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Oxford Professor: Cycling is 10 times more important than electric cars for reaching net-zero cities
(theconversation.com)
this post was submitted on 08 Apr 2025
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Yes, I will cycle 15 miles (one-way) to the nearest produce section.
I'm all for bikes in sufficiently urban areas, but they are never going to be reasonable for 90% of America (by land mass, not population).
We need passenger train service (or other mass transit) that can cover lower density areas and still be reliable. (There's active train tracks within 100m of both my driveway and the produce section, so for me a passenger train would be ideal.)
Okay, so counterpoint: In a lot of ways, the EU is like a country. And it’s a large one - maybe not quite the US’s size, but big. And much of it is bike friendly.
No, people don’t traverse the mountains in their little hand-me-down red bike. But they don’t often traverse those mountains every month anyway. And when they do, trains exist for that.
So this exposes not a landmass problem, but an urban planning problem. It is the easiest thing in the world to stand in the middle of an 8-lane stroad in the boonies, where people are waiting 5 minutes to traverse two blocks of traffic lights to get to the quarter-square-mile parking lot outside their coffee shop, praying you’re not killed as you wait for the walk signal, and scream at the top of your lungs “What in the everloving fuck is the point of all this?” And it would be a family-friendly exasperation since it would be drowned out by engine noise.
We can build about 8 new walking-friendly cities in the space taken up by one goddamn McDonald’s parking lot.
If you think urban planning has anything to do this how I get to the grocery store, you aren't facing the problem.
The population density of the EU is 106/km^2^. The population density of my county is 22.4/mi^2^ (8.64/km^2^).
This is exactly the problem that urban planning is meant to solve. Our specific US problem may not have been solved YET but that doesn’t mean it can’t be. As an engineer, one of our sayings is “anything can be engineered, it just depends on how much money you have”. So for this problem, it’s more about our communal values: if we decide as a community to value public transit and pedestrian friendly urban planning, we put our community funds in those areas instead of centering cars.