So the real question is not how high does the price need to go to get people on bikes but how high does it need to go to change the way our society is organized. When we moved from horses to cars, it took a lot of time and innovation. Moving away from cars to something else will also require a lot of time and innovation.

I personally think people will give up their homes before they give up their automobiles. When gas was over $4/gallon in 2008 I was carpooling with a co-worker. We were already carpooling, but we were surprised that we were not able to convince ANYONE else to carpool. They needed their cars for errands and lunch -- could not go without them for even one day. Everyone just moaned, but not one person could be bothered to pack a lunch one day a week.

I ask the same question of smokers who pay what, $5+ a pack these days I'm guessing.

Down here in Georgia people are just in love with their cars. Georgia also has one of the highest obesity rates in the nation, so I guess their lack of exercise (and a piss poor diet) and their love for cars will continue no matter what gas prices are.

In my case, gas cost had nothing to do with it. It was all the scarcity of parking spaces and the congestion of roads. My bottom line was that cycling was more convenient than driving. Even though I was not a recreational cyclist, I concluded that I should start riding to work.

The value of cycling is that it can substitute quite well for driving over short distances. Unlike carpooling, and mass transportation, it does not require any social or attitudinal changes.


Paul

If I could answer that question, I'd make a fortune.

$4/gal. When it got that high my drive was 14 miles one way and half of that was down an interstate. When an opportunity came to move I selected a condo 3 miles from work and close to the center of town. Then I thought, at three miles I could start riding to work when it is nice out. Now sometimes I ride even when it isn't that nice out.

If it wasn't for the fear of 4dolla gas, I would live in the country again with deer in the back yard and a shop for the boats, big yard and 14 mile commute.

I live in the country, with deer in the back yard and a barn for the bikes, big yard for the dogs...and a 5 mile commute.

It took me a lot of years...and finally a huge cut in salary to get that accomplished tho. YMMV.

That's just it... we didn't move from horses to cars, there was a public transit step in most cases. Cities had light rail, buses and trolleys, and all of that was taken away to make room for cars, and pass the expense of transportation back to the individual user.

No one ever went broke underestimating the laziness of the American public.

[with apologies to H.L. Mencken]

Yes, but public transit (read as buses) isn't nearly as efficient as taking a car or riding a bike here (Orange County, CA). 2.5 hours for bus vs 0.5 for car or bike, and if the transfers are within 5 minutes, so if your bus catches to many reds, you'll miss the transfer.

That is with the current public transit... which is lame by comparison to the old public transit... the stuff that was removed.

Its pretty clear that most people will give up other things to a large degree before they give up driving. That still reduces fossil fuel consumption overall, with detrimental effects to the economy, even inf the amount of driving is about the same. But it probably isn't going to amount to many more bikes on the road..at least not in the near future.

Same here. I have a good job and can afford gas. I even have two cars, but don't commute in either. It's just that L.A. traffic sucks so much that it takes me the same amount of time, and sometimes less to ride my bike to work. Then when I get here, I have to battle for street parking for about 15 minutes, while with my bike, I just wheel it in and park next to my desk.

I'm kind of glad traffic is bad here though (mostly), because if it weren't, I might've never tried riding to work, and now I can't really go back to driving for daily commutes, even if traffic is light. It's just too fun and keeps me healthy.

I'm fairly certain that at $5.00 / gallon, you'll get a sizeable increase in ridership. Still wont' be close to a large percentage, but it'll be significant compared to current numbers.

In Socal, a surprising number of people experimented with bikes when gas was briefly $4.00 and above a gallon, but that only lasted for a few weeks.

When gas hit $4 a gallon, I parked the truck and rode the fire out of my bicycles.

I saw an increase in others on their bikes, but not a flood of new cyclists, by any means.

I think $5 would sell a lot of bikes; $6 would start to crack the culture of driving.

If you live in the suburbs, it is hard to wean yourself off the V-8, though.

In the case of Ft Worth, we didn't really move from horses to cars exactly. The first "subdivision" had trolley cars running up and down and into downtown, and an extensive rail system that connected to Dallas and beyond. Sometime after WWII, when everything new was best, we made the move to the far out suburbs and let the in-town neighborhoods go to the dogs. Moving further out required automobiles. Soon there was an outcry to get those trolleys out of the way so people could get in to work as they drove in from the suburbs. Tracks were paved over or ripped up and we never looked back. Progress...

Every product has a life cycle. The personal automobile has already peaked in the developed world. In the US, there are currently more licensed cars than there are licensed drivers (and almost everyone who's physically capable of driving is licensed to do so), so there's really nowhere to go but down. It's not going to disappear anytime soon, but people's habits are already changing. Car ownership for under-30s is much lower than the last couple generations at the same age. Most families still own cars, but the one-car family is no longer a fringe element.

Cycling is already up substantially over where it was a decade ago. Public transit use is also way up. In reducing car use, public transit is more widely accepted than biking, and expensive energy increases the mode share of both.

Urban design is also changing. They're still building 'burbs, but city cores throughout North America are increasing their density.

Anyone who expects things to change overnight, or for cars to up and disappear, are deluding themselves. That's not how the world works. But that doesn't mean things aren't changing.

https://www.miller-mccune.com/environ...raveled-26524/

Due to the recent tax rise, the UK price is now about $7.33/US gal.

You have a way to go yet

There will be a correlation between fuel prices and the number of commuters, but other options will become feasable and more desirable for a majority of Americans. Telecommuting, carpooling, moving downtown, satellite offices, company shuttles, corporate errand cars, electrics, scooters... people are lazy and other people are clever.

Yeah I would watch that. Lance Armstrong as the host? Seems like a pretty legit show idea. Of course 2 monkeys could come up with a reality show idea right now. LOL

Here in Lincoln where gas was getting close to $5 I think it brought more people to commute by bicycle. Thats why I started again and I wanted to lose some more weight. Our bus system here sucks (I could ride back and forth at least twice in the time that it takes to ride the bus), but when gas was that high the people riding the bus doubled and the cost to operate was still the same. I had begun flipping bikes the summer before that and when gas went higher people were buying bikes like hotcakes. Lincoln is pretty easy to bike around.

Being green is in and bicycling as actual transportation is green. The bike racks at the college I work at are always full during the day and I know at least half of the bikes are used. 5-7 years ago there were few bikes and probably only 5 that were ridding and probably all of them were buy faculty and staff. Now you have a nice mix of both students and people who work there riding. So at least in my area there is some hope. I know if gas was $5 a gallon my wife would ride alot more. There are alot more commuters than the first time I was commuting about the same route around 2001.

And some people are lazy AND clever - they're called engineers.

A lot of the car-centric culture revolves around the basic structure of our cities - they're for the most part zoned into districts, and commercial and industrial companies are not allowed into residential areas, nor are people allowed to reside in commercial or industrial areas. (Yes, there are some notable exceptions, but as a general rule you'll find this is the case in most cities.) Further, neighborhoods are not all the same - some are wonderful, and some are so bad that I won't even drive through them, let alone bike or walk through them. Finally, population density is lower than it was in pre-car days (again, this is true for most cities, but not all), so residential areas are more spread out than they were when we relied on buggies or feet to move us around.

All of these elements conspire against cycling to work. I chose my neighborhood carefully when I bought my house, and I've been fortunate not to have a bike commute that's too long to fit into my schedule. However, for many of my co-workers, that's not the case - they live in the far-flung areas where housing is in general less expensive, and they drive 15-25 miles to work. While some here bike that far (or farther) to work, that's just not feasible for most people - between not being in shape to start that sort of long commute and the time demands that an hour or two each direction place on the schedule, it just doesn't work.

What the increasing cost of gasoline will drive, then, is not a wholesale move from cars to bikes. What it will drive is a gradual, but fundamental, change in the way our cities are structured, similar to the structural changes that occurred when the automobile took over and sprawl became the cheap, easy way to build cities. We'll see an increase in population density of central areas, and we're likely to see a shift toward more numerous, smaller business districts interspersed with neighborhoods. We'll see an increase in mass transit (although this is going to be a long uphill battle in many areas), and we'll see new and creative solutions to the problem of how to move people. Much of the focus will be on transit systems that include main trunk lines (trains come to mind) with a variety of feeder lines (think bus routes) feeding them. But we'll also see innovations in fuel-efficient vehicles (many used to transport individuals to transit hubs), and along with that, more bicycles.

A big issue that we'll have to deal with as a society is how to accomplish these changes. In a lot of ways, the modification of city structures from the middle of the 19th century (when most travel was by horse or by foot), through the latter part of the 19th century (when trains and trolleys became prevalent in many areas), and on through the middle of the 20th century (when car ownership became nearly universal) was an easier change to make - each step opened up new tracts of land that could be used to expand cities, and invited people to put more distance between where they live and the places where they need to go regularly. Reversing this trend of more distance will not be easy or cheap, and will not be accomplished quickly.

My prediction is that, in 30 years, we'll hardly recognize our own urban landscapes - but that the change will have been accomplished so slowly that most of us will never stop to think about how different 2041 is from 2011 unless we're reminiscing to our kids or grandkids. The changes will be much more akin to the level of changes between, say, 1940 and 1970 than to the changes between, say, 1980 and now.

Given the average age and fuel economy of the existing car fleet in the U.S., several years of sustained high gas prices could drive quite a shift away from inefficient cars, without necessarily creating many more cyclists.

If there were just a little less ego tied up in horsepower in this country, most of the V-8 passenger vehicles on the road could be replaced with far more efficient cars that just aren't quite as sexy. I can carry five people and 300lbs of dogs in my little Subaru wagon, it just doesn't get up to freeway speeds quite as fast as a Hemi Charger.

That change is much easier once you're into multifamily residential densities, apartments or condos.

Where it's difficult is built-out single-family residential neighborhoods.

If existing code calls for 6,000 square foot lot sizes, and you lower that to 4,000 square foot minimum lot sizes, how do you increase actual density in a built neighborhood?

Someone has to buy up multiple 6,000 square foot lots with existing houses, then combine and re-subdivide the lots.

If you're really lucky, you can turn two 6,000 square foot lots with two houses into three 4,000 square foot lots without having to tear down either of the houses. But in most cases, you can't, so you only really get the 4,000 square foot density if someone can afford to redevelop the neighborhood.

One alternative that's hard-fought in many neighborhoods is accessory dwelling units on existing lots -- adding a mother-in-law apartment or a guest house to an existing home on a larger lot. Regulations usually try to maintain the feel of single-family residential while allowing de-facto multi-family residential.

(It does go the other way, too. My neighborhood was platted as a walkable streetcar suburb, served by the Seattle-Tacoma Interurban Railway. The trolley stopped running before WW-II, but the basic plat map hasn't changed. The older parts of town still have very walkable neighborhoods with homes close to the street.)

Commuting short distances isn't really a concern for most people. It's days out on the town, or trips upstate, vacations. Those types of things.

If you live 40 miles from work - you have to be pretty freaking fit to nearly ride a century every day. And it's not practical to use a bicycle for the things I listed above. So realistically... bicycles - with our current infrastructure - aren't practical replacements for vehicles.