[jodrellblank]

> Did something bad happen to you relating to cycling?

A haw haw haw an ad-hom.

> You’re struggling so hard to paint bikes negatively

I'm writing pages of stuff off the top of my head, my biggest "struggle" is how you can't see any of these things exist. I haven't mentioned bike theft (compared to, say, shoe theft), noise pollution of squeaking brakes, people I see around biking while staring at their phones, the fact that we live in a car-world which is to a rough approximation the best possible world for bikes (lots of tarmac, lots of spread out things, low costs) and even then the vast majority of people don't own or regularly use bikes, and almost any other world would make bikes less convenient and more costly, making that worse. Not to mention the way you can leave maps and notes and sunshades and medical kits in your car glove box, but you always need to carry everything away from your bike, not to mention the huge change that sets in if you happen to bike at night and need lights and batteries and reflective clothes for safety, not to mention the extra difficulty of calling someone up to ask for a lift if they have nowhere on their car to put a bike, or leaving your bike out to come back to a wet rained-on saddle, or how cold your hands get held out in front of you, or how wearing a helmet messes up your hair, or how people desire a 'dashcam' experience and have to have it affixed to their helmet.

> I still don’t get your angle whatsoever. Every single thing you claim to want is advanced considerably, and we get closer to walking culture, every single time someone rides a bike instead of a car.

No we don't.

Take the "ungenerously small car" comment and look at the Top Gear clip "Driving in Lucca" - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c_eLViH7_YI - the ultracompact cars are the Fiat 500, the Citroen DS3 (~4m long, 1.7m wide) and a Renault Clio also ~4m long 1.7m wide. And look how they barely fit in the streets of a city built for humans. Look as they drive around, how there's no long straight roadways for a bike to get up to speed and make strong use of the vaunted efficiency and ability to cover longer distances more quickly. And if you tried, a chance of a bike popping out of any junction at any time at 10mph would make everything awful for humans who weren't biking.

At 4:30 in the clip there are ~7 bikes visible. That's approximately everywhere you can leave a bike in that scene including in front of some windows on the left. That's 7 people can bike to that street out of a city of ~85k population + tourists. There's no room there for a "small car sized parking for 10 bikes" turned sidways because the "ungenerously small car" takes up the entire human-size space and there wouldn't be room to take the bikes out and barely room to walk past.

What you get from bikes is not "closer to walking", it's "things built around distances too far to walk with the idea that people will bike those distances". Building around walking means building things close enough that nobody needs or wants to bike. It's like saying you get closer to reading by watching a short film.

> My argument is that bikes are better than cars. So we are in full agreement

I'm saying that bikes are /bad/ and you're saying bikes are /good/. That's not full agreement. Even if we both agree that cars are bad, I say bikes are bad for the same reasons, on a smaller scale, and for their own reasons on top.

> As a walker, I see people asking for bike lanes downtown as a good thing that helps me. You say you don't want bikes on your sidewalk, yet complain about how bike paths are paid for... you do realize that dedicated bike paths get bikes off the sidewalk, right?

... you're going to terrorise walkers into paying for bike lanes for you to use, so you don't have to pay for them? You do realize that doesn't sound nice or friendly, or what someone on "the same side" would say, right?

> For someone who brought the concept of externality to this thread, you’re actively trying to externalize time to exaggerate your claims. Cars are more expensive, and money requires time. You can’t count only the travel time to the shop while ignoring the extra time it takes to earn the money to buy & repair your car.

Me: cars have costs. bikes have costs.

You all: Why can't you see that cars have higer costs?

Me: I can see that. Why can't you see bikes have costs at all?

You: I don't understand how you can ignore the costs of cars are so big?

Me: I'm agree the costs of cars are high. Look at the downsides of bikes.

You: But her car emails!

Me: Stop focusing on cars. Bike costs. Annoying. Inconvenient.

You: How can you ignore the cost of cars like this!?

Hello? I know cars have high costs! I'm not /denying that/. I'm not interested in that because /I'm not supporting everyone-has-a-car-world/. I'm supporting nobody-needs-a-bike-or-car world specifically against the alternative most-people-need-a-bike-world.

> This isn’t true, you are making assumptions, making things up. Citizens fund Amsterdam’s bike infrastructure. Not walkers, not drivers. Citizens.

If everyone payes the same tax, that's another way of saying bikers dont' pay any special tax. Which is what I said and you said is made up, then said the same thing. ???

> the majority of my fellow citizens are asking for improved bike infrastructure.

Because the majority (>50%) of them want to use it? Or because they are willing to suffer paying for it to get you off the roads and sidewalks because you're annoying both pedestrians and drivers? Cycling England says there are ~160,000 bikes crossing London every day, but Transport for London says there are 2,600,000 cars registered in London.

Cycling England says "n 2018, cycling accounted for 1.7% of all trips". That's 99.3% of citizen-trips on foot and in cars and public transport "funding" 1.7% of citizen trips.

"England: 42% of people aged 5+ own or have access to a bicycle" yet "80.9% cycle less than once per month or never".

https://www.cyclinguk.org/statistics

> You are harping up a storm

A storm full of points you're completely glossing over in favour of ad-homs and diverting the talk about cars instead.

> Who pays for bike paths is not a major problem anywhere

Did I say it was a major problem? I said it was an example of something bike enthusiasts don't mention. In England 2% of journeys are by bike. That leaves "Citizens" paying for road and pavement usage for 98% of journeys and also paying bike path costs for some subset of 2% of journeys.

> And if it was a problem, it would be a great problem to have, because it would mean people are biking instead of driving.

That would be bad because you'd have a world built around distances too far to walk, far enough to want to drive, but unable to drive. What would get 80% of people to bike those distances in lieu of cars is most likely motorized bikes.

[dahart]

I wasn't attacking you with an ad-hominem, I'm sorry it seemed like that. I was honestly asking why you're so bothered about bikes. You have a lot of reasons, but I don't understand your overall thrust or point.

> and diverting the talk about cars instead.

You keep saying this over and over and over, yet I keep pointing out consistently that I'm primarily focused on bikes vs cars, and primarily responding to your comment here, which compared bikes to cars, and didn't even mention walking. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24186001 You somehow don't even see you're the one moving the goal post.

[jodrellblank]

Take a step back, I don't want bikes banned, or to stop you from riding your bike on the road or pavement tomorrow. We're imagining a future where we say that internal combustion engines emit too much air pollution and CO2 and should be replaced. One choice we have is to replace them with electric cars. Electric cars still have large resource costs around the planet because they're quite big, and have costs in their use in urban environments in parking spaces and charging cables and traffic lights and etc. (NB. another unmentioned thing - all the desire for self-driving cars isn't going to build self-driving bikes anytime soon).

There is an element of social unfairness where people need frequent use of tens of thousands of dollars of car to live a first-class citizen life, and doing without makes people second-class citizens in many ways. If we step away from cars (and for the moment, motorbikes and mopeds and so on), there are not many choices left, they boil down to:

1) Keep the world the same, solely switch cars for bikes.

2) Rebuild and rezone smaller and denser, but stop at bike distances.

3) Rebuild and rezone smaller and denser, to walking distances. Walking distances have to be very dense because people walk slowly.

The first is unworkable - 2% of journeys done on bikes today is not going to boost to 90%+ journeys done on bikes just by taking the cars away. The distances in the world today are built for cars.

The second has all the costs of cars but on a smaller scale. It has all the costs of rebuilding and rezoning. It has all the social unfairness of still needing a personal transportation device. And on top of that it has all the problems of bikes that I've been listing because they're not very good compared to cars.

The third, done well, has the massive advantages that you don't need a vehicle and get more money in your pocket. The cost of having to use walking effort instead of driving is offset by the fact that you don't have to walk far. The disadvantages of not having a vehicle are traded off with the advantages of not needing a vehicle. More people get a first-class experience of life.

The first is cheap but it won't work. People need cars now because everything is so far apart and it was built far apart because everyone else has cars. The second and third are not going to happen because rebuilding is expensive and people don't want to give up their cars. But if they did happen, the second is a chance to make hundreds of millions of people's lives simpler, cheaper, easier, less hassle, and lower global resource use, not done, stopped short of that, deliberately to make people have to use bikes just for the sake of people using bikes. It's a /tragedy/.

Even if the third happened perfectly, that wouldn't stop you from riding your bike to work. What it would mean is you wouldn't have to. Most people wouldn't have to, and wouldn't. If the second happened, it would mean most people couldn't avoid riding a bike to work because work was deliberately zoned too far to walk to prop up bike use.

> yet I keep pointing out consistently that I'm primarily focused on bikes vs cars

I'm primarily focused on humans vs vehicles. Bikes and cars both go on the vehicle side. I criticised biking to work, I have kept criticising biking in every reply, that's not moving goalposts unless you think I was cricitising bikes in favour of cars - I wasn't, I was just criticising bikes. Like the parent three posts to that one is "There's also a lot more people biking now and I'm hopeful that it will help shape future legislation to make the city even more bike friendly" - why? Why hope to make legislation to make the city more bike friendly instead of hoping to make the city rezone so people can live and work close enough that they don't need vehicles? "I want to see more bikes" why do you?