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How many cars are needed
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this post was submitted on 31 Oct 2025
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I guess for bicycles, you'd get that down to about 7 meters. Estimated from heavily used bike lanes in Copenhagen where at rush hour two bikes per second pass (7200 persons per hour). Edit: Here is a video of bike rush hour in Amsterdam - try to count the number of persons passing per second.
Fun fact: The distance at which bikes with good paths are faster than metros / rapid transit / commuter rail, or light rail is surprisingly large. I commute to the center of Munich, 14 kilometers one way. It is about 50 minutes on the bike and 60-75 by light rail. And I go at leisurly speed. Plus the bike is much more reliable (outside of icy winter weather, where bike paths are not cleared).
Edit: I'd like to add that for bikes, you don't need necessarily need a single 7 meter wide connection. Four connections, each 2 meters wide, will do fine, too!
Or just work remotely from home.
Thanks for that. I wonder if anyone has developed a rough algorithm for it? I'm sure it depends on the infrastructure. My city is maybe 25% designed for bicycles (optimistically) so I imagine it would score lower than a lot of modernized European metro areas. And that makes me sad.
The season just ended, but every Monday I go cycling though a different urban neighborhood with ~600 other people so hopefully we can make an impression and improve things.
I have seen web sites which show the estimated average travel time from one place in a color-coded map.
Practically spoken, you can compare the estimated travel time from public transit apps or google maps with rough route planning in openstreetmap.org.
Concretely, I use the https://brouter.de/brouter-web app at my PC to plan commute routes, and set my own average speed (which is about 15 km/h - younger people with a bit of training might reach 20 km/h). (One could also use the OSMand app on the smart phone (or one of its open source forks), which underneath uses openstreetmap and brouter as well. But I find the phone display just too small to do that comfortably).
The trick for going fast, safe and relaxed along longer distances is to select routes with few intersections and traffic lights. In my case, around 35% of the daily commute is a cyclepath at the side of a motorway, 20% is along Munich's river Isar, much of the rest are so-called bike roads with reduced speed for cars which attract a lot of bike traffic in the city.
Oh, and if you ever need to commute longer distances outside cities, consider a velomobile (for smooth concrete roads) or a recumbent bike (for dirt roads). They are great for that and you get more speed for your energy.
Yeah I had a commute through Boston US and the subway took 40-45 mins including 5 mins walk each end and the bike took 30-33 mins door to door. Subway was 50-70 for a while there when overdue critical repair work was ongoing. The subway route was straighter too.