[SahAssar]

A subway is a high latency, high bandwidth carrier. A bike track is a low latency, high bandwidth carrier. That is in a subway all "packets" (people) need to wait for the next opportunity to depart, whereas in a bike system all packets move more slowly, but at a more continuous pace (set by the maximum speed of the transport).

A lot more people can pass any point in a biketrack per hour than they can per subwaytrack, and they can often take a more direct path to their destination using bikes than they can by subway. That also means that a bike system is better suited to a city where both the departure and the destination are diverse among all "packets".

That's not even starting to talk about how biketracks scale much better economically since they are much cheaper to build.

[trhway]

>A subway is a high latency, high bandwidth carrier.

Trains coming in each couple minutes - show me lower latency than that :)

>A lot more people can pass any point in a biketrack per hour than they can per subwaytrack

several hundreds (up to a thousand in rush hour packing) people per train each couple of minutes - beat that.

Anyway, the rest of what you're saying about biking is just a theory that doesn't come even close to the reality of any big dense city in Europe/Asia. This is why those cities has highly developed subway system - the low latency high bandwidth and high speed mode of transportation. You put all these people on bikes and they would choke the city.

[SahAssar]

I guess you have never visited Copenhagen or Amsterdam? Those two are pretty strong counterpoints to what you are saying.

[trhway]

I stated from the start that lower density smaller cities (which Copenhagen or Amsterdam are - having density 1/3rd and 1/4th of San Francisco for example) may allow for luxury of letting people to enjoy their commute on bikes.

[SahAssar]

High density usually isn't the problem for American cities (though it might be for SF, I don't know that one specifically), but rather low density suburban sprawl is. Higher density usually makes it easier to walk or use personal transport like bikes.

For it to be too dense for biking to be a viable transport they would have to be much denser than European cities which would by definition not allow for parking in the places where business takes place (in which case nobody would drive).

Most American cities were clearly designed with cars in mind, while most European where not (having grown organically rather than being designed), and while the American decision might have seemed better for the better part of the last 100 years, that might not be the case for the next couple of decades.