What makes a city spread out?

[Lazarus]

This goes with the thread on making biking popular thread.
What in your mind makes a city to spreadout to be able to commute by bike? What would be the maximum miles that you would travel on your bike a day?

[SVOboy]

I would go up to 40 round trip consistently, depending on the quality of the roads / weather, I think. Around here it's made troublesome by awful roads with lots of glass and bad drivers, but in NH it's much nicer for longer commutes.

[AndrewJ]

In my mind a bikeable city is one that
1.) Has plenty of bike lanes
2.) Uses a grid street pattern to spread traffic out instead of routing all traffic though main "collector" streets
3.) Uses measures to make vehicle traffic more difficult. IE: speed bumps, one-way streets, car-free streets.


carfree.com has an interesting plan for a car-free city, it's basically a 6-lobe design each lobe being interconnected by light rail.

Pretty interesting stuff, if only I could come up with the money to found my own city...

[Peakster]

Originally Posted by Lazarus

What would be the maximum miles that you would travel on your bike a day?

I would be fine riding anywhere in my city on a bicycle, since our urban footprint is only about 7x7 miles in size. The crappy thing is the snow and cold 5-6 months of the year. After school is finished, I'm going to ride my bike as much as possible to cut down on automobile costs.


Another real problem is that most Reginians expect people to travel by car. So my friends and family have the tendancy of calling me up and saying 'come on over right now!' (meaning they expect me to be there within 10-20 minutes).

[Lazarus]

Originally Posted by AndrewJ

In my mind a bikeable city is one that
1.) Has plenty of bike lanes
2.) Uses a grid street pattern to spread traffic out instead of routing all traffic though main "collector" streets
3.) Uses measures to make vehicle traffic more difficult. IE: speed bumps, one-way streets, car-free streets.


carfree.com has an interesting plan for a car-free city, it's basically a 6-lobe design each lobe being interconnected by light rail.

Pretty interesting stuff, if only I could come up with the money to found my own city...

Very interesting indeed. That's a great link.

[igo]

Realistically a commute would have to be under 5 miles each for me to consider commuting almost every day. Any longer then that commuting by car is more convenient. I may consider longer distances in places where traffic/parking is really bad (like nyc).