[chongli]

What about all your groceries? Your wife at the fertility clinic? Little Sally at the community pool? Grandpa at the doctor’s office? Bikes for everyone and a little cart for the groceries?

What if grandpa walks with a cane and your wife is 9 months pregnant? What if it’s below freezing and there’s 8 inches of snow on the ground? All of this to cut out a handful of parking spaces for a town of 500 in the middle of the Great Plains?

[avianlyric]

Electric bikes and electric tricycles solve your accessibility problem. As for snow, do the same think you do for cars, plough your bike paths and grit them. It’ll be quicker and cheaper than ploughing and gritting roads because bike paths are physically much smaller to serve the same number of people.

Or you take a half way approach, only have accessibility spaces in town, so those unable to use a bike, or similar small personal transport device, can drive and park.

As for groceries, we solved that a long time ago. They’re called cargo bikes, you can even get electric versions. Great for filling up with groceries and children.

Also we’re not talking about towns of 500 in the great planes. We’re talking about towns and cities of thousands to millions of people. You would have be an either an idiot or trying to be deliberately obtuse to assume this discussion is talking about villages in arse end of nowhere.

[chongli]

The bike paths are small now because hardly anyone uses them. If everyone and their mother was riding bikes around everywhere they’d have to be a lot bigger.

Furthermore, I think you’re really underestimating what it’s like to live in a cold northern place during the winter. There are snowstorms that go on for hours and hours and you need to plough and salt the roads hourly just for cars. Bikes are A LOT less tolerant of poor conditions so it would be even worse. Not to mention the fact that people like to be comfortable so nobody’s going to want to ride a bike in a blizzard. If a city tried to force everyone to use bikes then people would move away.

[avianlyric]

> The bike paths are small now because hardly anyone uses them. If everyone and their mother was riding bikes around everywhere they’d have to be a lot bigger.

A bike path capable of taking 200 bikes / hour is always going to be smaller than a road that can take 200 cars / hour. Bikes are physically smaller, you can fit plenty of them into the footprint of a single car.

> Furthermore, I think you’re really underestimating what it’s like to live in a cold northern place during the winter. There are snowstorms that go on for hours and hours and you need to plough and salt the roads hourly just for cars.

Most of the world doesn’t live in these locations. If your city is really so bad that it impossible to move around without a car, then stick with a car. Doesn’t change the fact that most places are perfectly compatible with bikes.

> Not to mention the fact that people like to be comfortable so nobody’s going to want to ride a bike in a blizzard.

Wear a thick coat. There are plenty of places where that have blizzards and the majority of trips are made by bike.

> If a city tried to force everyone to use bikes then people would move away.

There’s more to a city than just the number of cars in it. There are plenty of cities that already punish car driver heavily. Their populations still grow, their economies still grow. Providing enough roads and space for everyone to drive is not a requirement for a successful city, arguably the opposite is true. The worlds largest mega cities have the best public transport, and some of the most punishing and expensive to use road infrastructure. Just look at cities like Tokyo, London and Paris.