Costs and Cars

 This study from Forbes suggests that car ownership costs a lot of money, relative to using bikes in particular. I think this is correct, but also more correct in large cities like London (which it focuses on) and less true in places like the Quad Cities. And I want to talk a bit about why.

1. Increased Car Costs

Big cities tend to have big car costs: higher insurance costs (for many reasons), higher gas costs (often due to taxes), higher parking costs, even higher license costs (Singapore being the extreme example). 

Smaller cities and rural areas have correspondingly lower costs, so the gap is less extreme.

This guy costs less in the Quad Cities than he would in a city like London--to get, keep up, and use.

2. Increased Bike Access

Conversely, the bike has much greater utility in cities that actually support it. I got my local temple to install a bike rack (thanks, folks!) but it isn't standard for houses of worship, grocery stores, or pretty much anywhere else you go in places like the Quad Cities to have bike parking--much less general public bike parking like you'll see general public car parking.

This is unusual.

This is unheard of (well, obviously it's heard of in Amsterdam, where I took this photo, but you know what I mean).

And that's just talking about what you do with the bike once you get there: the bike access to places is much harder in places like the QCA as well. 

My kingdom for a separated bike lane!

That makes the lower costs of bike use much more accessible, since it means that someone who wants to use a bike instead of a car actually can.

3. Social Expectation

And of course, part of why there isn't the bike infrastructure in places in the QCA that there is in bigger cities is that a car is just expected here, and a bike isn't. London may be struggling to get as many bike commuters as it would benefit from, but it's also doing a lot to improve that (hence the CityBracket win after all).

The QCA has implemented improvements, and the recreational biking around is definitely good and getting better, with long bike lanes on both sides of the river and along Duck Creek in Davenport. But for true bike replacement, it's not even really in the realm of possibility. 

Trust me, I'm trying.

I often bike to work, bike to get groceries, bike my kids to school, bike to services--but I can't bike everywhere, every day, safely, and do what I need to do without a car pretty frequently, because the social expectation is that everyone has a car, so everything is built around that.

This is one of the ways in which mass transit and bike infrastructure are mutually advantageous: both shift the baseline expectation of car to one of not necessarily having a car, which means that the world bends more freely to allow life without that particular kind of vehicle.

London's excellent transit creates space for better biking; similarly, Amsterdam's better biking creates mental space for better transit. They're co-constitutive.

That creates the great puzzle of a cityscape like the QCA: how do we go from neither to either, or both?

Well, the main thing I'm trying is just actually using what's here--biking where I can, using the bus when I can, and so on.

But community organizing--bending social expectations by actually talking to each other--is a key component as well.

And if you can get the local government on board like London has, well, that really kickstarts the process.