So New York saw a pretty steep drop in public transit ridership during the pandemic, and I think the theory is that a lot of the riders moved over to biking instead. That is what initially triggered the installation of the extra bike line on the Brooklyn Bridge: Much more bike traffic and empty subways. I suppose NY just has a bigger share of non-drivers that wanted to avoid the subway but still needed to get places, so they biked.
It's almost like misfunding public transit leads to more individual transportation. I think that certain politicians think that by doing this they'll create more car users, but driving is just prohibitively expensive for what you get, to the point that it just doesn't make sense for people's wallets.
“Extra bike lane” is a stretch, it’s the same width as the old one but now is on the car deck. It’s difficult to use without inhaling exhaust and there are areas that are completely submerged during rain. They should have taken a lane from both sides of the car deck at least. (Just use the Manhattan bridge anyway)
nope, lots of people fled out of the city and many still work remote. I drive into manhattan for work periodically and it's not even close to 2019 crowds.
@@8_bit_Geek school populations have been dropping for a while now. Even a cities increase population. The school population has been dropping. Lower school enrollment is more to do with people having fewer kids.
Bike infrastructure seems to be one area where North American cities are actually progressing in the right direction. Every city I’ve visited recently seems to have noticeably improved and expanded their bike lanes / trail systems. While we have a long way to go, at least this one mode is showing real, tangible progress.
yeah, i think more people are just venting about the scale of the problem, and how slow the change is. it is measurable change, but it's often patchwork, and liable to rollbacks like with toronto. there was an active discouraging of bike transportation for at least a century, and an active encouraging of polluting cars. i wonder who profited from that. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Motors_streetcar_conspiracy it's progress, but we need to guard ourselves from the viewpoint that rationality is inevitable.
@@ethanstump It's definitely a patchwork (at best) in most cities. But I also see tangible efforts being made in my area to connect the patchwork routes to make it more of an actual network. Let's hope it sticks.
Even tho many cities are starting to now put bike lines now to make it easier to navigate like example In Phoenix we still the issue to spraw and zoning laws in many cities which makes biking utterly useless since you need a car to get to anywhere cause everything is so spread apart like housing from commercial places.
100%. We just visited Boston and stayed around Somerville in Cambridge and we're easily able to bike around Boston. I would be 5 - 10 years ago I wouldn't have been able to comfortably do that with my girlfriend. That and Boston drivers seem to be fearful of legal repercussions around pedestrians and cyclists. I felt a lot more power as a road user on a bike or walking than I do in my own city.
Hope you are right. I hate having to visit my sister in suburban Cincinnati, with stroads, and twice daily bus service, I am dependent on her to get around. Just being able to walk across a bridge over the interstate would be an improvement.
I am a work from home person in New York who bikes across one of our four bridges about once a week. My theory as to why NYC bike ridership is up from 2019 to 2021 is 1) during covid, the subway became less desirable to ride due to public health/ general safety concerns 2) this prompted many newbies to start biking 3) food delivery by bike courier has significantly increased. Many of the newbies who started riding bikes during the pandemic are continuing to ride bikes due to NYC's fairly good bike infrastructure with good bike lanes and the excellent and expanding citibike program.
We saw the same (approximately) phenomenon in most French cities where the bike use exploded during the pandemic. The politics were afraid of a raise in car traffic after the lockdown (which happened to be on may 11th 2020) and they used the fact that there were basically no car out to build a lot of experimental bike lanes (the French for bike lanes is piste cyclable an these ones were called "coronapistes"). They started encouraging people to take bikes and to reassure people about public transit even before may 11th. Some of the coronapistes have now been removed but some of them are now definitive and the increase in traffic is still visible today. We don't have a lot of data about the increase of bike traffic yet except on the places where there are bike counters. I think it might keep increasing with the raise of gas prices.
Video suggestion - Alleys: What are they good for? Growing up in the suburbs I didn't really understand their purpose but now that I live in a neighborhood that has them I appreciate how they limit driveway conflicts and provide a place for utilities to go (both powerlines and garbage collection). But they fill a very different role today than what they were originally built for, which is as I understand it was largely for horse and carriage access. I'd love to learn more about how different cities have and continue to use their alleyways and what they could be used for tomorrow (I've heard some propose turning them into city-wide bike networks)
Here's a really cool video all about the history and current state of alleys: th-cam.com/video/O12po86Gh-I/w-d-xo.html Though it would be cool to see modern alley use adaptations, I have a sense that cities aren't able to change much about the alley structure they started with, so most likely the video above already captures most of the differences in design choices that still exist today. I could be wrong and I'd be happy to be corrected of course.
As someone who's lived in Chicago close to 20 years I often wonder whether alleys are really as useful as they seem to be in my own experience. Granted it's more of an analysis topic than a top 10 list or something.
NYer here. More people, like me, are (e)biking rather than taking the subway, and I see a lot more gig-economy delivery “cyclists” flying over the bridges to get from their outer borough neighborhoods to do food deliveries in Manhattan. I think this is especially true for the 59th bridge.
So the bike lanes are being used by non-registered mopeds doing non-licensed commercial delivery service... capitalism finds a way to ratfuck every good thing.
In regards to the increase in NYC bike traffic, I think there are a few factors. 1. I think the pandemic has caused a lot of people who still have to commute to work to ditch commuting by subway. The subway generally feels less crowded than it did pre-pandemic. The obvious alternative to subway/bus commuting in NYC is obviously biking because of how impractical cars are during most times of the day. 2. NYC has reduced a lot of its former restrictions on e-bikes which has caused an explosion of new e-bikes on the road. 3. Citibike has expanded to new neighborhoods and added pedal-assist bikes.
As a NYer, I agree with this. I also would add that subway crime fears (whether more perception that reality) could be another factor. And for me, personally, commuting by bike is simply faster and more enjoyable than the subway.
Yea, when my office re-opened I initially decided to do the 20 mile round trip bike ride out of covid concerns. While I do ride the train sometimes now (Like today, heat index over 100 :|) I've kept riding the bike as I enjoy it and it's good exercise. I will say, other than some bad headways I feel like the complaints that the trains have gone to hell are somewhat overblown. While crime is up, crime on the train is still very rare. It's mostly the same as it ever was, just easier to get a seat now.
100% this comment. Citibike has expanded a ton into Astoria and still has yet to grow in Sunnyside and Woodside. That and the new popularity of e-bikes are huge factors. They've also been expanding bike lanes everywhere. If you did a video on biggest improvements in bike infrastructure during the pandemic, NY would be up there.
With regard to NYC, Citibike has been expanding into underserved neighborhoods and building out a massive e-bike (pedal-assist) fleet which has incentivized people who normally would take public transportation or even drive to start riding bikes instead.
Yeah, anecdotally, as I reviewed and edited, several of the bikes I picked up in my footage were Citibikes -- it's a more important component of overall bike volumes than I would've thought.
@@CityNerd A lot of New Yorkers use Citibike for commuting, I personally prefer it over a regular bike for commuting and shopping - First, I don't have to lug a bike up and down 3 flights of stairs just to bike to and from work, second, if it's a nice day when I go to work and a torrential downpour when I'm going home I don't have to worry about leaving my bike somewhere. Those are my reasons for bikeshare, I suspect there are a lot of like minded people. I don't know exactly how many bikes are in the network (it's at least 12,000), but they are currently planning to expand to 40,000 bikes, and the highest single day usage was 126,360 rides. I think its safe to say it's a major component of our transportation infrastructure at this point
Living in one of those neighborhoods, I have noticed the significant uptick in Citibike usage. I'm one of the converts myself! Also agree with other commenters that in many ways it's more convenient than owning a bike (small apartments, multi-story walk ups, etc)
Two things I thought of for New York 1. Many delivery drivers used to drive small mopeds with two stroke motors, most of those have now been replaced by ebikes. 2. The city significantly increased bike infrastructure during the pandemic, they used the decreased traffic as an excuse to make streets safer for pedestrians and cyclists.
In Chicago, the lakefront trail Navy Pier flyover, joining directly into a newly-expanded river bridge, was finally completed in May 2021. It's really nice. This should go a long way in boosting the bike and ped numbers. And hopefully avoid countless bike-ped conflicts in tourist season.
@@295g295 What's there now is pretty different from what was shown in the video. That's how you used to have to cross the river. Now there's a completely separate bridge called the Navy Pier Flyover that was built out for pedestrians/bikes
Many people in NYC bought bikes and started to use them to avoid crowded and unsanitary public transportation. I got my e-brompton half a year ago and do 3/4 of my trips to work etc by my bike.
fun fact: back in the 80s, I wrote a post apocalyptic story set in and around Portland. I predicted that by the time of the story another bridge would have been added, and I placed it more or less exactly where the Tilikum bridge is.
@@robotx9285 no, I've had to update the document format a couple times since I wrote it, and it's not good enough to be bothered submitting it for publication, but it's still on my computer.
For me in NYC, I converted from riding the subway to buying Citi bike annual membership due to the pandemic, and never looked back. Citi bike is much cheaper, its coverage is great, its travel time is much more predictable, and cycling infrastructure has gotten much better over the years
My father once complained that the government would take "one lane from us to give it to cyclists", he argued that whenever he drove through it, barely anyone was using it. I thought later, how many streets I had seen with barely any traffic, some of them very wide. Nobody ever thinks of those redundant streets and the money that was spent building it and maintaining it, for barely any use at all. But they improve access to some area or building for someone, and so do bike lanes
For every trip I take to the grocery store by bike, that's one less car in the way of all the other cars. If enough of us rode around on bikes, he could drive his automobile without having to follow any other cars.
Topic suggestion: anything to do with urban heat. Something like figuring out which cities have the biggest difference between the hottest and coolest parts of the city, using the kind of data that geotab uses, for instance.
My first reaction to this video was. "Finally a video where Denver can maybe get some credit" then I realized our only "water" is the S. Platte River which is maybe 40 feet wide. But it has a dedicated bike / pedestrian bridge across it that connects with the Cherry Creek trail!.
SF/Oakland deserves a dishonorable mention. There is no way to cross the bay bridge on bike alone. Your options for the cross bay trip are: 1. Take BART or bus across the whole way 2. Take the bus to/from Treasure Island and then get on the bike path on the new side of the bridge 3. My personal favorite go across both the San Rafael Richmond Bridge and the Golden Gate Bridge (a 2.5 to 3 hour ride).
As a Bay Area resident, agree 100%. SF/Oakland should not have been mentioned in this video. You forgot one other option: Head south to the Dumbarton Bridge, probably closer to a 5-hour ride for slowpokes like me. On the plus side, if you ride the Dumbarton Bridge, you won't need to dodge tourists on rented bikes liek on the GG as you'll be the ONLY rider on the bridge.
3 reasons for NYC's bike bounce back. New bike lane improvements. For Queensboro Bridge, Cresent St to Astoria (A-sto-ri-a) and 61st/62nd Sts were installed during the pandemic, as well as Brooklyn Bridge. Rise in e-bikes/citi-bike was a big boost to bridge counts, and Food delivery has been shifting to bikes.
There's plans for the Queensboro Bridge to make a ped path out of the outer lane going eastbound, thereby making the current path a dedicated bike path. The plan has been stalled though due to lane closures from construction, apparently the outer lane must stay open to "ease traffic." Really shows who the DOT prioritizes
They just ‘conveniently’ started to replace the deck on the upper level right before peak season and delaying the bike path. Nor is the congestion pricing being worked on smh
The Chicago River bridge was significantly improved recently, with the existing bridge widened to (sort of) separate pedestrians and cyclists more, as well as lengthened to go over two busy streets instead of crossing them at street level. It's unfortunate the data is so bad but I'm willing to bet this really upped the numbers. It's a nice, smooth ride through the whole area that involves no at grade crossing with vehicles :)
I had no idea small creators receive that many ad offers, might as well take them up, I fast forward through ads anyway and don't begrudge anyone for making a living
The view from the Williamsburg Bridge is phenomenal. On the train, the L is almost always more convenient for most trips even when the M is a one-seat ride, but the view from the tunnel just isn't the same. Your pronunciation of Astoria gets an E for effort 😂 Wonderful video as always!
Man I love the Tilikum. Best bridge in Portland after St. Johns, I said it. But also the Steel Bridge is quite an impressive classic. There is an old video from the Worlds Fair in the early 20th when it was still young showing trains crossing alongside pedestrian traffic. It's kind of amazing to see a bridge still doing the same duties for 100 years without any drastic changes.
@Zaydan Naufal Honestly, I'd love a worlds fair but it would be so mundanely corporate in the 21st century I don't think it'd feel the same. I doubt we'd see the worlds largest log cabin built in Portland in 2035. We'd probably get the worlds largest Stumptown coffee cup or some crap.
When I was up in NY earlier this year I was blown away by how many delivery guys on e-bikes I saw (and spotted a bunch in your footage). That’s not really widespread in DC yet and I can’t stop thinking about how that is obviously much better than all the DoorDash etc drivers I see double parked everywhere to pick up or drop off an order. I’ve been especially thinking about it this week as DC is starting to share some of their plans for bus-only lanes and keeping a TON of parking spaces, often specifically for pickup/drop off spots. Seems like one of those things that’s a good idea for the way things are at this exact moment but is hopefully not where we’ll be in a few years, and maybe baking in more delivery being done with cars than we’d have otherwise.
It's insane in NY. Noticed it last year, and it was even more pronounced this year. Those people are on a mission, too -- step off the curb at your own risk!
Good point about the delivery bikes. I'm sure that has contributed to the jump in the bike numbers since the pandemic. More people working from home and ordering delivery.
The Mass ave bridge in Boston probably has a higher bike count now because in 2019 there were just painted bike lanes but recently they have installed fully protected bike lanes as part of a larger planned transformation of the bridge
It was cool to see multiple bridges I’ve used for bike commuting show up in this video: the bridge along the strand and the Mass Ave bridge. The Mass Ave bridge has gotten a very wide protected bike lane in the past year. It’s currently just protected with large orange traffic cones, but a more permanent solution is in the works.
I was about to say - the cone separated lane seems to be getting a lot of use. Also, i thought that the September 2019 count showed 5,000 cyclists going across the bridge. I remember being really impressed/shocked at just how many people were on bikes at the Mass Ave in Back Bay.
I rode over the Williamsburg bridge to high school every day, rain or shine... the wide open lanes and the magnificent view never got old. For years as a depressed teenager it was the best part of my day...
I envision a New York where the only vehicles on the road are taxis, delivery vehicles, buses, and emergency vehicles. Everyone else bikes or rides street trolleys. Or Onewheels, like me.
The picture you show when talking about San Francisco-Oakland is the Golden Gate Bridge, which connects SF to Marin County. The Bay Bridge only has bike facilities on the eastern portion, which connects Oakland to Yerba Buena Island, so you can't actually bike between SF and Oakland. Thanks for the videos. I actually look forward to seeing what you've come up with each Wednesday. (Incidentally, I hope YT is paying you something. They show plenty of ads during your videos.)
I think a full span Bay Bridge bike lane would be an interesting case study on this as it is much longer than all the other bridges on this. All the top NYC bridges are 1-2 miles over a heavily transited path. Full Bay bridge would be 7 miles from SF to Emeryville which seems like it would seriously limit the watershed of potential riders. Though don't get me wrong I'd love to bike RSR, Golden Gate, and Bay bridge in one loop!
@@ryanmccormick4686 I think the full span (i.e. western + eastern) would be a huge win for bikes in SF, and would probably get a ton of e-bike riders. The Golden Gate's cyclists are mostly tourists and not commuters, and has weird times when you're allowed to bike on it (it switches with the eastern and western walkways)
Top notch as always. As a cyclist I appreciate this topic. I cross the Freemont bridge in Seattle often and really dislike the setup, way to narrow for muti use but its safer than the Ballard bridge for bikes a peds. The Freemont also connects to the ship canal trail to the west heading towards Interbay/Magnolia and the Elliot bay trail. Thanks again for the great content.
Video Suggestion: Top Public transit projects in development! For example Minneapolis currently has the Green line SWLRT expansion under construction, albeit delayed, and the blue line expansion route recommendation undergoing environmental studies. I know you mentioned seattle having it's LRT extended in a previous video, and Toronto is host to a whole bunch of projects. Would be cool to know what cities/areas would be worthwhile visiting and taking transit... in a few years. Could rank by miles or public transit added, percentage of miles added or monetary values for statistical ranking for a couple suggestions, but I'm sure you've probably got a better more interesting way of explaining it haha.
Glad you gave a shoutout to Washington Ave bridge in Minneapolis. It's absolutely packed September-Thanksgiving and March-May, and plenty of people still use it even in January.
10:56 You cannot use Drayton Park railway station on Arsenal football club match days because of safety reasons i.e. the platform is too-narrow and as such would suffer massive overcrowding and likely passengers would be pushed onto moving trains and there is no money in building a new platform because the station is so underutilised along with the rest of the line.. I may also add that Finsbury Park is also fairly well connected to Gillespie Road (Arsenal stadium) among a few other stations and several bus services nearby...
@@CityNerd I'm not even "local" lol I live >10mi away in SW London I just happened to know this fact. I may also add that along the end of the line that Drayton Park Station is on suffered a deadly train crash in 1975 killing most people on board which took place at Morgate (the train started at Drayton Park) and no one knows the cause! So here's another fact for ya!
As a bike user for pretty much everything in paris. I can tell you, that the view, by night, on the seine bridges, NEVER gets old. It's always fascinating. It's been going like this for 20 years, for me. Thanks for the content!
Every adult and child should own a bicycle and ride it regularly. Healthy exercise and fossil fuels free transportation. Ride to work, ride to school, ride for fun and ride for health.
For some comparison, from 2021 data there were two bridges in London with higher average daily cyclist counts than Williamsburg Bridge - Blackfriars Bridge with 8045 and London Bridge with 8361. Westminster Bridge (4898) and Waterloo Bridge (5418) would also have made the top ten.
Boston has been experimenting with taking the Mass Ave. bridge down to 2 car lanes to expand the bike lanes and are taking data on trip volumes, hopefully it'll be released soon! Happy to see the city investing in bike infrastructure, especially at the expense of cars. Now if only they would also improve the networks that the bridge connects to instead of just improving the route for people going between Back Bay and MIT. As far as Portland dropping in ridership I'd say a large part of it can probably be attributed to downtown generally becoming a much less desirable place to be over the last few years. There's plenty of discussion to be had as to the causes of and ways to fix downtown Portland but sadly I think it's pretty hard to deny that it is just not as pleasant a place to be as it used to be.
Montreal has many bike counters including one on the Jacques-Cartier Bridge but you have to dig a little to find the raw data. I did extract the data for Jacques-Cartier Bridge for 2019, here are the numbers From April 1st 2019 to October 31 2019: Average of 2,352 bikes daily From May 1st 2019 to May 31st 2019: Average of 1,779 bikes daily From July 1st 2019 to July 31st 2019: Average of 5,453 bikes daily The Jacques-Cartier Bridge connects the suburbs (and not so bike friendly) of the south shore of the St Lawrence River with the Island of Montreal. There are two islands in the middle of the river on which there are popular activity sites, especially during summer (parks, a roller coaster park, beach, swimming pool, festivals, etc.). So, outside of summer (July and August), most of bike traffic is made of commuters or long-distance cyclists on the weekends.
@@gaelfortier2668 The bridge is quite steep and quite a long ride. It's a bit of a weird list though because where do you draw the line? The various bridges over the Lachine canal probably break all these numbers in the summer but they're much smaller. It would be interesting to show the old Monk bridge where they replaced a road bridge with a new bridge and just kept the whole old bridge as a cycle bridge.
@@gaelfortier2668 i dont go on jacques cartier cause it is way too high and way too scary. I traversed it on foot once and it was one of the scariest things ive experienced
The New York bridge count makes sense, like many folks have said, MTAs ridership still hasn’t reached (I believe) 65% of pre-pandemic levels, many folks who are going into the city are choosing other methods. It also makes sense because the Williamsburg bridge seems like the flattest of all of the bridges and East Manhattan has notoriously bad train connections
I personally believe that all car bridges in cities should have a bike bridge directly next to them so commuters stuck in car traffic have to witness bikes whizzing by, which will hopefully convince drivers to bike more.
I work on the Queensboro Bridge. (Proud to see all 4 of our East River Bridges make the list.) You're spot on with most of your conjecture. Also, the bike infrastructure going north into Astoria, though primarily used as parking for car repair shops, does make it more inviting to bikers. The big news now is that when we're done redecking the upper roadway, we will open the south outer roadway as a bike lane. First we need the capacity during construction and then we need to modify the lane and barriers for bike use. I can't wait, the tiny shared lane on the north is scary with the motorbikes.
Ballona Creek Bridge user here. Another thing that may add to its usage is that all of the other nearby crossings over the creek don't even have SIDEWALKS, let alone bike lanes. I live 2 miles inland and the Strand bike path is still the fastest way to get north of the river
the busiest cyclepath in the Netherlands is the Vredenburg in Utrecht with over 12,5 million cyclists per year (35.000 per day), though these numbers are a little lower than they used to be due to still a lot of people are working from home following the Covid crisis.
Love it. Great info, great sense or humor. Everything backed by data or a disclaimer about lack of proper data. One of my favorites and I look forward to a new video every week. Keep it up!
Unrelated topic suggestion: best (and worst) transit connections to universities. I have to assume students ride transit more than any other demographic but this feels underappreciated by many cities.
I wonder if you count different campuses or just university campuses. Arizona State University is split up into 4 major campuses across the Phoenix valley with facilities elsewhere, though only the downtown Phoenix and Tempe campuses are connected by the light rail, while the west and Polytechnic campuses only have bus connections (you can transfer from the light rail to a university shuttle when going to Polytechnic, but not west campus). I wonder if the different University of California areas are separate universities or just all a part of 1 university (I bet the former).
@@grahamturner2640 that's an interesting wrinkle! In my experience most universities have one main campus but that's definitely not the case for all. Some don't even really have a proper campus - just a bunch of buildings spread throughout a city. It probably doesn't matter too much for this question though because universities that are spread out presumably don't have that much transit demand at any one location. If there's two or maybe 3 locations that all have a lot of demand, you could probably do an average.
The busiest bike counters in Berlin, Germany, register around 9000 cyclists per day (7am-7pm weekdays, annual average) but the Dutch 30,000+ are next level :)
I’m glad that you factored in the Brooklyn bridge data post dedicated bike lane installation. Curious to see if ridership continued to increase in 2022. Prior to the bike lane install, the bikes shared space with pedestrians on an elevated wooden plank walkway. It was absolutely terrible and dangerous for both parties.
I don't know if it would be feasible - but as a 30 something stuck in the suburbs with one child (and another on the way) I dream of getting into a large urban area with good infrastructure/transit, the problem is that unless you can also afford private schools, many of the public school districts in these areas are barely passable to downright abysmal. A list of relatively well rated school zones in nice urban areas would surely be a godsend to us parents.
I'd be willing to bet that the divergence in trend lines between NYC and other places has to do with interplay between bikes, transit and autos in the context of a respiratory disease pandemic. The pandemic makes transit a less desireable mode of transportation relative to both bikes and autos, given the highly congested and restricted air flow inside of train cars and buses. In NYC there's both more people looking for an alternative to transit, and bikes relative to autos is more doable for more trips in NYC, particularly in the areas around some of these bridges mentioned, than in most other cities. In other words, if you had an auto commute prior to COVID, you weren't getting on a bike because of COVID, but if you had a subway commute, you very well might.
In addition, as someone who started biking during the “quarantine” era, I felt it was a good time to learn because there were just fewer cars out on the road. And, yeah, felt weird about the subway for a long time.
Lol, April-October (well, May-September) is the "off-season" for biking in Houston. Also, if you do go ahead with a "top 10 protected bicycle networks," be careful of Google Maps! It tends to lag a couple of years behind.
Chicago resident here. Our mayor recently said we are a "car-city". :/ So I don't expect the city to collect bike data other than taking it from strava.
Meet the new boss, same as the old boss. Rather than it being her fault entirely, the system by which she came to power is fucked up. Unless serious voter education ensues, voters will fall for another car centric politician that will stall progress for decades.
Des Moines IA has some pretty great bike paths and infrastructure including a dedicated ped/bike bridge downtown. Of course usership is low because red state murica but still
As a resident of Amsterdam I feel oddly slighted in this video (if I must ;-) ) great video overall! Love to see bike use growing! I lived in the SF bay before here, and was surprised to hear u say there's great bike infrastructure. I mostly remember just gutters, if that. Aside from very few new developments, everything else felt suicidal
It was probably too late to add to your calculations, but the Chestnut St. bridge in Philly was recently reopened after a three year reconstruction. It has a dedicated bike lane, and furthermore, one traffic lane was eliminated in the University City section of Chestnut St. (west of the bridge) to create a dedicated bike lane.
You should do a video entirely about Boston. Absolutely everything about it, all of it's quirks, and things that make it unique. I'd watch hours of content on it.
Brooklynite here! I've noticed a massive increase of bike mode share in my part of North Brooklyn. While some people believe it is due to depressed transit ridership, I've also noticed that even as ridership has begun to recover since 2021, bike usage does not seem to be decreasing. I'm think a lot of the increase might be in local trips, or maybe some trips originally made by car, especially as a lot of improvements to cycle infrastructure in neighborhoods like Williamsburgh make biking a much more viable option for both of those types of trips.
Good job on collating stats for that one. I couldn't find any in french for Pont Champlain in Montreal or the smaller ones and apparently 75000 yearly trips for Quebec Bridge in Quebec City.
Ce n'est que depuis l'ouverture du nouveau pont Champlain qu'il y a une piste cyclable de ce côté. La plupart du trafic de vélo passe par le pont Jacques-Cartier ou le pont Victoria (compteur "Estacade"). Les données sont sur le site de la Ville de Montréal, mais il faut chercher un peu.
I live directly next to the Queensboro Bridge and ride the bike lane a few times a week. Once the ongoing road project on the upper roadway is complete they’re going to move the pedestrian pathway over to the southern exterior lane and dedicate the current bike/pedestrian lane to bikes only. It currently gets very crowded, so once it’s bike-only I expect ridership will go up even more. There has been a big shift to e-bikes, scooters, EUCs, etc lately and you see them all on that bridge. Thanks for the great videos!
Watching this as Arsenal is top of the league COYG! PS… Great videos! I just discovered your channel and am now perusing your back catalog. Lots of gems!
I'd be really curious to see where Johnson Street Bridge in Victoria BC ranks in this list. Victoria isn't a very large metro area, but it has a high cycling mode share for North America and the bridge has a bike/ped crossing that is always busy. Of course there might not be any data.
@@CityNerd Go a bit north and look at the Selkirk Trestle. Assuming I'm pulling the data correctly it has over 4000 daily average April-October 2021. That's the bridge that carries t he Galloping Goose Regional Trail which is kind of the "bike highway" for Victoria.
@@CityNerd note the eco-counter only counts the multi-use deck, not the bike lanes on the car deck, so that low 2000s is likely high 2000s to low 3000s. And it has been growing
For the Queensboro Bridge, Citibike expanded a lot into the LIC and Astoria neighborhoods during the pandemic and is now expanding into Sunnyside and Woodside. And both sides of the bridge already had decent bike infrastructure that's been making slight improvements here and there such as upgrading lanes to be protected, etc. The Crescent street two way protected both lanes are a big help connecting Astoria directly to the bridge as well. The city is planning to convert the eastbound outer car lane into either a two way bike lane and making the current lane just pedestrian oriented or vice versa. The current setup is okay, but a bit tight for pedestrians and cyclists going in both directions, especially at ebike speeds. So separating the two and making one side only walking/running and the other just cycling is probably the best and safest idea for all. I also wanna shout-out the new bike and pedestrian lanes on the new Koscuiuszko Bridge. It's quite nice with some lovely views. Not too steep like other bridges, very wide. They did a good job.
The Mass Ave bridge numbers are higher now due to a semi-quick build lane expansion, and will positively boom once the promised permanent upgrades arrive! Here's hoping the flex-post shortage doesn't hold us up.
The Outer Drive Bridge has been completely redone for cyclists and pedestrians within the past 3 years to create the Navy Pier Flyover. I would say the ridership has gone up significantly despite it not being a good design imo.
I think that geography really does a disservice to the actual count - Montréal has made huge strides but essentially has no bridges, as the city is entirely on the island - it's a long ride to the burbs over one of the longest bridges in the region, very few do it. Also, total counts or per capita? I bet Portland beats NYC, but it would be a much more interesting list in any case. Thanks for the video, nerdz !
What a great topic idea. As a cyclist in Chicago, it is truly frustrating how terrible the options are for crossing the north/south branch of the chicago river. I would imagine that the outer drive bridge is higher up on the list if the data were clean. That bridge is constantly packed
As a resident of Sunnyside in Queens who also bikes to work in Midtown 4x a week, I think the big jump in riders is a function of the creation of several protected bike lanes: Skillman heading west, 43rd Ave heading east, and perhaps most importantly, on Queens Boulevard itself. I’d say the ride portion in Queens is safer than the part in Manhattan.
One thing I noticed during the pandemic living in Astoria is that the bike shops were all emptied out. People were taking advantage of the lack of cars and biking around for exercise and entertainment. Seems like quite a few people are now using their bikes to go to work. That coupled with the new parking-protected bike lane on Crescent must have been the tipping point.
Video Idea: What about a top 10 list on the best inner city neighbourhoods (US, Canada, Mexico) to raise a family, allowing for easy access to amenities, and ability to live car-free or car-light. People overwhelmingly think that to raise a child you need to move to a cookie-cutter car-dependent suburb and buy an SUV. You hear this all the time: "suburbs are the best place to raise a kid" when they're not. They're depressing, they trap you in your home with your kid (unless you want to sit in traffic to go literally anywhere), they're devoid of culture and amenities, and they result in children who are shut in. Now I know that living in a 1,000 sq ft flat in a condo tower may be less than ideal when you have a toddler or young child. But a medium-density townhouse with parks, recreation, and good accessible transit is, in my view, so much better than spaced out single family zoning with maybe one half-assed playground down the street. Unlike everyone I know who fled to the suburbs when they had their kid, my wife and I stayed in an inner city neighbourhood and it's so much fun to travel with my child. I could never imagine moving to a suburb
One note on the 59th Street Bridge - during the pandemic, the Crescent Street bike lane was converted to two way (it was previously only southbound) and was protected and/or buffered for about 90% of its length. That made bike commutes from Astoria (the lane’s catchment area) much more achievable than they were previously.
I'd be interested to see which NA cities are the most accessible (in terms of wheelchair access/tactile paving/etc etc.) Also, another video could be which are the least. And then a global comparison! A lot of cities are not very accessible despite ADA and other similar laws.
Anecdotally, I know a few people who used to routinely ride transit who switched to biking during the pandemic (a lot of them not even because of concerns about the safety of riding transit, it was just that transit service became so unreliable with drivers getting sick that getting a bike was almost a necessity for them).
I'm from New York and a big reason for the higher bike ridership is the NYC open streets program that made a lot of streets public space for all which encouraged people to ride on bikes since cars were deprioritized by the program
NYC bike rider here. Lots of great points as to why biking increased during the pandemic, but I think one reason no one has touched on yet is how all of the protests during the summer of 2020 created a brand new generation of riders! These bike protests, organized through Instagram, went on for months and enhanced or created new social biking groups mainly based on Insta and Strava. Many of these trips are not commuting trips - biking has just gained a lot of popularity around the city over the last few years. Also, the new Brooklyn Bridge bike lane is a real improvement over the bumpy wooden plank tourist littered path we had prior. However, I still prefer the Manhattan Bridge path in that area.
hmmmm… I think Im neutral because Brooklyn because it has a flatter incline than Manhattan Bridge. Manhattan Bridge Bike lane is wider and doesn’t feel tacked on.
@@SwiftySanders true from the Brooklyn side that the BB incline isn’t bad, but from the Manhattan side it’s not that great lol. Part of the fun is getting to a point where those inclines feel easy to conquer! I like the WB incline the least
For a new topic I suggest looking at underground and overground walking route for pedestrians. I think this summer has been a big wake up call to how we are losing the fight against climate change. I think most urban planners have frowned on these routes in the past specifically looking at Houston. But, I feel like we will need lots of more shaded areas that can only be created by heavy use of tree lines or underground tunnels. Personally I've always been a fan of tunnels since I moved to Somerville, and the tunnel near my apartment allowed me to avoid two streets of heavy traffic by foot in about a minute of walking. I also am intrigued by overhead sheltered walk ways like in Minneapolis that help people cross in the harsh winter months.
I'd be interested, I always like to see Toronto win a top 10 list. Might also be good to measure things like shoping, accessibility, nber of direct entrances to transit or other locations.
Urban planners dislike tunnels and skywalks because they want to focus ped traffic at street level for step-off-the-curb transit convenience and because it diverts potential business from shops that line sidewalks. I like some of these off-street ped networks (such as Crystal City's) but it's hard to argue against the reasoning that that more people on the streets make for safer streetscapes.
@@colormedubious4747 I am familiar with this critique, especially from Jeff Specter. But, I think its a little bit lazy and often comes from people who live in heavily walked northeastern regions. Heat is lethal, and most southern cities in America don't have adequate shading, and aren't heavily walked to point that diverting foot traffic would be meaningful anyway.
Me (a Vancouverite) and my girlfriend (A New Yorker) spend a bunch of time in New York together; our theory on the uptick in bikes is the relative intensity of the other transit modes. Given that New York was ~ground zero for covid, and that the subway & regional rail systems are often very heavily used, its conceivable that many new yorkers -- disproportionately more than a city like Vancouver -- would "escape the subway" by deciding to bike places. Maybe its also the case that the New-York knowledge worker who was pushed into work-from-home but still has to go into the office occasionally thought "why don't I bike to work next Wednesday", which is a smaller ask then a regular commuter switching to biking. All pure speculation.
For New York City - I think CitiBike also plays a role in the increased bike ridership across the bridges. CitiBike has been around for a few years, but during 2020, a CitiBike docking station was installed across the street from my apartment in Harlem. I rarely rode a bike in Manhattan pre 2020, but suddenly I was able to explore the whole city via bike because of the ease and convenience of having a CitiBike dock right across from my apartment. Combine that with the added safety of bike vs subway during the pandemic, and I can understand why the bike numbers shot up. Now, (2023), I take the subway regularly, but because CitiBike is by my apartment, I find myself riding much more often than pre-2020. On a side note, I just vacationed in Konstanz, Germany - which is a city on the border of Germany & Switzerland. There is a bike/pedestrian bike bridge across the Rhine River that has a bike counter that was already at 14,000 trips that day, and that was during the late afternoon. The city has a population of 84,000 people, so that's a pretty large number of bike trips for a city of that size. I didn't expect Konstanz to be such a bike city! Very cool to see!
I'm guilty of perpetrating Vancouver boosterism. I live in Portland and every time someone talks about visiting Seattle I tell them to stay on the 5 and keep going to Vancouver because it is much better, and the people are nicer because they're Canadian. 😉
@@Shizz81 God love you! I used to work in food&beverage, and my favorite tourists were Americans. They were the friendliest, plus they tipped big. With respect to talking up my hometown, (I'm a Vancouverite), I'm always a little cautious; it's better to exceed expectations, and that's hard if they're really up there. Hope to visit Portland soon!
Back when you were here! And yes, that bridge traffic, at my doorstep, shot way up. A lot of mopeds too. They are supposed to pull a Manhattan Bridge and put the walking on the south side but they're dragging their feet.
I'd love a look at some other Micro Mobility infrastructure in those cities with it. Peachtree in Georgia is famious for its Golf Cart tracks. That sounds kind of funny, but the Netherlands allows microcars in the bus lanes, and if its light weight, electric, and speed capped I'm all for Gold Carts in bike lanes. Also a look at if E-Scooters are of any value or mostly just a lol.
Rental scooters don’t seem great, though it seems like they could work if some care were taken. There’s the parking, which seems fixable if you just take a comparatively small space out of car parking space and make people have to park there. If there was somewhere to park on every block, and you can enforce it through geolocation and penalties, the parking seems fixable. I’m curious about parking stuff outside though, it just seems like it reduces the life such that it is hard to get a good ROI. Seems like it makes much more sense if it is your own scooter you can bring inside. Having to have cars pick up to charge and resituate scooters also seems problematic.
@@clayton97330 Thats good, I would like to see that catch on. Golf Carts aren't discussed but imagine how much cheaper life would be if a golf cart could be your secind car.
The rentals are pricy to use on a regular basis but it's just as viable as an ebike for personal transport. In SF, there are lots of escooters being used to get around and I use one pretty regularly in place of the bus or driving.
Can you do a video on the transit projects (planned or under construction or even recently completed) with the most transformative potentials to their metro areas? Based on future ridership potential, new access to transit, car trips reduced, etc
As inhabitant of a continent with decent public transport I can help explain the increase in bike traffic, because we saw this everywhere in Europe, too: Buses and trains stopped or restricted services during the pandemic, so a lot of people switched to use bikes and e-bikes. At the same time car traffic was low, so it was convenient to use bikes even in places with bad bike infrastructure.
![ประสบการณ์ จ้าง Developer ที่ผมจะไม่มีวันลืม [ภาค2]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/pZbsSDRrmXA/mqdefault.jpg)
So New York saw a pretty steep drop in public transit ridership during the pandemic, and I think the theory is that a lot of the riders moved over to biking instead. That is what initially triggered the installation of the extra bike line on the Brooklyn Bridge: Much more bike traffic and empty subways. I suppose NY just has a bigger share of non-drivers that wanted to avoid the subway but still needed to get places, so they biked.
It's almost like misfunding public transit leads to more individual transportation. I think that certain politicians think that by doing this they'll create more car users, but driving is just prohibitively expensive for what you get, to the point that it just doesn't make sense for people's wallets.
“Extra bike lane” is a stretch, it’s the same width as the old one but now is on the car deck. It’s difficult to use without inhaling exhaust and there are areas that are completely submerged during rain.
They should have taken a lane from both sides of the car deck at least.
(Just use the Manhattan bridge anyway)
nope, lots of people fled out of the city and many still work remote. I drive into manhattan for work periodically and it's not even close to 2019 crowds.
a lot of people still moving out of NYC as the number of kids in school is down 20% or more from a few years ago
@@8_bit_Geek school populations have been dropping for a while now. Even a cities increase population. The school population has been dropping. Lower school enrollment is more to do with people having fewer kids.
Bike infrastructure seems to be one area where North American cities are actually progressing in the right direction. Every city I’ve visited recently seems to have noticeably improved and expanded their bike lanes / trail systems. While we have a long way to go, at least this one mode is showing real, tangible progress.
yeah, i think more people are just venting about the scale of the problem, and how slow the change is. it is measurable change, but it's often patchwork, and liable to rollbacks like with toronto. there was an active discouraging of bike transportation for at least a century, and an active encouraging of polluting cars. i wonder who profited from that. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Motors_streetcar_conspiracy
it's progress, but we need to guard ourselves from the viewpoint that rationality is inevitable.
@@ethanstump It's definitely a patchwork (at best) in most cities. But I also see tangible efforts being made in my area to connect the patchwork routes to make it more of an actual network. Let's hope it sticks.
Even tho many cities are starting to now put bike lines now to make it easier to navigate like example In Phoenix we still the issue to spraw and zoning laws in many cities which makes biking utterly useless since you need a car to get to anywhere cause everything is so spread apart like housing from commercial places.
100%. We just visited Boston and stayed around Somerville in Cambridge and we're easily able to bike around Boston. I would be 5 - 10 years ago I wouldn't have been able to comfortably do that with my girlfriend. That and Boston drivers seem to be fearful of legal repercussions around pedestrians and cyclists. I felt a lot more power as a road user on a bike or walking than I do in my own city.
Hope you are right. I hate having to visit my sister in suburban Cincinnati, with stroads, and twice daily bus service, I am dependent on her to get around. Just being able to walk across a bridge over the interstate would be an improvement.
I am a work from home person in New York who bikes across one of our four bridges about once a week. My theory as to why NYC bike ridership is up from 2019 to 2021 is 1) during covid, the subway became less desirable to ride due to public health/ general safety concerns 2) this prompted many newbies to start biking 3) food delivery by bike courier has significantly increased. Many of the newbies who started riding bikes during the pandemic are continuing to ride bikes due to NYC's fairly good bike infrastructure with good bike lanes and the excellent and expanding citibike program.
a lot less traffic on the streets too
This all rings true
We saw the same (approximately) phenomenon in most French cities where the bike use exploded during the pandemic. The politics were afraid of a raise in car traffic after the lockdown (which happened to be on may 11th 2020) and they used the fact that there were basically no car out to build a lot of experimental bike lanes (the French for bike lanes is piste cyclable an these ones were called "coronapistes"). They started encouraging people to take bikes and to reassure people about public transit even before may 11th.
Some of the coronapistes have now been removed but some of them are now definitive and the increase in traffic is still visible today.
We don't have a lot of data about the increase of bike traffic yet except on the places where there are bike counters. I think it might keep increasing with the raise of gas prices.
Video suggestion - Alleys: What are they good for?
Growing up in the suburbs I didn't really understand their purpose but now that I live in a neighborhood that has them I appreciate how they limit driveway conflicts and provide a place for utilities to go (both powerlines and garbage collection). But they fill a very different role today than what they were originally built for, which is as I understand it was largely for horse and carriage access. I'd love to learn more about how different cities have and continue to use their alleyways and what they could be used for tomorrow (I've heard some propose turning them into city-wide bike networks)
Buildings need truck access and it's better for everyone involved if that access is through an alley than through the main street-facing side.
Here's a really cool video all about the history and current state of alleys: th-cam.com/video/O12po86Gh-I/w-d-xo.html
Though it would be cool to see modern alley use adaptations, I have a sense that cities aren't able to change much about the alley structure they started with, so most likely the video above already captures most of the differences in design choices that still exist today. I could be wrong and I'd be happy to be corrected of course.
As someone who's lived in Chicago close to 20 years I often wonder whether alleys are really as useful as they seem to be in my own experience. Granted it's more of an analysis topic than a top 10 list or something.
@@aaron-bieber I was going to suggest the same video :)
Alleys don't have the best reputation. Think Crime Alley in DC comics.
Recent subscriber and I've gotta say, every video of yours I watch makes me more and more grateful that I live in Portland.
NYer here. More people, like me, are (e)biking rather than taking the subway, and I see a lot more gig-economy delivery “cyclists” flying over the bridges to get from their outer borough neighborhoods to do food deliveries in Manhattan. I think this is especially true for the 59th bridge.
Very true. Traffic from non-bikes (aka unregistered mopeds) is probably bringing up the numbers.
Gig workers taking over the delivery business, and displacimg also car rides needed for Pick up, it seems
I live next to that bridge and I sure do hate how fast they come off when I'm rolling my son by in the stroller, lol.
So the bike lanes are being used by non-registered mopeds doing non-licensed commercial delivery service... capitalism finds a way to ratfuck every good thing.
@@MrTaxiRob yeah there are many inadequate and failed policies and systems at the root of those problems
In regards to the increase in NYC bike traffic, I think there are a few factors.
1. I think the pandemic has caused a lot of people who still have to commute to work to ditch commuting by subway. The subway generally feels less crowded than it did pre-pandemic. The obvious alternative to subway/bus commuting in NYC is obviously biking because of how impractical cars are during most times of the day.
2. NYC has reduced a lot of its former restrictions on e-bikes which has caused an explosion of new e-bikes on the road.
3. Citibike has expanded to new neighborhoods and added pedal-assist bikes.
As a NYer, I agree with this. I also would add that subway crime fears (whether more perception that reality) could be another factor. And for me, personally, commuting by bike is simply faster and more enjoyable than the subway.
Yea, when my office re-opened I initially decided to do the 20 mile round trip bike ride out of covid concerns. While I do ride the train sometimes now (Like today, heat index over 100 :|) I've kept riding the bike as I enjoy it and it's good exercise. I will say, other than some bad headways I feel like the complaints that the trains have gone to hell are somewhat overblown. While crime is up, crime on the train is still very rare. It's mostly the same as it ever was, just easier to get a seat now.
Theres a huge disparity in bike lane availbility in brooklyn same with citi bikes. Some parts in brooklyn are hell
100% this comment. Citibike has expanded a ton into Astoria and still has yet to grow in Sunnyside and Woodside. That and the new popularity of e-bikes are huge factors.
They've also been expanding bike lanes everywhere. If you did a video on biggest improvements in bike infrastructure during the pandemic, NY would be up there.
@Zaydan Naufal I think Lyft sponsors it
With regard to NYC, Citibike has been expanding into underserved neighborhoods and building out a massive e-bike (pedal-assist) fleet which has incentivized people who normally would take public transportation or even drive to start riding bikes instead.
Yeah, anecdotally, as I reviewed and edited, several of the bikes I picked up in my footage were Citibikes -- it's a more important component of overall bike volumes than I would've thought.
@@CityNerd A lot of New Yorkers use Citibike for commuting, I personally prefer it over a regular bike for commuting and shopping - First, I don't have to lug a bike up and down 3 flights of stairs just to bike to and from work, second, if it's a nice day when I go to work and a torrential downpour when I'm going home I don't have to worry about leaving my bike somewhere. Those are my reasons for bikeshare, I suspect there are a lot of like minded people. I don't know exactly how many bikes are in the network (it's at least 12,000), but they are currently planning to expand to 40,000 bikes, and the highest single day usage was 126,360 rides. I think its safe to say it's a major component of our transportation infrastructure at this point
Living in one of those neighborhoods, I have noticed the significant uptick in Citibike usage. I'm one of the converts myself! Also agree with other commenters that in many ways it's more convenient than owning a bike (small apartments, multi-story walk ups, etc)
@@CityNerd Will there be a video on the Citibike shift?
Two things I thought of for New York
1. Many delivery drivers used to drive small mopeds with two stroke motors, most of those have now been replaced by ebikes.
2. The city significantly increased bike infrastructure during the pandemic, they used the decreased traffic as an excuse to make streets safer for pedestrians and cyclists.
The same change happened pretty much everywhere in Europe, too.
it’s quite an experience to not yet be out of my 20s, yet I’m already starting to get severe nostalgia for things like those moped engines!
In Chicago, the lakefront trail Navy Pier flyover, joining directly into a newly-expanded river bridge, was finally completed in May 2021. It's really nice. This should go a long way in boosting the bike and ped numbers. And hopefully avoid countless bike-ped conflicts in tourist season.
> 6:42 < Chicago
@@295g295 What's there now is pretty different from what was shown in the video. That's how you used to have to cross the river. Now there's a completely separate bridge called the Navy Pier Flyover that was built out for pedestrians/bikes
Many people in NYC bought bikes and started to use them to avoid crowded and unsanitary public transportation. I got my e-brompton half a year ago and do 3/4 of my trips to work etc by my bike.
fun fact: back in the 80s, I wrote a post apocalyptic story set in and around Portland. I predicted that by the time of the story another bridge would have been added, and I placed it more or less exactly where the Tilikum bridge is.
Is it lost?
Nice. I'd love to see a ped/bike bridge at Salmon Street, honestly
@@robotx9285 no, I've had to update the document format a couple times since I wrote it, and it's not good enough to be bothered submitting it for publication, but it's still on my computer.
Chicago LSD bridge was finally expanded with separated biking / running lanes. So much nicer.
For me in NYC, I converted from riding the subway to buying Citi bike annual membership due to the pandemic, and never looked back. Citi bike is much cheaper, its coverage is great, its travel time is much more predictable, and cycling infrastructure has gotten much better over the years
My father once complained that the government would take "one lane from us to give it to cyclists", he argued that whenever he drove through it, barely anyone was using it.
I thought later, how many streets I had seen with barely any traffic, some of them very wide. Nobody ever thinks of those redundant streets and the money that was spent building it and maintaining it, for barely any use at all. But they improve access to some area or building for someone, and so do bike lanes
Not to mention empty sidewalks that are much more expensive to build than bike lanes.
For every trip I take to the grocery store by bike, that's one less car in the way of all the other cars. If enough of us rode around on bikes, he could drive his automobile without having to follow any other cars.
There are an incredible number of overbuilt streets where I am now in Las Vegas. What you said is particularly true of the US sun belt.
Topic suggestion: anything to do with urban heat. Something like figuring out which cities have the biggest difference between the hottest and coolest parts of the city, using the kind of data that geotab uses, for instance.
It's interesting stuff for sure. Good suggestion!
My first reaction to this video was. "Finally a video where Denver can maybe get some credit" then I realized our only "water" is the S. Platte River which is maybe 40 feet wide. But it has a dedicated bike / pedestrian bridge across it that connects with the Cherry Creek trail!.
Man I struggled to find data for Denver -- I looked this time AND in 2018. It's a good bike city!
DC and Virginia are actually building a dedicated bike bridge across the Potomac River as part of the Long Bridge Project
SF/Oakland deserves a dishonorable mention. There is no way to cross the bay bridge on bike alone. Your options for the cross bay trip are:
1. Take BART or bus across the whole way
2. Take the bus to/from Treasure Island and then get on the bike path on the new side of the bridge
3. My personal favorite go across both the San Rafael Richmond Bridge and the Golden Gate Bridge (a 2.5 to 3 hour ride).
Yeah, it's ridiculous.
As a Bay Area resident, agree 100%. SF/Oakland should not have been mentioned in this video. You forgot one other option: Head south to the Dumbarton Bridge, probably closer to a 5-hour ride for slowpokes like me. On the plus side, if you ride the Dumbarton Bridge, you won't need to dodge tourists on rented bikes liek on the GG as you'll be the ONLY rider on the bridge.
3 reasons for NYC's bike bounce back.
New bike lane improvements. For Queensboro Bridge, Cresent St to Astoria (A-sto-ri-a) and 61st/62nd Sts were installed during the pandemic, as well as Brooklyn Bridge. Rise in e-bikes/citi-bike was a big boost to bridge counts, and Food delivery has been shifting to bikes.
There's plans for the Queensboro Bridge to make a ped path out of the outer lane going eastbound, thereby making the current path a dedicated bike path. The plan has been stalled though due to lane closures from construction, apparently the outer lane must stay open to "ease traffic." Really shows who the DOT prioritizes
They just ‘conveniently’ started to replace the deck on the upper level right before peak season and delaying the bike path. Nor is the congestion pricing being worked on smh
@@Jabid21 I watch the traffic on the upper level out my window every day. Even at 3 am it's packed. All because of this dumb project.
The Chicago River bridge was significantly improved recently, with the existing bridge widened to (sort of) separate pedestrians and cyclists more, as well as lengthened to go over two busy streets instead of crossing them at street level. It's unfortunate the data is so bad but I'm willing to bet this really upped the numbers. It's a nice, smooth ride through the whole area that involves no at grade crossing with vehicles :)
Queens denizen here. A four-bridge bike tour of those East River crossings is a favorite weekend activity of mine. Never get enough of those views!
Glad to hear! Biking over the bridges is really one of my favorites when I visit.
I had no idea small creators receive that many ad offers, might as well take them up, I fast forward through ads anyway and don't begrudge anyone for making a living
I was just looking for a video like this, there isn't enough of this kind of content out there.
The view from the Williamsburg Bridge is phenomenal. On the train, the L is almost always more convenient for most trips even when the M is a one-seat ride, but the view from the tunnel just isn't the same.
Your pronunciation of Astoria gets an E for effort 😂
Wonderful video as always!
Man I love the Tilikum. Best bridge in Portland after St. Johns, I said it. But also the Steel Bridge is quite an impressive classic. There is an old video from the Worlds Fair in the early 20th when it was still young showing trains crossing alongside pedestrian traffic. It's kind of amazing to see a bridge still doing the same duties for 100 years without any drastic changes.
Did you mean Tikkum? :P
It's not the Tilikum. It's the Tilikum, Bridge of the People. The St. John's is gorgeous!
@Zaydan Naufal Honestly, I'd love a worlds fair but it would be so mundanely corporate in the 21st century I don't think it'd feel the same. I doubt we'd see the worlds largest log cabin built in Portland in 2035. We'd probably get the worlds largest Stumptown coffee cup or some crap.
When I was up in NY earlier this year I was blown away by how many delivery guys on e-bikes I saw (and spotted a bunch in your footage). That’s not really widespread in DC yet and I can’t stop thinking about how that is obviously much better than all the DoorDash etc drivers I see double parked everywhere to pick up or drop off an order. I’ve been especially thinking about it this week as DC is starting to share some of their plans for bus-only lanes and keeping a TON of parking spaces, often specifically for pickup/drop off spots. Seems like one of those things that’s a good idea for the way things are at this exact moment but is hopefully not where we’ll be in a few years, and maybe baking in more delivery being done with cars than we’d have otherwise.
It's insane in NY. Noticed it last year, and it was even more pronounced this year. Those people are on a mission, too -- step off the curb at your own risk!
@@CityNerd New York is basically the only place delivery apps can make money because almost a meals are delivered by bike instead of a car.
Good point about the delivery bikes. I'm sure that has contributed to the jump in the bike numbers since the pandemic. More people working from home and ordering delivery.
@@SpencerHeckwolf see a lot in Toronto too. Seems to be all Indian immigrants doing it.
The Mass ave bridge in Boston probably has a higher bike count now because in 2019 there were just painted bike lanes but recently they have installed fully protected bike lanes as part of a larger planned transformation of the bridge
Nice -- I'm hoping there continue to be reasons to update this list!
It was cool to see multiple bridges I’ve used for bike commuting show up in this video: the bridge along the strand and the Mass Ave bridge.
The Mass Ave bridge has gotten a very wide protected bike lane in the past year. It’s currently just protected with large orange traffic cones, but a more permanent solution is in the works.
I was about to say - the cone separated lane seems to be getting a lot of use.
Also, i thought that the September 2019 count showed 5,000 cyclists going across the bridge. I remember being really impressed/shocked at just how many people were on bikes at the Mass Ave in Back Bay.
I rode over the Williamsburg bridge to high school every day, rain or shine... the wide open lanes and the magnificent view never got old. For years as a depressed teenager it was the best part of my day...
I envision a New York where the only vehicles on the road are taxis, delivery vehicles, buses, and emergency vehicles. Everyone else bikes or rides street trolleys. Or Onewheels, like me.
The picture you show when talking about San Francisco-Oakland is the Golden Gate Bridge, which connects SF to Marin County. The Bay Bridge only has bike facilities on the eastern portion, which connects Oakland to Yerba Buena Island, so you can't actually bike between SF and Oakland. Thanks for the videos. I actually look forward to seeing what you've come up with each Wednesday. (Incidentally, I hope YT is paying you something. They show plenty of ads during your videos.)
I think a full span Bay Bridge bike lane would be an interesting case study on this as it is much longer than all the other bridges on this. All the top NYC bridges are 1-2 miles over a heavily transited path. Full Bay bridge would be 7 miles from SF to Emeryville which seems like it would seriously limit the watershed of potential riders. Though don't get me wrong I'd love to bike RSR, Golden Gate, and Bay bridge in one loop!
@@ryanmccormick4686 I think the full span (i.e. western + eastern) would be a huge win for bikes in SF, and would probably get a ton of e-bike riders. The Golden Gate's cyclists are mostly tourists and not commuters, and has weird times when you're allowed to bike on it (it switches with the eastern and western walkways)
Top notch as always. As a cyclist I appreciate this topic. I cross the Freemont bridge in Seattle often and really dislike the setup, way to narrow for muti use but its safer than the Ballard bridge for bikes a peds. The Freemont also connects to the ship canal trail to the west heading towards Interbay/Magnolia and the Elliot bay trail. Thanks again for the great content.
Yeah, I kinda wanted to mention the trail on the south side too but didn't wanna digress too much. (I used to live in Interbay!)
Waiting for the cross-over episode with Shifter
Video Suggestion: Top Public transit projects in development! For example Minneapolis currently has the Green line SWLRT expansion under construction, albeit delayed, and the blue line expansion route recommendation undergoing environmental studies. I know you mentioned seattle having it's LRT extended in a previous video, and Toronto is host to a whole bunch of projects. Would be cool to know what cities/areas would be worthwhile visiting and taking transit... in a few years. Could rank by miles or public transit added, percentage of miles added or monetary values for statistical ranking for a couple suggestions, but I'm sure you've probably got a better more interesting way of explaining it haha.
I'm really happy with how quickly this channel appears to be growing
It’s nice to see cities start repurposing unneeded travel lanes into bike and pedestrians facilities.
Glad you gave a shoutout to Washington Ave bridge in Minneapolis. It's absolutely packed September-Thanksgiving and March-May, and plenty of people still use it even in January.
10:56 You cannot use Drayton Park railway station on Arsenal football club match days because of safety reasons i.e. the platform is too-narrow and as such would suffer massive overcrowding and likely passengers would be pushed onto moving trains and there is no money in building a new platform because the station is so underutilised along with the rest of the line.. I may also add that Finsbury Park is also fairly well connected to Gillespie Road (Arsenal stadium) among a few other stations and several bus services nearby...
That's the local insight I'm looking for!
@@CityNerd I'm not even "local" lol I live >10mi away in SW London I just happened to know this fact. I may also add that along the end of the line that Drayton Park Station is on suffered a deadly train crash in 1975 killing most people on board which took place at Morgate (the train started at Drayton Park) and no one knows the cause! So here's another fact for ya!
As a bike user for pretty much everything in paris.
I can tell you, that the view, by night, on the seine bridges, NEVER gets old.
It's always fascinating. It's been going like this for 20 years, for me.
Thanks for the content!
Every adult and child should own a bicycle and ride it regularly.
Healthy exercise and fossil fuels free transportation.
Ride to work, ride to school, ride for fun and ride for health.
For some comparison, from 2021 data there were two bridges in London with higher average daily cyclist counts than Williamsburg Bridge - Blackfriars Bridge with 8045 and London Bridge with 8361. Westminster Bridge (4898) and Waterloo Bridge (5418) would also have made the top ten.
Oh thanks for that! I've biked over a couple of those myself, and I believe it!
12:58 so much metal and concrete, and that airy breeze with a tang of fumes.
Boston has been experimenting with taking the Mass Ave. bridge down to 2 car lanes to expand the bike lanes and are taking data on trip volumes, hopefully it'll be released soon! Happy to see the city investing in bike infrastructure, especially at the expense of cars. Now if only they would also improve the networks that the bridge connects to instead of just improving the route for people going between Back Bay and MIT.
As far as Portland dropping in ridership I'd say a large part of it can probably be attributed to downtown generally becoming a much less desirable place to be over the last few years. There's plenty of discussion to be had as to the causes of and ways to fix downtown Portland but sadly I think it's pretty hard to deny that it is just not as pleasant a place to be as it used to be.
Montreal has many bike counters including one on the Jacques-Cartier Bridge but you have to dig a little to find the raw data. I did extract the data for Jacques-Cartier Bridge for 2019, here are the numbers
From April 1st 2019 to October 31 2019: Average of 2,352 bikes daily
From May 1st 2019 to May 31st 2019: Average of 1,779 bikes daily
From July 1st 2019 to July 31st 2019: Average of 5,453 bikes daily
The Jacques-Cartier Bridge connects the suburbs (and not so bike friendly) of the south shore of the St Lawrence River with the Island of Montreal. There are two islands in the middle of the river on which there are popular activity sites, especially during summer (parks, a roller coaster park, beach, swimming pool, festivals, etc.). So, outside of summer (July and August), most of bike traffic is made of commuters or long-distance cyclists on the weekends.
One reason why it may not be as popular is because the Metro connects the Jean-Drapeau park with Montreal and Longueuil, and the bridge is very steep
@@gaelfortier2668 The bridge is quite steep and quite a long ride. It's a bit of a weird list though because where do you draw the line? The various bridges over the Lachine canal probably break all these numbers in the summer but they're much smaller. It would be interesting to show the old Monk bridge where they replaced a road bridge with a new bridge and just kept the whole old bridge as a cycle bridge.
@@gaelfortier2668 i dont go on jacques cartier cause it is way too high and way too scary. I traversed it on foot once and it was one of the scariest things ive experienced
The New York bridge count makes sense, like many folks have said, MTAs ridership still hasn’t reached (I believe) 65% of pre-pandemic levels, many folks who are going into the city are choosing other methods. It also makes sense because the Williamsburg bridge seems like the flattest of all of the bridges and East Manhattan has notoriously bad train connections
the new lane on brooklyn bridge is *shockingly* flat, if you haven't tried it yet
I personally believe that all car bridges in cities should have a bike bridge directly next to them so commuters stuck in car traffic have to witness bikes whizzing by, which will hopefully convince drivers to bike more.
Was watching for the bridge in Minneapolis. Glad it got an honorable mention.
I work on the Queensboro Bridge. (Proud to see all 4 of our East River Bridges make the list.) You're spot on with most of your conjecture. Also, the bike infrastructure going north into Astoria, though primarily used as parking for car repair shops, does make it more inviting to bikers. The big news now is that when we're done redecking the upper roadway, we will open the south outer roadway as a bike lane. First we need the capacity during construction and then we need to modify the lane and barriers for bike use. I can't wait, the tiny shared lane on the north is scary with the motorbikes.
Ballona Creek Bridge user here. Another thing that may add to its usage is that all of the other nearby crossings over the creek don't even have SIDEWALKS, let alone bike lanes. I live 2 miles inland and the Strand bike path is still the fastest way to get north of the river
the busiest cyclepath in the Netherlands is the Vredenburg in Utrecht with over 12,5 million cyclists per year (35.000 per day), though these numbers are a little lower than they used to be due to still a lot of people are working from home following the Covid crisis.
and maybe " itchy boots" noraly being away in North America lol.
Always love it when you get a bit technical. Nerd out, baby!
Love it. Great info, great sense or humor. Everything backed by data or a disclaimer about lack of proper data. One of my favorites and I look forward to a new video every week. Keep it up!
Unrelated topic suggestion: best (and worst) transit connections to universities. I have to assume students ride transit more than any other demographic but this feels underappreciated by many cities.
I wonder if you count different campuses or just university campuses. Arizona State University is split up into 4 major campuses across the Phoenix valley with facilities elsewhere, though only the downtown Phoenix and Tempe campuses are connected by the light rail, while the west and Polytechnic campuses only have bus connections (you can transfer from the light rail to a university shuttle when going to Polytechnic, but not west campus). I wonder if the different University of California areas are separate universities or just all a part of 1 university (I bet the former).
@@grahamturner2640 that's an interesting wrinkle! In my experience most universities have one main campus but that's definitely not the case for all. Some don't even really have a proper campus - just a bunch of buildings spread throughout a city. It probably doesn't matter too much for this question though because universities that are spread out presumably don't have that much transit demand at any one location. If there's two or maybe 3 locations that all have a lot of demand, you could probably do an average.
The busiest bike counters in Berlin, Germany, register around 9000 cyclists per day (7am-7pm weekdays, annual average) but the Dutch 30,000+ are next level :)
I’m glad that you factored in the Brooklyn bridge data post dedicated bike lane installation. Curious to see if ridership continued to increase in 2022. Prior to the bike lane install, the bikes shared space with pedestrians on an elevated wooden plank walkway. It was absolutely terrible and dangerous for both parties.
I don't know if it would be feasible - but as a 30 something stuck in the suburbs with one child (and another on the way) I dream of getting into a large urban area with good infrastructure/transit, the problem is that unless you can also afford private schools, many of the public school districts in these areas are barely passable to downright abysmal. A list of relatively well rated school zones in nice urban areas would surely be a godsend to us parents.
I'd be willing to bet that the divergence in trend lines between NYC and other places has to do with interplay between bikes, transit and autos in the context of a respiratory disease pandemic. The pandemic makes transit a less desireable mode of transportation relative to both bikes and autos, given the highly congested and restricted air flow inside of train cars and buses. In NYC there's both more people looking for an alternative to transit, and bikes relative to autos is more doable for more trips in NYC, particularly in the areas around some of these bridges mentioned, than in most other cities. In other words, if you had an auto commute prior to COVID, you weren't getting on a bike because of COVID, but if you had a subway commute, you very well might.
In addition, as someone who started biking during the “quarantine” era, I felt it was a good time to learn because there were just fewer cars out on the road. And, yeah, felt weird about the subway for a long time.
Lol, April-October (well, May-September) is the "off-season" for biking in Houston.
Also, if you do go ahead with a "top 10 protected bicycle networks," be careful of Google Maps! It tends to lag a couple of years behind.
Chicago resident here. Our mayor recently said we are a "car-city". :/ So I don't expect the city to collect bike data other than taking it from strava.
"The practical reality is we are a car city"...Lori Lightfoot might be one of the worst mayors in the US. She has to go...
Meet the new boss, same as the old boss. Rather than it being her fault entirely, the system by which she came to power is fucked up. Unless serious voter education ensues, voters will fall for another car centric politician that will stall progress for decades.
That's really too bad because Chicago could be a great bike city. It's flat on a grid. The bones are all there.
@@ethanstump damn we are having the same issues with London Breed, been backpedaling on all the safe, car free or slow street initiatives.
It kills me. My tax money is going to petroleum giveaways. I'd pay money to take my vote back.
Des Moines IA has some pretty great bike paths and infrastructure including a dedicated ped/bike bridge downtown. Of course usership is low because red state murica but still
The clips of bike lanes in the first 45 seconds are on routes I take multiple times a week!! That’s so cooooooool
As a resident of Amsterdam I feel oddly slighted in this video (if I must ;-) ) great video overall! Love to see bike use growing! I lived in the SF bay before here, and was surprised to hear u say there's great bike infrastructure. I mostly remember just gutters, if that. Aside from very few new developments, everything else felt suicidal
It was probably too late to add to your calculations, but the Chestnut St. bridge in Philly was recently reopened after a three year reconstruction. It has a dedicated bike lane, and furthermore, one traffic lane was eliminated in the University City section of Chestnut St. (west of the bridge) to create a dedicated bike lane.
You should do a video entirely about Boston. Absolutely everything about it, all of it's quirks, and things that make it unique. I'd watch hours of content on it.
Brooklynite here! I've noticed a massive increase of bike mode share in my part of North Brooklyn. While some people believe it is due to depressed transit ridership, I've also noticed that even as ridership has begun to recover since 2021, bike usage does not seem to be decreasing. I'm think a lot of the increase might be in local trips, or maybe some trips originally made by car, especially as a lot of improvements to cycle infrastructure in neighborhoods like Williamsburgh make biking a much more viable option for both of those types of trips.
Good job on collating stats for that one. I couldn't find any in french for Pont Champlain in Montreal or the smaller ones and apparently 75000 yearly trips for Quebec Bridge in Quebec City.
Ce n'est que depuis l'ouverture du nouveau pont Champlain qu'il y a une piste cyclable de ce côté. La plupart du trafic de vélo passe par le pont Jacques-Cartier ou le pont Victoria (compteur "Estacade"). Les données sont sur le site de la Ville de Montréal, mais il faut chercher un peu.
I live directly next to the Queensboro Bridge and ride the bike lane a few times a week. Once the ongoing road project on the upper roadway is complete they’re going to move the pedestrian pathway over to the southern exterior lane and dedicate the current bike/pedestrian lane to bikes only. It currently gets very crowded, so once it’s bike-only I expect ridership will go up even more.
There has been a big shift to e-bikes, scooters, EUCs, etc lately and you see them all on that bridge.
Thanks for the great videos!
Watching this as Arsenal is top of the league COYG!
PS… Great videos! I just discovered your channel and am now perusing your back catalog. Lots of gems!
I'd be really curious to see where Johnson Street Bridge in Victoria BC ranks in this list. Victoria isn't a very large metro area, but it has a high cycling mode share for North America and the bridge has a bike/ped crossing that is always busy. Of course there might not be any data.
Oh I looked at it! There's an eco counter -- I got low 2000s. data.eco-counter.com/public2/?id=100059041
I loooooooove Victoria by the way
@@CityNerd Go a bit north and look at the Selkirk Trestle. Assuming I'm pulling the data correctly it has over 4000 daily average April-October 2021. That's the bridge that carries t he Galloping Goose Regional Trail which is kind of the "bike highway" for Victoria.
@@CityNerd note the eco-counter only counts the multi-use deck, not the bike lanes on the car deck, so that low 2000s is likely high 2000s to low 3000s. And it has been growing
For the Queensboro Bridge, Citibike expanded a lot into the LIC and Astoria neighborhoods during the pandemic and is now expanding into Sunnyside and Woodside. And both sides of the bridge already had decent bike infrastructure that's been making slight improvements here and there such as upgrading lanes to be protected, etc. The Crescent street two way protected both lanes are a big help connecting Astoria directly to the bridge as well.
The city is planning to convert the eastbound outer car lane into either a two way bike lane and making the current lane just pedestrian oriented or vice versa. The current setup is okay, but a bit tight for pedestrians and cyclists going in both directions, especially at ebike speeds. So separating the two and making one side only walking/running and the other just cycling is probably the best and safest idea for all.
I also wanna shout-out the new bike and pedestrian lanes on the new Koscuiuszko Bridge. It's quite nice with some lovely views. Not too steep like other bridges, very wide. They did a good job.
The Mass Ave bridge numbers are higher now due to a semi-quick build lane expansion, and will positively boom once the promised permanent upgrades arrive! Here's hoping the flex-post shortage doesn't hold us up.
Good timing, considering the Douthat article that dropped today.
The Outer Drive Bridge has been completely redone for cyclists and pedestrians within the past 3 years to create the Navy Pier Flyover. I would say the ridership has gone up significantly despite it not being a good design imo.
i swear i start every comment on here with the same three words but... 'AS A CHICAGOAN,' i would looove to see a top 10 bike networks in NA!!
I think that geography really does a disservice to the actual count - Montréal has made huge strides but essentially has no bridges, as the city is entirely on the island - it's a long ride to the burbs over one of the longest bridges in the region, very few do it. Also, total counts or per capita? I bet Portland beats NYC, but it would be a much more interesting list in any case. Thanks for the video, nerdz !
I found the Montreal data.
Avg. 2,352 bikes daily from April to November and a peak in July of an avg of 5,453 bikes daily. (2019 data)
@@anne12876 Makes a lot sense, July is peak festival season on Île Sainte-Hélène.
What a great topic idea. As a cyclist in Chicago, it is truly frustrating how terrible the options are for crossing the north/south branch of the chicago river. I would imagine that the outer drive bridge is higher up on the list if the data were clean. That bridge is constantly packed
As a resident of Sunnyside in Queens who also bikes to work in Midtown 4x a week, I think the big jump in riders is a function of the creation of several protected bike lanes: Skillman heading west, 43rd Ave heading east, and perhaps most importantly, on Queens Boulevard itself. I’d say the ride portion in Queens is safer than the part in Manhattan.
Your channel is only one year old?!? I don’t know how I lived without this kind of information before. :)
One thing I noticed during the pandemic living in Astoria is that the bike shops were all emptied out. People were taking advantage of the lack of cars and biking around for exercise and entertainment. Seems like quite a few people are now using their bikes to go to work. That coupled with the new parking-protected bike lane on Crescent must have been the tipping point.
The bike supply chain has been a nightmare everywhere, but NY was probably especially hard hit.
People flyyyyy down Crescent
12:08 - Pont Jacques Cartier ... with LaRonde amusement park
Video Idea: What about a top 10 list on the best inner city neighbourhoods (US, Canada, Mexico) to raise a family, allowing for easy access to amenities, and ability to live car-free or car-light.
People overwhelmingly think that to raise a child you need to move to a cookie-cutter car-dependent suburb and buy an SUV. You hear this all the time: "suburbs are the best place to raise a kid" when they're not. They're depressing, they trap you in your home with your kid (unless you want to sit in traffic to go literally anywhere), they're devoid of culture and amenities, and they result in children who are shut in.
Now I know that living in a 1,000 sq ft flat in a condo tower may be less than ideal when you have a toddler or young child. But a medium-density townhouse with parks, recreation, and good accessible transit is, in my view, so much better than spaced out single family zoning with maybe one half-assed playground down the street. Unlike everyone I know who fled to the suburbs when they had their kid, my wife and I stayed in an inner city neighbourhood and it's so much fun to travel with my child. I could never imagine moving to a suburb
One note on the 59th Street Bridge - during the pandemic, the Crescent Street bike lane was converted to two way (it was previously only southbound) and was protected and/or buffered for about 90% of its length. That made bike commutes from Astoria (the lane’s catchment area) much more achievable than they were previously.
Also the Williamsburg Bridge never gets old.
I'd be interested to see which NA cities are the most accessible (in terms of wheelchair access/tactile paving/etc etc.) Also, another video could be which are the least. And then a global comparison!
A lot of cities are not very accessible despite ADA and other similar laws.
Anecdotally, I know a few people who used to routinely ride transit who switched to biking during the pandemic (a lot of them not even because of concerns about the safety of riding transit, it was just that transit service became so unreliable with drivers getting sick that getting a bike was almost a necessity for them).
I'm from New York and a big reason for the higher bike ridership is the NYC open streets program that made a lot of streets public space for all which encouraged people to ride on bikes since cars were deprioritized by the program
NYC bike rider here. Lots of great points as to why biking increased during the pandemic, but I think one reason no one has touched on yet is how all of the protests during the summer of 2020 created a brand new generation of riders! These bike protests, organized through Instagram, went on for months and enhanced or created new social biking groups mainly based on Insta and Strava. Many of these trips are not commuting trips - biking has just gained a lot of popularity around the city over the last few years.
Also, the new Brooklyn Bridge bike lane is a real improvement over the bumpy wooden plank tourist littered path we had prior. However, I still prefer the Manhattan Bridge path in that area.
hmmmm… I think Im neutral because Brooklyn because it has a flatter incline than Manhattan Bridge. Manhattan Bridge Bike lane is wider and doesn’t feel tacked on.
@@SwiftySanders true from the Brooklyn side that the BB incline isn’t bad, but from the Manhattan side it’s not that great lol. Part of the fun is getting to a point where those inclines feel easy to conquer! I like the WB incline the least
For a new topic I suggest looking at underground and overground walking route for pedestrians. I think this summer has been a big wake up call to how we are losing the fight against climate change. I think most urban planners have frowned on these routes in the past specifically looking at Houston. But, I feel like we will need lots of more shaded areas that can only be created by heavy use of tree lines or underground tunnels. Personally I've always been a fan of tunnels since I moved to Somerville, and the tunnel near my apartment allowed me to avoid two streets of heavy traffic by foot in about a minute of walking. I also am intrigued by overhead sheltered walk ways like in Minneapolis that help people cross in the harsh winter months.
I'd be interested, I always like to see Toronto win a top 10 list.
Might also be good to measure things like shoping, accessibility, nber of direct entrances to transit or other locations.
Urban planners dislike tunnels and skywalks because they want to focus ped traffic at street level for step-off-the-curb transit convenience and because it diverts potential business from shops that line sidewalks. I like some of these off-street ped networks (such as Crystal City's) but it's hard to argue against the reasoning that that more people on the streets make for safer streetscapes.
With high levels of pollution too I wouldn't wonder if there's uses for enclosed spaces
@@colormedubious4747 I am familiar with this critique, especially from Jeff Specter. But, I think its a little bit lazy and often comes from people who live in heavily walked northeastern regions. Heat is lethal, and most southern cities in America don't have adequate shading, and aren't heavily walked to point that diverting foot traffic would be meaningful anyway.
@@neolithictransitrevolution427
Montreal and Calgary should make a list like this too.
I biked the Queensboro a lot when I lived in Astoria and that was before all the newer infrastructure. I'd love to bike that route now.
Me (a Vancouverite) and my girlfriend (A New Yorker) spend a bunch of time in New York together; our theory on the uptick in bikes is the relative intensity of the other transit modes. Given that New York was ~ground zero for covid, and that the subway & regional rail systems are often very heavily used, its conceivable that many new yorkers -- disproportionately more than a city like Vancouver -- would "escape the subway" by deciding to bike places. Maybe its also the case that the New-York knowledge worker who was pushed into work-from-home but still has to go into the office occasionally thought "why don't I bike to work next Wednesday", which is a smaller ask then a regular commuter switching to biking.
All pure speculation.
For New York City - I think CitiBike also plays a role in the increased bike ridership across the bridges. CitiBike has been around for a few years, but during 2020, a CitiBike docking station was installed across the street from my apartment in Harlem. I rarely rode a bike in Manhattan pre 2020, but suddenly I was able to explore the whole city via bike because of the ease and convenience of having a CitiBike dock right across from my apartment. Combine that with the added safety of bike vs subway during the pandemic, and I can understand why the bike numbers shot up. Now, (2023), I take the subway regularly, but because CitiBike is by my apartment, I find myself riding much more often than pre-2020.
On a side note, I just vacationed in Konstanz, Germany - which is a city on the border of Germany & Switzerland. There is a bike/pedestrian bike bridge across the Rhine River that has a bike counter that was already at 14,000 trips that day, and that was during the late afternoon. The city has a population of 84,000 people, so that's a pretty large number of bike trips for a city of that size. I didn't expect Konstanz to be such a bike city! Very cool to see!
Enjoyed this video! Keep up good work.
I love the jabs at Vancouver boosterism. Keep it coming! (I'm a lifelong Vancouverite, it's exhausting sometimes)
I know what you mean!
I'm guilty of perpetrating Vancouver boosterism. I live in Portland and every time someone talks about visiting Seattle I tell them to stay on the 5 and keep going to Vancouver because it is much better, and the people are nicer because they're Canadian. 😉
@@Shizz81 God love you! I used to work in food&beverage, and my favorite tourists were Americans. They were the friendliest, plus they tipped big. With respect to talking up my hometown, (I'm a Vancouverite), I'm always a little cautious; it's better to exceed expectations, and that's hard if they're really up there. Hope to visit Portland soon!
I can hardly fault Vancouver for it. Every time I visit I'm like, why don't I live here. You'd kinda rather keep it a secret though
the sidewalk on the patullo bridge is super frightening.
Back when you were here! And yes, that bridge traffic, at my doorstep, shot way up. A lot of mopeds too. They are supposed to pull a Manhattan Bridge and put the walking on the south side but they're dragging their feet.
I'd love a look at some other Micro Mobility infrastructure in those cities with it.
Peachtree in Georgia is famious for its Golf Cart tracks. That sounds kind of funny, but the Netherlands allows microcars in the bus lanes, and if its light weight, electric, and speed capped I'm all for Gold Carts in bike lanes.
Also a look at if E-Scooters are of any value or mostly just a lol.
In Texas people drive golf carts around on regular surface streets and nobody bats an eye. Electric public scooters are also "littered" everywhere
Rental scooters don’t seem great, though it seems like they could work if some care were taken. There’s the parking, which seems fixable if you just take a comparatively small space out of car parking space and make people have to park there. If there was somewhere to park on every block, and you can enforce it through geolocation and penalties, the parking seems fixable.
I’m curious about parking stuff outside though, it just seems like it reduces the life such that it is hard to get a good ROI. Seems like it makes much more sense if it is your own scooter you can bring inside. Having to have cars pick up to charge and resituate scooters also seems problematic.
@@clayton97330 Thats good, I would like to see that catch on. Golf Carts aren't discussed but imagine how much cheaper life would be if a golf cart could be your secind car.
@@Nemonurwingy I agree, having sheltered drop off points would be a big improvement.
The rentals are pricy to use on a regular basis but it's just as viable as an ebike for personal transport. In SF, there are lots of escooters being used to get around and I use one pretty regularly in place of the bus or driving.
Can you do a video on the transit projects (planned or under construction or even recently completed) with the most transformative potentials to their metro areas? Based on future ridership potential, new access to transit, car trips reduced, etc
Got to love a personalised email from an advertiser starting with "Hello Creator!"
As inhabitant of a continent with decent public transport I can help explain the increase in bike traffic, because we saw this everywhere in Europe, too: Buses and trains stopped or restricted services during the pandemic, so a lot of people switched to use bikes and e-bikes. At the same time car traffic was low, so it was convenient to use bikes even in places with bad bike infrastructure.