Copenhagen: In City of Cyclists, Pedestrians Feel the Squeeze
15th September 2011
Mr. le Dous, 56, a power plant engineer, rides a bike himself, as do his children, though he also has a car. He just wishes bikers would behave.
“We call cyclists the plague of the pavement,” he said.
The downside of being a Yuppie Heaven. Funny how the people in New York and Los Angeles who are such big proponents of biking do not, so far as I can tell, themselves ride bicycles.
September 15th, 2011 at 09:59
Actually, that’s beginning to change.
New York just kicked off its “one way rent a bike” program modeled on the one that’s been going in Washington DC for a year or so. By all accounts it (the one in DC) is going over very well, although they have to work out some better logistics, i.e., bikes tend to collect in certain areas and come up short in others, so they have to be trucked around to even out supply.
If it works in NY, I suspect we’ll be seeing a lot of other communities initiating something similar.
September 15th, 2011 at 10:18
As for why more people don’t ride bicycles, it’s because the automobile has expanded our the scale of our living areas way beyond the cycle’s useful distance.
Even at an average speed of 10-12mph–the normal cruising speed for most people–it still takes me 20 minutes to reach the nearest grocery store. By car it’s about 5 minutes. And when I get there, I don’t have any way to carry my purchases home. (I’ve been thinking of rigging some sort of home-made panniers; the commercial ones are both too expensive and too flimsy for the use I would put them. As usual, however, that project has been relegated to “something I’ll get to eventually”…)