be to the general public in American cities as compared to things like buses.
Telecommuting may mitigate this problem, but only for a small sub-set of workers for now, and even long term the fact remains that people still need to go into an office at least occasionally, and a good number of people can't get to work feasibly by bike. Plus, most people want to go somewhere after work, to the store and to church once a week, etc. This is orders of magnitude larger than a mile and a half (apparently the dutch average).
I don't see why electric cars can't accomplish sustainability goals without trying to force a demographic shift of that scale (which is very unlikely to happen).
I live in Berlin, with the population only slightly smaller than Los Angeles, and about 30% of the people regularly use bikes. Almost all trips I take somehow come out to about 4-6km, or 20 to 30min.
L.A. isn't even that much larger (1300km^2 to 900km^2). But anecdotally it seems to me like long commutes across metro regions are far more common?
As for blue-collar workers, I just recently saw a local plumber had switched to one of those cargo bikes. He said he had customers mostly within a 2x2km area, and was spending 20% of his days searching for parking spaces before.
Because anything resembling a personal automobile is
1. Still enormously dangerous to everyone else on the same road;
2. Takes up a ridiculous chunk of space;
3. Doubly so when parked/not used;
4. Does not navigate nimbly in traffic;
5. Rips up tarmac and damages road surfaces;
6. Makes a fair amount of noise still;
I could go on but I think you get the point. It's not only about CO2 emissions, it's also about its place among the humans it shares living spaces with.
I bought a One Wheel, comparable an ebike basically, and it's awesome for the 0.5-4.0 mile range. Plus, it's more fun than the subway or a bus so I'll even take it over the subway when practical.
Like you, if my destination is with a mile or two, I'm probably walking (unless I'm pressed for time or have to carry a bunch of stuff).
I do bike to/from work, though (about 5 miles each way). I sold my car a few years back, and a bicycle is the only transportation I own.
I really enjoy being car-free! I didn't realize how much of a burden and hassle owning a car was until I got rid of mine. It seriously improved my standard of living. When I'm in a situation where I really need a car, I either rent one or (more often) hire a cab. This happens about once per month.
> Either way you count it, the Dutch hardly bike at all.
Whaa???? How is that "hardly bike at all"? That's an enormous average!
I'm guessing the National average for the USA rounds to zero. Honestly, I bet the average for the USA per year rounds to zero.
Would be much more interested in the average bicycle miles per day of only people who take at least, say, 3 or 4 trip a week by bike.
Bang. In much of America, it is against the law to build dense cities where people are statistically close to work and the grocery store.
Why do we have low density residential zoning in the first place? Preferring a large yard is one thing, but how did it come to be that America legally required houses to have yards?
The rarification of US cities happened in the 1940s and 1950s, when entire neighborhoods were bulldozed to make room for highways and parking lots that idealistic modernists and self-serving auto lobbyists believed were the future.
When I worked in Midtown I saw 3 high rises go up. 1 for GaTech students, another for apartments, and another for condos. Brookhaven was pretty crazy when I lived there but they have tried to combat the problem with better zoning.[1]. Chamblee added a bunch of new high density housing.
[1] https://www.cbs46.com/news/brookhaven-pushes-for-housing-aff...
Also the city added only about half as many new units last year as it did the year before.
And yes Atlanta is cheaper than other much higher density cities, that's why I said we have the same problem just not on the same scale.
If you own a house you wouldn’t want the value to meet inflation every year. You want it to gain value. Atlanta is a very affordable city by any measure.
>If you own a house you wouldn’t want the value to meet inflation every year. You want it to gain value.
Of course. That's a huge part of the of the problem. Housing can't be both a good investment and affordable. You've basically summed up NIMBYism in 2 sentences.
>Atlanta is a very affordable city by any measure
It is currently more affordable than some cities less affordable than others. But if housing prices keep outpacing inflation and more importantly wage growth, it won't be affordable for long.
There’s only one time in the past 30 years where housing prices dropped and people lost money. It wasn’t because of NIMBYism.
[1] https://www.ajc.com/business/real-estate/atlanta-pending-hom...
[2] https://www.ajc.com/business/atlanta-wages-but-not-fast-hous...
And Atlanta added far fewer units in 2018 than 2017 (you can Google the numbers) so we're actually slowing the rate at which we're adding housing.
>There’s only one time in the past 30 years where housing prices dropped and people lost money. It wasn’t because of NIMBYism.
When did I imply that NIMBYism caused housing prices to drop. I said the exact opposite.
Low density is prevalent outside of California. Here is a zoning map of Jacksonville FL: https://imgur.com/K6DbVYj
The yellow is all low density residential. Purple is commercial and grey is industrial.
Source: http://maps.coj.net/DuvalProperty/#
[1] https://www.bizjournals.com/jacksonville/news/2018/12/20/new...
[0]https://www.realtor.com/realestateandhomes-detail/11136-Oak-...
In my opinion, those constituents have a right to do that (localized decision-making). I see a lot of comments on HN that deride arguments made for neighborhood character or quality of life, but it is a very real thing that is important to lots of people. Not everyone wants to live in a dense city. Most of the consternation against the less-dense areas are from people who want to live in those areas because they are attractive, but they also then demand it change to accommodate them on dimensions like zoning, which I don't think is fair.
Maybe if you're worried about CO2 emissions having those CO2 eating beings in your backyard could be a better option.
Probably not easy to quantify.
Also, grasses can be great CO2 sink as well, depending on the conditions and maintenance routine: https://sustainability.stackexchange.com/questions/4534/is-g...
But OK let's not nitpick, I'm not talking about only regarding CO2, it was just an example of something that is relevant these days for a lot of people.
My point is that would be interesting to study this as matter of what kind of life would be better, given different metrics.
But not everyone wants to live in a sprawling suburb, but we've engineered financial and educational systems and property rights norms that make it difficult for even those who wish to live in a dense city to choose to do so.
On the other extreme, you have people up in arms about gentrification, where they oppose new or better housing because they're worried it'll increase their property values. But in both cases, it's the people who already live there that push back on more and/or denser housing.
"Sure, my house is valuable now, but if I could also walk to a grocery store, a barbershop, a coffee shop, an electronics store, a beer pub, a few restaurants, and a few other kinds of stores, AND get on public transportation that would take me to local hubs and office spaces -- surely my house would drop value like crazy then!".
Greater logic: people looking to rent a small, inexpensive apartment are clearly the same people looking to buy a house with a backyard, so increasing the supply of the former would decrease prices for the latter by the law of supply and demand.
Exploding brain logic: ignoring property values going up every time the subway/local rail starts expansion into an area. Also voting against public transport expansion because nobody is using it anyway. AND also voting against constructing dense housing, because it will increase traffic.
Note that all three are required to block mixed-used dense walkable developments on the premise of "my property value" --- and that all three currently apply to the Bay Area.
In many cities, the logic of opposing transit is pretty explicitly racist. In Atlanta, I would hear MARTA derided as being only for black people, and in Baltimore's suburbs in 2018 there was a stink from suburbanites who live on the light rail route complaining that the train was "bringing in crime".
I live in the plateau neighbourhood of Montreal and as far as I can tell it’s one of the few in north america that doesn’t require any parking. Travel is more like the dutch. You walk, bike, or take a short metro ride and it’s not terribly slower than a car for most of your daily trips, if not faster.
What's the lesson here? It seems to be saying that no amount of new infrastructure will make people ride bikes.
I expect these graphs to change in the coming 5 years.
P.s. Our today's issue is having speed pedelecs which are not allowed on our biking lanes in cities/suburbs/villages (big speed difference) but are just about too slow for the regular 50km/h roads :).
P.p.s. Electric bikes are around 2000€ on average. Speed pedelecs start at 3500€ but quickly go to 5000€, and 8000€+ for premium brands is not uncommon. We still love our bikes ;).
When you see Pedelec, it means S-Pedelec, which is more powerful (45km/h), helmet required, basically a moped. Mostly used by older folks and weekend long-distance cycling groups.
Count as mopeds, and controversial because they are more dangerous (partly because they look like normal bicycles and the rider is sitting upright but they're going much faster than normal bikes, other traffic doesn't expect it).
But they do make it feasible to use a bike for longer commutes.
Special clothes are entirely unnecessary unless you're racing.
An average of 1.5 miles per person per day sounds huge.
What's the American average? 0.05 miles?
What's the baseline from where the author justifies the "hardly bike" line?
There are 17 million people in Netherlands, and 800.000 in Amsterdam.
If half of the people in Amsterdam go about 5km per day (they wouldn't need much more, it's not a huge city, and they'd mostly go to/from work/school/home) that's 2.5 km per person per day -- the number they post.
Half of the people of a city biking everyday is HUGE, and dwarfs any US town 5x easily.
Heck, merely 10% of the population biking every day would be huge, and that's easily within the number given.
I'd say the same holds for other Dutch cities and villages.
So what are we are comparing with?
2.5km per cyclist per day is tiny.
The difference between those two statements and the specific details and societal implications thereof is the whole point of the article.
Not really. It would be tiny if it was describing hobbyist biking fanatics etc (who are expected to bike much more).
But when the "per cyclist" is used to describe regular people who bike to home/work/etc (because the country has a bike culture), as a per day number it's big. Because then it can be compared to the tons of regular people who don't bike at all in other countries.
In other words 2.5km per day "per capita" and "per cyclist" could be equally huge, when the percentage of cyclists is big in the population, because the "per cyclist" suddenly doesn't mean:
"Bike fans in Netherlands do an average 2.5km per day"
but:
"Shitloads of people in Netherlands have a bike and do an average 2.5km per day on it"
The article already points out that a much higher proportion of people in the Netherlands bike.
"The Dutch hardly bike at all" refers to an individual cyclist compared with an individual cyclist in the states. To someone who does bicycle regularly, 1.5 miles is, indeed, hardly anything at all. I bike 1.5 miles in each direction to my train each day (so twice that average) and don't consider myself to bike far at all.
I guess at worst you can say it's a click-baity title, as it's appearing to go counter to your expectations of a heavy biking culture (which it is) to say that any one cycling individual doesn't actually bike far, but that shift in perspective is the point of the article.
You also cannot compare average biking distance for a whole population with the average biking distance of the biking subset of another population. That is like comparing life expectancy of musical conductors with the life expectancy of the general population.
> I guess at worst you can say it's a click-baity title
That is being extremely generous.
That’s part of it, in the Netherlands you might cycle even more on weekends and holidays to go somewhere, and there is no ‘bad weather’ (it’s already bad most of the time).
If, on average, they only played the piano once a week, just to play a single scale, would it be fair to have an article whose title was "The Dutch barely play at all"?
All three things would be true:
1. The Dutch were famous because most of them played the piano
2. The average Dutch person plays significantly more scales than the average American (who probably play <0.005 scales)
3. The Dutch "barely play at all."
Honestly, I don't see why this title is bothering you so much. Most people's image is of the Dutch biking everywhere.
The Dutch are not insane fitness nuts biking 25 miles to work daily. They just have a built environment where taking a bike actually makes sense because they aren't going terribly far, just far enough that the hassles involved in taking a bike (like locking it up) are worth it.
The point of the title is PR. It's an attempt to rebut the assumption that this is hard, so fat, out of shape Americans have no hope of aspiring to create a bicycle culture like the vaunted Dutch, who must all be super athletic as one of their many godlike virtues.
There's nothing all that special about the Dutch people. They aren't all Olympic athletes. They aren't all brainwashed hyper virtuous types making hyper virtuous choices at enormous personal expense and suffering.
They just have a built environment that helps make it easy for little old grandmas to take their bike somewhere.
If you want to argue that it's a bad title for HN, sure. I totally agree.
But the title wasn't written for HN and it's a perfectly fine title for it's intended purpose for most audiences.
Huh, I missed that in the title.
My first guess was that their other public transit was good enough that not much biking was needed, which isn't far off the mark.
(Banning cars would also be a solution, as 'bike infrastructure' is really infrastructure to protect bikes from cars, but it's not necessary when there's large amounts of street space that could be repurposed from car storage)
US rail stations also generally have less, and less secure, bike parking versus equivalent stations in the Netherlands, reducing their catchment areas to a mile-wide 'walkshed' rather than a few-mile-wide 'bikeshed'.
It does nothing for the fact that the roads are often in a pretty bad state and more importantly that you share the streets with cars.
I already had an asshole bump his car on my legs apparently voluntarily. I know that some riders wear gopro constantly in order to document this kind of occurrences. And even aside from these extreme morons, inattentive drivers are pretty dangerous. I can't wait for the day where there will be a dedicated segregated bike lane on market. That will be a good start.
Well it's not really possible for cars to give a crap. It's the drivers we need to point out here. And drivers are people. People who are literally okay with other humans dying from the one tonne machines they drive around at high momentum and with recklessly little attention (texting, etc.)
This behaviour should be rightfully vilified as psychotic, rather than normalised through statements about "cars". The media almost always uses language that absolves humans of their chosen actions that lead to tragic incidents.
Streets are supposedly built from the taxes the car owner pay. How much taxes do bikers pay ?
But this piece highlights an oft overlooked piece of the puzzle and it's a critical element. You can willy nilly add all the bike racks and other infrastructure you want, it's not going to result in people flooding out onto the streets on their bikes if there's nothing within a reasonable distance. American policies actively make it outright illegal to build the kind of dense urban fabric crucial to the Dutch success with fostering bike culture.
This is changing. The last three cities I've lived in had strong growth boundaries specifically intended to prevent the cities from sprawling any further.
We require streets to be very wide to accommodate car traffic.
We require homes to be a certain minimum size.
We mandate lots of parking.
We have minimum lot sizes.
We have set backs from the lot line. This means you can't build row houses. We have places where if you buy an empty lot, you can build a row house matching the ones on either side. If you buy an old building, you can't tear it down and build new because it is grandfathered in and a new building would have to conform to a different set of rules.
We do seem to be lightening up on parking requirements in some cities, but many of these other issues are not being aggressively addressed.
You mostly can't build walkable neighborhoods in the US. This has been true a long time. The New Urbanism movement was about trying to do exactly that and they frequently had to do a lot of research and find loopholes to try to create anything akin to their vision. Their plans were usually denied the first time they were submitted and then they would go through zoning codes very carefully and start renaming things on their drawings to a conforming use that largely preserved their intended layout.
I know some things are changing, but we still have a long way to go. We've been building a certain kind of urban fabric a long time and it will take time to remedy the problems that have grown out of that fact.
I agree entirely. What I've seen count as "baby steps".
As I tell myself when something is taking far longer than it should, at least the trend line is pointing the right direction. A small amount of progress is preferable to none at all.
I commute 30 miles a day each way (60 total) from my house to work. Even a crazy fitness nut likely wouldn't cycle that many miles every day. My commute isn't even long compared to some people's...
Trains aren't the answer either. The US is just too spread out on average. Yes, they'll work in dense cities... but not in the suburbs or rural areas - ie, where majority of the country lives.
People living in big, dense cities are too quick to forget most people don't live that life. Out here, a car is pretty necessary.
> Even a crazy fitness nut likely wouldn't cycle that many miles every day
Speaking as a crazy fitness nut, I have to tell you no, sorry, 30 miles is my warm up/recovery distance.
> People living in big, dense cities are too quick to forget most people don't live that life
80% of the US population lives within an urban area.
> Out here, a car is pretty necessary
I live in the suburbs. When I have an early meeting, I ride to the train station. I do have a car, but I still don't have to use it.
To sum up: car dependency is a self-fulfilling prophecy based on a combination of wilful ignorance and unwillingness to change.
> 30 miles is my warm up/recovery distance
That's absurd and you know it. Possibly spoken from someone that doesn't actually cycle, or is greatly exaggerating. You ride 1-2 hours for a warm-up/cool-down? You expect regular people to ride 1-2 hours to work each day?
You expect to maintain 20-30mph pacing with stop signs, street lights, riding on regular city streets? Completely absurd and out of touch with reality. That's insane pacing - that's race pacing.
Most cyclists will do 20-30 miles for an entire ride. Sometimes exceeding that, but certainly not doing 60 miles a day (3-4 hours a day) 5 days a week. That is, unless, you're training for something... which a daily commuter going to an office job isn't.
Not to mention if you're someone doing that kind of mileage, you likely own a bike that costs as much as a car, but is far harder to "park" securely, doesn't work well in the rain, and requires you to carry work clothing, laptops, paperwork, groceries, and more on your back.
> 80% of the US population lives within an urban area.
Source? If you're citing the WaPo article which cites Census data - they're lumping Suburban and Urban together and calling it just Urban - that's super disingenuous.
Most people live in suburban areas. There are certainly dense population areas in true urban areas (SF, NY, Seattle, LA, etc), but that's not 80% of the nation. Not even close.
> I live in the suburbs. When I have an early meeting, I ride to the train station.
You probably work at an area near the train station then - perhaps a Downtown location or similar. What if this commute required multiple trains hops, with distance between the train stations because you're commuting 3 cities over for work each day? Feasible? Sure... but now you've taken an hour long commute and turned it into 3 hours each way. That's not feasible for most people.
This narrative falls flat when faced with actual working circumstances for many people... outside the ideal "just take the train" scenario. What if there's not even a train?
> That's absurd and you know it.
That is wilful rejection of facts. You defined the upper bound of possibility by invoking crazy fitness nuts - well, here I am to tell you how wrong you were.
> You expect regular people to ride 1-2 hours to work each day?
I know many people (who would not describe themselves as "crazy fitness nuts") who do just that. Yes, they do rely on high quality end-of-trip facilities, but many of our urban employers and councils now offer these.
I also know people who commute in a car for longer than that. As commute durations go, measurement in hours is far from unusual.
> Completely absurd and out of touch with reality. That's insane pacing - that's race pacing
It's true. I won at least one nationally sanctioned bike race every year from 2011-2015. Sorry, what was your problem with that? You invoke crazy fitness nuts, we show up like Candyman.
> Most cyclists will do 20-30 miles for an entire ride
Again, I was speaking to your incorrect claim of the upper bound of the possible. But sure, move the goalposts if you like, because:
> You probably work at an area near the train station then - perhaps a Downtown location or similar
I simply live in a country and a state that didn't pathetically lowball its rail infrastructure and intermodal transit options.
> actual working circumstances for many people
You get what you voted for, based on what you believed was possible, and suggesting things are impossible is just wilful, pig-headed rejection of what can be achieved if the people actually want it, with the simple evidence that it's been achieved elsewhere.
Cars are a useful tool, but the claim that they simply are an essential element of a functioning modern society begs the question of why certain societies are so automobile dependent, and wilfully ignores those that aren't.
Why not? In the city I used to live in, my car commute was 5 miles one way, but took 1-2 hours because of traffic. Thousands of others had the same situation, and they all did it too.
Don't know about you, but I have friends who cycled around 30-40 mins to work each day and back (so 1 hour total), and they were regular people (not even particularly young, like 30+).
And my city is anything but bike friendly...
I did pretty close to that for quite a while when I lived in NYC and I'm very, very far from being a fitness nut. I biked from Brooklyn up to Morningside Heights and back every day. 12 miles according to Google Maps and took me about 45 minutes each way. Taking the subway would normally be slightly faster, but not by a lot. And despite the crappy weather, physical exhaustion (really just going over the Williamsburg Bridge,the rest of the ride was pretty flat), hassle of locking up and maintaining a bike, and the distinct feeling that cabbies and truck drivers were actually trying to kill me on a daily basis, it was still much, much more pleasant than cramming myself onto a crowded subway train during rush hour.
I'm no crazy fitness nut or bike fanatic, but I wouldn't have a problem biking that.
And then there's the culture of suburbanism and ages of policies to increase the sprawl. All of that making public mass transit less cost efficient.
It only disappoints people who expect to gain knowlege by skimming over headlines.
https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=reuters.com https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=bbc.co.uk
I feel like the difference in % of people even in the Bay Area that bike 15, 25, and 45 (all the way from SF to MV) is minuscule.
Everyone I talk to either doesn't bike at all, or has something like a .5-3 mile ride as their whole commute or part of their commute.
Is that the whole story though?
The Dutch are much more fit in general than the median US population (regarding obesity, etc). So them biking more is not necessarily only due to better cities.
Also, their cities are also not an accident of nature they had to make do with: they built them that way, like the US cities were built for cars. So their biking more is not a mere accident of how they cities are. Rather both their cities and their biking are intentional.
Third, even in places with similar population density and distances, the US has let bikers as several people have mentioned. So while "it's more convenient to bike" is part of the explanation, it doesn't tell the whole story.
This article has a particular point and I think it's a good point. It actually has two main points:
1. The built environment is a large factor.
2. The high numbers of cyclists in The Netherlands is really a whole lot of people making fairly short trips on a regular basis.
The first is a big problem that will take years to remedy. The second is about an erroneous impression that serves as a psychological barrier to adopting better policies.
A lot of Americans tend to be all "Why bother?! It's hopeless!"
It's not hopeless. Even your average fat American can probably bike a mile or so.
Biking regularly is no doubt a very large part of why the Dutch are healthier, not the other way around. You need biking infrastructure to help foster a healthier lifestyle. You don't need to wait until Americans all magically wake up one day with super athletic physiques before you biking more is viable in the US.
In most of America, a 2.5km round trip gets you almost nowhere useful. It's almost nothing. On an American scale, it's hardly anything at all.
The average American[0] drives more than 59 km per day, so even at the most generous number from the article, that's 4%.
That's the point of the article, the entire point.
[0] https://www.fool.com/investing/general/2015/01/25/the-averag...
I thought that it sounded really small, but my point of comparison is my own personal bicycling habit -- my daily bicycle commute is about 10 miles round trip. Yes, I'm an American.
Of course the US cycles far less, but it's reputation is of being the most car centric country in the world.
The US city I live in is far more bike-friendly than most, and I assume that it has a higher percentage of bike commuters than most (but that's my personal assumption).
The city has automated bike counters scattered around, and annually does a manual bike count where they tally the number of parked bikes that are publicly visible, in an attempt at estimating the percentage of commutes that are done by bike.
The most recent figure they published (last year) put their estimation right around 7%.
The summary and the graph supporting it are startling. I think in my city you see a very exponential increase in car transportation starting past the average distance we cross the parking lot, about 500 feet.
Statista's graph (https://www.statista.com/statistics/620169/average-biking-di...) doesn't show any dip from 2010 to 2011 at all though.
The sources for these graphs are all in Dutch so it's hard to say where the discrepancy lies.
https://opendata.cbs.nl/statline/#/CBS/nl/dataset/83499NED/t...
vervoermiddel = means of transport
fiets = bike
per persoon per dag = per person per day
Verplaatsingen / aantal = Trips / number
Afstand / km = distance / kilometres
Reisduur / uren = Trip duration / hours
(source: I live part time in Amsterdam. My partner and I have 5 bikes there, despite being there a few days a month)
The question is where the black-background graphs came from, as they have data from 2006. Particularly the first as the 1.5 km average is very different from the 2.5 km national average.