Quote:
Originally Posted by jammies
Is there, though? I'd think there is a lot of soft demand, as in "if it was dead easy to cycle to work, I might do it a few times a year, but more likely I'd wistfully consider it but not do it" but not enough real demand to make up a significant proportion of the population.
The problem is that people form habits, and the weather and distances to travel here are simply not conducive to year-round cycling, and thus the habit of cycling to work will never fully form in any but the most dedicated. You can commission all kinds of studies where people will claim they want to cycle to work, but that has the same conviction of studies where people claim they will "start saving money", "lose some weight this year", and "stop watching so much television and start reading".
How many people use the existing pathway system to get to work right now? It's a perfectly serviceable system, and when I used to live up north on Nose Creek I'd occasionally take my bike downtown and it took around the same time as driving. And yet the pathways had more joggers and pedestrians than cyclists - on a dedicated system with no traffic at all.
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It's perfectly reasonable that we could double or even triple the amount of cyclists who regularly cycle - not just for work, but for other trips as well. Of course, it'll never be 20% mode share, but if we could move from 2% to say 4 or 5%, that's good in the North American context. The pathway system is great, but it doesn't penetrate the places where people actually work or do things other than recreation. This is the gap the on-street infrastructure fills.