salcedo

https://www.bikebiz.com/news/read/of...car-use/022268

No separated bike paths

Bad weather (not as cold as other places I guess)

Not a good road-sharing culture (based on my experience watching YouTube videos of drivers complaining that cyclists don’t pay “road tax”)

Why are there so many cyclists in London compared to other cities, specially in the US and Canada?

acidfast7

London is a mixed bag. Some parts are good, some parts are horrible.

Public transport is actually excellent, but super jammed during rush hour and commuting into London is crazy expensive.

The congestion charge is £11.50/day to drive in the city, that's what the cyclists don't pay.

Also, London isn't really that dense. It's much less dense than other European cities, so that doesn't really contribute to the cycling.

mcours2006

I suspect the price petrol might have something to do with it.

acidfast7

Not really. It's more the cost of the train/bus than anything else. No one drives in London (or even into London due to the £11.5/day charge to do so ... that's just to enter, not to park or anything else.)

Here are the fares ...

https://content.tfl.gov.uk/adult-fares.pdf

Median wage is £34K/year in London. That's pre-tax or about £26K post-tax.

A yearly subway pass hovers between £1.5-£4K or up to nearly 20% of post-tax wage (or 2 months of full salary). A bicycle is significantly less.

mcours2006

Perhaps I should have rephrased. The price of petrol probably deters people from driving, or owning a car, for that matter, but the cost of transit would drive the commuters to some other means of transport.

Looking at the price of fares, it is not completely unreasonable, especially if you don't have a long commute, but still more expensive than here. In Toronto, a monthly transit is $146CAD, or about £88.

acidfast7

Actually, car ownership is quite cheap here compared to North America and continental Europe in general. Cars are inexpensive used (we bought a 3-year VW Golf with 6k miles for £9k or 50% of the £18K new price ... 6 speed manual with a 1.2 TSI (turbo petrol engine)). Distances are very short and the engines are misers actually. Insurance is dirt cheap (we pay £350/year for full coverage on that Golf). Yearly tax is around £110. Maintenance is cheap as well. £250 for a full explicit 2-year tune up (plugs/wires/ignition/oil/coolant/air/cabin/fuel/etc...)

Cars are really inexpensive in the UK. Just did new front brakes/rotors at a VW dealership for £200 with 20% VAT (tax) ... so £160 for parts and labour. Four new winter tyres (deep snow tyres) were £300 full installed.

People never really talk about petrol even though it's expensive by North American standards. People talk about traffic, which is why I usually use the train instead, even though it's expensive.

mcours2006

I don't think price of autos/parts are that far off from North America. Repairs can be expensive if you take it to the dealer. Insurance here in Canada, and specifically in Ontario, is crazy expensive, especially if you don't have a good driving records, or have had claims in the past.

I suppose congestion is not bad enough here that people are willing to forego the automobile, even if transit is a cheaper option.

salcedo

Toronto is also much colder gets much more snow than London, but I think their congestion tax must play a huge role

If you had to pay 20 CAD every single time you want to take your car downtown, I bet you'd see a lot more bikes

PedalingWalrus

is that what you pay to get to New York City from New Jersey? :-)

acidfast7

Actually, when I lived in Stockholm they implemented the same congestion charge system. Most Stockholmers were against it before it was implemented and then for it after it was implemented.

mcours2006

Dat true.

I notice there are a lot more people riding in Toronto's core neighbourhoods, but the cold and snow is a huge obstacle. Unless we/they do something like a congestion tax there's little disincentive to drive.

mcours2006

I think Toronto is headed toward a more transit/cyclist friendly direction, which necessarily means a less automobile-friendly one. Permanent bike lanes on Bloor West and the recent change to King St are just a couple of examples. It's good to see, but whether or not things will continue to change in that direction depends on the next administration. Cf. Rob Ford.

noglider 

Actually, yes. The toll for the Hudson River crossings from New Jersey into New York City are about $15. That's inbound. There is no toll outbound.

The graph is, as they say, startling, but now that I've read about the transit fares, it makes sense. Wow, those fares are high. London's climate isn't very pleasant, but it's a bit milder than Copenhagen's, right? And it's flat, right?

Interesting about low car ownership costs in the UK! So the structure, whether deliberate or not, encourages owning cars but discourages driving them, which is how I would want it. Sometimes, nothing does the job as well as a car, and it's nice to have, but driving every day is dumb, and you're luck if you can avoid it.

Well, I am, in any case. I drove my wife's car to work. I do it a few times a year, just to bring it to the mechanic.

acidfast7

1. Yes. London is nowhere as nice as CPH to cycle but it's not so bad.

2. Car ownership is cheap. Car usage is cheap. This is based on my experience compared to the US. Traffic is horrible. Worse than the Northeast corridor by lightyears.

3. It's nice to have as going into the countryside and seeing the bits of the country that aren't so accessible is well worth it. I could borrow/rent, but ownership isn't much. One the depreciation happens (usually 5 years or so), then it's nearly zero cost to own/use a car not so often.

OBoile

Our transit in Toronto is much worse than London. For maybe 85% of the city, you're looking at taking a bus/streetcar in order to reach a subway station. So to go from point A to point B frequently requires a bus/streetcar -> subway -> bus/streetcar which really makes the times add up. For my wife to go from our house in Etobicoke to her work downtown takes 1 hour on transit and 15 minutes by car (she works at odd ours so avoids rush hour). It's about a 45 minute bike ride for her but the odd hours makes her somewhat apprehensive (she doesn't want to be riding on the Lakeshore MUP at 3 am for instance). For me, going to a closer part of downtown, it's about 30 minutes by bike and normally 45-50 on transit (but closer to an hour now due to construction).

I also think, as someone else said, the fact that it is colder plays a part.

The congestion tax is, obviously, also a huge difference. That would likely get my wife to ride or take transit far more often.

fietsbob

I am thinking; that Congestion Area Vehicle tax, has had a pocket book effect...

acidfast7

The scale is also different. No disrespect to GTA, but it's not London (which was the world's most populous city at 1900.)

EURSTAT states that 14.6M ppl live in the commuter area. Personally, I see people everyday commuting 1.25h each way to work. I'd believe that the real commuter area is between 20-25M and by far the largest in Europe (due to Geography). People even commute daily via the EuroStar from Paris to London.

The stress on the commuter is not felt elsewhere in the West (in parts of Asia and SA it is).

Thus, the London commuter belt ends up with my cyclists by force.

OBoile

Agreed. Good point.

mcours2006

I don't know about the transit system in London, but the TTC is as good as you can get given the size of the city and the current infrastructure. At the times your wife is commuting it's off peak, and buses might run every 20-30 minutes. Of course it'll take that long to get to work if she's just missed it. But catch one or two on time and she's still downtown in twenty minutes.

As far as cost is concerned, it's way cheaper than riding the bus up in York Region where I am, especially for children and students. TTC is free for kids under 12, and for students it's only $2 cash. Compare that with YRT, it's $4 cash for everyone.

acidfast7

I agree that systems scale by size. Frankfurt (and the Rhein-Main-Valley ... RMV) are similar is size/scale and are excellent but only serve 6-10M ppl. I'm not sure London in better than FFM, but it's on a different scale (and I'd argue that Chengdu/Seoul/YRB are even bigger based on my limited experience with them.)

https://www.rmv.de/linkableblob/de/1...llbahnplan.pdf

They were switching to 24h service as did Stockholm before I left and London has done now on FSSM.

OBoile

My wife takes a bus (up to the Bloor line), then subway, then another subway on transit. The bus comes right by our door, so the 1 hour estimate is based on catching the bus right as it comes. If she misses it, even during peak times, it's a minimum 15 minutes extra. Fortunately, the bus is fairly consistent so this doesn't happen often. On the way home however, her travel time is often extended when she just misses the bus, so it's often well over an hour for her.

There are many cities of comparable size that have better transit - but infrastructure is a problem. Toronto has neglected it for far too long in favour of keeping our absurdly low property taxes (and for the love of god, why aren't we charging a congestion fee for people in the GTA who drive in on our roads). Furthermore, when they build subways and LRTs they often build out (the Scarborough subway is a particularly asinine example of this) rather than improving coverage in the core of the city. The area from Roncessvalles to Main and south of Eglington needs far better subway and/or LRT (with right of way/dedicated tracks removed from traffic) coverage. Toronto has focused far to much on moving people in and out of the city that they have sorely neglected moving people around within the city.

As I said above, I'd bet about 85% of people in Toronto cannot walk to a subway stop. When you have to walk to a bus/streetcar stop, then wait in the cold, then sit on a crowded vehicle that still gets stuck in traffic like any car there really isn't much incentive to take transit over driving.

The fare is quite reasonable. On that I agree. In fact, it probably should be raised.

acidfast7

Actually that's multi-modal territory. Cycle to the station and have a bike on each end.