If you make it pleasant to ride a bike - people will do it.
Where I live, there is an off-street bike path that was completed about 10 years ago. Since then many new businesses have opened along the path. The economic impact of pulling people OUT OF A CAR and INTO THEIR environment is perhaps under-appreciated.
> The economic impact of pulling people OUT OF A CAR and INTO THEIR environment is perhaps under-appreciated.
All you have to do is stop and take a look at pictures where you see lots of people riding bikes or walking near businesses and then contrast that with a 4-lane road to get an idea of how much more economic activity is generated locally for a business.
If you don't have an automobile industry (and even if you do) you are pillaging your own economic well-being by taking thousands of dollars from families and forcing them to send it to far away places that make cars and oil and gas when they could be spending it in their own neighborhoods and towns.
It's fucking crazy that we do this. I don't know how much more emphasis I can put on it. Requiring people to drive a car 20 miles, 40 minutes, whatever to just live their lives is so stupid it defies belief. That's not to say you can't have a car (or two). It's to say that we shouldn't design all of our towns and cities around moving cars around instead of people. We're literally making ourselves poor trying to do this.
Think of the median income of a country that you might imagine is a "nice" place to live. I found a source that lists them all (in fictitious "international dollars", not USD). So here's a few:
* USA: $19,300
----
* France: $16,300
* Japan: $14,200
* Israel: $10,800
* UK: $14,800
* Spain: $11,800
Wow, we are so much richer than those guys. Our quality of life must be higher, right? This extra 30% money for everyone(!) must translate to a higher standard of living. Maybe we work more than people in those countries, but it translates to: less air pollution, quieter streets, less time spent commuting, more pleasant built environments, more beautiful cities, better health, more civil services, better parks and public facilities ...
Nope. All that money just goes to cars. We make an extra 30% -- and then turn around and burn it, literally, in cars, making everyone poorer, more atomized, more depressed, more unhealthy. For an unlucky hundreds of thousands of us per year, we are physically hurt; for 35,000 of us, we are killed!
> taking thousands of dollars from families and forcing them to send it to far away places
Not sure if it's what you meant, but that phrasing reverses cause and effect. The arrangement of homes, offices, and retail precedes most individual housing choices. In other words, people chose to live in places, already knowing what the transport implications would be. They weren't yanked out of their car-free utopia and forced to live a car-centric lifestyle.
I agree that the car-centric way we do transit and urban planning is absolutely disastrous and needs to change, but part of making that happen is not simply dismissing people's revealed preferences as something imposed from above. It's the solution that's likely to be imposed from above, and I'm OK with that personally, but in the political real world it pits a whole bunch of noble principles against the hyper-individualist anti-government attitudes prevalent especially in the US. That's how you end up with "ban all cars" on one side and "rolling coal" on the other. The trick is to understand and accommodate the reasons why people choose to live as they do, while still moving toward a better future.
> Requiring people to drive a car 20 miles, 40 minutes, whatever to just live their lives is so stupid it defies belief.
That's pretty misleading and tendentious framing. There's no law requiring people to drive that much: even in the most suburbanly zoned suburb, if you pick someplace close to your job, you have to drive far less than "20 miles, 40 minutes." If you have a more of a commute, it's probably due to optimizing for other priorities.
It'd be great if I could walk around the corner to the a coffee shop and a grocery store, but those businesses just wouldn't be viable at the density I also want to live in.
getting rid of the car doesn't get rid of the commute. Plently of countries in the world where most people commute by train/bus/subway but it's still 40 minutes or more on average to commute.
> It's fucking crazy that we do this. I don't know how much more emphasis I can put on it.
I usually jump on a soapbox whenever I see so much support for getting rid of cars on HN, so here goes:
Not everyone lives in a city.
I’m 100% in agreement for all of these arguments, with the precondition that you live in the city.
But many prefer and enjoy distance from neighbors, commerce/industry, and enjoy being surrounded by a more natural environment.
And many of these comments seem to completely ignore folks that prefer a quieter lifestyle over being surrounded by everything.
This is especially true as we move more towards remote work — if people are able to work out of their home, a percentage of those will want their home -- where they spend a large majority of their life -- to have some privacy and pleasant surroundings. Which means distance. Which means cars.
"We're literally making ourselves poor trying to do this." I guess you'd need to explain why we've had this infrastructure for the entire history of our country, and it didn't "make us poor" before. You're implying it so obviously doesn't work, yet it's been the default setup for every city in the country for a long time now. It very obviously has worked in the past.
The belief that the opposite is true is so entrenched that business owners in Manhattan vehemently opposed banning cars on 14th St for fear that it would devastate their businesses. Of course, nothing of the sort happened. The cars were banned and nothing happened except that the street got a lot quieter and safer.
Based on feedback from local businesses in early 2020 (pre-Covid), ~40% of food and beverage businesses reported that business had become either "worse" or "much worse" since the changes. Reports from "dry retail" businesses are slightly better and service businesses slightly worse.
This is compared with <20% of businesses that reported any kind of improvement in business conditions.
Traffic also increased substantially on some of the nearby streets, as expected.
A reasonable discussion on the impact of these kinds of changes can be had; but not if we're going to make up statements about what the impact of the changes was.
This attitude is common in my city as well. So many people seem to think that if you cannot park directly in front of a business then that business will fail.
Yeah Denver turned one of the residential roads in my neighborhood into an official bike road two years ago. They replaced stop signs with roundabouts, put up tons of signage, and where there are lights at major crossings they put sensors that are triggered by bikes.
Even though it’s still shared with cars, it’s so much more pleasant and safe because they are more aware and polite.
Went from biking being just a thing I do to get around to taking my son to and from school on his bike every day.
The problem is excessive deference by local authorities to incumbent business operators. Often the businesses have no idea how their customers get to their store. They assume everyone drives, but careful observational surveys often disprove this idea. This was shown conclusively in Toronto and Oakland by before/after studies. Governments shouldn't revere the input of local business operators. They should study the evidence and act rationally.
Yeah pretty simple. I've lived in places where I biked almost everywhere and placed where I've been scared to even get on a bike. Biking is my preferred way of getting around a city but some cities invite bikers and others dont.
This is a great and underrated point: high-speed traffic avenues are terrible for business.
As a retail business, you want to be in a place where actual humans are there and moving slowly enough to lay eyes on your storefront.
The only way it works for stroad big box developments are giant ugly signs designed to be visible for miles. Even then, someone might just decide to drive on by rather than dealing with a two-way center left turn lane against two lanes of oncoming traffic.
The other thing to remember is that cars can drive around, parking can be in the rear, etc - there's no reason to dedicate the prime real-estate to parking of all things.
And when buildings face the road and are closer to it, it becomes more walkable and rideable. You're more likely to slip into a store if it's up against the sidewalk than if you have to cross an acre of parking to get to it.
> If you make it pleasant to ride a bike - people will do it.
Just to put this context < 100 more people "did it". 138 -> 211 isn't significant at all. Also 138 was on day with 55 deg weather and 211 was on 75 deg weather. more people ride bikes on a perfect 75deg day.
I don't know if that's a lot of return on investment over six years. I love being able to bike in protected bike lanes but the numbers, I would say, are dismal:
>"While the growth rate change during each year was modest, the accumulated impact over the study period was more substantial – a growth rate in bicycle counts of 69% over the 6-year study period. Locations with an on-street bike lane, also showed growth though at a lower rate than protected bikeways. On average, these on-street bike lane locations saw 99 more cyclists on average during the peak period and a similar rate of increase in ridership over time compared to locations without facilities (26% increase over 6 years)."
It is also much more intersiting for the biker.
On many occasions I met people or interesting art / shops etc. while biking, I would have missing those travling by car or bus.
You are much more connected to your environment. You do not need an artificial entertainment system, the world itself is your entertainment, as it should be.
Slow travel is like going to a bookstore to get the latest O'Reilly book. If you walk or ride your bike to your destination, you're traveling slow enough to notice what you're passing, and you may notice something you've never seen before, or stop in at a store you've always passed on by, just like walking to the tech section in the bookstore would take you past all the other rows of books, which have a chance of catching your eye.
If you drive, you're going to your destination and are unlikely to be derailed or sidetracked, just like ordering a book from Amazon doesn't get much visibility into anything else, even with all their AI.
Minneapolis resident here. Biking is pretty serious in our city, even in the winter. Many of the bike lanes and paths are plowed with the same priority as car traffic. We also have the Grand Rounds, which is almost 80 miles of paths that circle the lakes in Minneapolis and further into St. Paul. It's pretty amazing.
The day after the Metrodome collapsed, I was able to bike to work on the greenway even though every road in town was out of commission. It was plowed with a higher priority than anywhere else!
Additionally, a lot of the county highways around Minneapolis have car-width shoulders. It's not all of them, but it's enough to ride 60-80-100 miles pretty easily without having to worry too much about getting picked off by a vehicle straying over the right lane line a little.
Fat bike in the winter; road bike in the summer; fat bike/mountain bike on lots of mountain bike trails in the metro and outstate all year. It's pretty great.
Note that the improvement was on protected bike lanes, which is the key. A dedicated bike path (even if shared with pedestrians) is the kind of thing that gets people who don't ride to try riding.
Painting some lines on the road can help once people are on the bike - we need more dedicated bike lanes and they should be designed to "shortcut" in ways that roads do not.
Even things like "mostly" closing an alley to through car traffic and making it a bike "road" can work - people won't cut through it if cars are blocked from getting to the other end, but they can still use it to access back alley stuff if necessary.
> Painting some lines on the road can help once people are on the bike
Nah, it really doesn't. It just creates aggravation for cars and bikes alike, as both parties are stressed out about small spaces and eventually who-went-over-the-line. The only place it helps is at intersections, to favour filtering; whether that's a good thing per se, I'll leave for others to argue.
This is one of those areas where politicians' default modes ("compromise" and "progressive improvement") just don't work. On busy roads, you either build wholly-separated spaces for bicycles and motor vehicles, or you might as well not bother. On tight streets, you close the street to motors or you might as well not bother.
Painting lines is only useful to assuage somebody's conscience or tick some abstract box, not to actual road users. And I say that as a motorbike owner.
The places I've seen where line painting works is where it replaced on-street parking; a bike lane painted on a road that is 10-12 feet wide works well, for some value of well.
The thin bike lanes added to roads are a joke most of the time.
this german documentary makes exactly the same observation and argument. street markings may help existing riders, but most of those will ride anyways, even without dedicated paths.
whereas protected bike lanes are what really attracts new riders
This was a case study with no control group. Case studies are, IMHO, close to useless.
Having read the study, I'm not impressed. No attempt was made to compare Minneapolis with peer cities as controls, that is, ones which did not increase bike infrastructure. A limited model was attempted regarding climate impacts, but beyond this little was done to control for external factors. Thus we have no idea if the change in bike usage was due to the bike lanes or if it was due to some other factor, such as societal, environmental, or other changes in Minnesota, or the US, which increased ridership over the 7-year inclusive (!!!) time period of the study.
Additionally, this study was essentially a before-and-after for the US's $25 million Nonmotorized Transportation Pilot Program (NTPP). The study is based on data gathered by parties highly invested in the program's success, such as Transit for Livable Communities (a nonprofit paid by Minnesota to manage the program), rather than disinterested parties.
Do I want to see cycling successful? You bet I do. Does this paper tell us anything much? No, it does not.
I'm a cyclist in Minneapolis, and I'd love to see even more dedicated bike and multiuse trails everywhere. I think it's critical for all sorts of reasons, and have personal investments in it at some level.
I had a sort of similar reaction as you to the study though. It's better than nothing, it provides some numbers that are consistent with one interpretation, and I believe that interpretation, but there are other interpretations.
One issue is that dedicated bike paths in the Twin Cities don't get put in random places. The money and municipal planning involved in them is focused on pathways that are of critical infrastructural importance, or where studies have already shown that they're likely to see a lot of use. They get put in places where the city and county wants to increase nonvehicular transportation as much as possible, to increase access to something (e.g., light rail, some kind of hub) or to connect two or more places.
So showing that bike use is higher in places that a lot of city, county, park, and DoT planners have decided there's a demand for, based on years of study, isn't entirely surprising. It would be like if five companies did a multiyear study of demand for product X versus Y, concluded people would prefer X, made product X, and showed that it sold better than Y.
On the other hand, you could go full circle and interpret this as just meaning the municipal planning studies are usually right, and people do like dedicated bike lanes, especially in the places their studies suggest.
According to Figure 6 from the study linked below, the trend in cycling levels in the Netherlands was essentially flat from the mid-80s to the mid-2000s. I recall (but cannot find) a source with statistics that suggest a minor increase since then, but much of the current infrastructure was in place 15 years ago.
It's quite generalized. If you're looking for more focused data and conclusions, public projects like these infrastructure improvements that are to some degree novel or pioneering (for the USA at least) are subject to a high level of attention and data collection over time. The city's website presents a lot of those results:
Minneapolis in particular has been remarkable in the USA bikey world for their investment in multimodal infrastructure over the last 15 years. In this regard they've long been widely regarded as a success and discussed in detail in blogs, magazines, etc.
After spending a decade living and biking around Minneapolis, I recently moved to Boston.
The comparison of bicycle infrastructure (and number of people cycling) is stark. Given how bad the vehicle traffic is in Boston, I expected lots of bike commuters.
But there's no cohesive bicycle infrastructure here. Protected lanes barely exist, and even when they do, they suddenly end - leaving you on the side of a busy road.
It’s really problematic. Next door Cambridge is devolving into civil war over bike lanes on Mass Ave. The trouble is that to put in the bike lanes something else has to give. What’s giving is parking spaces which the merchants consider essential to their livelihood. Every time this comes up on Nextdoor it becomes a shouting match. Personally, I stick to riding on the Minuteman. My calculation of the risk reward ratio isn’t good enough to justify riding on the streets.
Ironically if you had better bike infrastructure you wouldn't need all the parking.
The MBTA bus redesign ought to help too.
But there is no reason why downtown dense city areas should be so car-dependent. It's not like people will stop going to shops along Mass Ave if they can't drive there!
What's worse is that even in surrounding suburbs, which have wide roads, the bike infrastructure is basically nonexistent, and car traffic is correspondingly horrible.
Not to mention the economic benefits to small businesses of having downtown bike infrastructure. Imagine how places like Malden would benefit (especially since there is already a bike path there).
It's a case of the relatively spread out development pattern and associated wide rights of way being advantageous. Minneapolis can tack on fairly substantial bike infrastructure without totally screwing over cars, which would be just as politically difficult in Minneapolis as any other American city.
The Grand Rounds help a lot too. It's a great basis to have inherited from the past.
Not a Boston resident, but have some friends up there who say that there are great bike paths for urban ingress/egress, but not particularly good for intra-urban travel. Does that match your experience?
I've put on about 200 miles since moving to Boston, and that observation does not align with my experience at all.
So far I've ridden one very good path connecting a few suburbs to Boston (Minuteman Bike Trail, a rails to trails path). There are other paths, but they're combined with running/walking trails and generally not conducive to bicycle travel.
The bike lanes of nearby Somerville and Cambridge are okay, but still lacking in comparison with Minneapolis.
Not really surprised. The foundation was already there. Maybe 15-20 years ago Minneapolis started to build bike lanes along old railways and trolly lines. Some of the paths spanned the city and became thoroughfares totally isolated from traffic. The city had a good thing and kept at it. Good for them.
Worth mentioning is that the city has grown in population. That was designed by previous mayoral campaigns to bring in industry. Lots of suburban folks also started moving back into the city too in the 2010s, so demographically the city was ripe to see more cycling. There’s also just a better culture for exercise and outdoor activity in Minneapolis. It used to be one of the fittest cities.
I’m not sure this could work everywhere. Minneapolis has different planning than most cities I’ve seen. There’s a lot of residential space (that’s now being re-zoned), which means more room to build on and options in case bike paths reroute traffic. The streets are generally larger and there are lots of parallel avenues and boulevards that facilitate partitioning of cyclists and cars. Personally, I find this to be ideal for commuting, and Minneapolis began to experiment with closing streets to cyclists a long time ago. I’ll stop myself from ranting about the budget for interstates and road maintenance compared to the cost of 76mi bike lanes though.
Concur. I lived in minneapolis for a long time, and biked almost 100% (except winter). I have never felt more un-safe than when I tried to live this lifestyle in LA. In Minneapolis, you could ride along bike-specific greenways and literally stop at bike-only pubs, coffee shops, etc. It was quite accommodating.
I'm sure much of that has changed with recent events, but I'm moving back and am cautiously optimistic.
I want to call out their conversion of old railways to "greenways" though. Rail lines are straight, off the main roads, have their own bridges, and usually run into the old warehouse areas that are actually the new build-up areas with all the cool bars, student housing, etc. Really smart use of existing infra.
I’ve been a bike commuter in Minneapolis for almost two decades at this point. It’s much better than it was. In the early 2000s I’d say most cars were not used to or expecting to share the streets with other forms of transportation. Back then it was not uncommon to have motorists hurl insults or trash at you from their window. Today it’s not that difficult to route your commute to most places entirely on bike specific infrastructure. On the other hand, over the last five years and especially since the pandemic I’ve noticed a huge increase in distracted drivers who are driving dangerously and unpredictably. All this is to say, a lot of people have done a lot of hard work which has made this a better place to live and bike in, but there is still a long way to go.
Readit News
Where I live, there is an off-street bike path that was completed about 10 years ago. Since then many new businesses have opened along the path. The economic impact of pulling people OUT OF A CAR and INTO THEIR environment is perhaps under-appreciated.
All you have to do is stop and take a look at pictures where you see lots of people riding bikes or walking near businesses and then contrast that with a 4-lane road to get an idea of how much more economic activity is generated locally for a business.
If you don't have an automobile industry (and even if you do) you are pillaging your own economic well-being by taking thousands of dollars from families and forcing them to send it to far away places that make cars and oil and gas when they could be spending it in their own neighborhoods and towns.
It's fucking crazy that we do this. I don't know how much more emphasis I can put on it. Requiring people to drive a car 20 miles, 40 minutes, whatever to just live their lives is so stupid it defies belief. That's not to say you can't have a car (or two). It's to say that we shouldn't design all of our towns and cities around moving cars around instead of people. We're literally making ourselves poor trying to do this.
Think of the median income of a country that you might imagine is a "nice" place to live. I found a source that lists them all (in fictitious "international dollars", not USD). So here's a few:
* USA: $19,300
----
* France: $16,300
* Japan: $14,200
* Israel: $10,800
* UK: $14,800
* Spain: $11,800
Wow, we are so much richer than those guys. Our quality of life must be higher, right? This extra 30% money for everyone(!) must translate to a higher standard of living. Maybe we work more than people in those countries, but it translates to: less air pollution, quieter streets, less time spent commuting, more pleasant built environments, more beautiful cities, better health, more civil services, better parks and public facilities ...
Nope. All that money just goes to cars. We make an extra 30% -- and then turn around and burn it, literally, in cars, making everyone poorer, more atomized, more depressed, more unhealthy. For an unlucky hundreds of thousands of us per year, we are physically hurt; for 35,000 of us, we are killed!
For what?
Not sure if it's what you meant, but that phrasing reverses cause and effect. The arrangement of homes, offices, and retail precedes most individual housing choices. In other words, people chose to live in places, already knowing what the transport implications would be. They weren't yanked out of their car-free utopia and forced to live a car-centric lifestyle.
I agree that the car-centric way we do transit and urban planning is absolutely disastrous and needs to change, but part of making that happen is not simply dismissing people's revealed preferences as something imposed from above. It's the solution that's likely to be imposed from above, and I'm OK with that personally, but in the political real world it pits a whole bunch of noble principles against the hyper-individualist anti-government attitudes prevalent especially in the US. That's how you end up with "ban all cars" on one side and "rolling coal" on the other. The trick is to understand and accommodate the reasons why people choose to live as they do, while still moving toward a better future.
That's pretty misleading and tendentious framing. There's no law requiring people to drive that much: even in the most suburbanly zoned suburb, if you pick someplace close to your job, you have to drive far less than "20 miles, 40 minutes." If you have a more of a commute, it's probably due to optimizing for other priorities.
It'd be great if I could walk around the corner to the a coffee shop and a grocery store, but those businesses just wouldn't be viable at the density I also want to live in.
I usually jump on a soapbox whenever I see so much support for getting rid of cars on HN, so here goes:
Not everyone lives in a city.
I’m 100% in agreement for all of these arguments, with the precondition that you live in the city.
But many prefer and enjoy distance from neighbors, commerce/industry, and enjoy being surrounded by a more natural environment.
And many of these comments seem to completely ignore folks that prefer a quieter lifestyle over being surrounded by everything.
This is especially true as we move more towards remote work — if people are able to work out of their home, a percentage of those will want their home -- where they spend a large majority of their life -- to have some privacy and pleasant surroundings. Which means distance. Which means cars.
This is compared with <20% of businesses that reported any kind of improvement in business conditions.
https://static1.squarespace.com/static/5bc63eb90b77bd20c50c5... (page 21)
Traffic also increased substantially on some of the nearby streets, as expected.
A reasonable discussion on the impact of these kinds of changes can be had; but not if we're going to make up statements about what the impact of the changes was.
Even though it’s still shared with cars, it’s so much more pleasant and safe because they are more aware and polite.
Went from biking being just a thing I do to get around to taking my son to and from school on his bike every day.
There's a lovely saying in Dutch urban design circles, "Build for the traffic you want, not the traffic you have."
As a retail business, you want to be in a place where actual humans are there and moving slowly enough to lay eyes on your storefront.
The only way it works for stroad big box developments are giant ugly signs designed to be visible for miles. Even then, someone might just decide to drive on by rather than dealing with a two-way center left turn lane against two lanes of oncoming traffic.
And when buildings face the road and are closer to it, it becomes more walkable and rideable. You're more likely to slip into a store if it's up against the sidewalk than if you have to cross an acre of parking to get to it.
Just to put this context < 100 more people "did it". 138 -> 211 isn't significant at all. Also 138 was on day with 55 deg weather and 211 was on 75 deg weather. more people ride bikes on a perfect 75deg day.
>"While the growth rate change during each year was modest, the accumulated impact over the study period was more substantial – a growth rate in bicycle counts of 69% over the 6-year study period. Locations with an on-street bike lane, also showed growth though at a lower rate than protected bikeways. On average, these on-street bike lane locations saw 99 more cyclists on average during the peak period and a similar rate of increase in ridership over time compared to locations without facilities (26% increase over 6 years)."
If you drive, you're going to your destination and are unlikely to be derailed or sidetracked, just like ordering a book from Amazon doesn't get much visibility into anything else, even with all their AI.
Fat bike in the winter; road bike in the summer; fat bike/mountain bike on lots of mountain bike trails in the metro and outstate all year. It's pretty great.
Painting some lines on the road can help once people are on the bike - we need more dedicated bike lanes and they should be designed to "shortcut" in ways that roads do not.
Even things like "mostly" closing an alley to through car traffic and making it a bike "road" can work - people won't cut through it if cars are blocked from getting to the other end, but they can still use it to access back alley stuff if necessary.
Nah, it really doesn't. It just creates aggravation for cars and bikes alike, as both parties are stressed out about small spaces and eventually who-went-over-the-line. The only place it helps is at intersections, to favour filtering; whether that's a good thing per se, I'll leave for others to argue.
This is one of those areas where politicians' default modes ("compromise" and "progressive improvement") just don't work. On busy roads, you either build wholly-separated spaces for bicycles and motor vehicles, or you might as well not bother. On tight streets, you close the street to motors or you might as well not bother.
Painting lines is only useful to assuage somebody's conscience or tick some abstract box, not to actual road users. And I say that as a motorbike owner.
The thin bike lanes added to roads are a joke most of the time.
this german documentary makes exactly the same observation and argument. street markings may help existing riders, but most of those will ride anyways, even without dedicated paths.
whereas protected bike lanes are what really attracts new riders
Having read the study, I'm not impressed. No attempt was made to compare Minneapolis with peer cities as controls, that is, ones which did not increase bike infrastructure. A limited model was attempted regarding climate impacts, but beyond this little was done to control for external factors. Thus we have no idea if the change in bike usage was due to the bike lanes or if it was due to some other factor, such as societal, environmental, or other changes in Minnesota, or the US, which increased ridership over the 7-year inclusive (!!!) time period of the study.
Additionally, this study was essentially a before-and-after for the US's $25 million Nonmotorized Transportation Pilot Program (NTPP). The study is based on data gathered by parties highly invested in the program's success, such as Transit for Livable Communities (a nonprofit paid by Minnesota to manage the program), rather than disinterested parties.
Do I want to see cycling successful? You bet I do. Does this paper tell us anything much? No, it does not.
I had a sort of similar reaction as you to the study though. It's better than nothing, it provides some numbers that are consistent with one interpretation, and I believe that interpretation, but there are other interpretations.
One issue is that dedicated bike paths in the Twin Cities don't get put in random places. The money and municipal planning involved in them is focused on pathways that are of critical infrastructural importance, or where studies have already shown that they're likely to see a lot of use. They get put in places where the city and county wants to increase nonvehicular transportation as much as possible, to increase access to something (e.g., light rail, some kind of hub) or to connect two or more places.
So showing that bike use is higher in places that a lot of city, county, park, and DoT planners have decided there's a demand for, based on years of study, isn't entirely surprising. It would be like if five companies did a multiyear study of demand for product X versus Y, concluded people would prefer X, made product X, and showed that it sold better than Y.
On the other hand, you could go full circle and interpret this as just meaning the municipal planning studies are usually right, and people do like dedicated bike lanes, especially in the places their studies suggest.
http://web.archive.org/web/20150211090849/http://www.policy....
https://www2.minneapolismn.gov/government/departments/public...
Minneapolis in particular has been remarkable in the USA bikey world for their investment in multimodal infrastructure over the last 15 years. In this regard they've long been widely regarded as a success and discussed in detail in blogs, magazines, etc.
The comparison of bicycle infrastructure (and number of people cycling) is stark. Given how bad the vehicle traffic is in Boston, I expected lots of bike commuters.
But there's no cohesive bicycle infrastructure here. Protected lanes barely exist, and even when they do, they suddenly end - leaving you on the side of a busy road.
Maybe one day Boston can catch up.
The MBTA bus redesign ought to help too.
But there is no reason why downtown dense city areas should be so car-dependent. It's not like people will stop going to shops along Mass Ave if they can't drive there!
What's worse is that even in surrounding suburbs, which have wide roads, the bike infrastructure is basically nonexistent, and car traffic is correspondingly horrible.
Not to mention the economic benefits to small businesses of having downtown bike infrastructure. Imagine how places like Malden would benefit (especially since there is already a bike path there).
The Grand Rounds help a lot too. It's a great basis to have inherited from the past.
So far I've ridden one very good path connecting a few suburbs to Boston (Minuteman Bike Trail, a rails to trails path). There are other paths, but they're combined with running/walking trails and generally not conducive to bicycle travel.
The bike lanes of nearby Somerville and Cambridge are okay, but still lacking in comparison with Minneapolis.
Worth mentioning is that the city has grown in population. That was designed by previous mayoral campaigns to bring in industry. Lots of suburban folks also started moving back into the city too in the 2010s, so demographically the city was ripe to see more cycling. There’s also just a better culture for exercise and outdoor activity in Minneapolis. It used to be one of the fittest cities.
I’m not sure this could work everywhere. Minneapolis has different planning than most cities I’ve seen. There’s a lot of residential space (that’s now being re-zoned), which means more room to build on and options in case bike paths reroute traffic. The streets are generally larger and there are lots of parallel avenues and boulevards that facilitate partitioning of cyclists and cars. Personally, I find this to be ideal for commuting, and Minneapolis began to experiment with closing streets to cyclists a long time ago. I’ll stop myself from ranting about the budget for interstates and road maintenance compared to the cost of 76mi bike lanes though.
I'm sure much of that has changed with recent events, but I'm moving back and am cautiously optimistic.
So like 50%?