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Why is Riding a Bicycle in the City Turning Into a Culture War
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this post was submitted on 05 Jun 2024
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Good luck with that. And the bike-riding population will do all their shopping far outside the city, where shops still survive? A cargo bike is nice for personal shopping, for deliviering letters or small packets, but you won't be able to fill the shelves of a supermarket this way. And whoever thinks about using freight trams for this, sit down and actually think this idea through for a change.
Delivery trucks are fine. They don't contribute to sprawl, are driven by professional drivers, and don't need parking lots.
It's personal automobiles that are the problem.
I was bout to write the exact same.
Cargo trucks cna also be limited to specific times, like 6am when most people arent in the street yet
Shall we take a guess at who the poor fella will be that has to work night shifts only because some bourgeois shoppers can't be bothered with the fact that full shelves don't appear through magic?
elves, dwarfs, hobbits and magic faires make it all happen
If I had a dime for every time somebody made this reply, I’d have a lot of dimes.
Nobody has ever said that. What people are saying is that the private automobile is the worst way to move masses of people in cities. They command ungodly amounts of space, make everything more expensive thereby, and aren’t even good at moving masses of people.
You want to increase the capacity of your road? You can:
Adding another lane never helped, it usually does the opposite. People will see there is "more" capacity and more people will use the road, causing even more congestion
Yes, you are right. You are talking of moving people inside cities. I am talking about a) getting in and out of the city and b) moving goods into and out of cities. None of the usual demands in this group ever even starts to address this.
What usually works better for moving people in and out of cities is park-n-ride setups where you setup a giant parking lot in the suburbs next to a metro station. People can just ditch their car outside the city and proceed using public transit. I often do this in Montreal, for example.
For goods, it's a similar setup but with big trucks transferring cargo to smaller trucks; this is already pretty common.
Just use busses and trams
And once people use bikes all over and you can get rid of the 10.000 parking spots, you can build much more local small shops. Nobody loves going to Walmart and nobody will if there are small local shops around the corner where you can simply walk to
Bikes ain't gonna work for people coming from far outside the city. I'm not talking about commuting distance, I'm talking about people who live in rural areas 2+ hours away from a city that need to come in occasionally. Having them make the whole trip by car necessitates maintaining car infrastructure in the city center, which will soon be co-opted by suburbanites. This use-case needs a bi-modal strategy.
You think that doesn't happen in the Netherlands? It's called public transportation. Trains, busses, trams, metro. People take their bikes onboard if they have to, get into the city, cycle the last little bit, and it's done
Also, if you gotta commute 2 hours you need a different job
I'm not talking about commutes, I'm talking about going to the city for an appointment/shopping/conference/concert/sightseeing/etc.
But yeah, cycling the last mile works in the Netherlands between cities or suburbs because they are relatively well served by inter-city transit, but what about places like this random dairy farm . Can this guy just take his bike to downtown Amsterdam?
No, but should be able to take a bus. Even so, let him use a car I don't mind, that's what they're for. Long distance transit, heavy hauling. The problem is with 95+% of the trips that are 4 miles and under where people drive their enormous pick-up trucks all empty. You can do those by bike.
Edit:
Just an example of what happens when you start reworked more and more car cities into people cities. You can still get there by car, it's just that public transport and bike and walking is easier so why wouldn't you
That's exactly what I was saying a few comments up. There's a use-case for cars, and there needs to be a way to get into the city when you arrive by car. Any good solution will probably involve parking the car somewhere outside city limits, otherwise it'll probably be co-opted by suburbanites.
In theory, P&R is fine.
But my experience with P&R is that they are generally so far out of the city and the bus/tram/tube/whatever connection is a normal "outside the city" link which goes every 30-60 minutes if one is lucky (during the weekdayday, evenings and weekends are way worse), and then stops at every lantern on the way to the city center. And still costs a fortune.
Additionally, the tram stop at our next P&R is not exactly handicapped-friendly. So I have to get my wife somehow into the tram, which involves a number of high steps at the trams' doors.
Yes, of course delivery trucks need access to cities, some goods are not practical to move by cargo bike. As do emergency services and buses. Nobody disagrees with this. The problem in many cities is that streets are clogged with useless private cars. So the obvious solution is to ban private cars.
Just because you have no need for a car, private cars are not necessarily useless.
Private cars in general are not useless, but private cars in the center of cities should be useless if the city is designed well. The space-transportation trade off does not make sense.
...if the city is designed well. You got the problem of the next city right on.
But even if I was living in a well-designed city, I would still use a private car, as moving handicapped people (like my wife) around on public transport is quite a nightmare. Yes, we have tried.
Sure, if you focus on the "zero" part of the phrase you can score a cheap point. Now focus on the "trucks" and the "clogging" part. A van can stock up a small to medium store just fine, and a walkable neighborhood doesn't need big box stores to begin with (and small business ownership is a plus for economic conservatives too). And with fewer cars carting individuals around, delivery vans can move in and out much more efficiently without clogging up anything.
Perhaps the idea is to find ways to articulate things that don’t lead to such obvious cheap points being scorable.
“Zero trucks on our roads!” <—- stupid idea that enables the cheap point
“But zero is a stupid number to aim for” <—- cheap point
“Well obviously not zero”
Then don’t say zero! Use your words precisely, as if you had some responsibility for what’s going on. Be more like an engineer, and less like a kid, with your speech.
Sure. Also, be a critical reader.
a critical mass reader?
Many smaller businesses could be served just fine with cargo bikes. And once every inch of free space is no longer clogged up by parking cars, it'll be easy to assign loading zones for bigger vehicles that supply supermarkets and the like. Now make those electric and everything becomes much quieter and less polluted. Then people will actually enjoy coming to the city centre again so business there can thrive.
Yeah I can only think of people envisioning small downtown stores only using small trucks/vans or the weird one underground cargo tracks (there is a startup in Texas pushing for that one).
Even then trucking tends to just make more sense from everything I've experienced, but what do I know
Underground cargo tracks is a nice idea, but hardly realistic. Can you imagine ripping open the whole city to build that, and the cost of such an undertaking?
If I remember right they were planning smaller deployments (think building scale, neighborhood scale) with boring tech being the solution to installation.
This can only provide a local solution. To make this work on a larger scale, you need the city to be built for this. So basically, this is a very long term thing.
I think last mile is probably the most problematic part of delivery anyways since it effects how the places we live are actually built the most.
Trains, ships, planes, and semis are all the solutions for the backhaul at the moment
It's not exactly some unsolvable logic puzzle. This is a problem not everywhere has, it's pretty simple.
Two solutions.
First, you create a second way in. It can be anything from dedicated streets for cargo with all the loading docks to shared warehouses at the edge of the city and underground tunnels like Disney. The main idea is to dedicate most streets to people and bikes, which can have all the storefronts
Or the easy way we could do far more quickly... Instead of slicing space you slice time. Limit deliveries from 4am to 7am, maybe an afternoon slot if necessary. The idea being people get the prime time, and you work out the logistics with that constraint
For better logistics, limit the size of the trucks and do shared distribution centers as a buffer for normal shipping times.
Ideally, you do #2 while transitioning to #1. Put a slowly increasing off hour delivery tax and create an incentive. The logistics will magically come together as the tax grows
Oh boy I sure do love being woken up at 5am because the loud-ass delivery truck is restocking the grocery store.
I don't know what it's like where you live, but I do sometimes get woken up by the garbage truck. Not often, but it's loud as shit and comes just before 5am... IDK if it's bad luck, but everywhere I've ever lived seems to have garbage trucks that came well before sunrise, and they're about the loudest trucks before you get up to construction vehicles
Unloading a truck isn't even on the same volume scale. Especially if we used small trucks from a distribution center outside the city. Other countries do it, and we do it already, just not in the same numbers I'm proposing
This doesn't sound like an actual issue to me
Adding more noise early in the morning doesn't feel like a good idea to me
So, why do we need a supermarket? Is there any reason a supermarket couldn't be replaced with it's contingent parts? A butcher, a veggie shop, a convenience food shop, a pharmacy, a bakery, and a condiments shop?
I don't see why they have to be stapled together when separate works just fine. All of which could fairly practically be stocked individually by small light duty trucks, or even a bike with a decently sized trailer.
I also don't see why even if you staple everything together, a cargo tram wouldn't work. Have two, a passenger tram that works one route, and a cargo line that runs by the loading bays of local stores. They can be switched on and off the overarching infrastructure without interfering with each other.
It would be a paradigm shift for the US, but I fail to see how it would be an unworkable one.
How do you think any of those are getting goods? If you ban trucks you'll just get cargo vans and then lots of smaller cars. Or they'll go out of business and people will complain you can't live in the city and move to suburbia. Again.
Ooh, how was that called again, proxy-arguments? They were answered 10 years ago already.
Mainly just economics. Supermarkets tend to have cheaper prices, and it’s probably a result of consolidating the operations to share resources (loading docks, refrigeration, payroll, etc)
Supermarkets should have cheaper prices, but now that they have formed a monopoly of just a few companies they are not.
Small shops keep supermarkets competitive, without them they become monopolistic.
That's not what I see here in Seattle. Yes, the supermarkets are monopolistic, but they are still significantly less expensive than going to a butcher, a baker, etc.
It's mostly an issue in rural and suburban areas. The grocery store closest to me feels like it's price gouging (Safeway) , and I try and go to other grocery stores for bigger trips like Wegmans or H-Mart.
Meat is especially bad, like $10/lb for ground chicken bad. Meanwhile at H-Mart it's $3/lb.
I see. I do live in an urban area these days. Anything specialized is overpriced (or maybe not overpriced, but expensive).
I agree. Which is why it was such a tragedy when we deliberately killed so many small shops in 2020.
And, all in all, they will need the same amount of goods to supply the same amount of people. And they will be substantially more expensive in comparison to a big box supermarket.