This! I love going mountain biking but commuting on a bike does not fit well with my person. And I t’s not missing bike lanes that are the problem with commuting, it is the numerous other issues a bike commute introduces to your life that are so often overseen. Cities must become walkable first again to succeed, making them bike friendly only pushes traffic problems a few years away…
5min walking through a park + 5-10 minutes in high speed, transport that is the future
1. I despise biking in non-ideal conditions (and where I live this is roughly 60% of the time)
2. From my observations as a pedestrian, driver, biker I have concluded that other bikers are bikers own worst enemy when it comes to the commute, a problem that has not improved with improved bike infrastructure
3. Bike commuting kinda never is at home anywhere, at rush hour you are not at home at the bile lane, you are way to slow for general traffic and way way too fast for the pedestrian sections and there is no solution to this, you have to cross at some point somewhere where you are the „bad guy“
4. I get sweaty when I bike and I don’t like having to shower away my commute before I start my work day (I’ve usually showered already before taking off..)
5. Running errands on the commute route is also problematic with a bike as at rush hour there is just too much going on and too little space in European cities. If we assume that everybody/majority commute by bike this just exacerbates
6. there’s more but I think the reasoning becomes clear
All in all I applaud people for doing it, I just couldn’t live with it and prefer to be a pedestrian that uses fast transport for the big sections.
And yes, I also think that mass bike commuting is a delusion, low hanging political fruit that is being pushed to pump greenwashing agendas and does only kick the problem further down the road. The future should be pedestrian first with well decentralised cities, work from anywhere Job culture and fast (ideally self driving) shared transport.
Personally I don't enjoy cyclists zipping around me on the sidewalk and cycle paths require space, so to me they sort of are.
Of course you can remove roads to create cycle paths, but there's a point at which this starts to affect public transport and services - after all it's not just cars that use the roads.
There's a number of European cities that have made huge leaps in recent years beautifying themselves while allowing more people to bike every day.