Build it and they won't come

On Sat, 30 Sep 2017 15:57:46 -0700, Joerg
wrote:

On 2017-09-30 11:43, jbeattie wrote:
On Saturday, September 30, 2017 at 7:59:49 AM UTC-7, Joerg wrote:
On 2017-09-29 17:47, jbeattie wrote:

[...]


... 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.


That ain't what we'd call a "hill". More like a bump.

Sure, it isn't Mt. Hood, but it's an 1,100 foot elevation gain from
my basement parking lot in a couple of miles, which is more than most
people are willing to do except maybe on an eBike. What you will do
is one thing. What the couch potato who is going to be saved by
bicycle infrastructure will do is another.


The then bike route needs to be longer and go around it.




... 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.


They may be steep but not for long. I always have to get back up
from 100ft or so to 1450ft where I live, with lots of ups and downs
in between. That is because nearly all errand runs require a ride
to Folsom or Rancho Cordova. A run to Placerville requires about
30-40mi round trip, mostly on rough and hilly singletrack. One of
the hardcore riders out here does that pretty much daily (but
farther, about 60mi).

Yes, and how many of the fat women at the local Safeway are going to
do that -- or even their brutish husbands?


They will never ride no matter what you give them. I am thinking about
those who are still athletic enough but 20 years from now will have
become blimps. LOTS of people I meet whoe are willing to ride. When I
say to them that I take a county road and then the bike path they
immediately decline. However, they say yes when I grudingly agree that
we truck the bikes to the trail head. Those ain't slowpokes, they are
serious riders.


But how many are "still athletic enough"?

Retired Lieutenant General Mark Hertling said in a 2009 speech that
75 percent of civilians who wanted to join the force were ineligible
due to being overweight.

"Of the 25 percent that could join, what we found was 65 percent could
not pass the [physical training] test on the first day. Young people
joining our service could not run, jump, tumble or roll the kind of
things you would expect soldiers to do if you're in combat, he pointed
out.

--
Cheers,

John B.

On Sat, 30 Sep 2017 12:21:51 -0700 (PDT), wrote:

On Friday, September 29, 2017 at 9:36:53 AM UTC-7, Joerg wrote:

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%".

Joerg - obesity in and of itself is not an illness. If you go into emergency rooms all over California you find the majority of people to be immigrants either legal or otherwise. This is major reason that the US isn't near the top of the healthy list. And even in this the life expectancy in the US is only a couple of years off of Switzerland who are on the top.

:-) Switzerland has the second longest life expectancy in the world.

The U.S. is number 31 on the list, between Costa Rica (30) and Cuba
(32).
--
Cheers,

John B.

On 9/30/2017 4:18 PM, Joerg wrote:

snip

In my experience a motorized vehicle is the first thing that anyone
buys just as soon as he/she can find the money to do it.


That is changing in the US. For many kids it is no longer a worthy goal
to have a driver license at 16. Or in any of the years following that.
They are completely content not being able to drive, they have no desire
to. This trend greatly worries the auto industry.

It's the biggest change in teenage and young adult behavior you've seen
and it's got the vehicle manufacturers worried.
http://www.pbs.org/newshour/updates/many-teens-dont-want-get-drivers-license/

We went through this with our kids, but they only delayed it about a
year. The thing is, you really want your children to learn to drive
while they are teens, as nerve-wracking as that can be. All the jokes
about driving skills based on ethnicity come down to the fact that those
drivers did not learn to drive as teens, they learned as adults. And
learning to drive these days, in a congested urban area, with a lot of
inexperienced adult drivers, is much different than when most of us here
learned to drive.

What would be good is moving to the model where you can cycle or take
public transit to work, and driving is more for excursions. This is the
case in many other countries where they have better transportation networks.

On 9/30/2017 6:57 PM, Joerg wrote:

A couple of weeks ago I took this from Rancho Cordova to Sloughhouse
(where the farmer's market is):

http://photos2.meetupstatic.com/phot..._22551636.jpeg

Wide, no speed limit, no slowpoke cyclists.

That MUP would be fine with me. Last week we used a similar one with our
novice cyclist friend. It was perhaps not quite as nice, but still nice
enough. It was very pleasant.

Why was it pleasant? Mostly because there were almost no other users on
the MUP. I like them fine if they don't cross many roads, if they are
smooth and wide enough, and if there's almost nobody else using them.

However, that set of criteria isn't very useful for getting funds to
build one.

--
- Frank Krygowski

On 9/30/2017 9:35 PM, John B. wrote:
On Sat, 30 Sep 2017 12:21:51 -0700 (PDT), wrote:

On Friday, September 29, 2017 at 9:36:53 AM UTC-7, Joerg wrote:

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%".

Joerg - obesity in and of itself is not an illness. If you go into emergency rooms all over California you find the majority of people to be immigrants either legal or otherwise. This is major reason that the US isn't near the top of the healthy list. And even in this the life expectancy in the US is only a couple of years off of Switzerland who are on the top.

:-) Switzerland has the second longest life expectancy in the world.

The U.S. is number 31 on the list, between Costa Rica (30) and Cuba
(32).

Perhaps we need better immigrants. We should start recruiting immigrants
from Canada, Slovenia, Ireland, Cyprus - you know, places with higher
life expectancies than the U.S.

Of course, most of those people won't want to move here because of our
crappy health care system.


--
- Frank Krygowski

On Fri, 29 Sep 2017 08:28:35 -0700 (PDT), jbeattie
wrote:

I still think the very best facilities are wide clean shoulders or
bike lanes. You can sweep them, and they aren't full of dogs and
walkers, etc., etc.

Ah yup. Bicycles are vehicles, the facilities for vehicles are called
"roads." The road just has to be wide enough. IMHO even a striped bike
lane is unnecessary. Here's the hard part- drivers and rders just need
to follw the laws, use some common sense and have tolerance for each
other. The problem with bikes as transporation is not infrastructure,
it's human nature which has a need to feel the world is "mine" rather
than "ours."

They allow for passing other bicyclists without hitting some on-coming
cyclist like the dopey two way cycle tracks -- which are fine if you
like conga lines or bike herds.

My accident back in May was a head-on collision with another cyclist, on
a segregated bike trail (actually MUP, but there was only us on it
there) through a park. Amazing amount of damage was done.

On Fri, 29 Sep 2017 09:15:06 -0700, Joerg
wrote:

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.

Unfortunately not necessarily.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Publication_bias

On 9/30/2017 7:18 PM, Joerg wrote:
On 2017-09-29 22:25, John B. wrote:
On Fri, 29 Sep 2017 23:15:56 -0400, Frank Krygowski
wrote:

On 9/29/2017 10:30 AM, 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...

If you count 3% as being "a lot more" than 1.5%.* Seems to me it's a
difference between negligible and negligible.

but 1.5% is a respectable number for the US.

IOW, you've lowered your standards to the point that you consider any
non-zero number to be respectable.


No, I just do not have a glass-half-empty mind like you seem to have.

Don't pretend it's a "half empty" vs. "half full" situation, Joerg.
You're bragging about 1.5%. Those who understand math know that 1.5% is
nowhere near half full. Numbers matter!

You have repeatedly brought up the health benefits. Did you suddenly
change your mind?

There are benefits to exercise. But those benefits occur only in those
who exercise. Every week I visit a town with bike paths, but almost
never any bicyclists in them. Seriously, I might see one bicyclist every
year on some of them. Those have certainly produced no measurable health
benefit. And despite your claims of potential miracles, that situation
exists in most U.S. towns. Remember, you're bragging about 1.5% -
something that anyone with numerical sense recognizes as negligible.

Cycling, like most things, is subject to the whims of fashion. It
may be "cool" for a while; then who knows? Muscle cars may come back in
style, and the teens whose moms and dads ride bikes may decide that
anything Mom or Dad do is stupid and geeky and must be avoided.


Doubtful.

Some of use started adult cycling during the 1970s "bike boom."
Multi-speed bikes were suddenly so popular, it was hard to find one to
buy in most towns; the bike shops had sold out.

That happened without any bike facilities, just like it happened again
in San Francisco just a few years ago, without any bike facilities.

Then suddenly, the popularity was gone. Yes, some of us fell in love and
kept bicycling. But I've met many more people who rode for a year or two
in the early '70s and never rode again. And they won't ride again even
if a bike path appears at their own front door.

(BTW, last Sunday the guy living three houses away from mine asked if
any of our bike club members would be interested in his 1970s ten speed.
That's 2x5=10 speeds, BTW.)


Sorry, Joerg, you're claiming Stevenage bike facility designers screwed
up based _only_ on the fact that almost nobody in Stevenage rides.
You're using 20-20 hindsight.

https://waronthemotorist.wordpress.c...s-not-britain/

Oh, good grief. The article is complaining in part that 1960s Stevenage
designs are not as good as 2015 Netherlands designs. It ignores that
1960s Stevenage designs were considered every bit as good as
Netherlands' at the time. It also complains that Stevenage has developed
beyond the reach of the bike trail network.

So what was the Stevenage council supposed to do? Continually spend
money each time a new bike trail design was proposed? Continually expand
the network each time a new development was built? How could they
justify that expense when almost no one was using bikes?

And the one thing the article gets right is actually its main message:
"the main point — that the primary reason people don’t cycle in
Stevenage is because it’s a town built for easy motoring — everybody is
agreed."

Everybody except you, Joerg!

1% is negligible in this field, just as it's negligible in almost every
other field.

So you want to promote spending bundles on segregated infrastructure to
get negligible results.


With that attitude we would never have had MRI machines, space shuttles,
jet aircraft, satellites, and so on. I have a different philosophy.

If MRI machines detected only 1% of the problems doctors looked for; if
space shuttles failed to reach orbit 99% of the time; if jet aircraft
successfully took off only one time out of a hundred, etc. then we would
have rightly called them failures.

Somehow the same math doesn't matter to bike segregationists.

--
- Frank Krygowski

On Sat, 30 Sep 2017 21:21:36 -0500, Tim McNamara
wrote:

On Fri, 29 Sep 2017 08:28:35 -0700 (PDT), jbeattie
wrote:

I still think the very best facilities are wide clean shoulders or
bike lanes. You can sweep them, and they aren't full of dogs and
walkers, etc., etc.

Ah yup. Bicycles are vehicles, the facilities for vehicles are called
"roads." The road just has to be wide enough. IMHO even a striped bike
lane is unnecessary. Here's the hard part- drivers and rders just need
to follw the laws, use some common sense and have tolerance for each
other. The problem with bikes as transporation is not infrastructure,
it's human nature which has a need to feel the world is "mine" rather
than "ours."

They allow for passing other bicyclists without hitting some on-coming
cyclist like the dopey two way cycle tracks -- which are fine if you
like conga lines or bike herds.

My accident back in May was a head-on collision with another cyclist, on
a segregated bike trail (actually MUP, but there was only us on it
there) through a park. Amazing amount of damage was done.

Thailand has a rule that, pending other proof, the larger vehicle is
deemed to be at fault so if an automobile runs over a bicycle unless
the auto driver can come up with some sort of proof that "the bicycle
did it" he will be forced to pay all costs. Medical care, lost work
days, new bicycle, etc. In the event of death he may be charged with
the equivalent of manslaughter although the normal practice is to
offer some form of financial compensation to the family of the
deceased which, if accepted, will negate any legal charges.

This doesn't mean that cars never hit bicycles but certainly does seem
to reduce the incident of the "attacks by pickup-ups" I see mentioned
here.
--
Cheers,

John B.

On 9/30/2017 11:49 PM, John B. wrote:
On Sat, 30 Sep 2017 21:21:36 -0500, Tim McNamara
wrote:

On Fri, 29 Sep 2017 08:28:35 -0700 (PDT), jbeattie
wrote:

I still think the very best facilities are wide clean shoulders or
bike lanes. You can sweep them, and they aren't full of dogs and
walkers, etc., etc.

Ah yup. Bicycles are vehicles, the facilities for vehicles are called
"roads." The road just has to be wide enough. IMHO even a striped bike
lane is unnecessary. Here's the hard part- drivers and rders just need
to follw the laws, use some common sense and have tolerance for each
other. The problem with bikes as transporation is not infrastructure,
it's human nature which has a need to feel the world is "mine" rather
than "ours."

They allow for passing other bicyclists without hitting some on-coming
cyclist like the dopey two way cycle tracks -- which are fine if you
like conga lines or bike herds.

My accident back in May was a head-on collision with another cyclist, on
a segregated bike trail (actually MUP, but there was only us on it
there) through a park. Amazing amount of damage was done.

Thailand has a rule that, pending other proof, the larger vehicle is
deemed to be at fault so if an automobile runs over a bicycle unless
the auto driver can come up with some sort of proof that "the bicycle
did it" he will be forced to pay all costs. Medical care, lost work
days, new bicycle, etc. In the event of death he may be charged with
the equivalent of manslaughter although the normal practice is to
offer some form of financial compensation to the family of the
deceased which, if accepted, will negate any legal charges.

This doesn't mean that cars never hit bicycles but certainly does seem
to reduce the incident of the "attacks by pickup-ups" I see mentioned
here.

Does that apply if a big bicyclist hits a little bicyclist?

I wouldn't like that. It's not that I'm very big; I'm very close to
average. But in bicycling, the little guys already have too many
advantages! ;-)


--
- Frank Krygowski