Dumb typos. I shouldn't be tweeting during meetings.
I'd be willing to entertain 30kph or 20 mph, but the 28 mph of Class 3 e-bikes is just too fast.
And for the 'what about cars' people, please feel free to look at *any* of my former posts on the subject. I think cars should be geofenced to the speed limit, *and* urban limits should be 15 mph for cars as well.
As we see from so many people in the comments, current e-bike are a reaction to our car-dominated culture.
"I need to go 25 mph to keep up with traffic and take the lane!"
Obviously we need to plan for the world we have, but we should not ignore the world we *want*
And the world *I* want is one in which urban traffic (car or bus or bike) does not go so fast as to make walking unpleasant/unsafe.
I worry that our focus on faster and faster e-bikes is engaging in an arms race with cars that bicyclists (being unarmored) will *always* lose.
Incendiary (and fat-fingered) initial tweet aside, I think that we, the bike community, need to have conversations about how fast e-bikes can go.
I am very worried about the speed genie getting out of the bottle (as it did with cars in the 1920s).
In Marin, where I work, there a lot of shared use paths, which bicyclists share with pedestrians/dogs/kids.
Whether you like it or not, people today *are* riding e-bikes way too fast on it.
What would you prefer? Education (ha)? Enforcement (bad)? Speed bumps (dangerous)?
Lastly, I'm happy to be taking the "bad guy of bike Twitter" hat away from these dumb Providence podcasters. 😉
On a zoom weminar hosted by @CalBike with renowned bike researchers John Pucher and @buehler_ralph on international international comparisons in biking!
🧵
Here is the share of trips made by bike across North America, Europe, and Japan. Huge variation across countries, with English speaking nations lagging behind.
But these differences are not because those countries are more dense! In the US, our share of bikes used for even short trips are tiny!
Whereas in the Netherlands, nearly half of all 1-2.5 mile trips are on a bike.
6,000+ miles of riding over my three years in the Bay.
All my bikers out there, what do you notice?
Super true! SPA is a huge block hole my map. 9th St and California sort of work, but have their own issues (and no fronting commercial for me to actually use!)
It's also so striking to see that we can get 2/3rds(!!) of the way there today. It's just not that far from Yerba Buena to Embarcadero, and yet it might as well be 1000 miles.
I'm not often surprised at how much space parking takes up. But, I just read the SFMTA 2014 Parking Census and...um...wow.
If you lined up the on-street parking spaces in San Francisco, it would be longer than *the state of California.*
If you include the publicly available off-street parking (setting aside every garage, apartment, and private lot), the line of parking would stretch...
...from San Francisco to Minneapolis.
There are neighborhoods where at there is *at least* 1 square foot of public parking for every 3 square feet of land.
There will always be "just one more project" to do.
There's always a chokepoint that "needs" widening, a winding segment that "needs" straightening, or a freeway interchange that "needs" an additional connection.
It's the classic '10 hot dogs 8 buns' problem:
"I've got 2 extra hot dogs so I need to buy more buns. I've got 6 extra buns..."
Except it's:
"We widened this segment, we now have a chokepoint we have to fix. Oh, and now we have a chokepoint further downstream that we...."
"Reforms have to justify themselves in a way that the status quo never does." -@JohnFPfaff on The Weeds podcast
This is the best formulation I've seen of a problem that bedevils America on countless fronts:
-Criminal justice
-Clean energy
-Transportation
-Housing, etc.
"Yeah, what's happening right now is terrible, but think of how it *might* be worse if we change it."
😐
Seriously, you should listen to this episode (and read @JohnFPfaff's excellent book, "Locked In").
"The question isn't whether police reduce crime. It does, but at an extreme social cost."