Originally Posted by
JoeyBike
Man, I was lucky the suburbs I grew up in were grid after grid of streets with 20 to 30 mph limits. It was so easy to get around by bike and mostly avoid riding on the 35 mph 4-lanes. Maybe I would have to ride on a fast road to access a small bridge, but only a couple of blocks - just wait for a gap and sprint!
I wonder if I would have turned out the same if cycling was impossible growing up. It was so easy to bike that my parents forced me to take their old car - I returned it after two weeks of feeding that monster. Most get their first car and feel liberated. I felt like I was stuck in a tar pit.
This isn't an original observation, but my own experience confirms it: development, even suburban development, built before about 1980 was largely grid-based, or at least involved a lot of through side streets that were roughly parallel to major arterials. I grew up in such a suburb, and safely rode my bike everywhere, sometimes to a reservoir 10 miles away from my house. Newer suburban developments involve dead-end clusters of houses that feed into a fairly small number of high-speed, narrow-lane arterials choked with traffic on the way to the mall. Kids basically ride their bikes in the cul de sac in front of their own house.
It should be pretty easy and inexpensive for cluster-based suburban communities to make bicycling a very effective and safe form of transportation simply by connecting the clusters with short bike paths or MUPs. Even car-obsessed people would get behind this once they understood that it would help reduce congestion.