[CalRobert]

Full size bikes on public transport doesn’t work well when crowded though. I briefly took a bikee recumbent (really small) on BART and it was great for me but pretty annoying for others for 1 stop (sorry if you went between Ashby and Oakland in 2011!)

Even in the Netherlands you need to pay €8.50 to bring your bike on, perhaps so the trains aren’t overrun.

[YawningAngel]

I think that is a very valid criticism. Equally, in the UK there is a sense of providers having tried nothing and then given up concluding that it hasn't worked. Some services that ban bikes legitimately cannot accommodate them safely, some can. Some services legitimately are too busy at peak times to accommodate bikes, and some ban them anyway because making granular policy is hard. In a similar vein, some of those same services that ban bikes due to how busy they are running eight of a possible 10 carriages because they claim not to need the space.

I think a lot of the rules turn out to be reasonable but the rulemakers should be less gung-ho about restricting bikes when they don't really need to

[CalRobert]

Yeah, among other things I thought it was odd I've only seen bike racks on buses in the US, but not in Europe (having looked for them in Ireland, the UK, and the Netherlands)