this post was submitted on 11 Oct 2023
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Bikes don't work well in places like where I live when you can easily get 1-2 feet of snow in the winter. Or very icy roads. They definitely should be used more, but they aren't a panacea.
Some nations that experience harsh winters have well maintained bicycle infrastructure year round. Access to effecient, maintained, and safe bicycle infrastructure is the biggest factor preventing or enabling cycling.
Biking in sub-zero temperatures when it isn't even safe to be exposed outside for more than a few minutes (also happens here in the winter) is not a good idea either.
Again, I am all about bikes. I think bikes should be widely adopted. I would also never ride one in winter conditions here no matter how well the infrastructure is maintained. Have you ever seen a road plowed after there's been a huge snowfall? Keeping a bike lane clear is not especially reasonable an expectation for a snowplow.
https://youtu.be/Uhx-26GfCBU?si=xm6kjWjVBJnN-iz_
Most bike lanes get a differnet treatment creating a tightly packed snow surface to pedal on.
Safe bicycle infrastructure does not equal bicycle gutters. Bicycle gutters are unsafe on most roads even in the summer and were designed without winter maintaince as a consideration.
Skipping through the video, those look like roads dedicated to bicycles. Unless you repurpose an entire city to be bicycle only, which is a very unlikely scenario in most places in this world with harsh winters, that really doesn't apply to the way snowplows usually work.
"Roads dedicated to bicycles"
What do you think good, safe and dedicated bicycle infrastructure looks like? Cars and bicycles has vastly different needs and therefore should have differently built roadways.
When your city repaves its 4-6 lane roads, it has the choice to change some of those car lanes to bicycle/pedestrian/multiuse paths.
How do you think you build a good, safe and dedicated bicycle infrastructure in a city which has not been designed for it? There are roads here, like the one where my office is, that only have one access route. How do even get the delivery trucks in if you make that only road bike-only? And if you say "just build another road," who is going to pay for that?
Also, almost every road here has two lanes, one in each direction.
No bike friendly city, and very few advocates for them, are suggesting to ban motor vehicles entirely. Rather, we can structure infrastrucrue to serve both, instead of just cars.
A 4 lane stroad can be turned into a two lane, limited access road with protected, separated bike lane and a median. This actually improves auto throughput, travel times, and emissions.
A 2 lane residential street can have restricted parking, narrower right of way, and wide rsidewalks. This naturally slows cars, making shared right of way safer for all.
A pedestrian zone can have moveable bollards, so that deliveries and mobility services can still access, whil keeping the street safe for people.
In all these cases, its not about bulldozing buildings, its about changing the way we use existing land.
The Netherlands did it. Just change construction requirements/guidelines, zoning, etc, get some biking activists, and wait 50 years. All of these problems have already been solved.
And to answer your specific question, I think they normally close off roads to regular cars but let delivery vehicles go through. In the short amount of time the vehicle is there, people just bike/walk around it. And they also make smaller delivery vehicles, including branded cargo bikes for when the situation fits.
Because we all know cities are usually able to plan things 50 years in advance...
No. Because infrastructure needs to be replaced every so often and after 50 years you’ll have gone through most of it. 50 years ago is around when the Netherlands switched from building car infrastructure to also building bike infrastructure.
It's funny how many of the same people making this sort of argument would happily go skiing in the exact same weather.
I sure as hell wouldn't go skiing when it's -30 and they say it's unsafe to be outside.
This is just conjecture.
Such a bike-only city just have to build heated underground tunnels for biking. If a New York subway style bike highway isn't good enough., since wind chill and all that, instead build a city-wide roof over the first floor of all the buildings in the city to basically make that first floor a basement.
This is obviously an extreme answer, but if a city wanted to be bike-only, the only barrier is cost.
no city wants to do that, but they could. Stick Solar panels on the first floor roof and do the solar freaking roadways idea to heat up the tiles and avoid plowing (without needing to make them car-proof.)
I got myself all excited, I wish this was more than a modern fantasy.
The problem with this idea is that melting snow takes a ridiculous amount of energy. (and also no one wants to feel banished underground)
Again, these problems have already been solved. Compress the snow on bike paths, and make a reliable public transport system for when its really too cold.
Cost is a pretty huge barrier. Money doesn't grow on trees.
Bike lanes cost less than car lanes. Bike-path-sized snowplows probably cost less than car-lane-sized ones, too.
Bike infrastructure only seems unaffordable for those who dishonestly see it as an add-on on top of car infrastructure, rather than correctly as a replacement for (some of) it.
Well sure, bike infrastructure is cheap if you take a road for cars, ban all cars, and declare it bike only.
But that's so ridiculous it's not worth mentioning.
My family lives in a rural town of 1600, my wife works 800m from home and I commute 50km to the nearest city for work. Most days she walks to work for 7:30 or takes the ebike. I take our EV to arrive at 9am. My daughter takes the school bus , which arrives at my home at 8:17am.
There is a bus that comes to my town and goes to the city each day at 7AM and 8AM. Unfortunately, I cannot take the bus, or I would have to leave my daughter unattended. I don't think I need to explain why taking my bike 120km a day round trip by the bike path won't work.
By taking the EV, I make my life work and I save a good amount of CO2 in the process. My old hatchback would have burned 7.7l fuel to make the commute , or 7.7 * 19.6 lbs CO2 = 150lb CO2 per day. My EV gets 16kwh/100km generating between 3/4 lb and 5lb CO2 for the trip, based on local energy mix.
I think a mixture is the real solution. Public transport and human-powered transport such as bicycles should be encouraged as much as possible, but they cannot apply to every scenario. I have to drive about 10 miles down a 4-lane highway to an industrial park whose only access is that highway. Both my home and that industrial park are outside city limits. The nearest bus to me is 2 miles away and goes the opposite direction. Even with robust public transport in this area, it wouldn't be economically justifiable to get a bus to go from anywhere near my semi-rural subdivision to that industrial park. Not enough people would ride that bus and it wouldn't be safe to ride a bicycle there.
So I'm a case where I have to drive a car. I don't like it. I wish I had another option. I would never drive again if I could, but right now I drive a car and the most eco-friendly car I could afford, which was a used Prius.
So people in this community can berate me if they want, but I'm pretty much out of options unless I do something drastic like quit my job and move. And "quit your job and move so you don't need a car anymore" is not advice anyone should take. Maybe one day, I will be able to do that. I rode public transport all the time when I lived by the train in L.A. and I loved it. But I don't live in L.A. anymore, I live in a small city in Indiana where public transport throughout the county, which is mostly farms outside city limits, is just not viable.
They also don't work well in places like I live, where we reach 120°F for about one to one-and-a-half months of the year.
Neither do cars work well in those conditions.
If you clear and salt the bike paths in a timely manner, like we also expect for other roads, then bikes are a perfectly viable option even in winter.
Weird, because mine works just fine. Also, salt is incredibly ecologically damaging. Never use salt because roads are snowy or icy.
Car work a lot better than bikes in the snow lol
Twice as many wheels probably means more traction, eh? I can quite safely drive through 20cm of fresh snow. Good luck biking in that.
We've invented means to clear roads of snow, that's how we manage to make cars go on them during winter
Yes, they're called snowplows and they don't clear bike lanes.
Yes that sounds insurmountable
Come on man don't be so car-brained. There's obviously places outside of where you live where that problem showed up and solutions exist.
https://bicycledutch.wordpress.com/2013/01/31/clearing-the-streets-of-snow-and-ice/
That would absolutely not clear a 2 lane street with a bike lane on the side of 2 feet of snow and keep the bike lane clear. Be serious.
There's going to be a type of snow clearing device for every type of bike lane
Do you want me to keep googling them for you until you run out of ideas and then stop responding?
Come on
Sure, you google me a snow clearing device that will clear plowed snow after a 2-foot snowfall away from a bike lane that abuts a bunch of parked cars on a narrow street and also doesn't create a traffic hazard. Because that's what we deal with in my town.
https://dailyhive.com/vancouver/vancouver-bike-lane-snow-plow
Yeah, you do see that bike lane is separated from the rest of the road by a concrete line so that plow can plow that area separately from the rest of the road, right?
If it's not separated you just use the regular snow plower?
Do you think maybe, just maybe, it's possible that there isn't a single solution for every city and town in the world and there are unique problems they can face which make things other cities can do untenable? Is that even a remote possibility? Or does it not apply to plowing snow?
I can't think of a single place in the world that can't have bikes but can have cars
You cant think to think of any either, to be honest...
Good thing I didn't say it can't have bikes then. This is what I said:
Please don't put words in my mouth.
I'm pretty sure you can always solve that problem for bikes if you can solve it for cars
If you can't solve it for cars then these places are beyond relevance for urbanism
First of all, cars have a much greater grip on the road in icy conditions. So they can handle things like black ice when riding a bicycle on it would be extremely dangerous.
But sure, every small city and town with harsh winters are beyond relevance.
Small city and towns don't have cars now?
Guy who said "don't put words in my mouth" literally 10 minutes ago
Small cities and towns have a big problem solving things like black ice for cars. Hence the many accidents on days like that when people drive in those conditions. I know because I used to work for the local news station.
But hey, we're beyond relevance.
Beyond relevance period?
I thought I meant beyond relevance for urbanism, and by the way I mostly meant for this discussion about snow on bike lanes.
Guy who said "don't put words in my mouth" literally 10 minutes ago
Small towns going bankrupt is a result of newer means of transportation concentrating centers of activity within a region.
If you can't clean the ice for cars, cleaning it for bikes is cheaper. If you can't do any, then don't do any - you've got worse problems. Thus, irrelevant for this discussion.
I can't go by what you thought you meant. I went by what you said.
You literally didn't. You cut it off mid sentence.
It's insane how you've moved the goalpost from "It's impossible to clean snow off bike lanes" to "it's impossible to clean snow off some bike lanes when the conditions of the bike lanes are very specific" to "it's impossible to clean off bikelanes when the city is tiny and too broke to clean it off roads in the first place"
Guess what? Then don't clean them. Discussion has been moved to a segment of the problem that is so small and uninteresting that and if you had been clear about your message in the first place, nobody would've needed to answer you
Bye
That's another thing I never said. I never said impossible. And I have always been talking about where I live, not anywhere else. I made that very clear.
https://twitter.com/pekkatahkola/status/1627375239423197185
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uhx-26GfCBU
Good thing they aren't sharing the road with cars like around here, isn't it?
Oslo, Norway, is a great cycling city and all the kids ride their bikes to school in the winter. In Norway.
Neither do cars, unless the streets are plowed. And guess what could be done to bike lanes too, if the government in question gave a shit?