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> Huge cars, almost no biking lanes, a lot of people and other traffic.

When were you in NYC? We have more bike lanes than Stockholm these days. :)

Proof:

http://www.amny.com/transit/new-york-city-to-reach-1-000-mil... vs http://www.fourteenislands.com/bicycle-paths/



According to Google the Stockholm area is 188km^2 with 760km bike lanes and NY is 789km^2 with 1609km bike lanes.


Looking just at the installed capacity isn't a great way, if you do not control for overall area. Better to compare the relative space dedicated to cars, trains and bikes.

Couldn't find data for Stockholm, but here is a NY-Copenhagen comparison: black lines are the relative NYC allocation spaces, orange bars is Copenhagen. Relatively speaking, Copenhagen has much more biking space: https://whatthestreet.moovellab.com/newyork/results?bike=0.1...


Copenhagen is #1 on the list of bike-friendly cities. Of course it's going to outpace NYC.


Sure, but you're making my point against your original one. Copenhagen has a bit more than 400km of bike lanes [0], which is less than a fourth of what you reported NYC has. Which was my point: NYC should have much much more than 1,000 miles of bike lanes to be even comparable to Stockholm or Copenhagen.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cycling_in_Copenhagen#Infrastr...


I don't know about that. NYC has Staten Island and huge parts of Queens which are effectively a rural village, whereas Copenhagen as well as most of Europe is highly urban. If you mapped population density to bike lane coverage, NYC would come out pretty favorably.


As an avid bicycler and Swedish expat in Taiwan I gotta say I think one of the key things to feeling safe biking in Stockholm and Sweden in general is that Swedes are _fantastic_ at following traffic rules. Very predictable drivers. The Taiwanese bikes and scooters, on the other hand, act like schools of fish. Predictable as a mass but not as units.


That sentiment rings true for most of Europe to be honest. Americans are just not trained to be polite to transport other than cars.


The spring of 2017.

What can I say, there were some but not a lot. And many of these lanes were just painted on the road.

I think this is the big difference, cars drove on the biking lanes but in Stockholm the overwhelming majority of these lanes are protected so cars cannot drive on them.


>I think this is the big difference, cars drove on the biking lanes

Yes, that's the unfortunate reality of NYPD policing. They basically park in bike lanes with little or no consequence. However, with dedicated lanes a lot of progress is being made. Already there is a dedicated bike path that will allow you to drive for hundreds of miles north with little contact with cars.




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