I love bike/scooter shares because I can ride one way and if it's raining later, I'll take the bus. Biking is almost always fastest for a short/medium trip. I also have a pretty high tolerance to being out in the rain - waterproof shoes are the secret to being a pedestrian in a rainy city. I like Vessi. They don't feel that sturdy but I've put 100s of miles on my current pair and can still walk straight through a puddle and keep my socks dry.
There is no one transportation mode which works for every single person in every situation, including cars. That's why a healthy city supports a mix of transportation modes, and an emphasis on density.
> Looking at the top 5% most rainy hours of the year in Dublin, usage rates dropped to 81% of the average. In Seville and Valencia, those numbers were 79% and 74%. In Chicago, though, it was down to 47%. In Melbourne it was 46%, and in Vancouver usage was as low as 22% of the average.
> Again, you’d be forgiven for thinking this can all be explained by acclimatisation. Folks in Dublin, say, are used to miserable weather, so it makes sense they’d be happier to ride in it. But according to Dr Bean and co, it’s more complicated than that.
> Seville and Valencia are both rather dry, and yet rain in those cities doesn’t make that much of a difference to cyclist numbers. Why? Well, as the researchers speculate: “The difference could be that Seville and Valencia have large [bike share] systems and safe cycling infrastructure whereas Melbourne only had a small system not useful for commuters.”
> It might be that good, safe cycling infrastructure is enough to encourage people to ride even if the weather is bad. But when bike share infrastructure is bad (e.g. like it was in Melbourne), and the weather is bad, that’s a recipe for lower cyclist numbers.
I think this is just a matter of variance masked by their use of relative (vs absolute) units. I'll bet Chicago had storm/flood/tornado warnings on many of those days. Is the weather in Dublin, Seville, and Valencia as extreme as Chicago, Vancouver, & Melbourne?
I'm the lead paper author; the data for the study is all available from https://data.mendeley.com/datasets/2nxpvtz935/2 so you can look at, and analyse, the rain/UTCI impacts there. The models in the paper use absolute numbers - doing inter-city comparisons of weather is hard; you'll be criticized no matter what you choose to do.
The underlying weather data is from ERA5 - https://www.ecmwf.int/en/forecasts/datasets/reanalysis-datas... ... to answer questions like "is the weather in X, Y and Z as extreme as in A, B, and C" is going to be a deep question probably best assessed by looking at some of the other ERA5 data variables.
It could be attempts to not be opinionated, but the author doesn't seem to be a daily/commuting bike rider. I guess it is bikeshare data so there isn't various subsegments like road/mtb/fattire bike usage, electric assist vs manual, etc.
I did some three and a half season commuting one year (my bike couldn't handle substantial snow, if I had a fattire I would have done most of the snow days). This is in a northern midwestern state so it is -20 F to 100 F in full seasonal range. Non-assisted, I'm in good shape.
You'd also need information on whether they have showering facilities, secured parking for the bike, a permanent locker/space for the commuting clothes, backup rainsuit, toiletries, towel.
For my 5 mile commute, generally I lost nothing in time assuming the usual gridlock for the cars and parking in a garage. Showering was basically timeshifting with a bit of PITA.
But the big issue is that, compared to busses or even a really cheap used car, it doesn't really save that much money. You need to buy a lot of weather-specific clothing, the maintenance of the bike surprisingly adds up, flat tires are a big PITA compared to a donut wheel, and the rain is so hard... it just gets everywhere it seems.
And bikes always seem to steal about 10-15 minutes at either end, mostly due to security/storing/getting out of storage. Bike locks are a PITA. Bikes run into everything like doors as you hold them open.
So if city governments are serious, they need to get parking garages to pony up free secured storage space, incent those Planet Fitness places (which have the largest number of urban locations for a semi-public shower) to offer subsidized free or near-free access to shower and a free/near-free locker and/or subsidize work showers and lockers and storage. Subsidize/incent a bike rescue/repair service. Then there's the usual bike lanes/trails/crazy driver problem. In for-profit-healthcare America, biking is a substantial risk.
That said, for my 5 mile commute, I far preferred biking over driving, well, as long as it wasn't raining. Bundling up down to 25 degrees F had no effect on my enjoyment.
I also lived in a downtown and when it's nice enough to bike, it transforms living in a city substantially. You can hop on a bike (with the usual 10 minute annoyance) and basically teleport somewhere else in the city in 5-10 minutes. You can't do that with a car and parking, or walking.
The other big issue with urban bike transport is that it is almost impossible to take a left turn safely. And if you really want to make biking in the city nice, "superhighway" bike lanes with no lights make things so much easier. A lot of old railway lines going through cities can become these.
Nothing crystallized the (and I hate using this word) privilege-inducing psychology of cars than the difference in effort between getting going on a bike from a red light and a car. One involves almost a full-body mini-sprint that uses all your muscles, the other involves releasing a couple muscles in your shin to drop a pedal about a half an inch. The psychology of having a device with 100-500x the power output as a human controlled with the smallest of muscular movements coddles you, makes you impatient, and introduces a distinct and dangerous bully complex to the car-bicycle relationship if that person has any insecurity.
Heck the boring company should probably have started with a small-scale bike commuting tunnel as a POC. I also wonder if building elevated bike trails is really that expensive if we threw some civil and materials engineers at it for a bit.
Almost everything I stated was for the scooters too, it's just that they are slow and ridden by utter morons about 50% of the time, which shows I guess they are tapping a new market, since bike riders would never use them in that manner.
In Copenhagen I can only claim a –5°C to 25°C range, but over 60% of people commute by bicycle.
Few workplaces have showers, and even where they exist, not many people use them. It's not necessary – we aren't training for the Tour du France on the way to work.
A reasonable bicycle costs around €250-600. It should easily last 5 years. The only bicycle-only clothes I own is a pair of waterproof overtrousers (€15-ish).
I seem to get a puncture about every 18 months or so. I can fix it myself for €1 (patch) or €5 (new tube), or pay someone about €20 to fix it for me.
The delay at either end is measured in seconds, not minutes. Cycle parking is almost always more conveniently located than car parking. My bike is "locked" the Danish way, with just a rear wheel lock. I have occasionally spent 5 minutes looking for my bike, when I park it somewhere busy and forget where I left it, or someone has moved it to sweep up leaves. (I have done the same with a car, except for the leaves.)
> Then there's the usual bike lanes/trails/crazy driver problem.
Make it safe enough for a 7 year old child to cycle to school, and the most expensive part of the job is done. The rest (parking, showers, free repairs etc) is just decoration.
(But copy the Netherlands if possible. Copy Denmark if the Dutch way appears politically unachievable.)
> Almost everything I stated was for the scooters too, it's just that they are slow and ridden by utter morons about 50% of the time, which shows I guess they are tapping a new market, since bike riders would never use them in that manner.
With the assumption that approximately everyone in Copenhagen is a bike rider, I claim that it's the rented e-scooter that turns people into morons. I don't know why, but something about them makes normal people decide to dump them in the middle of the footpath, or have 3 people zooming around on one through a pedestrian area.
After less than a year, the e-scooters rental were banned from starting or ending in the city centre.
>Few workplaces have showers, and even where they exist, not many people use them. It's not necessary – we aren't training for the Tour du France on the way to work.
A big factor here is that Copenhagen is quite flat. It's easy to pick a comfortable pace that stays below the "sweat threshold". If hills (even small ones) are involved, it can be impractical to move slowly enough to stay below that threshold.
I don't really agree on the cost. I ride bike by -15C and the only specific thing I have is studded tires, which are about 200$ the pair and last at least 4/5 winters. Pants, jacket and gloves are anyways needed even to walk in winter so no read additional cost. What's more When it's cold it snows and doesn't rain so you just just warm clothes, not even waterproof ones so I use to just have warm sweatpants. A car would be a least 400$/month so much much more expensive, which is Why I don't have one. Chain maintenance and oils are peanuts, I've spent less than 50$ in three years.
The worst season for me is mostly the fall where it gets around 0C with rain and wind and then it gets super annoying to ride. I'd take -5 and snow anyway over a windy rainy day at 10C
Your cost calculation is a little off. I commute to work by bike since around 8 years, payed 800 $ initially for the brand new bike and only needed 3 maintenances in the bike shop for 400 $ total. Plus I bought some extra tires once for around 80 $ and a couple of replacement brakes / tubes / a bit of oil every now and them for a total of around 100 $. In terms of rain gear I've never needed to buy anything extra but my 20 $ cheap rain coat.
So we're at 1400 $ spread across 8 years and the bike still runs smoothly and is being used for other activities than commuting to work.
There is no cheaper alternative than this.
You almost always still need to take public transport, so you'd need a bus or rail pass.
To truly do it, you'll probably need a cart/trailer for the car, that's another couple hundred bucks.
You need a bike lock, you almost always need pannier racks and bags. Lights.
For rain gear, do you just tolerate getting your shoes and pants wet?
I agree it is still fundamentally cheaper, but it starts to get close to "ah, I might as well get a beater car" too quickly. We need a really good incentive to get people away from using cars for short trips. Likely that is high fuel prices and taxes...
You're right regarding panniers and bike lock, since I bought them back then... So throw in another 200 $ into the calculation above, but in the grand scheme it's still not that much less cost efficient.
No rail pass needed though, since I can bike across the city comfortably (can reach everything within my social circle in 20-45 mins). In the rare occasion that I really need to take public transport I just buy a single ticket / day pass.
I used to have a small Peugeot 106 back then, but sold it since it was rarely used and the cost was immense compared to what I have to pay for maintaining a bicycle.
The rain coat is huge and protects most of my pants, shoes will get wet, however on rainy days I commute with my red wings boots (which I didn't specifically buy for riding my bike) and even in heavy rain the inside of my shoe stays warm and dry, so a wipe at work is enough to have them dirt free again on the outside.
Obviously cars are more comfortable and have their purpose, especially in rural areas, but claiming that commuting by bike is close in costs is just not true.
And I consider myself the average bike commuter in terms of commute-related spendings, I know some extreme examples of coworkers / friends that ride used 20+ year old bikes with just the basic maintenance (breaks/chain/gear) that spend way less.
I agree that more incentives are always good to bring people out of their cars onto their bikes, but the incentives are already there...the amount of money I spend in the past 8 years commuting by bike is what I had to pay on a single repair of my Peugeot 106. If we add up fuel, insurance, other repairs, tax, parking costs than we're easily talking about a different dimension of costs.
> Heck the boring company should probably have started with a small-scale bike commuting tunnel as a POC.
I do genuinely think the best way Apple could move into the “mobility” market is by buying Brompton, the folding bike maker.
Lightness paramount? Check. User experience way beyond competing products? Check. Premium, urban-focused market? Check.
Going straight to self-driving cars is a massive leap for any company, even Apple, with no history in the area. Get people on bikes first and go from there.
Interesting data but doesnt seem to have the significance I hoped.
> And there’s a practical benefit here too. As the world faces a reckoning with climate change and sustainability, individuals and governments are looking at how they can do better. That’s brought cycling back into focus as a clean, accessible mode of transport – which can have far-reaching implications for the way that cities are built.
People who use bikes/bikeshares rn are early adopters, they probably got an unusually high willingness to deal with bad weather, go longer distances etc. I'd be more interested in data that show how the "average person" responds to this.
Also I'll remind ppl that when they talk about bikes for transport it just wont work for America. Our population is way unhealthy, it isnt a great option.
“Also I'll remind ppl that when they talk about bikes for transport it just wont work for America. Our population is way unhealthy, it isnt a great option.”
Theee is a feedback loop. More biking produces healthier people. You have to start somewhere.
I really don’t like when people categorically claim that things that work fine in other countries won’t work in the US. It makes no sense. I also hear people often talk about “human nature” when in reality it’s just US culture.
The US really needs to accept that they are not the leaders in many things anymore and that they don’t have the world’s best of everything . There are things to learn from other countries.
Well I don’t think he’s saying it would fail in America because the US is leading, but actually because it’s behind in health. Either way such generalized comments are always off target because the US is a hugely large and varied place (in climate, population, terrain, design, etc). It’s hard to say anything categorically will or will not work across the country. The key error here isn’t thinking too highly or badly about this country or another, it’s about making sweeping generalizations.
When imagining bike policy, stop thinking nationally in context and start thinking hyper-locally.
Maybe if your city matches key elements of one in another country that implemented a successful program to do X, your city could stand to learn a thing or two. To presume that a prescription from Copenhagen would be equally valuable across the the vast scope of conditions in the US as an entire country is a ludicrous assumption from the start. This isn’t a “pride” thing, or an issue of the US accepting something, it’s an issue of scale and comparing apples to oranges. Bike lane policies cannot be a national issue here, they are local issues. Each locality needs to learn how to enable different transport modalities from other cities, yes, but what works in NYC will not be the same solution for Tampa, for example, or Bozeman.
The statement was “ it just wont work for America. ”. It wasn’t “it may be dependent on the locality”. You have to start somewhere and not throw the towel before you got started. Especially with biking I constantly hear the argument “some people may get sweaty a few days of the year so we have to keep driving cars the rest of the year too”. I thought this country is dynamic and innovative but in many ways it’s very stuck in its way.
Same with healthcare. When new ideas come up people say it won’t solve all (of the many) problems so let’s just stick to a terrible system.
> Also I'll remind ppl that when they talk about bikes for transport it just wont work for America. Our population is way unhealthy, it isnt a great option.
Wouldn't infrastructure be a greater issue in the US? While it is difficult to judge the overall health of people from appearances, I've observed people of most ages and most body types riding. Age and weight do have an impact on people's ability to ride and it is observable with how they ride. This is especially observable in the elderly where those who I know make an effort to remain fit are much more proficient riders.
Sharing is a specific audience, and one that probably has more transportation alternatives than the people that own bikes. So they'll switch faster.
Also, rain in Sevilla and Valencia is not like rain in Dublin, in my experience. It's warmer there, and the rain is lighter; you can almost count on your clothes drying there. Cycling in cold rain with wind wearing wet clothes from the morning is about the worst condition I know. Then again, cyclists in Dublin probably have rain clothing.
Another point: hot weather tends to occur in summer, when people are on holidays.
Paper lead author here - yes, usage is multi-factorial and there are hidden factors we may not know about. You can see the Paris August holidays in our visualizations of the models, and I was recently told about Goteborg July holidays.
So the model with four variables (UTCI, rain, hour of day, day of year) is best, but then that is hard to visualize.
I’d actually say it’s the opposite. My impression is that people who use bikeshares are casual cyclists and tourists. Everyone I know that I would consider a “cyclist” owns their own bike and would only use a bikeshare as a fallback if something happened to their bike. It’s possible bikeshare users are early adopters - but in cities where bikeshares have been around for nearing a decade (nyc comes to mind) I think that framing doesn’t make a ton of sense.
In NY a good number of people use Citibike even when owning their own bike, because there are a lot of factors like not needing to carry a lock, being able to mix biking and transit, etc. that make it more attractive for some trips. It also makes some trips reasonable, like ending up a mile or so from the nearest subway in another borough, that aren’t reasonable with either just a personal bike or just relying on transit.
I’m a “cyclist” (own way too many bikes, run a cycling website, volunteer for a cycling charity). Nonetheless bikeshares are hugely useful away from home. If I’m in London for the day, I can either go through the trauma of booking my own bike on the train, locking up wherever I go, and perpetually worrying that it might be nicked... or I can just hire a Santander bike when I get there.
They are great for riders but starting to be plague pedestrians in Germany. It can be stressful to walk and constantly have to watch for high speed bikes.
I think bicyclists are nuts trying to mingle in with relatively high-speed heavy metal boxes (vehicles). I think pedestrians are nuts to try and mingle with high-speed heavy metal frames (electric personal transport).
There is no one transportation mode which works for every single person in every situation, including cars. That's why a healthy city supports a mix of transportation modes, and an emphasis on density.