> Cities in general also don't sufficiently support mass transit and biking
Yes, and he's pointing to a very big reason why: electeds defer to small business owners, who tend to be irrationally hostile to those alternatives.
Zoning reform is all well and good (pretty sure Owens agrees with you there), but road use reform is much cheaper and faster path to greater safety. And it too will lead to greater density.
You miss my point. Bus lanes are economic and political non starters in cities without sufficient residential density. Not enough people to use them to justify the cost to the average city official. And all the bike lanes in the world aren’t going to help a business if enough people don’t live within biking distance. Denser housing is key, and it also drives down rents for retail.
A good biking distance is about 3-5 miles. Anyone living in a city should live within 3-5 miles of something. Heck even in a lot of suburbs or small towns, biking makes more sense that business owners realize. But the infrastructure discourages people biking.
I live in such a place. The primary reason why I bike to the grocery store, restaurants, and coffee shop while my spouse does not is safety. They're very concerned about the risks. I'm more tolerant of the risks, but their position is perfectly reasonable. If there were more biking infrastructure that made it safe to bike (separarte bikes and cars), more people would bike. But building such biking infrastructure is often seen as taking something away from car-driving customers.
But I also support denser housing. We should be doing both.
Good for you. But the average person is not going to bike 5 miles, or even a couple of miles for that matter, even with good infrastructure. It’s just too far for most folks. In biking heavy European cities, average trips are well less than a mile. That only works in dense cities. Density is key in all discussions about livable, walkable, bike-able, communities.
It's fine if biking is not for everyone, but it is a great option for some people. If we can encourage more people to sometimes bike instead bof drive a car, that is positive.
Even if we say that 1 mile is gold standard biking distance, surely there are people that live within 1 mile of a grocery or a restaurant. That is a very comfortable distance, as far as physical exertion goes, for many people. But, again, whenever cars and bikes are negotiating a shared space, it's dangerous, and a lot of people simply won't do it for safety concerns.
Next, I agree that increasing density is a very good goal. I want that. But surely you must acknowledge how painfully difficult that has been to achieve politically in most places in the United States? I think we should keep pushing for denser towns and cities, but even when progress is made, it is gradual. The vicious cycle is that cars encourage more sprawl, and sprawl demands cars. Maybe the city council isn't going to budge on bringing housing and businesses to be dense enough for most things to be 1 mile of each other. But maybe bringing some stuff within 4 or 5 miles is more possible sooner, and if it is, we should take it. Increasing density a little bit now makes it easier to increase density a little bit more tomorrow, and a little bit more the next day.
My last bit I want to share is ebikes really open up what is possible. Trips can be longer, the terrain can be hillier, and the exertion lower. The physical barriers to biking drop a lot. Costs are coming down, and are quite a bargain if one is able to replace a car with an ebike. The missing piece is infrastructure to support safe biking.
We are pretty much on the same page. My experience in Cambridge MA though (which has great bike infrastructure) is that bike lines have really done fuck-all to improve the walkability/livability of the city. We still have one story retail along major commercial avenues and the stores do suffer from a lack of parking. (Case in point: last week I tried to buy a present for my partner at a local store but ended up forced to drive to a box store because I couldn’t carry the present on a bike in the rain, and there was no place to park, and the MBTA sucks.) My point: density promotes walkability, bike-ability, and mass transit within urban cores.
> In biking heavy European cities, average trips are well less than a mile.
The average in the Netherlands in 2016 was ~3.5km (~2.2 miles) for ordinary bikes and ~5km (~3.1 miles) for ebikes. [1]
"For trips of up to 7.5 km (65% of all trips), 38% of the Dutch use the bicycle and 34% the car. For distances from 3.7 km and more, the car is more popular than the bicycle." [2]
"55% of workers who live within 5 km of their workplace go to work by bicycle. When the home-work distance is between 5 and 10 km 31% of the people go by bicycle and between 10 and 15 km that is 14%." [2]
Yes, and he's pointing to a very big reason why: electeds defer to small business owners, who tend to be irrationally hostile to those alternatives.
Zoning reform is all well and good (pretty sure Owens agrees with you there), but road use reform is much cheaper and faster path to greater safety. And it too will lead to greater density.