Bike quote of the week from my friend John Schubert, regarding cultural differences between Europe and America in terms of use of bicycles for transportation. Many American bicycling advocates see bicycle-specific infrastructure as a way to lure more people into using bikes for transportation, when in fact there are many other factors at play in Europe which are not present in the U.S. In Europe, the price mechanism is very coercive. American advocates choose to ignore that. I just bought a Honda Fit for $16,000. The same car in Denmark costs $30,000, and gas there is $8/gallon. (I was in Denmark in 2013, and saw this firsthand.) Danish auto ownership is very high (as evidenced by the scarcity of parking spots near my friends home in Copenhagen). But the financial incentive to use ones bike, even when one owns a car, is high. Gas and parking are expensive enough to make the incremental cost of one more trip significant. In the U.S., the incremental cost of using a car for one trip is minor. Most European countries spent the last 70 years doing things very differently from us. We kept building suburbs farther and farther out in the farmlands. They didnt. We tore down our trains. They maintained theirs. We make gas cheap. They didnt. We had much higher pay and lower taxes, so we could afford cars and they couldnt. We made drivers licenses easier to get. (Another of my Danish friends took six tries to pass her drivers license test.) The cultural attitudes are important. Most Americans dont want to be seen on a bike. And many of the ones who are willing to be seen on a bike dont want to be seen on a bike for utility purposes. In the echo chamber of disinhibited early adopters, people forget that they cant greatly expand cycling without addressing those issues.
Posted on: Fri, 02 Jan 2015 15:56:29 +0000
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