On Monday, June 15, 2020 at 9:49:07 AM UTC-7, Frank Krygowski wrote:
On 6/15/2020 11:14 AM, jbeattie wrote:
On Sunday, June 14, 2020 at 7:17:40 PM UTC-7, Frank Krygowski wrote:
On 6/14/2020 7:37 PM, jbeattie wrote:
On Sunday, June 14, 2020 at 9:42:52 AM UTC-7, Frank Krygowski wrote:
On 6/13/2020 8:52 PM, jbeattie wrote:

WTF? https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2...ng-kindermoord The bike facilities in the NL are of relatively recent origin.

The point you missed is this: If Netherlanders had no strong tradition
of travel without cars, they would not have mounted that campaign. The
quote is "The streets _no longer_ belonged to the people who lived
there." In the U.S., for 100 years (longer than several generations'
memory, the streets never did belong to the people.)

The point you missed is that NLs bike mode share tanked after the 1950s and road deaths skyrocketed. The revival -- such as it is -- was chalked up to the new segregated facilities. Can we turn Youngstown into Amsterdam with bike facilities. No. God only knows what might get them on bikes. I leave that to you.


"The Amsterdam and Copenhagens of the world" is a laughably small
sample, Jay. Why not give an example where cycling culture was not
previously dominant, but where the city or country's traffic is now
dominated by bicycles instead of cars? And where a typical resident can,
and does, get to almost any daily destination via protected facilities?

I'll wait.

Uh (raising hand), Amsterdam. See above.

You ignored the "was not previously dominant" part. Check out Amsterdam
in the 1950s: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oQ4XQElmO_E
If Amsterdam wasn't like that in the 1950s, it wouldn't be as it is today.

True, but if it hadn't invested in infrastructure starting in the '70s, it wouldn't be as it is today. It would be worse than it was in the 60s because of increased auto traffic, and road deaths would likely be higher.

I agree, if Amsterdam hadn't built bike infrastructure, Amsterdam
wouldn't have bike infrastructure. And yes, it wouldn't have as many
bike users.

But why is it that you and other bike infra promoters don't use 100
other cities as examples? Why _only_ Amsterdam and, occasionally,
Copenhagen, our of the tens of thousands of cities in the world?

Your argument is like saying "Every city should build acres and acres of
small-scale alleys like Marrakesh! _THEN_ we would have a thriving
pedestrian shopping zone!"
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/content/...ping-guide.jpg
Sorry, culture and history and environment matter.

Amsterdam and Copenhagen are dead flat. Their climate is milder even
than Portland's. They are very dense, with average trip distances less
than two miles. (When we stayed there, we had two groceries within 1/4
mile.) For those reasons, bicycling was popular long before there were
many bike facilities. All of that forms the necessary foundation for
what they have today.

In the 1950s and 1960s, some other cities tried duplicating those
facilities, hoping for the same bicycle dominance. It failed badly,
specifically because other cities lack those foundations. They don't
have the benign conditions, the density, nor the historic culture of
bicycling. They don't have parents and grandparents saying "When I was
young, everybody used to bicycle everywhere and it was lovely."

In some PDX neighborhoods its 20% bike mode share. High citywide numbers would be hard because of distances and most people not wanting to do 10% climbs from the west side.

If you shrink your focus area to a carefully chosen zone, you can get
wonderful numbers. Between me and three adjacent neighbors, I'm pretty
sure our mode share is over 20%. But that's just coincidence. (It's cool
that the guy who moved in two doors away is a career bike mechanic.)

I'm talking areas the size of your village, which is what, eight blocks?

You're probably talking about places like the super-flat southeast
neighborhoods. I remember that as tiny grid streets with lots of
parallel route choices, lots of little shops, a hippie vibe, etc. Our
village has none of that, and I see no way to build it here. For one
thing, our tiny village is chopped up by a big creek flowing north and a
big state route going east to west. And most residential streets were
purposely designed to dissuade through traffic.

Where you have meditation centers, we have Presbyterian churches. You
have tattoo parlors, we have opticians. You have cannabis outlets, we
have Walgreens. You have innumerable cafes, we have just two competing
coffee shops. One is always struggling while the other is subsidized by
a wealthy guy so his kids can run it for fun.

Culture makes a difference.

Apparently, you need to change your culture. My wife is a Lutheran, and she commuted by bike when I met her -- back when Portland was weird but claimed to be normal. I think Presbyterians can ride bikes, although they are farsighted.



What is Youngstown's bike mode share? Not seeing Youngstown on the list. http://peopleforbikes.org/blog/2020-...ngs-ridership/ Its wet even in June, and although we don't have the dreadful Ohio winters, we still ride in snow. https://i1.wp.com/usa.streetsblog.or...8314be95bf.jpg Day in. Day out. We're hardy Americans. So if you're not going to build facilities, how are you going to Youngstowners on bikes? Are you going to call them all Nancies and wussies? If so, can I help? That sounds like fun.

Youngstown's bike mode share is near zero. Interestingly, even almost
all avid riders here don't choose to bike to work or for utility. Sound
familiar? (Maybe it's because they, too, hate bike bags??)

But what if Youngstown put in some quasi-protected bike lanes? What if
the city started a "Biking is really cool and good for the environment!"
publicity campaign? How about an official "Bike to Work Day" with free
breakfast, giveaway trinkets, lots of publicity?

The bike mode share would still be near zero. Those things have happened
either here or in cities within my riding area. They've made no
detectable difference.

Fashion is weird and powerful. It's also very hard to control. It
happens on its own accord, with perhaps influence from the fundamental
culture of the area.

Here's a clue: I've never, ever seen a bumper sticker saying "Keep
Youngstown Weird."

Maybe you need bumper stickers. There are traffic volumes that would be impossible without the infrastructure. N. Williams for example: https://bikeportland.org/2016/05/04/...o-essay-182506 The Springwater Corridor on the eastside. The improved bridge crossings. OHSU is moving tons of people on to bikes: https://www.ohsu.edu/sites/default/f...s_landolfe.jpg

A lot of ordinary commuters I know ride because of certain facilities and would not commute otherwise. That doesn't excuse bad facilities or justify extravagant projects. It simply disproves that facilities have no impact on ridership. They do. Almighty data says so. Do I like them -- only a few, but again, I'm not the target demographic. My least favorite facility is packed in the mornings (pre-COVID).

You keep pretending to state my arguments, but you tailor them to your
rebuttals. I have never said that facilities have NO impact on
ridership. Yesterday my wife and I purposely avoided a MUP because I
knew it would be clotted with walkers and bikers. They drove to and from
the MUP, but they did ride or walk it.

I'm trying to figure out how this goes with your topic sentence. Was that MUP a waste of taxpayer money, and was it sited to promote cycling and failed?

MUPs often get sited for reasons entirely unrelated to relieving congestion or handling bike volume, although some rail-trail conversions around here do excellent double duty as recreational paths and bike highways. I'm not sold on MUPs, but many are zero cost to local government and dedicated as part of developments -- and required for development approval. That's how Joerg got a lot of his separate bike paths. I ride this one:
https://pages.uoregon.edu/jrussial/c...iver_trail.jpg
I'm pretty sure the land was grabbed from the local condo developments.

In fact, I can propose one local route for a MUP that would actually do
significant good. It's a barely-used railway line from the inner city
past the big local mall and shopping areas. It has relatively few street
crossings, so there would be minimal crossing conflicts. And if extended
past the mall, it would give more pleasant access to a hospital complex
and surrounding country roads

But if it were built, this would still not be a bicycling town. And the
mall developer would probably lobby against it, because it would make it
easier for poor black people to shop at the mall. Besides, October
through March it would get roughly zero use; people here seem to resist
bicycling when the temperature is below 40F, let alone below freezing.

Sounds like low-hanging fruit and easy to roll into development approval. Go for it! What's the worst that could happen? You could use it as your great test case -- go out there and count bikes.

BTW, what is a barely used rail line? Is it used sometimes? Would the RR abandon it. If you have to buy back the right-of-way from the RR or landowners, that's a whole other issue.




If there were 100 U.S. cities that had raised their bike mode share
above 2% by building bike infrastructure, I think you'd have a glimmer
of an argument. But even then - 2%?? In what arena is that called success?

When prior was zero, 2% is pretty good -- and it generally means a much higher local percentage. Why not get neighborhoods on bikes even if the whole-city numbers are pitiful?

OT, I like some facilities just because they are peaceful and beat the hell out of the roadway by any metric. I use some MUPs as my exclusive route and have abandoned the roadway. Does that increase ridership? Probably not, but there is a safety benefit for existing cyclists and pedestrians as well as the linear park aspect of it. Just get the money out of the park budget, which is actually the budget that pays for the one I use most: https://www.spinlister.com/blog/wp-c...on-creek-7.jpg
Which is a side path that allows me to skip this zero shoulder climb: https://tinyurl.com/ybjvls6c You can see where the side-path cuts into the forest. Thats a 45mph major arterial where I used to ride until traffic got too aggressive (rich people from Lake Oswego in their midlife crisis-mobiles). I could still ride there, I just don't want to anymore.

Your standards seem to be even lower - saying that _some_ facilities
have caused _some_ increase in riding. That throws all cost-benefit
analysis out the window.

In many cases the cost was zero or mandated by the Bike Bill or part of a larger transportation package built under one of the many federal funding programs -- or a mix of public and private money, like rail trails. And, again, straying from the "build it and they will come" question, there are facilities that just make for a nicer city, like in PDX, the Eastbank Esplanade.. https://www.spinlister.com/blog/east...ater-corridor/

Anyway, I agree that we shouldn't be extravagant and shouldn't build bad infrastructure, but I've seen huge increases in cycling in Portland in the last 35 years -- like from zero to too many some days, and it has followed large moves by planning departments and advocacy groups which included facility building, albeit mostly bike lanes and some larger centerpiece trails. We were still weird 35 years ago (had more jazz clubs back then by far -- plenty of weed, albeit not in shops and tattoo parlors), but assuming the new-comers are weirder and more into bikes, then we should capitalize on that..

I don't think the isolated bike chutes promoted anything but danger, and I feel the same way about the cycle tracks -- particularly through South Waterfront, but I'm constantly overruled on that one. It violates all of your standards, and I'm sure it was expensive, but people use it all the time to get to work. https://bikeportland.org/2015/08/14/...et-bike-155284 The massive influx of people who populate those condo towers are riding bikes, or at least some of them are. I hate that cycletrack and preferred the area when it was an abandoned shipyard, mini-storage, meth addicts and a pot-holed road that I rode virtually alone -- but again, I'm not the target demographic. They built it, and a lot of annoying people with blinding DRLs came.

-- Jay Beattie.