this post was submitted on 30 Sep 2023
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I'm not saying a car never makes sense. But Americans go out of their way to justify using a car and refusing anything that might change that. Most people live near urban center probably in suburbs. Those are just very bad land use, but with some small changes, bikes could be reasonable to get to a somewhat close bus or train station.
Protected bike lanes, as I said.
Are those all 50+km away?
Sports and grandparents, yes 50-60 km, dance and music lessons are about 30 km each with occasional 100km trips to performances.
I agree that we do not have land use optimized for bikes. That's been my thesis from the beginning. We can not easily reallocate suburband land use to make it possible to navigate via bike and public transit. Adding protected bike lanes to country roads would cost hundreds of millions of dollars to widen, and that's before we start considering the legal costs of buying all of the land it would require. And then what? You still need to reconfigure the land use itself to create concentrated commercial spaces, because it's no good if I have to ride 30 km to the grocer and then 70 km in the opposite direction to the shoe store if I want to do two errands in a single trip.
As I've said, you're underestimating the enormoty of the problem and the distances we travel for normal things.
Maybe, but on the other hand, some villages are so small here (couple of hundreds of residents), but they have rather frequent (hourly or more) transit. Furthermore, suburbs are definitively dense enough for buses and bikes. In between, investments for transit are needed. And sure there are areas where it is probably not feasible to do so, but only few people are affected.