Originally Posted by
alcjphil
Well, I live in a city that scores pretty well on a global basis. One area we score unusually high on is the number of bike share bicycles available to the general public. During our summer festivals, primarily the Montreal Jazzfest, riding your bike there is a pain, you cannot take your bike into the site, so you have to lock it up and trust that it will be there when the outdoor free concert is over. A Bixi which you can ditch at the entrance to the concert area is way better than your own bike. When the concert is over, you pick up another Bixi to ride home.
I think bike shares are great, wouldn't want to do without it, and are probably very important in the transition towards a more cycling friendly city. But it's not a measure to determine the best cycling cities, it can be a measure of the effort made, but that's a different matter and even then it isn't necessarily.
Originally Posted by
mr_bill
So Utrecht comes in first but you complain because your tiny city isn’t on the list?
?
-mr. bill
No, I complain about Antwerp beeing 3rd, like it would be the way to go, because the index isn't right in it's set up. You can rank cities by progress/effort and you can rank cities by the level of cycling it has. But you can't mix it up, because the latter influences and limits the first.
I don't mind leaving the smaller cities out, but Innsbruck and Bern which are on the list are twice as tiny as the city I live in. I don't care much for a ranking of cities by the quality of cycling, it's not like my cycling experience would improve if my city ranks top, and you'll probalby end up with 9 out of 10 Dutch cities that nobody knows and don't make the best example for cities that want to increase cycling. So it makes more sense to rank only cities of a certain size and rank them by effort and progress made in recent years. But this it doesn't paint a proper picture nor does it give much useful information.
Originally Posted by
mr_bill
Oh no. That can’t be. The only people who use bike share are people who can’t afford bikes, and tourists.
-mr. bill
People who can't afford bikes? I'm from a cycling environment, I really can't relate to that. Bike shares are much more expensive, even for the first month. I use them quite regularly in different cities where I got by train, rent one at the station with my public transport card for less than 5 euro/24h but in your own city you use your own bike so it's limited to a certain percentage. Bike share/rental is much bigger in Amsterdam than in Utrecht, but do all those tourists on bikes disrupting traffic really contribute to making a Amsterdam a better cycling city? In cities like Groningen, Utrecht and Nijmegen Swapfiets is very popular. This is a kind of a bike lease, for 15 euro's a month you get a bike that get swapped at your front door if it's broken, stolen or lost. But people treat the bikes like it's a bike share, often because they can't finder their 'own' among lots of simular looking bikes from the same company. This is creating a bike parking problem, which was already cramped so also not contributing to a better cycling city.
I'd just like it if an organization would make a proper, informative and useful ranking.