I-Like-To-Bike

Just the people and services that provide everything you use and do in your life and allow you to live as you do use that infrastructure, but who gives a darn about that, eh? Or perhaps you are "living" 100% self sufficient in your own self contained "living car free" utopia, and so should everybody else?

I suggest you take your honest evaluation of your lack of any need for road infrastructure to support your "car free living" to the LCF list where it might receive electronic high fives from honest moonbeam thinkers.

CliffordK

Do you ride a bike, walk, or take a bus on public roads?

Do you buy food and supplies that were transported on public roads? Manufactured by individuals that utilized the public roads to get to work?

noglider 

Of course we do, but do we tally the costs accurately? A huge fraction of what the police and emergency services do is for private vehicle traffic. I don't think road and fuel taxes pay for that. I think non-drivers subsidize drivers heavily.

Omiak

I don't think that highway would have to be 16 lanes wide if it was only transporting food and clothing and building supplies and whatnot. I'll ignore the rest of your straw man argument.

Vehicle Weight and Road Damage

I-Like-To-Bike

My comments aren't the only thing that you choose to ignore with your simple view of what it takes to support YOUR car free life. And really, every road is 16 lanes wide in your area? Wow!

I see that you also choose to ignore the needs of people that work to provide medical care, education, government services, entertainment and/or manufacture, assemble or service anybody or anything that YOU personally didn't need or use today.

Strawman? BS! You can live "car-free" in a world of smug ignorance as long as you choose to ignore reality and selfishly dream only of your own requirements while ignoring all sense of what it takes to provide or support everything you consume or need or is available for your use when/if you ( or anybody else) needs it to get along in your car-free dreamworld in Minneapolis.

LCF list is just your cup of tea.

CliffordK

The police should be for thefts, violent crimes, and etc. Although, at least with theft, it is not uncommon for the solution to be more expensive than the problem, and it often seems to result in paperwork simply being filed.

Somehow the police have inserted themselves into our society as the great traffic enforcers.

I realize that without enforcement road danger increases, and other crimes may increase if not monitored. However, there is far too much emphasis in things like putting "speed traps" in places that don't really make much difference. At times speed limits just don't make sense, unless they are designed to catch people driving at the speed conditions permit one to drive safely, which exceeds the posted limit for some reason.

Society needs the road infrastructure to move both people and supplies.

Yes, there is a lot of emphasis on cars for moving people to and from work, shopping, entertainment, and etc.

However, have no doubt that if the 8.4 million people in NYC suddenly took to the streets on their bikes, there would be just as big of traffic jams.

True, a bike doesn't have a large impact on the road, but it is susceptible to all types of road hazards that cars can run over, and the bikes do affect traffic flow (and traffic affects the movement of bikes). I often argue that cars do benefit from wide shoulders (which may or may not be good for bikes to ride on). But, there are many features for bikes (and runners & pedestrians) that are unnecessary for cars other than creating a buffer to help maintain traffic flow.

noglider 

Police do too much enforcement of some things, but they do plenty of useful stuff on the roads. I would not want to see a decreased presence. I just think that we forget the cost of road policing when we tally up the cost of roads. I believe the cost would go down significantly if we didn't have so many private motor vehicles.

Omiak

I was referring to a specific freeway which I happen to live next to.

There's not really any reason why the majority of those people can't commute by bike.

Please remember that this thread is about commuting. I'm fully aware that many aspects of my lifestyle require goods to be shipped over distance and that in many cases the best system we have for that at the moment is commercial trucking. This does not change the fact that the majority of automobile travel is superfluous and damaging to ourselves and our environment.

Automobile accidents kill more than 6 times as many people as war does annually. There are studies that indicate that automobile pollution kills more people than automobile accidents. A lifestyle based around driving increases rates of stress and obesity and there are related health costs. Building and maintaining roadways is expensive. Please note that I never meant to imply that we simply don't need roads. Rather that roadway construction and maintenance costs could be significantly reduced if fewer people commuted by car.

Omiak

I-Like-To-Bike

None at all? Really? Why is that, because you don't, or because you said so?
Dream on.

noglider 

Throughput increases when a large number of people switch from car to bike. The problem is, throughput is number of people passing through a point. It is an aggregate measure. Each individual person ends up moving more slowly. So there is a group incentive to use a bike but an individual incentive to use a car.

Omiak

Because the majority of them are able bodied people that could easily live within a reasonable cycling distance of their workplaces?

Daniel4

One size does not fit all. In another thread I was blasted for listing some reasons people might have for not the commuting by bicycle that I would think are legitimate.

It all depends upon a person's limit. Some people in these forums have no problem commuting from further than 10 miles away. Others can't even though they may live less than 10 km away.

Some people cite specific cases how they can transport their young children around to and from school, daycare and after-school sports activities by bike. Others just can't because the inconveniences far outweighs their perception of limited benefits.

Am I going to get into an argument with people who have the reasons I find legitimate? No.

Of course there are reasons I don't find legitimate and I will argue with those.

CliffordK

A lot of the reasons people drive cars is for convenience, although I do find it surprising how the local gym's parking lot is often full of cars.

I've averaged 40+ miles a day for the last 4 days, and will admit that it just beats me up, and that after riding my bike for eons. It can be tough to get all of my errands done in a radius of about 10 miles from my house.

Oh, and riding in the pouring rain isn't the most fun thing either.

I do wonder what life would be like with kids, no car, and living 10 miles from nowhere. At least in the summer, there are bike seats, tandems, and it never hurts to get the kids started early, but kids on a bike could be a real drag in the cold and rain.

CliffordK

Cute picture.

Time on the road, however, is also an issue.

So, if 60 people can drive 60 cars 10 miles in 10 minutes. One actually gets a throughput of about 360 cars in an hour.

On the other hand, if it takes those same 60 people an hour to ride that 10 miles on their bike, then to get the same throughput of the cars, one would have to have the equivalent of 360 bikes on the road.

And your little crowd of bikes ends up being just as long as the line of cars. And no doubt they'll periodically look like a football dog-pile, especially when riding closely packed together.

Of course, people tend to economize with the bikes, so it may be easy to put 10,000 to 20,000 miles on a car in a year, but it takes a lot of hard work to break 5,000 miles on a bike.

No doubt bike traffic jams become a big issue with some riders doing 5 mph, and others doing 20 mph.

scroca

I know!

From now on all goods will be transported by drone.

All people will move by bicycle.

Don't ask me what we will do about all the drone parts raining down from the collisions up above... Wait... Covered bike paths!!!

acidfast7

This is finally becoming by kind of thread

noglider 

@CliffordK, your math puzzles me. I don't see how bikes could take up the same amount of space as cars.

acidfast7

when taking the lane?

wouldn't happen in a properly designed city!

wphamilton

This is true, but you're talking about a 60 mph stretch of road. If this is really a comparison to a bike route, then there are going to be stop lights at both ends (otherwise it's a random stretch of highway, longer than those 360 cyclists are going to typically travel). I think that you're usually going to have much more of a bottleneck distributing those cars to the surface streets and that it will reduce the trip speed for them - making it a better ratio than the 6 bikes to 1 car.

For example my 10 mile commute was 20-30 minutes by car, including a good stretch of 4-lane highway. By bike it was 30-40 minutes (different route). I suspect that the throughput strongly favors the bikes in that example.

Also I think that noglider has a good point. You could have a lot more than 6 bikes in the space that a car needs to drive 60 mph, including the follow distance.

wolfchild

I say this as a car-free person who lives in a very car-centric city... If you really think it's so simple and easy for the "majority" of people to live within "reasonable" cycling distance from work then you are just pipe dreaming. The reality is very different from what you imagine.

wolfchild

Unless you're riding your bike high up in the sky, then you're using the infrastructure just like everybody else. It makes no difference if somebody is car-free or not.

cobrabyte

You're paying for infrastructure you don't use? So all the products you buy, the food you eat, the consumables you consume, the construction supplies that make up the building you work and live in...etc...those were not delivered by trucks that use the highway system?

You may not personally use the highway with your own personal vehicle, but you need the highways to maintain your lifestyle. Don't fool yourself into believing you don't.

ThermionicScott 

Bingo. There is no way that an equivalent total number of bike-commuters would take up more road space than single-occupant car drivers. If anything, Omiak's picture of 60 cars parked bumper-to-bumper way underestimates the space they require on a 60 MPH road, for the reason you mentioned.

The existing road system would be more than adequate if every single person switched to riding a bike, not that we need to worry about such a nightmarish scenario happening anytime soon.

I-Like-To-Bike

No need to wonder, just ignore reality and all will be well in the car free utopia where everybody rides without any concern for insignificant issues like family, time, distance, geography, health, weather, cargo, safety, etc.