Imagine a Boston with just a fifth as many cars

I go to a lot of these kind of events and there is, thankfully, no shortage of bike advocacy. Who knows why they weren't represented on the panel but bikes and bike infrastructure get plenty of love and attention in Boston--no harm in an event focused on pedestrians. And I disagree completely re Livable Streets--they are a great inclusive group.

Every time I'm in Harvard Square (I know that's not Boston, but still...), I don't understand why anyone would even bother with driving through it. Just divert traffic around it and let pedestrians do their thing. Would also be nice around Union Square in Somerville, expand pedestrian-only access in Downtown Crossing, etc. Some places (Central Square and Davis Square) might not work, but I see a lot of places where it would make sense to divert traffic and make it pedestrian-only.

Some are doing without cars. Boston had a large drop in the number of cars registered in the city while at the same time going in population. I got to think part of that is the increase in car sharing.

(reference on number of cars and people)
https://www.bostonglobe.com/business/2013/07/04/boston-limiting-new-park...

Elon Musk has more than enough on his plate and considering he has an ego as big as the sun, angry investors and a public clamoring for the more feasible high speed rail, the hyperloop will probably not happen in our lifetime.

After rising almost continuously since World War II, driving by U.S. households has declined nearly 10 percent since 2004, with a start before the Great Recession suggesting economics is not the only cause.

The average American household now owns fewer than two cars, returning to the levels of the early 1990s.

More teens and 20-somethings are waiting to get a license. Less than 70 percent of 19-year-olds now have one, down from 87 percent two decades ago.

Build it and people still aren't driving!

You can't look at two data points and say "bicycling is in decline!" The overall trend is up. You'd need a few more years of data (or at least annual data) to make a claim about any sort of downward trend.

Not to mention these aren't complete ridership counts - they only represent riders at specific areas in the city. If there's major construction/delays/traffic, many bicyclists are smart enough to seek alternate, faster routes and so would not be counted. (My guess is vehicle traffic counts would be down at those same intersections.) This is a really incomplete way to measure city-wide ridership. It would be better suited to comparing ridership, rather than giving a total.

You're not very good at examining data and coming to conclusions based on that data.

Why would you choose such a wierd two-year window like 2012-2014 to talk about biking being in decline....{opens link}

Ah...I see... because the 10+ year window going back to 2002 shows biking to be in a 400% increase over those 10 years.

{reads further on the link}

Ah...and the whole point of the data was to show that the decline is largely artificial due to the fact that there is nearby construction on-going and that other intersections throughout the city are still seeing year-on-year *increases* in cyclists. So, you cherry-picked the smallest possible frame of reference on a single point of data in order to generalize that biking has declined "about 15% in Cambridge".

So much for all the crap about bicycling would only be popular if roads made more bike friendly. Bicycling would be more popular if bikes came with motors and riders still didn't have to obey laws, get insurance, or wear helmets. That would make riding more popular.

http://massbike.org/blog/2015/05/18/cambridge-tops-list-as-americas-best...

All European cities are much older than the cities in the United States. They are extremely walkable and very densely packed. House sizes are much much smaller in the United States. Their cities and their public transportation grew before the advent of mass car ownership.

In the United States, cities largely grew because of car ownership. The United States tore up most of its public transportation in the 50s and 60s in favor of highways. Europe did the complete opposite.

Lastly, most of the public transportation companies in Europe where started and run by the respective governments of each country. It's a hell of a lot easier to build a railroad network when you are the government and you are using taxpayer money to do so.
In the United States you were expected to make money with your railroad. In Europe is a public service.

This is silly. Plus, a walk from Bowdoin to Charles, underground, including the stairs and elevators involved, would be expensive to build and still take 7-10 minutes. And not everyone can easily walk close to half a mile.

Water transportation is more efficient than rail and your citation makes a very wrong assumption (in fine print) that vehicles are full instead of using empirical load factors, which then favor high efficiency cars over heavy rail and bus vehicles which have gained poorly in efficiency compared to vast strides made by the automotive industry.

Ferries definitely have a place.
If a short ferry ride across a bay/harbor takes 10-15 minutes, where a cyclist would take over an hour, I'd say a ferry is a good alternative. Vancouver and Seattle are excellent examples of where ferry service makes sense.

So, if I'm reading you straight, every auto insurance company underwriting policies in the great Commonwealth is colluding with every other auto insurance company, as part of an insidious plot (possibly orchestrated by city planners--I'll need you to be more specific here) whose end-game is making it unaffordable for anyone to own a car. Which would then put said auto insurance companies out of business because, as we just established, no one would be buying auto insurance policies.

That's, uh... that's some kind of theory, DonnieBoston. I wish you well in your attempts to escape the godless Massachusetts liberalism that is currently stealing your precious bodily fluids.

Lyle, get a verified account!

Consider how selfish they are and how few own and ride tandem vehicles, or mount and use secondary seats on their bicycles. Bicyclists perpetuate the selfish paradigm more than car drivers - not only do they want single occupancy, many want a straight line of travel to travel ignoring do not enter signs, stop signs, and red lights!

US Census data has consistently shown however that carpooling is more popular than bicycling with just a few isolated exceptions.

     ^{... but they are to blame for much of what is wrong with urban Boston.}