Vancouver didn't start from scratch, but aggressively built out its cycling infra over the past two decades. I love bicycles, I love green tech, and I love my e-bike! But I also note these concomitants:
- Rapid gentrification. Foot/bike accessible urban infrastructure turns out to be the hottest possible commodity.
- Luxury pricing of car parking, insurance, and spacing. This seems harmless until you remember that e.g. poor people shop at box stores (which depend on a car to access) in order to bring down the cost of living. Intentionally pricing car access as a luxury good makes the poor pay for climate progress. Making cars more expensive to own and operate is an inflationary force that disproportionately afflicts the poor.
- Gentrification + Inflation = Displacement. It's almost a joke at this point -- if your neighbourhood is putting in a bike lane, and you don't own your home, you are basically watching them tidy up for the next tenant, who will be like you, but better-off, and will pay more in rent.
When I see a bike lane getting put in, I know I'll be moving in a few years. And those twee little bicycle-lane-only traffic lights? Cute, right? Those are basically tombstones for your local art scene, because that whole block is 'going Vanhattan' (portmanteau of 'Vancouver' and 'Manhattan').
Now, there's nothing inherently wrong with bikes, and I listed the above adverse outcomes as 'concomitants', and not side-effects. I don't want to suggest that the lines of causality are that clear.
But talk about 'optimizing' cities is fundamentally talk about redistributing those cities, and redistribution creates (or effaces) winners and losers.
> Making cars more expensive to own and operate is an inflationary force that disproportionately afflicts the poor
No it isn't. I think you know the answer to the question "are transit riders more or less affluent than drivers on average?"
> And those twee little bicycle-lane-only traffic lights? Cute, right? Those are basically tombstones for your local art scene, because that whole block is 'going Vanhattan' (portmanteau of 'Vancouver' and 'Manhattan').
Please name one place where this has occurred in Vancouver (which I am intimately familiar with).
> Luxury pricing of car parking, insurance, and spacing
This is a transition problem more than anything. Those are used by poor people today because the state subsidizes that way of shopping. If the state subsidizes a different way of shopping, that will become the cheap way of shopping
All problems are, when seen from far enough away, 'transition' problems.
They are very, very real for the people experiencing them. Life itself is transitory, often on a shorter timeline than the problems encountered throughout.
- Rapid gentrification. Foot/bike accessible urban infrastructure turns out to be the hottest possible commodity.
- Luxury pricing of car parking, insurance, and spacing. This seems harmless until you remember that e.g. poor people shop at box stores (which depend on a car to access) in order to bring down the cost of living. Intentionally pricing car access as a luxury good makes the poor pay for climate progress. Making cars more expensive to own and operate is an inflationary force that disproportionately afflicts the poor.
- Gentrification + Inflation = Displacement. It's almost a joke at this point -- if your neighbourhood is putting in a bike lane, and you don't own your home, you are basically watching them tidy up for the next tenant, who will be like you, but better-off, and will pay more in rent.
When I see a bike lane getting put in, I know I'll be moving in a few years. And those twee little bicycle-lane-only traffic lights? Cute, right? Those are basically tombstones for your local art scene, because that whole block is 'going Vanhattan' (portmanteau of 'Vancouver' and 'Manhattan').
Now, there's nothing inherently wrong with bikes, and I listed the above adverse outcomes as 'concomitants', and not side-effects. I don't want to suggest that the lines of causality are that clear.
But talk about 'optimizing' cities is fundamentally talk about redistributing those cities, and redistribution creates (or effaces) winners and losers.