Anecdotally I used to have to drive 30 minutes through suburbia for any “stuff”, but then moved to a town of ~3000 people and everything is still available, and it’s at most a 5 minute drive away. I do have a car but also cycle quite a bit (eg to work) would do just fine with no car at all
Yeah, I moved to a relatively small town. Almost everything is within walking distance. Two pharmacies, two banks, and a grocery store and some other stores and a couple restaurants about a block away. Urgent care, doctor, veterinarian and hospital a couple of blocks further. Downtown, with its theater and restaurants and bars etc. is about a nice leisurely 20 minute walk.
People in suburbia could have this too if they just zoned for it. Take out the stupid strip malls and stroads and put the businesses where the people are and vice-versa. Get some actual neighborhoods and communities again.
Well out in rural areas is a bit of a different matter. Some people will need cars.
But with proper town development and decent public transit, something like 80% of people who aren't way out in rural areas wouldn't need cars except for vacation/road trips. That's not some far-fetched sci-fi idea. It just needs politics to properly utilize what we've had for a long time.
The rural -> city hasn’t stopped and modern economies have the vast majority of their citizens in cities. Even for the US rural population is less than 20%
The US suburban population is over 50% [1]. It is impossible for these people to walk/bike/transit to work, and there is not an easy way to construct the infrastructure necessary for them to do so.
You forgot that they maybee need everyday drive to the work that is not in the city and other people that life not in the city needs to drive in the city.
Does that mean that you expect the rural population to pay heavy taxes on pollution, or to be reduced dramatically?
They will be far more exposed to the increase in floods, fires, and hurricanes. Insurance will likely refuse to cover the most common and destructive scenarios.
And basic fitness which unfortunately rules out 80% of population in usa. Thats really the problem not lack of bike lanes that HN seems to belive is the panacea.
It's true that Americans are overweight and out-of-shape, on average. But it's an extreme exaggeration to say that 80% of them are so unfit that they couldn't walk or bike to work.
Of course, their poor fitness may make Americans less likely to want to walk or bike, but I don't see why we'd assume that this can't be overcome with the right set of incentives.
> But surely it's an extreme exaggeration to say that 80% of them are so unfit that they couldn't walk or bike to work.
That was a stat put out by CDC [1]. Even after aggressive 64 yr cutoff only 22.9% of U.S. adults aged 18–64 met the guidelines. 80% of people are willing to ignore CDCs modest guidelines and risk " many chronic
conditions, disability, and mortality " per cdc . do you really think putting a bike lane is going is better motivation than death ?
I'm pretty regularly out of shape by those metrics and I have no real issues commuting by walking/cycling/transit, even doing commutes which are longer than average.
Physical fitness isn't the biggest issue or even really a big issue at all, the biggest practical issues I've found is getting large items to your home and the fact that a lot of work really does take a real full sized vehicle to load up with gear and people. Cars and trucks you to simply move literally tons stuff from place to place in a very flexible way, whereas on foot/transit/bicycle it is very awkward to move around even 50lbs of stuff without some sort of cart or wagon which really isn't going to let you haul all that much more very quickly. It's hard to imagine how you're going to move a work crew from site to site using bicycles lol.
I really see physical fitness as really not being very much of a problem at all except on the extremes. Certainly not for 80% of the population. I'm also going to point out the obvious which is that people that don't exercise are absolutely the type people who should be avoiding using a car to get around everywhere.
I don't have the time to read this report cover-to-cover but, based on the quick skim I just did, it seems to provide very little support of your claim, These are just the percentages of people who don't meet the "2008 federal guidelines for both aerobic and muscle-strengthening activities during leisure-time physical activity." The report seems to say nothing about whether these people could walk or bike to work. It simply confirms the point that I've already acknowledged, which is that Americans are unfit, on average.
If there's a particular passage that you have in mind, feel free to point me to it.
> do you really think putting a bike lane is going is better motivation than death
At the risk of taking this argument too seriously: It doesn't have to be better. It just has to be additive. And making something more convenient can be very powerful. Among other things, unlike marginally decreasing one's risk of death, something that makes your commute easier/cheaper/more enjoyable offers immediate, ascertainable benefits--unlike decreasing the risk of death, which is impossible to perceive in the moment, is highly contingent, and only mitigates a risk that is presumed to exist only far in the future.
More broadly, I honestly can't understand what your position is here. Can it really be that adding bike lane has no effect on peoples's willingness to ride a bike? That just seems...obviously wrong. Of course, how big an effect a given measure might have is a different matter.
And, in any case, Nobody said that just "putting in a bike lane" would get the job done on its own. Though it seems obvious that even that very modest step would help. There are--quite obviously--a lot of other levers out there. I'm no expert but, just off the top of my head we could also make it less convenient to drive and encourage development that allows people to live near where they work.
Exercise is boring. I want better bike and walking infrastructure (including places reachable from home that way) because then exercise is an incidental side effect of doing things.
> Americans are so lazy and out of shape that making it easier to walk or bike would have no effect on their likelihood to do so? That just seems...obviously wrong. Of course, how big an effect it might have is a different matter.
80% are willing to risk a life of suffering ( per cdc) to avoid physical activity. I don't see how its at all 'obvious' that putting bike lanes is going magically get them moving.
Again, a citation to a specific passage would be helpful. But the executive summary seems to say exactly the opposite of what you claim:
> Generally speaking, the results support the notion that people value bicycle facilities, in that they are willing to incur additional time costs in order to use higher quality facilities. In particular, people value having striped bike lanes. The incremental value of this improvement is much greater than the incremental value of moving the facility off-road entirely. The presence of facilities also appears to be associated with higher amounts of riding, although the precise nature of the impact is still unclear. From this research, it appears that a facility can increase the amount of riding in an area even up to one and a half miles from the ends of the facility, but it is not clear whether the effect is larger for residents that are closer than this.
> In terms of facilities and their impact on biking frequency, this survey found only a small
relationship between proximity to facilities and the likelihood of cycling, within a radius
of a mile or so.
> Somewhat to the chagrin of many officials excited about the prospects of using community design to
induce—or even enable—physical activity, this analysis suggests an uphill battle lies ahead.
Anyways, perhaps you can cite your sources behind your claims that you say are obvious. Surely public policy like building bike lanes has to have some solid data behind instead of just wishful thinking.
Honestly, I don't feel the need to provide a source to support the claim that, if you decrease the costs of doing something, more people will do it. (Though, as I said a few posts ago, that's not to make any claim about the size of the effect, or whether adding bike lanes is enough on its own to make a difference.) If you want a citation, the Minnesota study seems like it supports exactly what I am saying.
> The presence of facilities also appears to be associated with higher amounts of riding, although the precise nature of the impact is still unclear. From this research, it appears that a facility can increase the amount of riding in an area even up to one and a half miles from the ends of the facility, but it is not clear whether the effect is larger for residents that are closer than this.
> But when 2,283 of the cyclists in these lanes were surveyed, 10 percent of them said they would have taken another mode of travel (i.e. car, public transit, by foot, etc.) if the lane hadn't been built. Another 1 percent said they wouldn't have taken the trip at all.
> This study finds a significant correlation between the presence of bicycle lanes and Capital Bikeshare usage, and also highlights the importance of population density and mixed-uses in encouraging ridership.
* https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2024399118
(Studies Europeans, though I don't see any reason why incentives would work on europeans and not at all on Americans--though maybe one would expect the effect size to be somewhat smaller in proportion to Americans' lower level of fitness)
> We find robust evidence for substantial short-run increases in cycling in European cities due to new provisional cycling infrastructure.
It bears repeating, though, that this isn't just about bike lanes.
I don't think this is true, there are also e-bikes which while much less exercise would mitigate the difficulty and still be some physical activity for Americans
It’s not a permanent condition. During my teen years I worked to running 5km in 18 minutes (teen angst and crushes did wonders for motivation).
30 years later and 30 lbs overweight (thanks, covid), and I decided to start going to the gym and I added the treadmill.
After one month my heartrate at the 10 minute mark at a leisurely 12:00 minutes a mile pace (nowhere near my teen years) went from 150 to 130.
Mostly it’s been about getting my diaphragm back in shape.
If I were smarter or more sensible I would’ve started with the elliptical first, but expensive running shoes and better techniques have kept my back and knees from hurting (so far).
“We can’t build an infrastructure for people to walk or bike more because everyone is too fat!” Add this to your standup routine, it’s truly the stuff of parody.
Probably because in North America we make it so damn hard to walk or bike anywhere, combined with a culture that teaches us that getting an acceptable level of exercise requires going out of your way to purchase a gym membership and find time in the day 3 times a week to go there, rather than just go outside and walk to get your groceries.
Is that really the reason though? In India ppl have to walk everywhere, Cars are still a luxury for a majority of the population. yet 50% of the population is obese and has one of the highest heart disease rates anywhere in the world. Obesity is driven mostly by diet, sure walking helps but 90% is diet.
This only works for city dwellers.