Why is Riding a Bicycle in the City Turning Into a Culture War
Why is Riding a Bicycle in the City Turning Into a Culture War
Here are some key reasons why a safety and efficiency issue is turning into a bicycle culture war.
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There should be zero delivery trucks clogging city streets. Zero.
Good luck with that. And the bike-riding population will do all their shopping far outside the city, where shops still survive? A cargo bike is nice for personal shopping, for deliviering letters or small packets, but you won't be able to fill the shelves of a supermarket this way. And whoever thinks about using freight trams for this, sit down and actually think this idea through for a change.
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Many smaller businesses could be served just fine with cargo bikes. And once every inch of free space is no longer clogged up by parking cars, it'll be easy to assign loading zones for bigger vehicles that supply supermarkets and the like. Now make those electric and everything becomes much quieter and less polluted. Then people will actually enjoy coming to the city centre again so business there can thrive.
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Sure, if you focus on the "zero" part of the phrase you can score a cheap point. Now focus on the "trucks" and the "clogging" part. A van can stock up a small to medium store just fine, and a walkable neighborhood doesn't need big box stores to begin with (and small business ownership is a plus for economic conservatives too). And with fewer cars carting individuals around, delivery vans can move in and out much more efficiently without clogging up anything.
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It's not exactly some unsolvable logic puzzle. This is a problem not everywhere has, it's pretty simple.
Two solutions.
First, you create a second way in. It can be anything from dedicated streets for cargo with all the loading docks to shared warehouses at the edge of the city and underground tunnels like Disney. The main idea is to dedicate most streets to people and bikes, which can have all the storefronts
Or the easy way we could do far more quickly... Instead of slicing space you slice time. Limit deliveries from 4am to 7am, maybe an afternoon slot if necessary. The idea being people get the prime time, and you work out the logistics with that constraint
For better logistics, limit the size of the trucks and do shared distribution centers as a buffer for normal shipping times.
Ideally, you do #2 while transitioning to #1. Put a slowly increasing off hour delivery tax and create an incentive. The logistics will magically come together as the tax grows
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Limit deliveries from 4am to 7am
Oh boy I sure do love being woken up at 5am because the loud-ass delivery truck is restocking the grocery store.
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I don't know what it's like where you live, but I do sometimes get woken up by the garbage truck. Not often, but it's loud as shit and comes just before 5am... IDK if it's bad luck, but everywhere I've ever lived seems to have garbage trucks that came well before sunrise, and they're about the loudest trucks before you get up to construction vehicles
Unloading a truck isn't even on the same volume scale. Especially if we used small trucks from a distribution center outside the city. Other countries do it, and we do it already, just not in the same numbers I'm proposing
This doesn't sound like an actual issue to me
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So, why do we need a supermarket? Is there any reason a supermarket couldn't be replaced with it's contingent parts? A butcher, a veggie shop, a convenience food shop, a pharmacy, a bakery, and a condiments shop?
I don't see why they have to be stapled together when separate works just fine. All of which could fairly practically be stocked individually by small light duty trucks, or even a bike with a decently sized trailer.
I also don't see why even if you staple everything together, a cargo tram wouldn't work. Have two, a passenger tram that works one route, and a cargo line that runs by the loading bays of local stores. They can be switched on and off the overarching infrastructure without interfering with each other.
It would be a paradigm shift for the US, but I fail to see how it would be an unworkable one.
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How do you think any of those are getting goods? If you ban trucks you'll just get cargo vans and then lots of smaller cars. Or they'll go out of business and people will complain you can't live in the city and move to suburbia. Again.
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Ooh, how was that called again, proxy-arguments? They were answered 10 years ago already.
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Is there any reason a supermarket couldn't be replaced with it's contingent parts?
Mainly just economics. Supermarkets tend to have cheaper prices, and it’s probably a result of consolidating the operations to share resources (loading docks, refrigeration, payroll, etc)
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Supermarkets should have cheaper prices, but now that they have formed a monopoly of just a few companies they are not.
Small shops keep supermarkets competitive, without them they become monopolistic.
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That's not what I see here in Seattle. Yes, the supermarkets are monopolistic, but they are still significantly less expensive than going to a butcher, a baker, etc.
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It's mostly an issue in rural and suburban areas. The grocery store closest to me feels like it's price gouging (Safeway) , and I try and go to other grocery stores for bigger trips like Wegmans or H-Mart.
Meat is especially bad, like $10/lb for ground chicken bad. Meanwhile at H-Mart it's $3/lb.
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If I had a dime for every time somebody made this reply, I’d have a lot of dimes.
Nobody has ever said that. What people are saying is that the private automobile is the worst way to move masses of people in cities. They command ungodly amounts of space, make everything more expensive thereby, and aren’t even good at moving masses of people.
You want to increase the capacity of your road? You can:
- spend millions adding lanes and possibly destroying houses
- turn a lane into a dedicated bus lane
- turn a lane into a bike lane
- hell, pedestrian areas have higher people capacities than car lanes
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Yes, you are right. You are talking of moving people inside cities. I am talking about a) getting in and out of the city and b) moving goods into and out of cities. None of the usual demands in this group ever even starts to address this.
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Yes, of course delivery trucks need access to cities, some goods are not practical to move by cargo bike. As do emergency services and buses. Nobody disagrees with this. The problem in many cities is that streets are clogged with useless private cars. So the obvious solution is to ban private cars.
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Just because you have no need for a car, private cars are not necessarily useless.
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Private cars in general are not useless, but private cars in the center of cities should be useless if the city is designed well. The space-transportation trade off does not make sense.
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What usually works better for moving people in and out of cities is park-n-ride setups where you setup a giant parking lot in the suburbs next to a metro station. People can just ditch their car outside the city and proceed using public transit. I often do this in Montreal, for example.
For goods, it's a similar setup but with big trucks transferring cargo to smaller trucks; this is already pretty common.
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Just use busses and trams
And once people use bikes all over and you can get rid of the 10.000 parking spots, you can build much more local small shops. Nobody loves going to Walmart and nobody will if there are small local shops around the corner where you can simply walk to
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Bikes ain't gonna work for people coming from far outside the city. I'm not talking about commuting distance, I'm talking about people who live in rural areas 2+ hours away from a city that need to come in occasionally. Having them make the whole trip by car necessitates maintaining car infrastructure in the city center, which will soon be co-opted by suburbanites. This use-case needs a bi-modal strategy.
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You think that doesn't happen in the Netherlands? It's called public transportation. Trains, busses, trams, metro. People take their bikes onboard if they have to, get into the city, cycle the last little bit, and it's done
Also, if you gotta commute 2 hours you need a different job
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I'm not talking about commutes, I'm talking about going to the city for an appointment/shopping/conference/concert/sightseeing/etc.
But yeah, cycling the last mile works in the Netherlands between cities or suburbs because they are relatively well served by inter-city transit, but what about places like this random dairy farm . Can this guy just take his bike to downtown Amsterdam?
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No, but should be able to take a bus. Even so, let him use a car I don't mind, that's what they're for. Long distance transit, heavy hauling. The problem is with 95+% of the trips that are 4 miles and under where people drive their enormous pick-up trucks all empty. You can do those by bike.
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Just an example of what happens when you start reworked more and more car cities into people cities. You can still get there by car, it's just that public transport and bike and walking is easier so why wouldn't you
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That's exactly what I was saying a few comments up. There's a use-case for cars, and there needs to be a way to get into the city when you arrive by car. Any good solution will probably involve parking the car somewhere outside city limits, otherwise it'll probably be co-opted by suburbanites.
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