Recently there were afewposts about using bikes as transportation. This left me curious. Who are the transportation cyclists at LessWrong? I am interested in hearing your reasons for choosing cycling and also about your riding style. Do you use bike infrastructure when available? Do you take the lane? I’m especially interested in justification for these choices, as choices in the vehicular cycling (criticism of vehicular cycling) vs. separate bike infrastructure debate don’t seem to always be well justified. (To outsiders, vehicular cyclists might be considered the contrarians among bicyclists.)
I ride in the bike lane most of the time, in the left half of it to be out of range of car doors. Depending on traffic, I often take the lane before intersections to avoid right-hook collisions. (My state’s driver’s handbook is pretty clear on drivers being required to merge into the rightmost (bike) lane before turning right but hardly anyone actually does this.) I also take the lane when making a left turn, and when there isn’t actually room for someone to pass me safely on the left but there might be room for a poor driver to think he can do so.
I don’t use bike paths much because (a) separate bike infrastructure doesn’t go most places I want to go and (b) when it does go where I want to go, separate bike infrastructure is often infested with headphone-wearing joggers who can’t hear my bell so I have to go very slowly or weave between them. When the joggers aren’t too numerous (e.g. if it’s raining) I do enjoy bike paths for recreation though.
I started biking for transportation when a friend gave me a bike that had been sitting in her basement for a year gathering dust. It turned out to be as fast as taking the bus and also a lot cheaper. I had a low income at the time, so frugality was a huge motivation, but it turned out to be fun as well. There’s also a great feeling of freedom in not having to check the bus schedule before you go somewhere. (For various reasons car ownership is not a viable option for me, though I’m thinking of getting a zipcar membership.)
My first transportation bike was a 40lb mountain bike, but when I moved to a hilly city this year the weight was a problem. I didn’t shop around much for a replacement, just got the first road-bike-like-thing I found at a garage sale. It has upright handlebars but otherwise appears to be a standard road bike (except for being 40 years old and French and having nonstandard bolt sizes, but what do you expect from a yard sale?) and I’m very happy with it. I can go straight up hills where I used to have to get off and walk.
I suppose I am getting health benefits from biking, or at least it seems to be getting easier with time, but exercise isn’t really a goal for me. I rarely bike fast enough to get tired or out of breath.
I cycle as my main form of transport around where I live (in the UK, so a bunch of this may be weird to you US people). Most common journey is to work and back (~1.5 miles, takes me about 10 minutes on the way there and 15 or so on the way back due to hills). I do this every weekday and also cycle to leisure/hobby locations, supermarket, etc.
Reasons for choosing cycling:
Habit. It’s been my main form of transport for about 6 years now and I cycled a fair bit before that too.
It’s free other than the initial cost of the bike (and I would want to own a bike even if it wasn’t my main form of transportation) and occasional maintenance costs. Overall, over the lifetime of the bike, unbeatably cheap.
It’s a lot quicker than walking (especially downhill!). It’s also a lot quicker than driving over the short distances that I mostly cover, on roads that are often blocked up with traffic that I can easily cycle around. On most of the routes I regularly cycle, it’s far quicker than any of the public transport options too, especially if you count waiting time.
It’s a lot better for the environment than driving.
It’s a good way to incorporate a little bit of extra activity into my day.
It’s easy to park a bike, virtually anywhere, for free. Most places I cycle to are in the middle of a city and parking the car there would be either prohibitively expensive or, more likely, impossible.
It’s flexible. I can jump on my bike at a moment’s notice and go from door to door rather than having to faff around defrosting the car, checking that it has petrol, finding somewhere to park, etc etc, or waiting for a bus.
If I’m lost, it’s dead easy to stop at the side of the road and check where I’m trying to get to, and I can walk back along the pavement if it turns out I’m on the wrong track. These things are often not easy when driving!
I enjoy the opportunity to spend a little bit of time outdoors just about every day; I feel it creates a nice gap between activities/work/etc. Of course I moan like crazy about this when it rains heavily, but I still do it.
I certainly do cycle on bike paths where they’re available, but nearly all my regular routes are just on primarily residential streets. Sometimes there are bike lanes in the road, which is fine and obviously I ride in them, but it doesn’t make me feel that much safer as they are shared with buses and often contain parked cars that are liable to open their doors without warning. Depending on the type of road, the situation, and the turn I’m about to take next, I either ride most of the way over to the left (staying out of cars’ way but not rubbing right up against the kerb, and looking ahead to pull out around a parked car if necessary) or take the lane (if there’s not room for a car to reasonably overtake me, if I’m riding at/near the speed limit on a steep downhill, if I’m about to turn right).
I generally feel fairly safe while cycling. I wear a helmet 95% of the time, and use lights at night (which cyclists legally must here). I’m normally a fairly defensive/paranoid cyclist: I slow down if I’m not sure what a car is doing, I practically insist on eye contact with the driver before I will cycle across someone waiting to turn out of a side street, I always look over my shoulder, I don’t run through red lights, etc. I’ve had about 3 “near misses” in the last 6 years of cycling virtually every day, all caused by cars that looked straight at me but did not see me. No actual accidents.
If you are going to naively follow a system in America,* vehicular cycling is safer than naive use of car lanes, which is safer than bike lanes, but far better than these systems is to understand the source of the danger, to know when bike lanes help you and when they hurt you, to know when it’s important to draw attention to yourself and how to do it.
I think that there is some very important context missing from that critical article you cited. “Bicycle lanes” means something very different in the author’s Denmark than Forester’s America. Bike lanes in America are better than they used to be, but in the past their main effect was to kill cyclists. As a bicyclist or pedestrian, it is very important to learn to disobey traffic laws. They are of value to you only as they predict the actions of the cars. What is important it to pay attention to the cars and to know how the markings will affect them. The closest I have come to collisions, as a pedestrian, as a bicyclist, and even as driver, is by being distracted from the real danger of cars by the instructions of lane markings and traffic signals.
* and probably the vast majority of the world. The Netherlands and Denmark are obvious exceptions. Perhaps there are lots of countries where basic bike lanes are better than nothing.
You are right. It is important to recognize that the law and safety may not overlap, especially in states where use of bike infrastructure is required by law.
I think that there is some very important context missing from that critical article you cited. “Bicycle lanes” means something very different in the author’s Denmark than Forester’s America. Bike lanes in America are better than they used to be, but in the past their main effect was to kill cyclists.
Yes, this is a good point. There are other cultural differences in Denmark that are relevant as well, primarily that cyclists and drivers are more willing to follow the law. For example. I have read the cyclists running red lights is not a significant issue in continental Europe, while in North America and the UK it’s fairly common.
I highlighted that article mostly because its reasoning is very common for bike infrastructure proponents. Bike infrastructure proponents tend not to talk about safety directly. What they do talk about is increasing the number of cyclists, and they criticize vehicular cycling as unable to do this. The critical article’s author Mikael Colville-Andersen writes: “There is nowhere in the world where this theory [vehicular cycling] has become practice and caused great numbers of citizens to take to the roads on a daily basis.”
The cherry picked study I mention seems to have multiple issues, though I admit I have not looked closely at it. Some vehicular cyclists have said the cycletracks in the study had few intersections (I haven’t verified this). The study also suggests that intersections are slighter safer than straight segments of road. Basically all other research I’ve seen suggests that intersections are much more dangerous, which makes me not trust this study. I think this result might be due to their strange control strategy, though I’m not sure.
I have never seen a detailed analysis of all bike safety issues, combining the safety in numbers effect with the other known issues. My thinking was that cyclists on LessWrong would be more informed in these areas, and I’d be interested in hearing their reasoning. Perhaps I’ll have to do my own analysis of all the different effects in combination.
Infrastructure can work, but it’s good to know where it works best (probably higher speed areas), what is necessary for it to be and seem safe, and also what’s cost effective. I’ve discussed with a bike advocate before that they shouldn’t focus too much on expensive infrastructure projects, and they’d do better to lower speed limits and add speed control features to certain roads.
I cycle as my main form of transportation. I chose cycling partly to save money and partly for exercise. I ride a flat bar touring bike with internal hub gears. I ride in a vehicular style, following the recommendations of “Cyclecraft” by John Franklin. This helps acheive the exercise goal, because vehicular cycling is impossible without a good level of fitness.
I’ll use high quality infrastructure when it’s available, but here in the UK most cycle infrastructure is worse than useless. We have “advisary cycle lines” in which cars can freely drive and park, so their only function is to promote conflict between cyclists and drivers. We have “advanced stop lines” at junctions which can only be legally entered through a narrow left-side feeder lane, placing the cyclist at the worst place posible for negotiating the junction. We have large numbers of shared use cycle paths which are hated by both cyclists and pedestrians.
I’d prefer to live in the Netherlands where high quality infrastructure is common. I have no confidence that the UK government can provide similar infrastructure here. Most politicians have no understanding of utility cycling and design facilities only considering leisure cycling. There’s a big risk that if some minor upgrades are provided cyclists will be compelled to use them, resulting in a network that’s less useful than the existing roads.
Infrastructure quality is a major issue. I don’t mind infrastructure at all as long as it is done well. Most of the infrastructure I have seen is not done well.
The infrastructure we have here in the US tends to be terrible, though perhaps for different reasons than in the UK. As an example, consider the recent cycletrack in where I live, Austin, TX. This cycletrack is a disaster as far as I’m concerned. Local bike advocates say that it’s Dutch style infrastructure, but it really isn’t. In the Netherlands, the intersections are separated with a bikes-only part of the light cycle. The current setup has no such separation, and encourages conflicts with motorists as far as I can tell. This is particularly bad where the cycletrack ends, as the road markings make cars and bikes cross, and drivers basically never yield or even look as they are required to. I just ride in the normal lane unless I’m stopping off somewhere on the cycletrack.
I had no idea vehicular cycling was a thing, but most of the recommendations on the wikipedia page are commonly accepted as good cycling safety when there’s no bike lanes—and around here bike lanes are rare. I’ll use bike lanes if they’re available and clear of obstructions, and I won’t take a lane unless the lane’s too narrow to share (like on a bridge or in construction) or unless I can keep up with traffic. I always signal, use turning lanes, stop at lights and stop signs, etc, as expected by the MTO guidelines. I ride a hybrid bicycle instead of a road bike because of cost, posture, and the condition of the roads.
As for why? Health benefits, pleasure, and I arrive at work more awake and alert.
Recently there were a few posts about using bikes as transportation. This left me curious. Who are the transportation cyclists at LessWrong? I am interested in hearing your reasons for choosing cycling and also about your riding style. Do you use bike infrastructure when available? Do you take the lane? I’m especially interested in justification for these choices, as choices in the vehicular cycling (criticism of vehicular cycling) vs. separate bike infrastructure debate don’t seem to always be well justified. (To outsiders, vehicular cyclists might be considered the contrarians among bicyclists.)
I ride in the bike lane most of the time, in the left half of it to be out of range of car doors. Depending on traffic, I often take the lane before intersections to avoid right-hook collisions. (My state’s driver’s handbook is pretty clear on drivers being required to merge into the rightmost (bike) lane before turning right but hardly anyone actually does this.) I also take the lane when making a left turn, and when there isn’t actually room for someone to pass me safely on the left but there might be room for a poor driver to think he can do so.
I don’t use bike paths much because (a) separate bike infrastructure doesn’t go most places I want to go and (b) when it does go where I want to go, separate bike infrastructure is often infested with headphone-wearing joggers who can’t hear my bell so I have to go very slowly or weave between them. When the joggers aren’t too numerous (e.g. if it’s raining) I do enjoy bike paths for recreation though.
I started biking for transportation when a friend gave me a bike that had been sitting in her basement for a year gathering dust. It turned out to be as fast as taking the bus and also a lot cheaper. I had a low income at the time, so frugality was a huge motivation, but it turned out to be fun as well. There’s also a great feeling of freedom in not having to check the bus schedule before you go somewhere. (For various reasons car ownership is not a viable option for me, though I’m thinking of getting a zipcar membership.)
My first transportation bike was a 40lb mountain bike, but when I moved to a hilly city this year the weight was a problem. I didn’t shop around much for a replacement, just got the first road-bike-like-thing I found at a garage sale. It has upright handlebars but otherwise appears to be a standard road bike (except for being 40 years old and French and having nonstandard bolt sizes, but what do you expect from a yard sale?) and I’m very happy with it. I can go straight up hills where I used to have to get off and walk.
I suppose I am getting health benefits from biking, or at least it seems to be getting easier with time, but exercise isn’t really a goal for me. I rarely bike fast enough to get tired or out of breath.
I cycle as my main form of transport around where I live (in the UK, so a bunch of this may be weird to you US people). Most common journey is to work and back (~1.5 miles, takes me about 10 minutes on the way there and 15 or so on the way back due to hills). I do this every weekday and also cycle to leisure/hobby locations, supermarket, etc.
Reasons for choosing cycling:
Habit. It’s been my main form of transport for about 6 years now and I cycled a fair bit before that too.
It’s free other than the initial cost of the bike (and I would want to own a bike even if it wasn’t my main form of transportation) and occasional maintenance costs. Overall, over the lifetime of the bike, unbeatably cheap.
It’s a lot quicker than walking (especially downhill!). It’s also a lot quicker than driving over the short distances that I mostly cover, on roads that are often blocked up with traffic that I can easily cycle around. On most of the routes I regularly cycle, it’s far quicker than any of the public transport options too, especially if you count waiting time.
It’s a lot better for the environment than driving.
It’s a good way to incorporate a little bit of extra activity into my day.
It’s easy to park a bike, virtually anywhere, for free. Most places I cycle to are in the middle of a city and parking the car there would be either prohibitively expensive or, more likely, impossible.
It’s flexible. I can jump on my bike at a moment’s notice and go from door to door rather than having to faff around defrosting the car, checking that it has petrol, finding somewhere to park, etc etc, or waiting for a bus.
If I’m lost, it’s dead easy to stop at the side of the road and check where I’m trying to get to, and I can walk back along the pavement if it turns out I’m on the wrong track. These things are often not easy when driving!
I enjoy the opportunity to spend a little bit of time outdoors just about every day; I feel it creates a nice gap between activities/work/etc. Of course I moan like crazy about this when it rains heavily, but I still do it.
I certainly do cycle on bike paths where they’re available, but nearly all my regular routes are just on primarily residential streets. Sometimes there are bike lanes in the road, which is fine and obviously I ride in them, but it doesn’t make me feel that much safer as they are shared with buses and often contain parked cars that are liable to open their doors without warning. Depending on the type of road, the situation, and the turn I’m about to take next, I either ride most of the way over to the left (staying out of cars’ way but not rubbing right up against the kerb, and looking ahead to pull out around a parked car if necessary) or take the lane (if there’s not room for a car to reasonably overtake me, if I’m riding at/near the speed limit on a steep downhill, if I’m about to turn right).
I generally feel fairly safe while cycling. I wear a helmet 95% of the time, and use lights at night (which cyclists legally must here). I’m normally a fairly defensive/paranoid cyclist: I slow down if I’m not sure what a car is doing, I practically insist on eye contact with the driver before I will cycle across someone waiting to turn out of a side street, I always look over my shoulder, I don’t run through red lights, etc. I’ve had about 3 “near misses” in the last 6 years of cycling virtually every day, all caused by cars that looked straight at me but did not see me. No actual accidents.
If you are going to naively follow a system in America,* vehicular cycling is safer than naive use of car lanes, which is safer than bike lanes, but far better than these systems is to understand the source of the danger, to know when bike lanes help you and when they hurt you, to know when it’s important to draw attention to yourself and how to do it.
I think that there is some very important context missing from that critical article you cited. “Bicycle lanes” means something very different in the author’s Denmark than Forester’s America. Bike lanes in America are better than they used to be, but in the past their main effect was to kill cyclists. As a bicyclist or pedestrian, it is very important to learn to disobey traffic laws. They are of value to you only as they predict the actions of the cars. What is important it to pay attention to the cars and to know how the markings will affect them. The closest I have come to collisions, as a pedestrian, as a bicyclist, and even as driver, is by being distracted from the real danger of cars by the instructions of lane markings and traffic signals.
* and probably the vast majority of the world. The Netherlands and Denmark are obvious exceptions. Perhaps there are lots of countries where basic bike lanes are better than nothing.
You are right. It is important to recognize that the law and safety may not overlap, especially in states where use of bike infrastructure is required by law.
Yes, this is a good point. There are other cultural differences in Denmark that are relevant as well, primarily that cyclists and drivers are more willing to follow the law. For example. I have read the cyclists running red lights is not a significant issue in continental Europe, while in North America and the UK it’s fairly common.
I highlighted that article mostly because its reasoning is very common for bike infrastructure proponents. Bike infrastructure proponents tend not to talk about safety directly. What they do talk about is increasing the number of cyclists, and they criticize vehicular cycling as unable to do this. The critical article’s author Mikael Colville-Andersen writes: “There is nowhere in the world where this theory [vehicular cycling] has become practice and caused great numbers of citizens to take to the roads on a daily basis.”
Vehicular cyclists tend to focus squarely on safely cycling and don’t seem to mind too much that few people cycle. When bike infrastructure advocates discuss safety, usually it’s in the form of a cherry picked study, the “safety in numbers” effect, or perhaps admitting “It doesn’t matter if bike lanes make you safer or not!” (this is a real quote!).
The cherry picked study I mention seems to have multiple issues, though I admit I have not looked closely at it. Some vehicular cyclists have said the cycletracks in the study had few intersections (I haven’t verified this). The study also suggests that intersections are slighter safer than straight segments of road. Basically all other research I’ve seen suggests that intersections are much more dangerous, which makes me not trust this study. I think this result might be due to their strange control strategy, though I’m not sure.
I have never seen a detailed analysis of all bike safety issues, combining the safety in numbers effect with the other known issues. My thinking was that cyclists on LessWrong would be more informed in these areas, and I’d be interested in hearing their reasoning. Perhaps I’ll have to do my own analysis of all the different effects in combination.
Infrastructure can work, but it’s good to know where it works best (probably higher speed areas), what is necessary for it to be and seem safe, and also what’s cost effective. I’ve discussed with a bike advocate before that they shouldn’t focus too much on expensive infrastructure projects, and they’d do better to lower speed limits and add speed control features to certain roads.
I cycle as my main form of transportation. I chose cycling partly to save money and partly for exercise. I ride a flat bar touring bike with internal hub gears. I ride in a vehicular style, following the recommendations of “Cyclecraft” by John Franklin. This helps acheive the exercise goal, because vehicular cycling is impossible without a good level of fitness.
I’ll use high quality infrastructure when it’s available, but here in the UK most cycle infrastructure is worse than useless. We have “advisary cycle lines” in which cars can freely drive and park, so their only function is to promote conflict between cyclists and drivers. We have “advanced stop lines” at junctions which can only be legally entered through a narrow left-side feeder lane, placing the cyclist at the worst place posible for negotiating the junction. We have large numbers of shared use cycle paths which are hated by both cyclists and pedestrians.
I’d prefer to live in the Netherlands where high quality infrastructure is common. I have no confidence that the UK government can provide similar infrastructure here. Most politicians have no understanding of utility cycling and design facilities only considering leisure cycling. There’s a big risk that if some minor upgrades are provided cyclists will be compelled to use them, resulting in a network that’s less useful than the existing roads.
Infrastructure quality is a major issue. I don’t mind infrastructure at all as long as it is done well. Most of the infrastructure I have seen is not done well.
The infrastructure we have here in the US tends to be terrible, though perhaps for different reasons than in the UK. As an example, consider the recent cycletrack in where I live, Austin, TX. This cycletrack is a disaster as far as I’m concerned. Local bike advocates say that it’s Dutch style infrastructure, but it really isn’t. In the Netherlands, the intersections are separated with a bikes-only part of the light cycle. The current setup has no such separation, and encourages conflicts with motorists as far as I can tell. This is particularly bad where the cycletrack ends, as the road markings make cars and bikes cross, and drivers basically never yield or even look as they are required to. I just ride in the normal lane unless I’m stopping off somewhere on the cycletrack.
I had no idea vehicular cycling was a thing, but most of the recommendations on the wikipedia page are commonly accepted as good cycling safety when there’s no bike lanes—and around here bike lanes are rare. I’ll use bike lanes if they’re available and clear of obstructions, and I won’t take a lane unless the lane’s too narrow to share (like on a bridge or in construction) or unless I can keep up with traffic. I always signal, use turning lanes, stop at lights and stop signs, etc, as expected by the MTO guidelines. I ride a hybrid bicycle instead of a road bike because of cost, posture, and the condition of the roads.
As for why? Health benefits, pleasure, and I arrive at work more awake and alert.