Too many shitheads driving. -Everytown, USA

I live in a suburb of Washington DC. Like most small US cities, mine was built around a stroad. My city’s elected officials care a great deal about biking infrastructure, but since the stroad cutting our town in half, along which is one of the only places where mixed use development is allowed by the state and county, is a state road, the city can do little but beg for them to fix it.

The state has finally decided to add bike gutters along the road, but with the car traffic speed and density that we have, I doubt that will have a great impact by itself. If I could change one thing, it would be to give that state road a diet and add protected bike lanes.

In my small local city there is a train station with decent connections to other larger cities.

The problem is that the main bus stop is near the high street, about 5-10 minuets walk away from the train station. This makes it much harder to catch buses too/from the train station.

There’s no safe way to bike to O’Hare airport. 6 lane highways, no sidewalks, nowhere to lock up.

Portland’s bike infrastructure is very good for a North American city. The problem is that it gets a bit spotty traveling further out. There also isn’t infrastructure if you want to bike outside of the city. Want to hop on your bike and go do some camping? Have fun going on tight rural highways with high speeds! And even in the metro area, it’s really just the urban core and surrounding residential areas that have good coverage.

COVID-19 has been devastating to transit service. There are fewer riders and the transit agency, Trimet, has struggled to find drivers. Before, late night service especially was poor, with even “frequent service” reduced to hourly by around 10, and overnight service being non-existent. Now on top of that, the worsening homelessness crisis and opioid epidemic has led to people smoking fentanyl on light rail trains. A lot of passengers just don’t feel entirely safe.

In Ulsan, the only means of public transport available is bus, with intervals from 20 minutes to an hour and 20 minutes.

I can get around fine without bike lanes everywhere but the busy intersections with multiple turn lanes force me to salmon or go on the sidewalk and that’s always a stressful part of my commute

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@ajsadauskas Bucharest, Romania - here:

Biking

• Its almost non existent; there is one decently made lane on Victoriei Avenue. Period. That’s it. That’s the only decent bike infrastructure you see in this entire city.

• There is another joke of a lane on the banks of Dâmbovița river (also known as Splaiul Independenței) which care use it as well. Is it illegal? Of course, it is. Does the police care enough? Sometimes it does, sometimes it does not. Drivers just take for granted the fact that there are no separators like on Victoriei (see before) and get in.

• Bicycle infrastructure created on the sidewalk - many mayors just draw a couple of lanes on the sidewalks and call it a day (example). Doesn’t matter if we, as bikers, need to get around pedestrians or if a kid just jumps in front of your bike. They just draw two lines on the sidewalk, and so they support mobility, right? Everything just not to upset the people in tin cans, or else, you’ll lose your votes. Thankfully, the road police is generally closing these, for these very reasons; but it still doesn’t help if at the end of the day the bike infrastructure is nonexistent (see the first point)

• There is no place to park your bike. There is an attempt in the 6th district, but it’s just too little. They look like this, generally:

  If you don’t have access to one of these, and you live in a higher level apartment building (as many people do here), then good luck getting 10-20 kg of iron with you upstairs/downstairs.

• You cannot take your bike inside public transit if it’s not foldable, except inside the metro - during weekends and early in the morning and late at night. If you have a flat tire, good luck with that.

Transit

I generally find it quite decent, by contrast, but there are some things that need improvement in my option, and some things that I hear people complain
Here’s what I do not like myself:

• buses get stuck in traffic. There are no bus lanes, so they have to share the road with drivers (drivers also tend to use other people’s space because f*ck them, why don’t they also get cars, are they poor? but still). This makes the buses move slow and not come on time.
• There are still, in this age and time, vehicles where you cannot use your bank card to pay directly with it. And this is driving me crazy. Your alternative is to either take your time to go to a booth, buy online, but for some reason wait for 60 mins for the ticket to activate on your travel card, pay by SMS (not really cutting it for me, as I use a prepay) or install an app called 24pay - which is both proprietary and uses space I do not have on my phone.
• Some tram lines use old rails that are yet to undergo changing for a long time already. They are in poor condition and pose a great risk for derailment. When traveling on them, trams usually swing sideways quite a lot, which makes it uncomfortable to ride them. They also have speed restrictions in these places, so they have to go reaaaaaaaaly slow to get to the destination.
• Transit is non-existent in the suburbs. There are some bus routes and that’s it. No trams, no trolleybuses, nothing else. You have to take the car to get in the city.
• The metro is the best way to get around. It’s clean, it comes on time generally, but the network is still not complete after all these years, it takes years just to build a few stations (see the M5 line, which took 9 years to complete only 1/3 of it) - so it’s generally crowded.
• Lack of air conditioning on most surface transit.

What other people complain about, and the reason they choose cars:

• Old vehicles
• Crowding
• People; some speak loud, some like to put various music, disturbing others etc.
• Dirty vehicles
• People destroying chairs and other internals, people that smell, drunk people etc.

Vancouver, Canada: Isolated pockets of bike lanes. Not like a neighborhood or an urban center where you can reasonably do everything you need within it, literally a single block of new development will have a dutch-style paved bike lane but you’re out to sea if you go beyond it.

In SEQ the biggest thing seems to be when the services stop. I used to live near-ish to a train station on the Gold Coast, and buses would not go between the suburb centre (and my place) and the station after about 5.45pm til the next morning. In Brisbane buses are much better and we got buses every 10-15 minutes during the day which was great, but then nothing between 11pm and 6am. Even 1 per hour at night would’ve been nice. I don’t understand how we can drop from 6 buses per hour to no buses for 7 hours straight. Buses and trams work much better than trains in SEQ, and cycling can be pretty dangerous if you have to go on any main roads. Not to mention the extremely long traffic light waiting times. But we are allowed to cycle on footpaths, so it can be an ok way of getting around if you don’t mind the hills and going a bit slow on the path.

First off: They exist only in the elite areas. Second: Everyone uses it to ride and park their SUVs, even the police itself.

@ajsadauskas it’s almost non-existent.