I was recently thinking about buying an elecrtic scooter/bike to get from point A to point B, with everything so close in a city, and traffic being bad. What are your thoughts on cycle-lanes, and cycling/scooting in general?

  • Jeffrey@lemmy.ml
    7·
    4 years ago

    Where I live, cycling lanes are often an afterthought which end up being a lackluster way to retrofit car infrastructure that never even considered pedestrian traffic in its development. What is needed where I live is complete renovation of the city to build/designate biking & pedestrian paths that are entirely separate from car traffic.

    There’s a really good book I read a couple months ago called The Great Inversion, it talks about how American cities were built backwards compared to the cities in the rest of the world.

    In most of Europe, for instance, it is my understanding that wealthier people live towards the city centers where most of the activity is, and poorer people live towards the periphery and then must commute into the city center.

    In America, from the 1930s onward, the wealthier someone was the further from the city center they would live; that way they could have a large house, lots of land, and a private commute in their own car.

    Now in America, there is a “great inversion” taking place where wealthier/ younger people increasingly want to live in the city centers and want public transit & bike/pedestrian infrastructure. It’s really interesting because virtually ALL american infrastructure is car-centric, if you don’t have a car here your quality of life is severely degraded. Our cities have been built from the ground up to be car-centric, so now that we want to change it is tremendously expensive and disruptive.

    There is a lot of experimentation being done to try and retrofit American suburbia to be more urban, but we’re really limited in what we can do. Want to build a transit line? Well, the ideal route would go directly through a few hundred single-family homes, so it will require negotiation with and the cooperation of every single homeowner in the way. Yikes. Want to build more dormitories, apartments, or condos? Not In My Back Yard, that will lower people’s property values, which for many Americans is their primary source of financial security, and is a very large source of revenue for many municipalities.

    So, cycling lanes are a half-ass retrofit, but a good start? They’re definitely better than nothing!

      • Jeffrey@lemmy.ml
        2·
        4 years ago

        Thanks for sharing that essay, it was fun a fun read! I think a lot of the issues he writes about are even more salient today, and it’s tragic that it took another 30 years after the writing of that essay for the American lust for the automobile to start to decline. Even in 2021, most people genuinely love their cars here. People will eagerly work hundreds of extra hours just to pay the finance charges on a nicer, newer vehicle.

        I also love this quote from the essay describing urban sprawl, I found it pretty relatable:

        These splintered cities are strung out along empty streets lined with identical developments; and their urban landscape (a desert) says, “These streets are made for driving as quickly as possible from work to home and vice versa. You go through here, you don’t live here. At the end of the workday everyone ought to stay at home, and anyone found on the street after nightfall should be considered suspect of plotting evil.”

        Since the 1980s New Urbanism has slowly gained popularity, but it is difficult because people want to live in proper urban settings without cars at the same time that they can not give up their cars because they don’t live in a proper urban setting. It’s a chicken and egg situation!

        If only a critical mass of people could have come to their senses 50 years ago as the author did, especially considering the essay was written in 1973 during the “first shock” oil crisis. That, to me, speaks volumes of the American infatuation with cars and consumerism. Opinions are changing, though. Now, we are about 25 years into the “great inversion”, and I think the momentum is unstoppable, but for 100 years our lives have been centered around cars, and the next 100 will be a journey to return life to our cities and communities.