Build it and they won't come

On 2017-09-29 09:05, sms wrote:
On 9/29/2017 7:30 AM, Joerg wrote:

snip

Over 1% which is a lot for the US, a society that unfortunately is
car-centric and not very keen on more healthy modes of transportation.
Best of all we now have some longhaul riders like myself, people who
cycle to places like Intel despite each trip being two-digit miles.
Before they bnuilt out bike lanes on the county road towards the west
the number of cyclists there was close to zero. Now you always see
cyclists and despite the significantly higher number there has not
been one new cross with a spoke wheel in front.

I clearly see that among neighbors and friends. "Hey, you've got a
nice bike in the garage. Want to ride?" ... "Nah, too dangerous" ...
"How about we truck them to the trail head and ride from there?" ...
"Yes!"

Bringa trail head to their neighborhood and they'll ride a lot more,
without first using their cars. The city of Folsom has proven it.
During rush hour some of segregated their bike paths are now so full
that I avoid going through that area during the evening hours.

Bike paths are a good thing.

Last night we had a "Transportation Seminar" in my city. I had voted
against spending $25,000 for a series of "seminars" because I knew that
they would be packed with faux consultants and developer hacks, and I
was not disappointed. Bicycles must have been mentioned ten times. I was
also amazed to hear these consultants mention Frank, Lou, and Jay.

Summary.

1. Increase density, or "Build it and we'll figure out later how to get
them to come and go."

First build high-density housing, and when the traffic congestion
becomes unbearable then maybe someone will build mass transit, with
non-existent money. I don't think that a single person in the room
believed this tripe, yet there are YIMBY groups that promote this approach.

What HAS worked in this area, and which the single experienced person on
the panel explained, is to build mass transit and then wait for higher
density housing and commercial office to be built next to it, but it
takes several decades for this to happen, and building mass transit is
enormously expensive.


I do not believe in that philosophy at all.


... In Silicon Valley, the old tilt-up one and two
story buildings along rail lines are coming down, and higher buildings
are replacing them, but it took decades of terrible ridership numbers
before this happened.

2. Spend billions of dollars of non-existent money on mass transit.


Exactly the point. It should not be done. Either the money is there or
it isn't. When it isn't, do not build.


"There's no more land for freeways so we can take the billions of
dollars we would have spent on freeways and spend it on mass transit."
What?! Where are those billions of dollars coming from? They don't
exist! This reminds me of checking out at Safeway where the cashier is
required to tell you "how much you saved." You saved fifteen dollars and
forty-five cents today Mr. Scharf." I reply, "well give it to me then,"
and, not sure if I'm serious, they begin to explain how I'm not actually
getting that money, it's just money that I didn't spend, and now I have
it to spend on other things, even though it's money I never actually had.

When the faux consultant said this, you could see people in the audience
looking at each other in bewilderment.

3. Bike mode share has doubled. Okay, fair enough, but going from 1% to
2% is not exactly a big accomplishment.


For America it is!


... In an area with mild weather,
and where most large employers provide shower facilities and secure
parking, the share should be much higher. But there are good reasons why
more people don't bicycle to work, especially people with young children
where both parents work. As empty nesters, we bicycle a lot, but when
our kids were young we had to rush from work to pick them up from
after-school care.


That was very different in Europe where we lived for decades. No parent
in their right mind would become soccer mom or dad unless you had a kid
with disabilities. As kids we either used public transit with rather
sub-optimal connections or our bikes. After one year of riding the
transit bus I switched to my road bike. To school and everywhere else.
Rain or shine, sleet, snow, ice, all the time. In America we have to
ween ourselves off of helicopter-parenting.


4. Uber/Lyft. These faux consultants think that Uber/Lyft are the
solution to "the last mile" between mass transit (trains, since no one
will take public buses). Yet they don't understand, or won't admit, that
the Uber/Lyft business model of subsidizing 50-60% of the cost of each
ride (or even 25%) can't continue indefinitely, and once these services
have to end predatory pricing, and price their product so they can at
least break even, their product will have a much smaller market. Uber
and Lyft also causes more traffic congestion and hurts mass transit
ridership.

If you have to pay for a Lyft or Uber ride for the last mile, four times
a day, plus pay the train fare, you're just going to drive. In San
Francisco, there used to be privately-owned jitneys that took people to
the train station, but those disappeared, but are now coming back
http://www.sfexaminer.com/sf-planning-first-kind-laws-jitney-private-bus-system-chariot/.


"Oh, we'll just sell some more bonds!" :-)


5. The panel was moderated by someone from the San Jose Planning
Commission, which is adopting plans that will greatly increase traffic
congestion by adding massive amounts of housing and commercial space
along corridors with no mass transit, and she previously worked for the
Silicon Valley Leadership Group, which has been instrumental in
preventing any taxes on their member businesses to pay for transit,
instead lobbying for extremely regressive sale taxes to fund mass
transit, with most of the money going just to San Jose. She is also the
director of the Silicon Valley Bicycle Coalition. Not an impartial
moderator, and she carefully picked the questions that were submitted by
the public to advance the agenda of those that selected her.

6. Electric bicycles. As Lou pointed out, and was pointed out last
night, electric bicycles are extremely popular in Europe and Asia but
not in the U.S.. Electric bicycles extend the distance that
non-hard-core riders are willing to commute, from 5-6 miles to 10-15
miles. This could actually increase the bicycle mode percentage by a few
percent when coupled with better bicycle infrastructure, which is
comparatively cheap to build, compared with freeways or light rail
lines. Maybe employers could subsidize the cost of electric bicycles, or
buy a fleet of them for employees to use.

As the cost of electric bicycles continues to fall, I think the adoption
rate in the U.S. will go up. If you could buy a quality electric bicycle
for under $1000, and there's no reason this is not doable, they would
sell better, but now we're seeing prices of $2000-5000 for good electric
bicycles in the U.S..


Risky. Those things will becomes faster, be souped up by youngsters, and
essentially become powerful motor vehicles on bike paths. Not good.


7. Buses on shoulders. OMG, this insanity is spreading. The idea is that
since the HOV lanes are congested with Teslas, plug-in hybrids, Leafs,
and solo drivers willing to pay to use these lanes, we should allow
buses to drive on the left shoulder of freeways. Well this actually
might help Google, Apple, Facebook, Yahoo, etc. buses, but it's not
going to get the remaining commuters onto public buses.

8. I about fell out of my chair when they mentioned Frank. Well not by
name. One of the panelists said that we should be happy that we have so
much traffic congestion because it was caused by a healthy economy, and
that cities like Youngstown Ohio would love to have the problems that we
have, and he put up a slide of traffic in that area (none).


Nuts.


I thought that it was in poor taste because the struggles of
post-industrial cities are not a joking matter, and what really needs to
happen is that the tech companies need to stop putting every new job in
Silicon Valley, and spread out across the country. There are plenty of
tech workers that would love to live in a place where they can afford a
house instead of paying $3.5K per month for a one bedroom apartment.


Yes, but companies will not move to areas that are non-right-to-work or
under any other union stranglehold. Then there is the critical mass
thing. You need to have a certain pool of talent available without
having to move everyone out there.


9. They also talked about Jay in Portland, and how the bicycle mode
share has increased, and how well mass transit is working. No one must
have told them about declining mass transit ridership in Portland
http://www.oregonlive.com/commuting/index.ssf/2017/09/trimet_report_rising_housing_c.html.
And while Portland has a very high bicycle commuting share, they
recently reduced their goal of bicycle commuting from 25% to 15%.


Though that's excellent for the US.


10. Self-driving cars and ZOVs (Zero Occupancy Vehicles). Uber and Lyft
believe that the key to profitability is in eliminating having to pay
drivers, which is why they are willing to lose billions of dollars of
investors money in the short term. But self-driving cars will only add
to congestion. Instead of parking at the destination, the self-driving
car will go back on the road empty, and either drive to the outskirts of
a city where there is sufficient free parking, or will just drive around
empty until it is summoned by another user. In large cities, Uber and
Lyft are greatly increasing traffic congestion, not just by drivers
aimlessly driving around waiting for a fare, or parking illegally, but
because the subsidized fares are taking people off of mass transit.


They could have also considered a self-flying SkyCar ...


The real solution was never mentioned of course. There are two things
that have been proven to work:

A. Fast rail transit to outlying areas with more land for housing. There
is actually slow rail transit that was started to do this, the ACE train
but it's a long ride because they are using very old rail infrastructure
with diesel locomotives. And like all mass transit, every additional
train requires more subsidies, so there is a reluctance to expand or
improve the service. Caltrain runs only four of their trains a day (two
in the morning and two in the evening) to the outlying areas of Morgan
Hill and Gilroy, and the last evening train leaves San Jose too early
for most tech workers.

B. Reducing demand. It's heresy to ever say that perhaps not every new
tech job needs to be in Silicon Valley. Cities love commercial office
buildings because of the taxes they receive, while taxes on housing
don't cover the cost of providing services.


All my own tech jobs are ... right here. I have a Zoom account and that
suffices to do even most diagnostic jobs across cyberspace. More and
more instruments such as oscilloscopes can be web-connected and can even
be remotely operated. Last year was the first year where the number of
business flights for me was zero. It works. Oh, and it was also the
first year my car mileage dropped below 1000mi/year.

--
Regards, Joerg

http://www.analogconsultants.com/

On 2017-09-29 08:14, wrote:
On Thursday, September 28, 2017 at 3:29:02 PM UTC-7, Joerg wrote:
On 2017-09-20 20:57, Tim McNamara wrote:
On Wed, 20 Sep 2017 21:47:25 -0400, Frank Krygowski
wrote:
Build it and they will come? Sorry, no.

Here's a new article dispelling the myth that segregated
facilities generate tremendous bike mode share.

https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2...ped-stevenage?



Unless motoring is actively dissuaded, almost all people who have
cars will drive cars.

I remember seeing period BBC footage about this, describing the
innovations in place at the time. Now, maybe it's what you're
used to; I grew up in a very bikeable suburb of Chicago and all
us kids just got around on bikes. So I looked at infrastructure
like this and was puzzled as to why.

Apparently I wasn't alone.

In the Minneapolis-St Paul area we have been building out both
on-street and separated bike facilities. While I find much of
the design of the on-street facilities to be objectionable and
even downright stupid, there has been a noticeable increase in
bike riding. Most of them are young uns and are not wearing the
pseudo-pro clown suits (I'm still wearing mine, although I've
reached an age and a body composition where that's probably
ill-advised). The separated facilities- which are pretty
extensive- get a whole lot of use; the on-street facilities seem
to get a lot of use too although not quite as much.

But this doesn't seem to work everywhere. Denmark made it work
by taxing cars at an astonishing rate- owning a car is an
economic hardship for many if not most Danes due to the tax
structure- and pairing that with extensive on-street bike
facilities. There would be no way to accomplish something like
that in the US, where owning a car and having cheap fuel is
effectively part of the Bill of Rights.


That is what many people who never lived there think but that isn't
the way it is. Nearly all adult Danes own cars, just like the
Dutch, the Germans, and so on. All countries where car ownership
isn't cheap but you've got to have one. They generaly have smaller
more economical cars. Not a monstrous SUV with a 5-liter engine but
a compact car with a 1.5-liter engine.

Why do people ride bikes there? Mainly because of the cycling
facilities. Another reason is health, Europeans are on average
less obese that Americans and there are reasons for that, one of
them being cycling.

My wife and I lived in Europe for decades so we know a thing or
two about it. Here in the US we have two cars. In Europe we had
only one and sometimes it sat in the garage for more than a month
without having rolled one lone kilometer.

Build it and they will come, it has been proven time and again.
Pointing to some examples where they screwed up as Frank likes to
do isn't going to change that fact.

Now that they are (finally!) building out the bicycle
infrastructure in this area I notice a significant uptick in rider
numbers but only in areas where cycle paths are built, not in the
others. Personally I was down to 757 miles total on my car
including business use for 2016, dropping further. About 4000 miles
between the road bike and the MTB. I do not even remember the last
time I bought gas and the tank is still at more than 3/4. Of
course, now I am gong through MTB tires like popcorn.

The US is an EXTREMELY healthy country. The problem is that
immigrants both legal and illegal pull the average health down. The
fact is that the life expectancy of the white anglo-saxon race is
longer than most others. Only the Japanese exceed them. This is NOT
because of health services because this has always been the case
throughout history.


Huh?

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3020302/

Quote "During 1991–2008, obesity prevalence for US-born adults increased
from 13.9 to 28.7%, while prevalence for immigrants increased from 9.5
to 20.7%".

--
Regards, Joerg

http://www.analogconsultants.com/

On Thursday, September 28, 2017 at 9:05:50 AM UTC-5, wrote:

Since I paid $55 for two flank steaks (which is a cheap cut of meat for the uninformed), two market steaks (a cheap sort of New York cut) and two boneless pork chops and everyone here treated it as some sort of lie or again some outrageously priced high end place instead of a normal butcher shop one can only assume that none of you actually shop or cook.


Based on your writing, I will assume you paid $55 (MY GOD!!!) for four steaks and two pork chops. Six pieces of meat. Assume each is half pound, so three pounds of meat total. Three pounds of meat for $55!!!! May I suggest that you stop going to a "butcher" shop and just go to the local grocery store. They have a meat department too. They will sell you the same meat you bought at the butcher shop. I'm sure you will not have to pay $18.33 per pound for your meat at the local grocery store. Stop using the butcher shop. Save your family some money.

On 29/09/2017 3:07 PM, wrote:
On Thursday, September 28, 2017 at 9:05:50 AM UTC-5, wrote:

Since I paid $55 for two flank steaks (which is a cheap cut of meat for the uninformed), two market steaks (a cheap sort of New York cut) and two boneless pork chops and everyone here treated it as some sort of lie or again some outrageously priced high end place instead of a normal butcher shop one can only assume that none of you actually shop or cook.


Based on your writing, I will assume you paid $55 (MY GOD!!!) for four steaks and two pork chops. Six pieces of meat. Assume each is half pound, so three pounds of meat total. Three pounds of meat for $55!!!! May I suggest that you stop going to a "butcher" shop and just go to the local grocery store. They have a meat department too. They will sell you the same meat you bought at the butcher shop. I'm sure you will not have to pay $18.33 per pound for your meat at the local grocery store. Stop using the butcher shop. Save your family some money.


Beef has been expensive here lately. Loblaws is a grocery store, not a
butcher.

https://www.loblaws.ca/search/150671...~selected/true

But still $18/lb is a lot for flank steak and pork chops.

On 9/29/2017 12:07 PM, wrote:
On Thursday, September 28, 2017 at 9:05:50 AM UTC-5, wrote:

Since I paid $55 for two flank steaks (which is a cheap cut of meat for the uninformed), two market steaks (a cheap sort of New York cut) and two boneless pork chops and everyone here treated it as some sort of lie or again some outrageously priced high end place instead of a normal butcher shop one can only assume that none of you actually shop or cook.


Based on your writing, I will assume you paid $55 (MY GOD!!!) for four steaks and two pork chops. Six pieces of meat. Assume each is half pound, so three pounds of meat total. Three pounds of meat for $55!!!! May I suggest that you stop going to a "butcher" shop and just go to the local grocery store. They have a meat department too. They will sell you the same meat you bought at the butcher shop. I'm sure you will not have to pay $18.33 per pound for your meat at the local grocery store. Stop using the butcher shop. Save your family some money.

I don't know of any butcher shops in my area. The stores with the USDA
Choice and Prime meat are Costco and Sprouts. It is beyond our
capability on r.b.t. to educate someone about where to shop. I have
never paid $18 a pound for meat of any kind.

Duane wrote:
On 29/09/2017 3:07 PM, wrote:
On Thursday, September 28, 2017 at 9:05:50 AM UTC-5, wrote:

Since I paid $55 for two flank steaks (which is a cheap cut of meat for
the uninformed), two market steaks (a cheap sort of New York cut) and
two boneless pork chops and everyone here treated it as some sort of
lie or again some outrageously priced high end place instead of a
normal butcher shop one can only assume that none of you actually shop or cook.


Based on your writing, I will assume you paid $55 (MY GOD!!!) for four
steaks and two pork chops. Six pieces of meat. Assume each is half
pound, so three pounds of meat total. Three pounds of meat for $55!!!!
May I suggest that you stop going to a "butcher" shop and just go to the
local grocery store. They have a meat department too. They will sell
you the same meat you bought at the butcher shop. I'm sure you will not
have to pay $18.33 per pound for your meat at the local grocery store.
Stop using the butcher shop. Save your family some money.


Beef has been expensive here lately. Loblaws is a grocery store, not a
butcher.

https://www.loblaws.ca/search/150671...~selected/true

But still $18/lb is a lot for flank steak and pork chops.





I should point out that the CAD/US exchange rate is currently .8009.

--
duane

On 9/29/2017 1:03 AM, John B. wrote:
On Thu, 28 Sep 2017 23:24:54 -0500, Tim McNamara
wrote:

On Thu, 28 Sep 2017 09:46:04 +0700, John B wrote:

I've a good friend who is from Perth, Western Australia, who tells me
that nearly all the vegetables sold in Perth are actually Chinese
grown and shipped to Australia via refrigerated containers, as they
are cheaper then veggies grown in Australia.

Slave labor saves money, keeps costs down *and* boosts profits:

http://www.nationalreview.com/articl...josh-gelernter

http://content.time.com/time/world/a...635144,00.html

If we get rid of enough government regulation, maybe we can do that in
the US too! Hey, wait, we've got a start on that already:

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2...invisible-army

http://tinyurl.com/ya4w4ojz
Well, given that the U.S. has a prison population of 693/100,000
population while China has 116/100,000 it appears that just maybe the
Chinese are doing something right.
--
Cheers,

John B.


Summary executions may have some downsides here that the
Chinese don't fear there.

--
Andrew Muzi
www.yellowjersey.org/
Open every day since 1 April, 1971

On 9/29/2017 11:37 AM, Joerg wrote:
On 2017-09-29 08:14, wrote:
On Thursday, September 28, 2017 at 3:29:02 PM UTC-7, Joerg
wrote:
On 2017-09-20 20:57, Tim McNamara wrote:
On Wed, 20 Sep 2017 21:47:25 -0400, Frank Krygowski
wrote:
Build it and they will come? Sorry, no.

Here's a new article dispelling the myth that segregated
facilities generate tremendous bike mode share.

https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2...ped-stevenage?




Unless motoring is actively dissuaded, almost all people who
have
cars will drive cars.

I remember seeing period BBC footage about this,
describing the
innovations in place at the time. Now, maybe it's what
you're
used to; I grew up in a very bikeable suburb of Chicago
and all
us kids just got around on bikes. So I looked at
infrastructure
like this and was puzzled as to why.

Apparently I wasn't alone.

In the Minneapolis-St Paul area we have been building
out both
on-street and separated bike facilities. While I find
much of
the design of the on-street facilities to be
objectionable and
even downright stupid, there has been a noticeable
increase in
bike riding. Most of them are young uns and are not
wearing the
pseudo-pro clown suits (I'm still wearing mine, although
I've
reached an age and a body composition where that's probably
ill-advised). The separated facilities- which are pretty
extensive- get a whole lot of use; the on-street
facilities seem
to get a lot of use too although not quite as much.

But this doesn't seem to work everywhere. Denmark made
it work
by taxing cars at an astonishing rate- owning a car is an
economic hardship for many if not most Danes due to the tax
structure- and pairing that with extensive on-street bike
facilities. There would be no way to accomplish
something like
that in the US, where owning a car and having cheap fuel is
effectively part of the Bill of Rights.


That is what many people who never lived there think but
that isn't
the way it is. Nearly all adult Danes own cars, just like
the
Dutch, the Germans, and so on. All countries where car
ownership
isn't cheap but you've got to have one. They generaly
have smaller
more economical cars. Not a monstrous SUV with a 5-liter
engine but
a compact car with a 1.5-liter engine.

Why do people ride bikes there? Mainly because of the
cycling
facilities. Another reason is health, Europeans are on
average
less obese that Americans and there are reasons for that,
one of
them being cycling.

My wife and I lived in Europe for decades so we know a
thing or
two about it. Here in the US we have two cars. In Europe
we had
only one and sometimes it sat in the garage for more than
a month
without having rolled one lone kilometer.

Build it and they will come, it has been proven time and
again.
Pointing to some examples where they screwed up as Frank
likes to
do isn't going to change that fact.

Now that they are (finally!) building out the bicycle
infrastructure in this area I notice a significant uptick
in rider
numbers but only in areas where cycle paths are built,
not in the
others. Personally I was down to 757 miles total on my car
including business use for 2016, dropping further. About
4000 miles
between the road bike and the MTB. I do not even remember
the last
time I bought gas and the tank is still at more than 3/4. Of
course, now I am gong through MTB tires like popcorn.

The US is an EXTREMELY healthy country. The problem is that
immigrants both legal and illegal pull the average health
down. The
fact is that the life expectancy of the white anglo-saxon
race is
longer than most others. Only the Japanese exceed them.
This is NOT
because of health services because this has always been
the case
throughout history.


Huh?

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3020302/

Quote "During 1991–2008, obesity prevalence for US-born
adults increased from 13.9 to 28.7%, while prevalence for
immigrants increased from 9.5 to 20.7%".


Nothing good about that but there are fatter populations.

http://www.worldatlas.com/articles/2...the-world.html

Mexico's socialist health scheme is suffering an inundation
of obesity, heart disease and diabetes with serious fiscal
consequences:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/0...n_3567772.html


--
Andrew Muzi
www.yellowjersey.org/
Open every day since 1 April, 1971

On 2017-09-29 15:12, AMuzi wrote:
On 9/29/2017 11:37 AM, Joerg wrote:
On 2017-09-29 08:14, wrote:
On Thursday, September 28, 2017 at 3:29:02 PM UTC-7, Joerg
wrote:
On 2017-09-20 20:57, Tim McNamara wrote:
On Wed, 20 Sep 2017 21:47:25 -0400, Frank Krygowski
wrote:
Build it and they will come? Sorry, no.

Here's a new article dispelling the myth that segregated
facilities generate tremendous bike mode share.

https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2...ped-stevenage?





Unless motoring is actively dissuaded, almost all people who
have
cars will drive cars.

I remember seeing period BBC footage about this,
describing the
innovations in place at the time. Now, maybe it's what
you're
used to; I grew up in a very bikeable suburb of Chicago
and all
us kids just got around on bikes. So I looked at
infrastructure
like this and was puzzled as to why.

Apparently I wasn't alone.

In the Minneapolis-St Paul area we have been building
out both
on-street and separated bike facilities. While I find
much of
the design of the on-street facilities to be
objectionable and
even downright stupid, there has been a noticeable
increase in
bike riding. Most of them are young uns and are not
wearing the
pseudo-pro clown suits (I'm still wearing mine, although
I've
reached an age and a body composition where that's probably
ill-advised). The separated facilities- which are pretty
extensive- get a whole lot of use; the on-street
facilities seem
to get a lot of use too although not quite as much.

But this doesn't seem to work everywhere. Denmark made
it work
by taxing cars at an astonishing rate- owning a car is an
economic hardship for many if not most Danes due to the tax
structure- and pairing that with extensive on-street bike
facilities. There would be no way to accomplish
something like
that in the US, where owning a car and having cheap fuel is
effectively part of the Bill of Rights.


That is what many people who never lived there think but
that isn't
the way it is. Nearly all adult Danes own cars, just like
the
Dutch, the Germans, and so on. All countries where car
ownership
isn't cheap but you've got to have one. They generaly
have smaller
more economical cars. Not a monstrous SUV with a 5-liter
engine but
a compact car with a 1.5-liter engine.

Why do people ride bikes there? Mainly because of the
cycling
facilities. Another reason is health, Europeans are on
average
less obese that Americans and there are reasons for that,
one of
them being cycling.

My wife and I lived in Europe for decades so we know a
thing or
two about it. Here in the US we have two cars. In Europe
we had
only one and sometimes it sat in the garage for more than
a month
without having rolled one lone kilometer.

Build it and they will come, it has been proven time and
again.
Pointing to some examples where they screwed up as Frank
likes to
do isn't going to change that fact.

Now that they are (finally!) building out the bicycle
infrastructure in this area I notice a significant uptick
in rider
numbers but only in areas where cycle paths are built,
not in the
others. Personally I was down to 757 miles total on my car
including business use for 2016, dropping further. About
4000 miles
between the road bike and the MTB. I do not even remember
the last
time I bought gas and the tank is still at more than 3/4. Of
course, now I am gong through MTB tires like popcorn.

The US is an EXTREMELY healthy country. The problem is that
immigrants both legal and illegal pull the average health
down. The
fact is that the life expectancy of the white anglo-saxon
race is
longer than most others. Only the Japanese exceed them.
This is NOT
because of health services because this has always been
the case
throughout history.


Huh?

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3020302/

Quote "During 1991–2008, obesity prevalence for US-born
adults increased from 13.9 to 28.7%, while prevalence for
immigrants increased from 9.5 to 20.7%".


Nothing good about that but there are fatter populations.

http://www.worldatlas.com/articles/2...the-world.html


Mexico's socialist health scheme is suffering an inundation of obesity,
heart disease and diabetes with serious fiscal consequences:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/0...n_3567772.html


AFAIK it was customary in the Pacific Islands to regard someone with a
major belly a rich person, they could always eat as much as they wante,
and did.

Still, the fact remains that immigrants do not pull down the average
health. We do that all by ourselves, with generous help from fast food
places and such. Habits are another problem. It's not just that most
people won't consider cycling even if you ran a red-carpeted class-I
bike path right to their house. Often when we go to a store with several
people in a car and I suggest to walk over to this other store where Joe
wants to buy new earphones for his MP3 player ... "Walk?! Why? Let's
drive over there". Hoofing it seems to be a very foreign concept to most
people.

--
Regards, Joerg

http://www.analogconsultants.com/

On Friday, September 29, 2017 at 9:15:00 AM UTC-7, Joerg wrote:
On 2017-09-29 08:49, wrote:
On Friday, September 29, 2017 at 8:28:37 AM UTC-7, jbeattie wrote:
On Friday, September 29, 2017 at 7:30:45 AM UTC-7, Joerg wrote:
On 2017-09-28 18:17, Frank Krygowski wrote:
On 9/28/2017 6:29 PM, Joerg wrote:

Why do people ride bikes there? Mainly because of the
cycling facilities. Another reason is health, Europeans are
on average less obese that Americans and there are reasons
for that, one of them being cycling.

Build it and they will come, it has been proven time and
again.

In the U.S., it's been proven time and time again that "build
it, and maybe 1.5% will come, if you're lucky and cycling is
fashionable in your area."


In some areas a lot more came but 1.5% is a respectable number
for the US. To repeat your own words: Calculate the longterm
health benefits from that 1.5% increase in Dollar numbers.

We can't calculate the health benefit. How would you even do that?
You assume that there is this magical group of couch potatoes just
waiting for a bike path -- and when it appears, they materialize in
droves -- clearing out their arteries and living for decades longer
in perfect health. We could put ear tags on them and follow their
every move to determine their outcomes -- maybe get a control group
of couch potatoes.

Alternate and more likely reality is that some people decide to
ride around on the new bike path, and if it goes in the general
direction of their work, they may even ride a few days a week
instead of going to the gym. They may run into each other and get
hurt, strain a knee -- who knows. Medical usage may rise or fall.


There have been many systematic studies confirming the health benefit of
cycling.

http://www.peoplepoweredmovement.org...eview_2011.pdf

There are also some that quantify the cost savings to health care
systems but the ones I read unfortunately behind a (steep) paywall
because published in high-class medical journals. You don't get to
publish in those unless your underlying data has been properly vetted.

Nobody is denying the health benefit of cycling -- or at least some health benefit from cycling. That's different from tying a health benefit to a particular piece of infrastructure. For example, my health has not improved any since the Broadway and S.W. Moody cycle tracks went in. I don't ride a single mile more or less. I ride slower on the cycle tracks, so they produce less of a cardiovascular work-out for me. They make me fat and slow and hasten my death.

Also, I crashed two years ago on an snowy, icy street car track in a bicycle facility, so that facility worsened my health. I defended a case where a guy broke his neck when a dog leash got stuck in his front wheel while riding on a MUP and another one where a guy did a face plant going over a transition on to an elevated bike lane. Bike lanes are murder!

But anyway, proving that some two mile bike path or some other piece of infrastructure is producing health benefits sufficient to justify the expense is basically impossible. You have to take it on faith.



European cities are different. People live close to work....


I lived in Europe. My distance to school was only 5mi but in my
university days the distances to the various places I had to go often
exceeded 10mi, sometimes 20mi. Most of the people I knew didn't think
twice before hopping on the bicycle, even if they had cars. An evening
in town in Maastricht was 40mi round trip and we did that at the spur of
the moment. The trip to my sports club in Belgium was more than 60mi
round trip and I can't remember anyone saying that was excessive (I had
to schlepp a heavy parachute, spare, boots, helmet and whatnot for that).

It's msotly the mindset that is different in Europe.

You were a statistical outlier: http://www.cycling-embassy.dk/wp-con...ng-in-DK-1.pdf Denmark does not knock my socks off: http://www.cycling-embassy.dk/wp-con...om-Denmark.pdf
NL: https://bicycledutch.wordpress.com/2...ger-distances/

Not dissing NL and Denmark, but both are dead flat and people live near work. We have people around here who live near work, and they ride too -- generally not in separate facilities.

As for the 'burbs, nobody is going to lug some 30lb 'fiet over the West Hills and travel ten plus miles from Beaverton. It's never going to happen. Copenhagenization stops at the hills, which are a stone's throw from my office. This is literally the view out of my office window, although I'm 10 stories higher: https://c2.staticflickr.com/8/7286/1...d422079d_b.jpg Nike, Intel, etc., etc. is over those hills. They are steep. Now we get lots of people on the flat east side. https://c2.staticflickr.com/8/7613/2...6661f837_b.jpg Mostly on-street bike lanes and bike boulevards. No fancy tracks required.

-- Jay Beattie.