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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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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.