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Oxford Professor: Cycling is 10 times more important than electric cars for reaching net-zero cities
(theconversation.com)
this post was submitted on 08 Apr 2025
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Yes, I will cycle 15 miles (one-way) to the nearest produce section.
I'm all for bikes in sufficiently urban areas, but they are never going to be reasonable for 90% of America (by land mass, not population).
We need passenger train service (or other mass transit) that can cover lower density areas and still be reliable. (There's active train tracks within 100m of both my driveway and the produce section, so for me a passenger train would be ideal.)
It really seems like your phrasing and tone indicate you think your views are incompatible with the thesis of this article, but they aren't
Sorry, my bad.
Okay, so counterpoint: In a lot of ways, the EU is like a country. And it’s a large one - maybe not quite the US’s size, but big. And much of it is bike friendly.
No, people don’t traverse the mountains in their little hand-me-down red bike. But they don’t often traverse those mountains every month anyway. And when they do, trains exist for that.
So this exposes not a landmass problem, but an urban planning problem. It is the easiest thing in the world to stand in the middle of an 8-lane stroad in the boonies, where people are waiting 5 minutes to traverse two blocks of traffic lights to get to the quarter-square-mile parking lot outside their coffee shop, praying you’re not killed as you wait for the walk signal, and scream at the top of your lungs “What in the everloving fuck is the point of all this?” And it would be a family-friendly exasperation since it would be drowned out by engine noise.
We can build about 8 new walking-friendly cities in the space taken up by one goddamn McDonald’s parking lot.
If you think urban planning has anything to do this how I get to the grocery store, you aren't facing the problem.
The population density of the EU is 106/km^2^. The population density of my county is 22.4/mi^2^ (8.64/km^2^).
In a small European town, you get on your bike, travel two blocks through zero red lights, and arrive at a cozy corner shop that has everything you need for lunch and freshly baked bread. If you don’t have a basket on your bike, you just walk there instead.
The gigastores we associate with groceries in the USA are a product of our car culture. Someone has braved the highway ramps, so they need to bring back a big haul in their large trunk. Of course, that also leads to food being wasted as we buy in bulk and let it expire.
Citing population density is just exemplifying the planning problem. You can look at Australia’s population density too, but it’d be disingenuous to include the large outback - which no one settles into, because why would they. Same question for America’s pointlessly broad frontiers, where everyone just seems to want to get away from each other.
Population density is relevant here, I'm not grabbing a lot of extra uninhabited territory to make the number bigger, I'm just using the smallest organizational unit that includes all my weekly trips.
I'm not trying to get groceries from a gigastore. This grocery store building has been there since I was a child in the 80s and while it is bigger than the store my father used to run, it's less than 20% the size of the WMT supercenter down the road -- half the size of the grocery section of that "gigastore" (it's not a max size supercenter). But, it is the closest produce section. You can be shelf-stable stuff from the dollar store(s) much closer, but I do sometimes need produce and I'd rather shop at this locally-owmed location than the chain dollar stores. (I don't even this they are franchises, just corporate owned.)
This is exactly the problem that urban planning is meant to solve. Our specific US problem may not have been solved YET but that doesn’t mean it can’t be. As an engineer, one of our sayings is “anything can be engineered, it just depends on how much money you have”. So for this problem, it’s more about our communal values: if we decide as a community to value public transit and pedestrian friendly urban planning, we put our community funds in those areas instead of centering cars.
If we had passenger trains with bike storage, I would never need a car again. We will never see that in America though. We can barely get infrastructure built. We have no national impetus to get it done.
Why the fuck is the nearest produce section 15 miles away? That's a major planning failure. Most trips that Americans take are less than 3 miles, so planning by population would be a lot more sensible than planning by land mass.
Well, there are a lot of reasons, I suppose. It's hard to name just one, but I guess because it isn't profitable to run a produce section any closer? That's not a root cause, and it's not something that reveals individually actionable items, but it's what I have. I'm not even sure there a collective action the 300 residents could take, other than funding a non-profitable community grocery store, maybe? But most of the residents are living below the poverty line, and the ones that aren't are either retired or otherwise uninterested in that kind of community action.
There's only 19k people in the whole county and 15mi. is the distance from where I live to the county seat.
I agree that urban planning should stop subsiding cars. But, America is, by land mass, not very urban, and I'm stuck in one of those areas.
Thats more a problem inherrent to how america builds its cities than it is a problem inherrent to the bicycle. I agree we still need to buld rail, but you would likely still have to increase density to get good ridership. Otherwise you start to sacrafice speed for frequent stops serving low density. A problem many buses already face.
"City" is an optimistic word for where I am compelled (by familial duty) to live. But, we need to plan for my density, too. Otherwise we'll still have millions of cars on the roads and they will need somewhere to park when they visit the city.
When I visit a real city, I don't mind paying for parking. I'd prefer not to have to pay for parking to get groceries each week, but that would probably be fine. But biking is not reasonable, and mass transit is unavailable.
Some places build transit stations outside of cities or in specific locations for people to drive to there then transit into the city. This can help control where the cars are instead of havings thousands of cars all trying to find on street parking downtown.
Yeah I see this problem too. I wonder if it might be a zoning issue. I think right now in the US in these areas we have suburban “centers” with Costco’s, Lowe’s, etc. and strip malls. All which require huge large parking areas. How would it look to provide people what they need, without the detrimental effects of car centered land use?
people who live in 90% of the least densely populated land on earth are... not that many people in the grand scheme of things.
And if you live close enough to civilization to have utilities like power maybe it's possible to also have a grocery store that's closer than average distance between towns in germany. Might even be beneficial idk.
My father used to run the grocery store in town. My brother ran it for a bit, too. I don't know the ultimate reasons it ahut down, but Dad wanted to retire and brother decided it wasn't worth it to run.
There's a dollar store in town, and an another 5 min north, and another 10 mi. south, but no produce at any.
I want to move back to a more urban area and be able to walk to a grocery store in 15 minutes, but Dad needs someone to live with him since he is now disabled. (Brother died.)
I remember there was a problem getting wholesale deliveries at the small scale needed to serve this town of barely 300 people.
I would love to be able to ride trains to get places and not have to drive everywhere.
I don't dislike driving, but if I could fit my schedule around public transit, I think I'd prefer that, most of the time.
Good public transit would be so frequent you wouldn't need to fit your schedule around it. I live in a place with passable public transit and I never check schedules before leaving the house. I wait 10 mins max (I'm still annoyed sometimes tho)
So the tracks are already there they just don't run passenger trains on it?..
worse, a lot of places have "rails2trails" programs where they rip out old train tracks and put in bicycle paths instead.
It makes more sense to put trains there and convert old car roads to bike paths
I like "rails2trails" bike paths because they tend to be flat (since trains can't handle steep grades unless they're a funicular or cog railroad), but I agree that running passenger trains again would be even better.
There's no reason we can't have more strict requirements of grade for bike roads.
I've been in bike roads that ran parallel to car roads. The bike road went up and down while the car road was at a better grade. So I got off the bike road and went on the car road. Its like these idiots think were out riding for fun on weekends or something.
The solution is regulations.
Yep. Passenger service stopped in my area before I was born, but my father remembers being able to use them that way.
Freight trains run through multiple times a day, still.
The "old train depot" meuseam / visitor's center is literally across the street from the grocery store w/ produce section.
15 mile with an electric bike and good infrastructure that let you go fast is doable. And electric bike is already so much better than a car because it weight much less and as such consume much less. But I agree overall it does not replace a train because people won't cycle when it rains.
I'd rather cycle when it rains than get a train, assuming it's not like 3 hours in a freezing temperature watching cars go by while I'm stuck at cyclists-only red light.
That's still almost an hour each way with the US class 1 ebike limit of 20mph. Not really doable for me or most people purely from a time usage stand point, not to mention 2 hours in the weather if it's poor.
An electric motorcycle would be a lot more interesting to me, because it's not held up by the stupid US ebike laws with such low speed limits.
45min-1 hour for one way to work is already what I do with public transport and it considered kind of standard time of commuting in Paris. In bike it is harder I have to admit you have to be willing to spend the time and have the physical condition to do it. The pro of taking public transport is also you can do other things while transporting even if limited but it is less tiring than driving a car or bike :)
Well sure, but if you add another 2 hours to get groceries on top of your commute that becomes kind of difficult right?
I'd be willing to take longer, but I wouldn't want to do the trip uncovered in the rain. Also, the highway doesn't have a shoulder in one section, so I'd have to route around that to be safe on the bike, and I don't know how much length that would add to the trip (and it would probably involve adding travel on unpaved / dirt / gravel roads...)
For what it’s worth, US limit is only 20mph with full motor. Class 3 is allowed, with 28mph (45kph, actually) when using pedal assist. I threw a larger chainring on my eBike to make maintaining 28mph easier and I just pedal everywhere.
Most bike paths are class 1 at least where I am, I don't think I'm going to pedal faster than 20 especially with a load of groceries.
Even 28mph isn't that fast when the roads I take to the store on a motorcycle are 45-60mph limits.
State-bound, but this.