Look behind to see the future?

[Fred W]

You'll need to put your thinking caps on here, and maybe move a bit outside your own personal comfort zones...

I came across this historical video on wimp.com and it gave me some serious pause to think.

Isn't this the direction we are all heading in the future?

How does any of this seem like a bad idea? (I can't see any)

Isn't this the same problem(s) that we are facing here and now, and even more likely so into the future?

How difficult would it be to develop bike path networks, especially urban ones? And how much less expensive would it be to maintain as compared to the massive inner city thoroughfares and congested parkways for motor traffic?

I would love to see a motor-less Sunday tried in an American city. I know that sections of Boulder CO have shutdown to non-motorized traffic only. Those Rocky Mountain hippies always have the good ideas first.

My thoughts:

Riding public transportation (buses, trains and subways) sucks because they don't necesarrily run when you need them to run. Having personal transport, like a bike, is much better.

I know that I personally could benefit a lot from cycling. The older I get, the harder it is to maintain anything close to resembling a healthy situation.

If they closed down the expressways in Boston to motorized traffic, just from the hours of 7AM to 7PM, imagine how easy it would be to get to work.

Is it already too late now? I live 45 miles north of Boston and many of my neighbors commute to the Greater Boston Area for employment. Is the spread already so large that it precludes these alternate options?

Why not a motorized bike lane? Limit the cc's or the speed, or both... but why not? People driving SUVs and pickup trucks to work are what is killing our communities and our economy.

My neighbors driving 45 miles to work are wasting years from their lives in just getting to work. How much do they like talk radio anyway?

Would you miss your car if you didn't drive it so much?

There must be a better way. Discuss...

 

[FJRay]

I like the bicycle idea if there is room away from the idiots. I quit using mine out of self defense.

 

[Redfish Hunter]

OK Fred,

I'll bite. Sure my fat behind could benefit from riding my bicycle more. Certainly this is healthy for the environment, the population, and the government.

But...

I notice the video only showed good weather. Does it not ever rain, snow, or even get cold in the Netherlands? Must be nice.

This looks useful in a city. It is not that practical when you are traveling a longer distance and live in a rural area.

I like you and respect you, I think you are very smart, but you have crossed a line with "People driving SUVs and pickup trucks to work are what is killing our communities and our economy." I call ********* on this one. I ride my motorcycle when I can, I drive my truck when I have to. I need that truck, I use it extensively for far more than day to day transport. It is a diesel and is as efficient as I can make it. If you don't want me to drive it, feel free to donate to The Redfish Hunter Corvette Acquisition Fund. I will happily drive whatever you are willing to pay for.

Last, in the video I thought I understood what the narrator was saying in the beginning but toward the end I got confused. At first I thought he was talking about cycle paths. By the time the video was winding down, I think he was saying that the Netherlands had lots of psychopaths. I think we have enough problems without that.

Good video, it does make one think.

 

[allrider]

They're trying to do something like it here in Seattle. Our Mayor McSchwinn is a big bicycle proponent. They put in bike lanes but you're still out there with the cagers half asleep at the wheel.

I used to ride my bicycle a lot before I bought the FJR. Now all I want to do is ride the FJR.

 

[Uncle Hud]

[This post is pretty very academic. You have been warned -- skip over it now.]

The single biggest element here is society and what we ask (demand?) from our government. Until our society asks for (demands?) bike paths and pedestrian trails like your Dutch citizens in the video clip, our DOTs will continue to build roads.

The second biggest element is the way our cities grew and matured. Almost all US cities grew up during the "car era" after World War II. The few cities that grew large before WWII have substantial transit systems that were required to sustain a large city before cars were plentiful. (Think Chicago, NYC, Boston, San Francisco. Then think LA, Miami, DC, Atlanta, Denver, Houston.) New cities pride themselves on their freeway lane-count, and the reach of multi-lane highways into the sprawling suburbs -- because that was the economy of the 50's through the 90's. And we're stuck with that structure: downtown, urban ring, suburbia, and suburban cities. It can't be undone.

The third biggest element was our fixation on roads and cars, and a blindness to alternatives. Road-building organizations always widened or built new roads in reaction to where development occurred. That is, when congestion became overwhelming, they designed a wider highway, bought adjacent property, and started pouring asphalt. The key concept here is reactive rather than predicitve construction. As Americans became more affluent, the number of cars on the highway grew much, much faster than the size of the highway that carried them. DOTs fell far behind the demand for roads, and were hampered by their reactive behavior, a ever-increasing demand for lower taxes, and the ever-increasing growth in car ownership. So we have a roadway infrastructure that can't handle the traffic loads, and the situation isn't getting better.

Nowadays, building or widening urban highways has become frightfully expensive, sometimes so expensive as to be literally impossible. Like you mentioned, Fred, 21st-century suburbanites are cursed with long commutes even if they don't work in the City Center. The Texas Transportation Institute publishes an annual list of cities with the longest average commute, and it blows my mind that people spend 45 to 60 minutes in their car driving each way to work and back. Why? I guess it's because they feel that the suburbs provide a better life for their families; when my kids were young, I lived in the suburbs, too.

As an example of the growth in traffic demand, I got my first car when I was 20, out of the house, and in the Navy. When I was a young father, our family got by with one car for about three years, then bought a second one. My two kids had our family's third car to drive to high school, and they each had a car in college. Our family of four went from one car to 4 cars in 18 years. That's a four-times growth in auto population in one generation. Your experience is probably similar. Did your highways get four times bigger during that same time period?

For what it's worth, I moved to Boston over the Labor Day weekend, and now take the T to work every day. I don't take the subway because I'm a save-the-planet altruistic kind of guy, it's because it would cost me $300 a month to park downtown, in addition to the gas and frustration of dealing with this 400-year old city's inadequate freeway system. But that same inadequate freeway system provides incentive to use transit, and the Boston transit system provides a realistic alternative due to its amazing geographic reach and phenomenal connectivity between commuter train, subway, bus, and ferry lines. I mean, jeez, one of the Boston commuter rail lines goes all the way to Providence, Rhode Island for heaven's sake! There are few US or Canadian cities that can offer as good an alternative to automobile commuting, so most of us don't really have a choice.

Until citizens start to get loud about bike paths, transit, or hell, separate motorcycle-only roadways, our DOTs will continue building conventional roads, because that's how we've always done it. And until those alternatives are built, we are left with our automobiles as they only way to get around. And until we all truly understand that roads, transit, bike paths, and sidewalks are built with tax money, our DOTs will be under-funded and won't be able to build enough of anything to relieve congestion.

Is there solution? Hard to think so. With residential areas well-separated from employment and shopping, our cities aren't built for bicycle commutes -- who's going to ride 15 miles to work on a bicycle? How do you bring home four bags of groceries and a gallon of milk on a bicycle? Even if transit systems were built, most suburbs don't have the population density to make them self-supporting through ticket sales. My oldest boy is buying a Tesla; he's been on the wait list for six months, but they're starting to build his car now. Maybe that's a way out. Doesn't solve traffic congestion, but it does reduce air pollution. (Yes, I realize electric cars are recharged by oil-fired or coal-fired generating plants, but that's a separate thread.)

Western civilization has overcome challenges much more difficult than urban transportation. The solutions often came from technological or societal changes that could not have been predicted. That's what will deliver us from this evil -- a bolt from the blue that no one can see now, and something better comes along.

Whew. Tuckered me out.

 

[odot]

Put some extra gears on this baby and you are good to go. You'll need your own lane, though....she's a bit wider then my 1984 GT pro performer with skyway tuff wheels.

 

[Niehart]

But...

I notice the video only showed good weather. Does it not ever rain, snow, or even get cold in the Netherlands? Must be nice.

Hills, the Netherlands has no stinking hills ...

 

[Uncle Hud]

Put some extra gears on this baby and you are good to go. You'll need your own lane, though....she's a bit wider then my 1984 GT pro performer with skyway tuff wheels.

Looks like my inflatable tailgate party chair would fit right nicely in the front of that thing. Who's pedaling?!

 

[odot]

That hippy uncle of yours that started this whole thing....

 

[DE OPPRESSO LIBER]

OMFG! This is the best reading I've done in a while!

1. Because the first post is utterly ******* ridiculous and so impractical it ain't even funny.

2. Uncle Hud makes so much sense that it's just ******* scary.

3. Odot's last post put coffee on the monitor! (Hey, at least it wasn't mine!)

Fred, I love ya dearly and I respect your intelligence, which by scientific standards, far exceeds my own, BUT....... your posts recently have me wondering about your thought processes as of late... your getting kinda out there, bro. Maybe Vermont would be your next logical step. To steal a quote from our hermano Papa Chuy, "Jes sayin' and 'nuff said".

 

[Uncle Hud]

...

2. Uncle Hud makes so much sense that it's just ******* scary.

...

You read all that!?!? As for my esteemed Uncle Fred, he's actually Point 1 in my overly-long diatribe: his micro-society is beginning to think outside the box of "build more roads, build wider roads." Good on you, Fred W!

[Full disclosure: I'll be kissing up to Fred W for a while, as I hope he'll show me all New England's good roads this coming spring. Then I'll leave him and his bicycle in my exhaust plume!]

 

[yamafitter]

But...

I notice the video only showed good weather. Does it not ever rain, snow, or even get cold in the Netherlands? Must be nice.

Last year I spent two weeks on a bicycle tour of Holland and the Dutch don't care if it is raining (it does) or snow (it does). They just throw on a rain slicker and keep riding. We had one day on our trip where we were out in the rain and gale force winds. I tucked in behind this fall Dutch girl and drafted for a number of kilometers. It was a very good test of my bicycle rain gear that day. Amsterdam has a parking problem but it is not cars it is finding room to park all the bikes.

Hills, the Netherlands has no stinking hills ...

I will have you know that I have this photo of the ski hill in Holland ....

They carpeted and lubed all 100 vertical feet of downhill mayhem and start skiing in September. We were there for opening day as we rode by on our bikes.

 

[Fred W]

It seems that some folks have trouble thinking outside the box.

In the title of this thread I made it clear we are talking about the future. Not what we could pull off next week given the current self-created and self-imposed limitations. More like, what is in store several generations from now, when it is no longer economical to feed fossil fuels (including electricity generated by fossil fuels) into our human conveyances.

I just thought it was interesting to note what the Dutch had already done many years ago.

 

[Niehart]

Just messing with ya Fred.

Years ago, I spent two weeks riding bikes there. We had a work boat that was turned into a floating hotel. We would unload in the morning and meet the boat at a new site each night. It was awesome and rain or shine, we road every day. That was one of my favorite vacations.

Living in the Seattle area and spending some of my working life in a service van, traffic, gas prices, parking and meeting scheduled times make your topic very interesting.

 

[Auburn]

[This post is pretty very academic. You have been warned -- skip over it now.]

The single biggest element here is society and what we ask (demand?) from our government. Until our society asks for (demands?) bike paths and pedestrian trails like your Dutch citizens in the video clip, our DOTs will continue to build roads.

...snip...

Find a way to license them, tax them and write tickets when they don't follow the traffic laws and I will support dedicated bike paths. Until then, they do not pay taxes for the bikes (other than purchase in some states) that can be used to build infrastructure for them. So quit spending taxes for infra structure for them, when the don't have enough from what they collect from vehicles to maintain what we currently have.

my 2 cents

 

[Fred W]

Good point.

We should stop building all those sidewalks too, 'cause you can't tax a pedestrian or write him a ticket..

And those bastids are always walking in front of cars and slowing down the traffic.

 

[odot]

Auburn....nail on the head. I don't wanna spend my tax dollars pipe dreams. Let's wait fifty years and worry bout bike paths when we run out of dinoGO juice.

 

[Auburn]

Good point.

We should stop building all those sidewalks too, 'cause you can't tax a pedestrian or write him a ticket..

And those bastids are always walking in front of cars and slowing down the traffic.

No that is covered in your property taxes which we all pay

 

[Redfish Hunter]

Find a way to license them, tax them and write tickets when they don't follow the traffic laws and I will support dedicated bike paths. Until then, they do not pay taxes for the bikes (other than purchase in some states) that can be used to build infrastructure for them. So quit spending taxes for infra structure for them, when the don't have enough from what they collect from vehicles to maintain what we currently have.

my 2 cents

I am going to agree with this one completely. I fully respect the dedicated bicyclist. I admire him or her for their commitment to their own health, the environment, the fine example they set. I do NOT appreciate it when they are holding up traffic in the middle of a busy road, glaring at all of the vehicles around them as though they should not be there. Then if one gets accidentally hit the media treats it as though someone intentionally clubbed a baby seal. No, you don't have just as much right to be there as everyone else. Everyone else paid taxes, pays those taxes every time they put gas in their tank, paid for a license that they were required to take a test for, paid to have their vehicle inspected, and is not slowing down the traffic flow.

In order for this to work, the bicyclist must improve his Public Relations skills, must remove the chip from his shoulder, and must take some responsibility for his own safety. If we had dedicated bike lanes like the ones in the video, that would be fantastic. But in the video those bicyclists gathered together and called for change. Those bicyclists were willing to take the responsibility. Most of the one's I see in my part of the world think that the rest of society owes them that. That is not the case.

If this is the future, great. In order for it to happen our bicyclists must assume some of the financial responsibility just like they did in the Netherlands. I don't see that happening here. Yet.