Roads may be wide, but it has encouraged a form of disposable housing development that I think will be a problem in the long-term. These houses by companies such as KB Homes (backed by Martha Stewart and notorious for shoddy construction) are not built to last generations…

James Howard Kunstler (who wrote the geography of nowhere) makes an interesting argument that these sprawled suburbs are the mass ghettos of the future… a huge social problem in the works…

I maintain that infrastructure and sprawl must be tackled hand-in-hand. This has to change through a commitment to by public officials to reverse sprawl… check out the Hammarby Model in Sweden. Once an industrial wasteland claimed by gangs, Hammarby is a sustainable suburb with a biking infrastructure that reduces distances and allows for manageable living.

Sprawl is the key enemy here… it even takes our fresh water reserves and consumes nearly every precious resource we have on this planet.

So I feel that I have completely missed the “opportunity” part of sprawl. And to be clear, I’m not trying to demonize anyone or anything here. Simply I’m saying this is not a rational, sustainable way of living and it is a barrier to bicycle culture as well as community building.

I agree that most people won’t cycle 10 miles each way. However, if they can cycle to a train station or bus stop, and either lock their bike for the day or take a folding bike on the train or bus to use at the other end, many more possibilities arise.

There are an awful lot of people who do just that over here. Assen has a population of just 65000, but the train station has a thousand cycle parking spaces, and they’re nearly all full. Bus stops also always include cycle parking, and that’s well used too.

Note that in this country people who use bikes as well as public transport are not usually counted in the cycling figures, but only in the public transport figures. 40% of train passengers use a bike to get to the station. i.e. the numbers cycling for at least part of their journey are significantly higher than the figures suggest.

You may be interested to know that one of the lowest cycling groups in this country is young fathers precisely because they often have work at a distance away from the family home and so commuting becomes less easy.

Women who stay at home with the children are more likely to keep cycling (that’s why there is a big market for moederfietsen which come from the factory fitted with two child seats and a carrier for a push-chair as well as the usual utility bike accoutrements), and is the reason why this country is the only place where more cycle journeys are made by women than by men.

And this, of course, brings to mind another market for cycling which we’ve not been discussing. Even if long commutes are too difficult for many people, there are lots of other journeys that most families make.

In the Netherlands, cycling accounts for a higher percentage of people’s shopping trips than it does of commuting trips.

I did not mean to imply that trips in the Netherlands are not long enough. Most of the people I work with have long commutes. They try to justify bicycle as a viable means of transportation in their situations and fail.

My argument is against people trying to shoe-horn a bicycle centric lifestyle in a car centric environment. I have seen videos of your long commutes and then embarked on a 14 mile commute to downtown myself. I see the difference.

I do see bicycling from a point of view of Jacksonville FL. Most cities are spread out like Jacksonville. A good portion of people commute 10+ miles. If all they are provided is bike lanes, then it will not work. The politicians here barely understand why bike lanes are not sufficient.

http://hembrow.eu/cycling/studytour.html

We include in town infrastructure, out of town infrastructure, school routes, commuting routes etc. The things which we have been discussing are not only talked about but demonstrated in action.