Project Drawdown has characterized a set of 93 technologies and practices that together can reduce concentrations of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. It’s a gigantic project with a lot of data and analyses.
In the linked video, the author goes through the measures to find which one is the most cost effective in terms of ratio of rCO2 reduction and economic cost
The maybe surprising result is that building bike infrastructure to shift a not even big percentage of travels from cars to bicycles or ebikes, is very cheap and has a huge effect on emissions.
The premise is that all solutions should be implemented to have a significant effect, but some are easier done than other.
crossposed from: https://feddit.it/post/6913495
It sounds like the real result is that reducing car trips has a positive effect on GHG emissions, and building bike infrastructure is the cheapest way of doing that. But there will be diminishing returns building bike infrastructure after a certain point if cities are continuing to be built as suburban sprawl. We should be building denser more walkable communities as well as expanding alternative modes of transport.
Walkability is way different from bike infrastructure. Walking is around 2mph. Biking is 12-17 (depending on how in shape you are) and up to 25 if you have an ebike. Entirely different.
Cyclists will still benefit from desner developments. I’d still rather cycle 10 minutes to work than 15 or 20 if it were more spread out.
Thats very slow, even if you mean mph. Cyclists usually go 20 mph or 30 kph. I topped out at ~40 mph = 60 kph (downhill)
@delirious_owl it’s not about how fast you can go, it’s about the average speed of people moving in a city. Cars can go over 150kph and still their average speed in cities is about 13kph, that’s why their so innefficient as an urban transport.
I don’t know where you live but in most cities I’ve been and lived in, people on bikes don’t need to go fast. They need to move their children, their groceries, go to work in their everyday clothes and not end up sweaty 🤷♂️
When you’re late for work, you should be able to ride on a road that’s not full of pedestrians and that has passing lanes to safely go 30 kph.
We should build infrastructure that’s safe for pedestrians, safe for leiser riders in the slow lane, and also safe for normal commuters who are just trying to get somewhere.
@delirious_owl well, even on nice, flat, straight segregated cycling line, most people don’t go 30kph. Not even 25, i can see it easily here because it’s the max speed authorized legally around and not many people pass electric bikes.
Admittedly, I’m late most of time and ride around 30kph to make up for it, but the huge majority of people? They’re like 15-20 kph max, really. And it’s more than enough to go around the city 🤷♂️
@delirious_owl @queermunist
> Cyclists usually go 20 mph or 30 kph.Good for you if that’s your cruising speed, but it’s not everyone who rides that fast. On busy urban bike paths, such speed is rather reckless. Most casual cyclists ride much slower (about half that speed).
Sounds like a poorly designd bike path if it doesn’t have passing lanes.
Roads are built to low cars to go 100 kph. Roads for bikes shouldn’t be designed for slower speeds.
@delirious_owl most bike paths around here are two-direction. To pass a slower cyclist, you need to go on the reverse direction lane. With heavy traffic, just like roads for cars with similar lane arrangement, passing is touchy.
What doesn’t help either are multifunctional paths, or paths shared by cyclists and pedestrians.
Yeah, sounds like very poor design. Are they planning to fix that problem?
@delirious_owl not as far as I know. The main problem in my small city is the bike network is disorganized. Pockets of bike paths or lanes that don’t link together. I believe they’re working on that.
Now thinking about it, not all bike paths are shared with pedestrians, fortunately.
Sounds like a poorly designd bike path if it doesn’t have passing lanes.
I love flying downhill! You can’t maintain that speed over 10 miles, though, especially with stops and hills to climb. We’re talking about commuting, not just sprinting lol
You are indeed delirious it seems! There’s absolutely no way to average 30kph in a city. Not even with an E-Bike capped at 45kph max. Even on flat open ground, no traffic, no traffic lights, stops, whatever, a 30kph average is a approaching a road bike training average. It’s an utterly impossible speed for a normal commuter on a city bike.
I’m not delirious. You said 17 was the max speed. Thats not true.
My point is that city planners shouldn’t see bicycles as a recreational activity for weekends. Lots of us use them to commute and get groceries. We need roads for bikes that are built for reasonable non-leiser transport. They should have space and curves and be paved to safely handle bicycle traffic with max speeds ranging from 30 kph to 60 kph, including 4 lanes with adequate space for safely passing in both directions.
It sounds like you dont live in a city with hills.
You said 17 was the max speed.
No, that was me.
Also I didn’t mean it’s the max speed, I meant it like a cruising speed. If I’m going to a grocery store I’m not pushing as fast as I can go lol
Also! If you have saddlebags and cargo the drag is going to make that harder anyway. Commuting adds complications to cycling.
Sorry for my mistake.
Also! If you have saddlebags and cargo the drag is going to make that harder anyway. Commuting adds complications to cycling.
Oh, both extremes are true in cities with hills. A bike with 4 panniers full of 1 weeks worth of groceries goes much faster downhill.
I didn’t say anything, but the post you’re originally referring to is not talking about max speeds either, but ranges. I.e. average speeds. In a hilly city you might well reach 30 or even 60kph downhill. But it’s then even less likely to hit that as an average, at some point you will have to go up that hill again.
Totally agree on changing the view of city planners though. Even if I’m lucky enough to live in a city where this already very much reality.
Bike infrastructure can be combined with other modes of transport. My daily commute is 56km in a mix of bike, bike in train, bike. Around 45min per way. I’m certainly not the only one either.
I did this for years too. Bicycle infrastructure includes ramps in train stations and adequate space for bicycles on trains.
It’s not too bad, really! Provided the trains are on time. And the fact that it takes away from the freedom of a bike only commute. As in, the thing I love about biking is that it’s all up to me. If I leave on time and my equipment is maintained well, there’s few things, short of a flat or crash, or a similar unforeseen condition, that will slow me down. And if I need to go faster I go harder. Absolutely love biking past a good traffic jam.
If cars are banned and everyone walks or rides bicycles, the natural consequence is denser mixed use cities.
We actually dont need to build bicylce infrastructure. Fortunately its already in-place. All we need to do is ban the cars from roads.
re: degrowth
it’s not a solution, it’s a philosophy that includes a family of solutions. It’s not just about plugging the thermal leaks in your house, it’s also about moving into a smaller house. It’s not just about reducing food waste, it’s about not eating more than what you need.
The beauty of it is that it’s inherently proportional to individual impact on the climate: the people with the most SF of living space per person are contributing the most to energy expenditure to heat their living space, regardless if you call it a “home” or be brutally honest and acknowledge it’s actually a a small private village; the people who eat the most food per person are contributing the most to whatever amount of food waste and food production there is.
I think my term will be much more appealing to people because you can still live, you know, eat a healthy meal, have nice dinners, and whatever; it’s not [garbled] a term that is kind of implicitly sounds like sacrifice
yes, that’s the problem. People are unwilling to ever give up anything. We are becoming a species of packrats and hoarders, and it’s destroying the planet and society. Greed and utopia cannot co-exist
Bike infrastructure is a good and cheap way to improve our planet in many ways, but it cant be the only thing we do to stop climate change, not even close. We will still need to heat our houses and produce products without emitting more CO2.
Watch the video. The selection of bike infrastructure is done so in a frame of lowest cost with highest benefit, and this is couched in the explanation that there’s no one thing to solve everything but rather a series of things that all must be done.
Is how you describe it an indication of an actual problem? I don’t know of anyone who thinks that any one improvement needs to solve the whole thing, in order to be worth it.
The whole premise is baffling. I’m not disagreeing with you here, but… is anyone?
It is necessary. It is not sufficient.
Is it? Did we barely measure a drop during covid when nobody was driving at all?
I’m really asking as I was surprised and saddened when I read about that
Emissions did fall, actually. Atmospheric levels continued to grow at near the same rate, and there are some posited explanations as to why
What I’m getting from all this is that any solution will necessarily be long term, as we can’t just stop everything and expect homeostasis to immediately return to the global ecosystem. Regardless of what we do, it will take time for atmospheric levels to start dropping.
Not having kid is pretty high impact
But that doesn’t change the amount of cars on the road
not immediately, but it does in the future. Which is what most of these solutions are analyzing
Yes but only in 20 years, and that doesn’t matter if a smaller population becomes more car dependent
that’s a big “if” because it not only requires that a smaller society become more car dependent, it requires that this hypothetical society become more car dependent enough to offset or even overcome the amount of good done by taking however many potential drivers off the road for a lifetime.
That’s kind of like saying “yeah, bike infrastructure is great, but not if we start making bikes out of uranium!”
My issue with degrowth is that it’s incompatible with capitalist society. Capitalism only works if the economy is growing. If the economy is stagnant, a win for your neighbor is a loss for you. It would be difficult to build a community under these conditions.
I know I’m on .ml and capitalism has a bad name around here. But I think is clear that markets can improve peoples lives, and alternatives are difficult to implement.
Turning fuckcars into an anticapitalist movement is unnecessary and unhelpful in my opinion. I just want to be able to bike around my city safely.
Capitalism only works if the economy is growing. If the economy is stagnant, a win for your neighbor is a loss for you.
“stagnant” seems to be playing a a double-meaning game here. “Stagnant” in terms of growth just means that we do not continue to make surplus and drive more demand to use the surplus and make even more surplus then drive even more demand to use the… ad infinitum.
“Stagnant” in the sense necessary to make a market a zero-sum game means that there is no production whatsoever, i.e. production quite literally stagnates, which isn’t what degrowth is about.
But I think is clear that markets can improve peoples lives
I’d go a step further and say that specifically capitalism has improved people’s lives. But not everyone’s, and the people it did work for are being increasingly cast aside by the current incarnation of the capitalist feamework.
And yes, in case you weren’t just using “market” as a shorthand for capitalism, but were actually unaware: there are other forms of market economies
and alternatives are difficult to implement.
Unfortunately true, but a worthwhile endeavor nonetheless.
Turning fuckcars into an anticapitalist movement is unnecessary and unhelpful in my opinion
Fuckcars as a movement only means anything and makes any difference if it understands and responds to the driving forces behind car culture; that includes the economic incentives that drove the push for more cars and car-centric cities.
In turn, it must necessarily diverge from and act against the economic status quo to some degree, which, by definition, makes it an anti-capitalist movement. It’s not a movement that seeks the best economic outcome, even though that may be a side effect, and thus can only be described as anti-capitalist.
Put another way: you don’t have to be a communist or an anarchist, and hell you might even be an ancap or fascist, but you have to realize that being anti-car and pro-capitalism means that you get to keep your bike paths only as long as they are the most profitable form of transportation
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Keeping focus off of the small group of companies contributing 80% of greenhouse emissions. I mean do this it would be amazing, but also focus on those polluters.
The producers and consumers are two sides of the very same coin. Those companies aren’t just emitting 80% of the GHGs for giggles, they’re satisfying consumer demand. If we shut them down—and no other companies popped up to pick up the demand—our lifestyle would have to change radically.
Building bike infrastructure is one of the most cost-effective ways to change our lifestyle.
The data takes that into account. It’s not just about what individuals can do, it’s about all possible solutions and their cost/benefit analysis. Obviously it’s not going to have “stop operations of the small group of companies responsible for 80% of ghg emissions” because that’s not a solution—we’re less likely to cease needing them than we arw to replace them or replace them with more companies that do less individually but the same amout overall—but it will list things like “replace x infrastructure within y industry” and the cost associated with it and how much CO2 equivalent it offsets over time.
Fuck clickbait thumbnails :(
Your summary is gold but I really dislike these “??”. I think it was veritasium who made a meta video about this and their own production - it didn’t even proof more efficient!
OK, someone please explain to me how the construction industry will work with only bikes?
