[astuyvenberg]

After spending a decade living and biking around Minneapolis, I recently moved to Boston.

The comparison of bicycle infrastructure (and number of people cycling) is stark. Given how bad the vehicle traffic is in Boston, I expected lots of bike commuters.

But there's no cohesive bicycle infrastructure here. Protected lanes barely exist, and even when they do, they suddenly end - leaving you on the side of a busy road.

Maybe one day Boston can catch up.

[bwanab]

It’s really problematic. Next door Cambridge is devolving into civil war over bike lanes on Mass Ave. The trouble is that to put in the bike lanes something else has to give. What’s giving is parking spaces which the merchants consider essential to their livelihood. Every time this comes up on Nextdoor it becomes a shouting match. Personally, I stick to riding on the Minuteman. My calculation of the risk reward ratio isn’t good enough to justify riding on the streets.

[nerdponx]

Ironically if you had better bike infrastructure you wouldn't need all the parking.

The MBTA bus redesign ought to help too.

But there is no reason why downtown dense city areas should be so car-dependent. It's not like people will stop going to shops along Mass Ave if they can't drive there!

What's worse is that even in surrounding suburbs, which have wide roads, the bike infrastructure is basically nonexistent, and car traffic is correspondingly horrible.

Not to mention the economic benefits to small businesses of having downtown bike infrastructure. Imagine how places like Malden would benefit (especially since there is already a bike path there).

[ocb]

It's a case of the relatively spread out development pattern and associated wide rights of way being advantageous. Minneapolis can tack on fairly substantial bike infrastructure without totally screwing over cars, which would be just as politically difficult in Minneapolis as any other American city.

The Grand Rounds help a lot too. It's a great basis to have inherited from the past.

[gen220]

Not a Boston resident, but have some friends up there who say that there are great bike paths for urban ingress/egress, but not particularly good for intra-urban travel. Does that match your experience?

[astuyvenberg]

I've put on about 200 miles since moving to Boston, and that observation does not align with my experience at all.

So far I've ridden one very good path connecting a few suburbs to Boston (Minuteman Bike Trail, a rails to trails path). There are other paths, but they're combined with running/walking trails and generally not conducive to bicycle travel.

The bike lanes of nearby Somerville and Cambridge are okay, but still lacking in comparison with Minneapolis.

[gen220]

Gotcha, that's disappointing.

I think my friends were riding along the Charles River, for what it's worth. They're more occasional bike commuters (once or twice per week) than a real serious bunch, and I don't know their start/end points.

Rail-to-trail appears to be how most longish (10 mile +) bike paths come into existence in the northeast, from my observations. There's a lot less "free space" to work with than other parts of the country, since the land is so developed / dominated by automobiles.

[rory]

I used to commute on the Charles River bike paths and esplanade. It is actually pretty great for commuting from the Allston and Harvard areas downtown, but that experience doesn't generalize to other routes around the city. And the last half mile or so to get to your actual office can be pretty perilous.