I will say in their defense, that people in wintery snow packed states up north kinda need a garage or lose their truck or automobile in a blizzard save hours of shoveling. Makes clearing the driveway easier if vehicles etc are pulled in, and less vulnerable to hail, wind & theft. Basically having garages makes life a lot easier, even if you don't own a motor vehicle. You could just as easily have a spiffy workshop & bike storage vs automobile or truck. Even here in PA where we get less snow there are many, many, many houses with no garage or carport or provision for carport or if they do have a garage it doesn't fit the larger automobiles, which makes no sense to me. If you live in a place with snowy winters, carports & garages do indeed make sense.... but.... the massive size & how dominant the garage is vs the rest of the house makes no sense.

I had a concept a few years ago involving automated fully electronic vehicles that used radio, smart roads & mobile device software to basically delete the personal automobile and be used to make most types of deliveries (including groceries) which would take most trucks off local roads... the roads would then last longer due to the lighter driverless delivery vehicles.... you could even interlink them with transload facilities and have rail do all the interstate & moderate distance transport. This would be paired with a new economic model where say if you wanted a new faucet & were not sure which fit best in your bathroom instead of making several trips.. you'd have several faucets delivered to you via automated vehicle.. and you'd simply return the ones you weren't going to use, and the trip wouldn't just be to your residence, it would make other deliveries and pickups along a designated route determined by logistics software that actually al ready exists. You could also return it from another location to increase convenience.

The same would applied to passenger transport... you have a schedule set up and they do all the work so you're there on time with minimal time in transit.

All of this is totally doable with existing technologies. You could have a few different sizes & capacities of both delivery and passenger vehicles or even hybrid types that do both. It's the 21st century now, time to dump the Victorian era one horse & buggy for one rider system.

- Andy

>>>>Second, that riding a bicycle, period, is seen as weird, and is actually getting more and more weird as time goes by. <<<<<<

This thread has started to reach that point where people are attacking each other, so I just want to pop in again and comment that I'm aware I'm bringing some of my own baggage to the discussion...the way many people do. I am guilty of using the term "spandex" a little too liberally to generalize everything I see as a hindrance to the advancement of cycling's popularity. For this, I apologize to the manufacturers of Spandex and to the people who wear it and who find that it makes riding more pleasant. And for what it's worth, I suppose the padded underwear I wear beneath my cargo shorts is probably Spandex, too, huh?

Anyway, to address the comment above, I am strongly convinced that the main reason my co-workers think I am "weird" for biking three miles to work is that they still aren't convinced that I don't stop somewhere just outside the office to change into some kind of Super Spandexman suit, complete with goggles, toe-clips, and a Go-Pro camera on my helmet. They simply cannot buy that not all cyclists wear nipple-tight Tour DeFrance jerseys and shave their legs. So grolby, I agree with a lot of what you're saying, but I think the "weirdness" people perceive about bicycling has a lot more to do with "spandex" than people who wear spandex care to admit.

Bike commuting is a great goal to have and I really wish more people were doing it...However, making bike commuting into some extreme ideology, where you start preaching to people and forcefully trying to make converts out of them is not good...many years ago before I started bike commuting I was very car-centric, and now I am a car-free bike commuter. Nobody influenced me, nobody told me to bike commute, it was my own decision.

Time will tell, but so far ive met a lot of lovely ladies, sadly things didn't work out for other reasons with most of them.

- Andy

lie back and think of england.

Many of the women I know wear spandex/elastene when they bike these days. Like it or not spandex/elastene is about as common in the USA as "normal clothing" is in Copenhagen.

State College has a fairly large population of people that have a dead-flat ride to campus. Unfortunately, the main drag in from Cletusville dominates the roads in from that part of town. So I can imagine people not wanting to ride on those roads. It's really too bad we let the people from out of down dominate our cityscapes like that.

If you can, try finding books on the subject written when the automobile was just starting to become common. Before the affordable automobile, most people rarely traveled more than 20 miles from their home, and a large portion of the working class lived in abject poverty because their employment opportunities were limited to whatever was available within walking distance. The automobile more than anything else improved the standard of living for the working class by allowing them to travel between where they could find affordable quality housing and employment that matched their skills with decent pay.

We need to look forward not back, the good-ol-days weren't so good for most people, and its over population not their tools that are the issue. The harsh truth is we need to curtail our lifestyles to compensate for irresponsible breeding habits.

Sure it does, back then children were expected to share a 10x10 room instead of giving each child 15x15, and then having a separate&2nd living room for the upstairs(childs) bedrooms. Guest bedrooms and home offices weren't seen as essential, only 2(or even 1) bathrooms. No mancave(that's what the garage was for). So houses were smaller. rage function hasn't changed, the balance of garage/house has. As for garage, you can have it fit 1-2 vehicles+storage or a workshop. Keep your project car/boat inside, whatever.

I'm so ****ed when I go to buy a house. I want to be near good cycling infrastructure, but want enough space to garden, no HOA and a big enough garage for two cars+bikes+a workshop. Where am I going to find something that meets all those expectations? Or room to build a detached outbuilding for vehicles+tools. Either way.

And when the whistle blows....switch places.

Ya, totally agree. I suck right into the idea of almost proprietary equipment for every hobby I've ever been in. It's even difficult reisisting the urge get special platform pedals and special flat shoes for my mtb.

Riding a bike for any practical purpose just takes so much longer for me than driving. My commute stretch-goal this summer will take 4+hours out of my day. Riding is for exercise and bragging rights when I look in the mirror. (gee, I look better than I did last year...)

I work at a large university and many women who aren't biking wear spandex.

I have no problem with this.

Actually, none of the people whom I see biking to school wear spandex. I rarely bike to work - I'd have to get up too early - but when I do, I' m the only rider in spandex. The women in spandex all come in from the parking lot.

Comments I receive from co-workers all involve a perception that it's too unsafe. Clothing is never at issue.

...give up the cycling infrastructure, and you're golden! ;)

Possibly people might come across a few too many discussions with cycling ideologues with wackadoodle suggestions that just might prompt a perception that at least some bicycle commuting "advocates" are not only weird but totally out of touch with reality and the discussion has been changed to living in an imaginary dreamworld.

[MENTION=90453]tjspiel[/MENTION], any photos of you standing in front of one of those garages in white pants, pastel shirt, and neon tie? Gotta love the 80's.

I would love to have a picture of me dressed up like that on my old white Peugeot. Sadly none exists.

Here is a pic of the garage at the townhouse I lived for my last 8 years in Shoreview. Streetview distorts it some. I sold it in 1999 at the height of the housing market. A guy drove by an hour after the for sale sign went up. I was standing in the driveway and he offered me the asking price without ever seeing the inside.

The double garage had almost the same sized footprint as the townhouse. ;)

http://maps.googleapis.com/maps/api/...5&sensor=false



My first few years in Shoreview I lived in an efficiency apartment that cost about $400 a month. A single stall garage with room for nothing other than a car was an extra $125 a month.

Don't misunderstand, I do appreciate the value of garages. But moving outward from the center of a city and into the suburbs is like rings on a tree. The oldest homes near the center of the city don't have garages or if they do they were added later. When they were built people didn't have cars.

I live in Minneapolis proper but in a neighborhood that was developed in the 30s. The houses all have garages, but usually only single car garages (at least originally). They are typically in the back of the house, not the front and are accessed through the alleys. There was a trolly line that ran down the major street at one end of the block. People had cars then but usually only one and pubiic transport was still heavily utilized. We have sidewalks. There are stores, restaurants and parks within easy walking distance.

Through the seventies and eighties you saw the garage become a more prominently featured part of the home when viewed from the front. The 90's is where it seemed to really go off the rails, IMHO. The garage often dwarfs everything else that's visible from the street side.

If you wanted to explain to someone how important the car is to American culture, all you have to do is show them one of these houses. And the surprising thing is that people don't really notice it.

Hello! The garage makes up 2/3 of what people see when they look at your house ! Maybe that's a sign that we care about cars a little too much.

Yes, and I think this has become even more vital, now that most households require two or more jobs to make ends meet, and change jobs every few years due to layoffs or wage stagnation. Life becomes more complex if you have kids too, especially if you feel that they need to attend private schools, or want to provide them with extracurriculars such as music lessons. My state is pushing to replace public schools with charters, meaning that virtually everybody will have to drive their kids to some far-flung school.

Amusingly, my family uses bike / bus / walking for the basics: Work, school, and shopping. Most of our car use is for extracurriculars and recreation.

I think that exaggerates the role played by the automobile. I would (for example) give unionization a lot of credit for businesses paying living wages for what otherwise would have been low paying jobs. People rarely traveled more than 20 miles from their home because stores, schools, bars, restaurants, banks, churches, etc were located near where people lived. If the town you lived in didn't have opportunities, you found a job in a community that did and you moved there. People kept jobs for decades. Laying workers off was a last resort and a sign of trouble, - not a sign of healthy corporate restructuring.

Besides, it's not like people went from walking to driving cars. There were horses, mules, carriages, trains, street cars, trolleys, etc. Oh, and bikes.

Just ran across this website: https://www.walkscore.com

You plug in an address and it gives the address a score on a scale from 1 to 100 in terms of walkability. My old Shoreview neighborhood scored 17 which sounds pretty bad but the house I grew up in scored a 3.

My Minneapolis neighborhood scored 58 in terms of walkability and got a 69 for bikeability :)

There was also a slider that let's you pick a time interval and then select a mode of travel. It would show you the area on the map that you could travel to within that time frame. So if you pick 20 minutes, it'll show you the area that you can cover by bike from that address within 20 minutes.

The Shoreview address wasn't given a score for bikeability or transit. It also didn't have the slider feature.

I'm not sure what the scores are based on but it seems fairly accurate. We are in walking distance to a number of places but there are other Minneapolis neighborhoods that are much, much better.

The problem with walkscore is that it's distance based. There have been a number or articles about how it rates a 1/4 mile walk along a 55 mph 4-lane road with no sidewalk to a place with 1 greasy spoon and a 7-eleven better than a 1/3 mile walk along a 30 mph residential street with a sidewalk to a place with 4 nice cafe's, a grocery, and other things.

Great idea, useless execution.

I'm sure it's far from perfect but I doubt it's consistently that bad. FWIW the 3 scores I got pretty accurately reflected the realities of places I have lived.

Edit: Turns out that walkscore improved their algorithms starting last year so that it's not longer just distance based. They called it the "Street Smart Walk Score Algorithm"

Ha. I live in 10014.

Nice ! Is it that good in reality ?

The neighborhood where I work (North Loop) gets a walkability score of 93, a transit score of 97, and a bike score of 94. Those numbers seem a little inflated.

If they gave some weighting to the types of places you'd have to walk to get somewhere (sidewalk vs no sidewalk, busy high-speed thoroughfare vs slower) then it'd be quite useful. As is it can be misleading.

Apparently it has been doing exactly that since last year: "Street Smart Walk Score Algorithm"

E-assist bikes have already been mentioned but aside from that no one has really talked about technology and potential improvements to human powered transport.

Even existing things like trikes or recumbents can make long distance commutes faster and more comfortable. I know some people don't like how low to the ground they are, but if the infrastructure were safe enough that could alleviate some concerns.

Then there are velo-mobiles that could help people manage in poor weather.

There are lots of ways that bike performance could be enhanced but our performance bikes tend to come from the racing world where design is very much limited by UCI rules, - which are based on tradition as much as anything else. For example, racing bikes still have seat stays and seat tubes only because rules require them, - modern construction techniques don't.

I guess what I'm saying is that when thinking about what is realistic in terms of bike commuting, we shouldn't limit ourselves to only consider bikes as we normally think of them. We may be able to cover more ground in less time and perhaps even in more comfort if we look beyond traditional bikes.

I am actually considering this for my next step up/or down from my PriusC, depending on how one looks at it Welcome to Organic Transit!

Yes! Everything is within a half mile: restaurants, tourist sites, shoe repair, watch repair, grocery stores, delis, pizzerias, clothing stores, drug stores, bike shops, hardware stores. I happen to like some supermarkets that are farther, so I walk about 2.5 miles round trip. It's immensely impractical to do short trips by car, so no sane person does it. Parking can take longer than the trip.

Walking is so convenient that I don't ride my bike unless my trip is at least a mile, often longer.

It's also quite invigorating to have so many people out on the streets. In the course of my day, I think I might witness hundreds or maybe even a thousand faces. Can you imagine that? It's radically different from living and working in the suburbs.

I've been thinking something like that may make a far more practical winter commuter than a traditional bike. The only problem I see is where to keep it at work.

If I were an engineer I'd have an easier time at this but if there was such a beast as a lightweight folding trike with an optional fabric body...