From: strobl@gmd.de (Wolfgang Strobl)
Subject: Re: Cars and suburbs
Organization: GMD, Sankt Augustin, Germany
Distribution: na
Date: Tue, 26 Jan 1993 23:11:55 GMT

In <C1HBDo.6sB@rice.edu> shenry@cs.rice.edu (Sam Henry) writes:

>In article <kraas.727971827@gmd.de> strobl@gmd.de (Wolfgang Strobl)
>hits the nail on the head:

>>... Judging from German traffic statistics, most cars
>>are used under conditions which seem to be ideal for bicycle use,
>>most of the time. This may be different in the US.

>Actually, it is not.  Over half of workers in the USA live within 6
>miles/10 km of their jobs.  A very easy bicycle commute.

Well, it depends. I have to ride about 12 km from my home to work,
if I take the shortest available route. Unfortunately, German
law imposes the bicylist to use a bike path (bikeway? I'm not
sure about the terminology here), if there is one along (i.e.
parallel to) the street. In practice, this means that one has
to cross the street often, because such bike paths aren't
continous, but start, switch side or end quite often and randomly, 
and that one has to pay attention to much more traffic lights 
than a car driver who uses the same route would have to.

In addition, many bike paths are former sidewalks, so one
has to pay attention to slow pedestrians, which makes it
quite impossible to ride at a decent speed. 

This stop & go way of riding not only costs time, it costs
a lot of power, too. And it's quite dangerous.

There is a German joke that "Radweg" (== bike way, bike path),
the official term for a bike path which has to be used, really 
should be written as "Rad weg!", i.e. "Bike, get out 
of here!".

Anyway, even under such bad circumstances it is possible
to ride with an average speed of about 18 km/h, end to end.

The average speed of cars in our cities is less, if one
takes the time wasted in traffic jams and the time necessary
to find a parking lot, plus the time to walk from the
parking lot to the real destination into account.

>Your German statistics also probably includes info on avg dist/trip.

Sure. There is a German book 
  Heiner Monheim / Rita Monheim-Dandorfer
  Strassen fuer alle   (Streets For Everybody) 
  Analysen und Konzepte zum Stadtverkehr der Zukunft
  (Analyses and conceptions for future city traffic and transportation) 
  Rasch und Roehring, Hamburg, 1990
  ISBN 3-89136-368-0 
which contains a lot of thoughts and statistical material about
traffic and urban planning. The chapter about "means of transport and
distance" contains a statistic which relates distance to percentage of
the choosen means of transport. It says that for distances between 500m 
and 1km, the car is used in 24 % of the trips, and that for 1km - 2km, 
the car is used in 40 % of the trips. This corresponds to my own
- of course limited - observations: about two third of the parents
use the car to take their children to our kindergarten, for example.

Most of them live, like us, in a distance of between 500m and 1km
to the kindergarten. My two childs used their own bikes to go to
the kindergarten since the age of four, AND THEY WHERE FASTER, most
of the time, for the same distance.

--
      o      (     Wolfgang Strobl    Wolfgang.Strobl@gmd.de (+49 2241) 14-2394
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