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Why is Riding a Bicycle in the City Turning Into a Culture War
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this post was submitted on 05 Jun 2024
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What usually works better for moving people in and out of cities is park-n-ride setups where you setup a giant parking lot in the suburbs next to a metro station. People can just ditch their car outside the city and proceed using public transit. I often do this in Montreal, for example.
For goods, it's a similar setup but with big trucks transferring cargo to smaller trucks; this is already pretty common.
In theory, P&R is fine.
But my experience with P&R is that they are generally so far out of the city and the bus/tram/tube/whatever connection is a normal "outside the city" link which goes every 30-60 minutes if one is lucky (during the weekdayday, evenings and weekends are way worse), and then stops at every lantern on the way to the city center. And still costs a fortune.
Additionally, the tram stop at our next P&R is not exactly handicapped-friendly. So I have to get my wife somehow into the tram, which involves a number of high steps at the trams' doors.
Just use busses and trams
And once people use bikes all over and you can get rid of the 10.000 parking spots, you can build much more local small shops. Nobody loves going to Walmart and nobody will if there are small local shops around the corner where you can simply walk to
Bikes ain't gonna work for people coming from far outside the city. I'm not talking about commuting distance, I'm talking about people who live in rural areas 2+ hours away from a city that need to come in occasionally. Having them make the whole trip by car necessitates maintaining car infrastructure in the city center, which will soon be co-opted by suburbanites. This use-case needs a bi-modal strategy.
You think that doesn't happen in the Netherlands? It's called public transportation. Trains, busses, trams, metro. People take their bikes onboard if they have to, get into the city, cycle the last little bit, and it's done
Also, if you gotta commute 2 hours you need a different job
I'm not talking about commutes, I'm talking about going to the city for an appointment/shopping/conference/concert/sightseeing/etc.
But yeah, cycling the last mile works in the Netherlands between cities or suburbs because they are relatively well served by inter-city transit, but what about places like this random dairy farm . Can this guy just take his bike to downtown Amsterdam?
No, but should be able to take a bus. Even so, let him use a car I don't mind, that's what they're for. Long distance transit, heavy hauling. The problem is with 95+% of the trips that are 4 miles and under where people drive their enormous pick-up trucks all empty. You can do those by bike.
Edit:
Just an example of what happens when you start reworked more and more car cities into people cities. You can still get there by car, it's just that public transport and bike and walking is easier so why wouldn't you
That's exactly what I was saying a few comments up. There's a use-case for cars, and there needs to be a way to get into the city when you arrive by car. Any good solution will probably involve parking the car somewhere outside city limits, otherwise it'll probably be co-opted by suburbanites.