Shifting gears: How do we shift people from private cars to walking and cycling?
Shifting gears: How do we shift people from private cars to walking and cycling?
Infrastructure.
I have a 90% car free commute of 15 km to my work.
Tax incentives. I'm using my end of the year bonus' taxes and social contribution for a premium e bike lease. R&M Multicharger2 GT rohloff. It costs me like 1200 euros per year. (3 year lease) While I get paid 10 euros (untaxed) per day of commuting.
So basically.. 2300 euros income, 1200 costs.. 1100 euros per year extra income + bike lease (includes insurances). After 3 years I can buy the bike for 1450 euros. So that will be 1850 euros extra + a bike in 3 years time.
Incentivised. Sold my car cuz this thing can do grocery shopping and carrying people.
At the start I was 93 kg, now I'm 89 kg after 2 months. Which is a good bonus because cardio is damn time consuming to do it in your free time without any functionality.
Lots of places in America would need to be completely rebuilt to do an amount of it we'd probably like.
The real answer is probably improvement by a thousand tiny micro-solutions. One thing here that helps like 500 people in a county, another thing that helps 300.
Even those 800 cars off the road are pretty nice if they were originally in your area.
Make everything a person needs within walking distance.
Do that by changing zoning laws to allow mixed use with no parking minimums
in my town all the old men lose their shit over how 15 minute cities will run their lives if you bring up this idea. they are all visibly fucking miserable already
Copy the traffic laws and infrastructure from the Netherlands.
By force.
Carbon tax.
Give them more time to travel?
I think E-Bikes are the answer. They are small, light, and safe like bikes; but can better accommodate running errands; when the errands are spread apart by miles.
As long as you basically have to take ebikes inside everywhere or get them stolen, this is not really an option.
I don’t think protected bike parking is too much of a hurdle. I also think the market for it will develop naturally; as more people use E-bikes.
Foldable ebikes are a thing too.
You don't, and they aren't. No one is stealing a 57.3 pound bike frame, especially if you've put a decent lock on it and a stationary object. You can take the battery with you inside, and for work, you probably want to so you can recharge it. Most E-bikes are damn heavy even without the 7.5 pound battery. I've owned two so far, and noone has ever fucked with either one. Got the second one after the first one's motor burned out after almost 11,000 miles.
Hot take: you DON'T.
The vast, VAST majority of current car drives can best be replaced by PUBLIC TRANSIT, not walking or cycling.
The anti-car fixation on cycling is actually doing a disservice to the necessary transition away from cars. Cycling at its heart is and always will be a leisure activity for the vast majority of people. Every dollar currently spent on cycling infrastructure and lobbying could do an order of magnitude more good if it was spent on better public transit instead.
When public transit is good, it naturally makes cycling more likely. But that's a side benefit. Public transit itself should be the focus.
This is exactly right. Americans need to ask why nobody is driving in big European or East Asian cities. It's not because they're all on bicycles! It's because they're on subways and trams which come every 90 seconds.
As far as I'm aware there are literally TWO small weird exceptions to this rule (Netherlands and Denmark - developed countries where people really do cycle a lot). America needs to forget about them and look at the vastly more common situation in countries where people don't drive, like China, Japan, Germany, France and so on.
American comment
This came off kinda rude, I didn't mean for it to be. I'm gonna leave it in the interest of transparency though
Answer is always the same. Infrastructure. I had stopped riding my bike when I went to college as everything was walkable and when I got work it was far enough away I had to get a car. Later in life I had a situation where I could bike and a bike culture was growing in my city and I started to do it. Once I had I wondered why I had not started sooner. I eventually reailized the bike lanes I used had only just been put into place a few years before I started biking and like my wife would not bike without a protected bike lane with physical barriers. The more infrastructure lends itself to walking and cycling the more walking and cycling will take place.
In the cities, sure. Outside the cities i think e-biks help a lot. 5 kilometers is fine on regular bike, maybe even 10 - but more that that is a lot easier on e-bike.
And i saw some research and how most trips are actually really short (where i live at least).
Also people have become way too unhealthy so just getting started, with all the sweating and exhaustion and wind is a barrier. Self-imposed, but still a barrier.
I agree somewhat. I feel your distances are a bit short. I had a 3 mile commute which is just a bit shy 5 kilometers and I actually would do a 4 mile detour because otherwise it was just to short. It was a nice walk though. So your high end to me is just about where it gets nice and for anyone not in poor shape I would say it could go double so 10-20 kilometers. It could be im in some super great shape but I really doubt that. The basic idea I get though as I know I had this real long one that was like 25 kilometers. I did it for bike to work week but going both ways and man I was on the couch with my legs hurting. It was a great commute if I went in the morning when it was cooler and the commute was mostly flat but in that direction it was a bit more downhill overall and then where Im at I could bring my bike on a train to get back. So for me it would be about 20 kilometers for the e-bike. I actually have sorta wanted to get one because im getting old.
Yeah, I'd need to start with an e-bike before eventually normal bike.
Looking at the few close-by errands I do in a car, the drive is 3-15 minutes and Google Maps says would be 6-40 minutes on a bike. Maybe slightly faster on an e-bike?
Tax cars to reflect their actual social and environmental cost.
And stop subsidising their use/infrastructure.
Yes! Make car registration pay for all roads and safe-from-incompetent-drivers lanes for bikes! Make it also pay for all the police officers who do nothing but babysit dogshit drivers all day!
I would love to walk or bike everywhere, but in most places in the US it's just not feasible. I'm a 30 minute bike ride from the nearest grocery store. And outside of the liquor store (8 minute ride) and Dunkin Donuts (12 minute ride), that's the nearest thing to me. But also, only the main roads have sidewalks. So I'm biking down a side road that's supposed to be 25 mph but most people do at least 35.
Most places in this country are set up for driving, with substantially separated residential and commercial areas. Even public transportation would have a hard time fixing this. Am I going to wait 45 minutes for a bus to come, at that I can take a 25 minute indirect ride around town to finally get to the grocery store, only to then have to wait another 30-45 minutes for another bus to take me around town until I can finally get near my house? Or am I going to drive a 20 minute round trip? Heck, even biking would be faster than taking a bus locally.
The US sucks for anything except for cars.
Most places by land area, sure.
But many, many people live within a metro area that has at least some pockets where being car-free is feasible. For cities like New York, Chicago, DC, or San Francisco, those pockets are pretty large and cover a large population.
Growing those neighborhoods by population and size is part of the overall strategy for reducing car dependence. Even in heavily car dependent Houston or LA, there are mixed use developments where people can live and grocery shop and dine and maybe even work without needing a car. Obviously that's not going to work for meeting up with other people from the same city, but living in a neighborhood like that can reduce the typical number of weekly car trips for a typical household: whether the young kids need to be driven to a playground/park or to school, whether a visit to the grocery store or gym or bar or library need a car, etc.
I can only speak for Chicago, but the lines of those pockets where being car-free is feasible are pretty intentionally only the white wealthy neighborhoods on the north side. The south and west sides do not have bike lanes, have tons of potholes, no sidewalks, and if you are in a black neighborhood no grocery stores in biking distance.
It will also have to be public transport realistically, but what seemed to be most convincing to the people around me is individual health benefits, we have shocking obesity rates in the UK so me being a somewhat skinny fat lady with an overweight BMI without a big stomach has literally got people asking me how I do it, and I tell them I walk everywhere. It's kind of a lie though because exercise doesn't make you lose weight, but it's a white lie since I also have decent health despite no actual exercise and I do actually credit that to walking and believe my car driving peers could stand to benefit.
Obviously this is already with walkable infrastructure in place. The road to get there in North America is much longer and harder and in the US it will require far more fundamental cultural and societal shifts in the direction opposite to the one y'all are on now, like less racism, less white flight and landlordism in suburbs, more welfare to reduce crime and inequality and more cultural cohesion to draw people to cities, and then infrastructure to practically rebuild streets from scratch with dense, mixed-zone housing and walkable yet modern and spacious designs that won't be too europoor style (which sucks too tbqh) so as not to cause a backlash.
we have shocking obesity rates in the UK
Comparable to some of the least bad among US states.
By closing roads, in cities, turn roads into walkable spaces. Turn road lanes into cycle lanes. Install places to park bikes. People will walk and cycle if it's convenient and safe. Less roads means less cars, people using cars will divert instead of sitting in traffic, people will walk or cycle instead of using a car to avoid sitting in traffic.
It's not rocket science, just provide the infrastructure for it and it will naturally shift.
It starts with a cultural shift. I live in suburban USA, there are no bike lanes and often no sidewalks, it's common to drive 5+ miles to the grocery store. People here would never consider living in a city because "there are too many people" and they "need space/land". They're used to using their car and already own one. Without the support of the tax payers the required infrastructure will never get funded.
Infrastructure and/or stagflation
