Originally Posted by
I-Like-To-Bike
In which forward thinking U.S. cities are cars now "out" while bikes are "in"? Any info on what the percentages of transportation mileage might be for bikes and cars in these forward thinking cities?
I don't have the stats on the % of transportation mileage for bikes vs car, but surely if there is one, car mileage would blow bike mileage out of the water even if there's a huge improvement in bicycling popularity.
Examples below are showing evidences that bicycling is more popular than driving.
SF: Over 70% increase in cycling from 2006-2011. SF already has funding for bike infrastructure for the next 5 years, almost $2 million/year. Pretty good for a 49 sq. mile city. Bicycling market in this city has gone through the roof and has the largest market in the nation.
Washington DC: Bikeshare there is the most popular in the nation with 1700 bikes at 170 stations. In 2011, DC has added almost 60 miles and 2300 bicycle racks.
Chicago: The mayor is spending $91 million on bike facilities to attract young professionals and will have a $18 million bike share program that comprises 3000 bicycles at 300 rental stations. Crazy!
NYC: Polling has never shown that 60% of NYC residents support bike lanes and over 3/4 want to increase or maintain the number of bike lanes. Cycling has doubled since 2007. I could never imagine a dense city like NYC could have separated bike lanes.
Los Angeles: One of the most car-centric cities in the world with pretty poor public transit, and cycling has increased 32% from 2009-2011. They have the world' largest bicycling event called Ciclavia attracting more than 100,000 cyclists.
Portland: Don't need to explain here.
Minneapolis: Cycling increased 47% from 2007-2011 and from 2010-2011, the city expanded its on-street bike lanes network by 75%. By no means, this city has good public transit. So if people ride more is because they drive less.
You could argue that these are all dense cities. I will give you another example. Palo Alto is a suburb in the Silicon Valley and saw a 7.1% of commuters cycling in 2011 vs 5.6% in 2000. There are 11 bicycle bridges, over 40 miles of bike lanes and 11 miles of trails. They are building yet another bicycle bridge to link east and west Palo Alto.
Originally Posted by
gerv
I don't know if this is completely true. I keep thinking of the case of Toronto where the suburbanites put an anti-bike mayor in office. There's a lot of back and forth that goes on. I don't think he'll be in forever, but you can't count on a victory anywhere.
Toronto is an exception (there's an exception to everything) and besides, there is a bike lane on a block down which is parallel to this major road. Vancouver and Montreal are going full force. The mayor of Vancouver commutes to work by bike and Montreal has a great bike share program in Bixi.