this post was submitted on 30 Sep 2023
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Okay, maybe it won't help you, but there sure are people who don't commute 30+km each way and could use some part of the bike lane. Also, ebikes exist
Weather and hills really are not the main issue, I live in Switzerland. We have plenty of hills and shitty weather ;)
I live in Pennsylvania, which is more than two and a half times the size of Switzerland, and that's just one state. You cannot take an ebike from Philadelphia to West Chester, PA, nor would it be safe on country roads at night.
An ebike would be fun for getting around town, but it doesn't replace a car. You know the old saying, Americans think 100 years is a long time, and Europeans think 100 kms is a long distance. I drove 52 km to tonight to a farm for a party, and while I did pass a few horse and buggys (Amish country) there is zero chance that happens at all unless I have a car.
My experience (minus the Amish, probably) is fairly typical for Americans. Most of us commute at least 25 minutes by car each way every work day. I don't, because I work from home, but I still drive almost every day to sports practices, dance classes, music lessons, or visits to the grandparents. I own a bike, as does every member of my family, but we only ride recreationally.
I'm not saying a car never makes sense. But Americans go out of their way to justify using a car and refusing anything that might change that. Most people live near urban center probably in suburbs. Those are just very bad land use, but with some small changes, bikes could be reasonable to get to a somewhat close bus or train station.
Protected bike lanes, as I said.
Are those all 50+km away?
Sports and grandparents, yes 50-60 km, dance and music lessons are about 30 km each with occasional 100km trips to performances.
I agree that we do not have land use optimized for bikes. That's been my thesis from the beginning. We can not easily reallocate suburband land use to make it possible to navigate via bike and public transit. Adding protected bike lanes to country roads would cost hundreds of millions of dollars to widen, and that's before we start considering the legal costs of buying all of the land it would require. And then what? You still need to reconfigure the land use itself to create concentrated commercial spaces, because it's no good if I have to ride 30 km to the grocer and then 70 km in the opposite direction to the shoe store if I want to do two errands in a single trip.
As I've said, you're underestimating the enormoty of the problem and the distances we travel for normal things.
Maybe, but on the other hand, some villages are so small here (couple of hundreds of residents), but they have rather frequent (hourly or more) transit. Furthermore, suburbs are definitively dense enough for buses and bikes. In between, investments for transit are needed. And sure there are areas where it is probably not feasible to do so, but only few people are affected.