As an American who has been living in China for some years, I don’t miss the car-centric lifestyle one bit. But I don’t see a viable path to wide adoption in the US, especially since your choice of transportation is now part of the fucking culture wars.
For bikes to have real gains, you must somehow make cars less appealing. And while individual mindset is similar in China and the US — everybody really really wants cars now — the outcome has so far been different. Here’s my guess as to the reasons why, with the most important first:
- It’s super hard to buy a car here. The waiting time for a new number plate is something like 10 years (for the non-rich anyway). I’m so thankful for this — I can’t imagine this city with tons more cars. (You used to be able to jump the queue by buying an EV, but the waiting list for that has grown now too)
- Even after you buy a car, there are days when you can’t legally drive it, depending on the last digit of your number plate.
- It’s straight up annoying and expensive to drive to most places in the city. Traffic is terrible, and for short trips you’ll spend way more time and money parking than driving (its common for a 10 minute bike ride to be a 30-40 minute drive during rush hour). That said, the city does not seem interested in fixing this problem by widening roads, which I take as a win.
- There is bike infrastructure: not only are there decent bike lanes, but drivers are used to sharing the road with bikes. It’s not Scandinavia, but it’s way better than the US.
- There are shared bikes fucking everywhere, so it’s always an easy option. It’s super rare that I end up somewhere and cannot find a bike.
- There is zero tolerance for drunk driving. If you’re going somewhere to drink, that’s a trip you’re not driving.
All this said, even though there are so many bikes on the streets that they stack up at traffic lights like cars during rush hour, I feel like the number of bike commuters is 1-2 orders of magnitude less than the number of subway commuters. There’s a scale (population, and geographic size) at which you can’t just promote biking, you must invest in public transport.
>There is bike infrastructure: not only are there decent bike lanes, but drivers are used to sharing the road with bikes
You other description matches quite well to Beijing so I assume you are living in Beijing, but this one doesn't quite match from my experience.
Yes there are technically "bike lanes", but Beijing drivers really treat them more like "ramps" that's use to get on and off the main road, or even "shortcuts" when the main road is too jammed. They really have no respect whatsoever to cyclists' right of the way on the bike lanes.
Totally agree, drivers don't respect cyclists' right of way at all, and the bike lanes are often clogged with parked cars. But the bike lanes are still useful, and in places where a bike has to go into the road to go around a car, the cars _expect_ this. I don't have much good to say about the drivers around here, but they're definitely used to the road being filled with cyclists, e-bikes, and grandpas on their 三轮车.
I think that had much more to do with drivers driving much more defensively, because there's so much more chaos on the road. For example in the US you can mostly expect drivers to drive within their lanes, while in Beijing it's more like half half that they drive in the lanes or on the lines.
For bikes to have real gains, you must somehow make cars less appealing. And while individual mindset is similar in China and the US — everybody really really wants cars now — the outcome has so far been different. Here’s my guess as to the reasons why, with the most important first:
- It’s super hard to buy a car here. The waiting time for a new number plate is something like 10 years (for the non-rich anyway). I’m so thankful for this — I can’t imagine this city with tons more cars. (You used to be able to jump the queue by buying an EV, but the waiting list for that has grown now too)
- Even after you buy a car, there are days when you can’t legally drive it, depending on the last digit of your number plate.
- It’s straight up annoying and expensive to drive to most places in the city. Traffic is terrible, and for short trips you’ll spend way more time and money parking than driving (its common for a 10 minute bike ride to be a 30-40 minute drive during rush hour). That said, the city does not seem interested in fixing this problem by widening roads, which I take as a win.
- There is bike infrastructure: not only are there decent bike lanes, but drivers are used to sharing the road with bikes. It’s not Scandinavia, but it’s way better than the US.
- There are shared bikes fucking everywhere, so it’s always an easy option. It’s super rare that I end up somewhere and cannot find a bike.
- There is zero tolerance for drunk driving. If you’re going somewhere to drink, that’s a trip you’re not driving.
All this said, even though there are so many bikes on the streets that they stack up at traffic lights like cars during rush hour, I feel like the number of bike commuters is 1-2 orders of magnitude less than the number of subway commuters. There’s a scale (population, and geographic size) at which you can’t just promote biking, you must invest in public transport.