Build it and they won't come

On 9/28/2017 9:20 PM, jbeattie wrote:
On Thursday, September 28, 2017 at 5:37:38 PM UTC-7, Frank Krygowski wrote:
On 9/28/2017 10:05 AM, wrote:
It must be nice not to have to worry about the price of things.

Yes, it is. I was careful about spending all my life. It took me a while
to change my habits and spend money without worry, but I do.

My wife has pretty much the same attitude I do. When we went to Paris, I
actually had to convince her to shop for clothes. I don't think many
wives say "My husband _made_ me buy clothes in Paris!"

Tell me - do you people put your wive's on a budget and then complain that they can't handle money? This certainly sounds like the sort of thing that Frank would do.

No, Tom.

Or are other people paying your way?

Hmm. Well, I'm covered partly by Medicaid. Jay may be able to answer
your question. I don't pay much attention to that, because aside from
the insanity of trying to fill out forms, catch insurance mistakes, etc.
it just works for me. Sorry it doesn't work so well for you.

I think you mean Medicare (not Medicaid) ...

You're right, which shows how much attention I pay to this. For me, it
just works.

... and yes, Frank, you are a welfare king -- sucking off the public teat. A dead weight on society. Please exit left through the gift shop and down the dark shaft to the right.

We should all do our part. Tom's not very happy here, so he can go first.


--
- Frank Krygowski

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.

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.


Pointing to some examples where they screwed up as Frank likes to do
isn't going to change that fact.

But the examples I've given _did_ build it, and they _didn't_ come.
Don't pretend that's false.


You can always find an example where they screwed up. Conceptually that
proves nothing. Just like the ridiculous "bullet train" the leftists
want to build in California. It (hopefully) will never be built but if
it does the initial segment will run from nowhere to nowhere. Therefore,
ridership would be miniscule.


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.

Significant? What are the numbers?


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.

--
Regards, Joerg

http://www.analogconsultants.com/

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.

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.

European cities are different. People live close to work. The average bicycle commute distance in Amsterdam is a few miles. Bicycle facilities work in these environments, and they certainly make riding more pleasant in all environments (except for dangerous MUPs). NYC would work with millions of bike paths, at least during the parts of the year -- although dirt is too expensive for that to happen soon, and they would be overrun with pedestrians. But there are places where you could make the Amsterdam thing work.

Personally, all the attempts to Amsterdamify or Copenhagenize Portland have made it less rideable for me. The congested cycle tracks and weird facilities with ten times the numbers of lights and dangerous road furniture don't entice me to ride my bike. I chose to ride on the super-scary roads to avoid the facilities. OTOH, the rail-trail out to Boring and on the east side of the river are convenient for weekend rides -- except when they are used for charity walks (like last week) or cargo bike disaster drill races (a few months back) or what-have-you.

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. 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. Not my cup of tea.

-- Jay Beattie.

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.

European cities are different. People live close to work. The average bicycle commute distance in Amsterdam is a few miles. Bicycle facilities work in these environments, and they certainly make riding more pleasant in all environments (except for dangerous MUPs). NYC would work with millions of bike paths, at least during the parts of the year -- although dirt is too expensive for that to happen soon, and they would be overrun with pedestrians. But there are places where you could make the Amsterdam thing work.

Personally, all the attempts to Amsterdamify or Copenhagenize Portland have made it less rideable for me. The congested cycle tracks and weird facilities with ten times the numbers of lights and dangerous road furniture don't entice me to ride my bike. I chose to ride on the super-scary roads to avoid the facilities. OTOH, the rail-trail out to Boring and on the east side of the river are convenient for weekend rides -- except when they are used for charity walks (like last week) or cargo bike disaster drill races (a few months back) or what-have-you.

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. 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. Not my cup of tea.

-- Jay Beattie.

Jay - the other day on TV they said that one hour a day of sitting at your computer would completely stop any health benefits you'd gain from ANY exercise. I think that we're all about to die.

On Thursday, September 28, 2017 at 11:03:30 PM UTC-7, 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.

Torturing prisoners so that they don't want to go to jail again is what you're looking for? Underfed to the level of starvation? No health care whatsoever? Work the same as a healthy, well fed person expected of them?

I do believe that the punishment should fit the crime and that if it did we'd have a great deal less crime.

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. 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.

"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. 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.

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/.

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..

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).

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.

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%.

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.

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.

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.


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.


... The
average bicycle commute distance in Amsterdam is a few miles.
Bicycle facilities work in these environments, and they certainly
make riding more pleasant in all environments (except for dangerous
MUPs). NYC would work with millions of bike paths, at least during
the parts of the year -- although dirt is too expensive for that to
happen soon, and they would be overrun with pedestrians. But there
are places where you could make the Amsterdam thing work.


Sure. Folsom in California did make that work. So did Davis, big time.


Personally, all the attempts to Amsterdamify or Copenhagenize
Portland have made it less rideable for me. The congested cycle
tracks and weird facilities with ten times the numbers of lights
and dangerous road furniture don't entice me to ride my bike. I
chose to ride on the super-scary roads to avoid the facilities.
OTOH, the rail-trail out to Boring and on the east side of the
river are convenient for weekend rides -- except when they are used
for charity walks (like last week) or cargo bike disaster drill
races (a few months back) or what-have-you.


Hire on or volunteer with Guide Dogs for the Blind, then you could use
that trail to commute :-)


I still think the very best facilities are wide clean shoulders or
bike lanes.


Yes, those are nice as well. Though I do not enjoy riding in such a
noisy environment where every 10-20 vehicles you get a plume of Diesel
soot into your face. I always prefer segregated paths if available and
of adequate quality. My favorite is the lowest cost bike path there is,
singletrack.


... You can sweep them, and they aren't full of dogs and
walkers, etc., etc. 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. Not my cup
of tea.

-- Jay Beattie.

Jay - the other day on TV they said that one hour a day of sitting at
your computer would completely stop any health benefits you'd gain
from ANY exercise. I think that we're all about to die.


That's sounds like warmingist stuff :-)

--
Regards, Joerg

http://www.analogconsultants.com/

On Friday, September 29, 2017 at 9:05:19 AM UTC-7, 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. 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.

"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. 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.

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/.

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..

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).

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.

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%.

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.

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.

I support your ideas. Brown's supertrains have been a terrible idea from the start and have done nothing but waste money. Bicycles in San Francisco are OK because of the limited size of the business district. But something has to be done about the almost total ignorance of traffic laws by cyclists. In San Francisco probably half of the bike/car accidents are the fault of the cyclist. Licensing doesn't sound like a good idea but if they have Drivers Education in schools they should teach proper bicycling as well.

The easier you make it to commute into the highly congested areas the most you will congest them. Why are businesses tending to center on San Francisco and Silicon Valley in a day of the Internet? Why wouldn't there be a lot more business in Livermore when so much traffic comes from Stockton and Tracy areas?

The same with Napa - why are they spending hours in commute traffic instead of opening offices in Napa?

There is absolutely NO need for centralization. There is nothing gained by it.