Basically, for those of you here who ride a bicycle, what do you have in the way of bike infrastructure, and how pleasant/painful is it to cycle where you live? In my area, there’s a small handful of mixed-use sidewalks (basically they made the sidewalk a bit wider, made it asphalt, and painted a yellow line down the middle) which are certainly better than nothing (especially better than painted bike gutters) but not really a connected bike network, it pains me to see how much could be done but isn’t, it’s not like there isn’t the space or anything either
There’s one of those paths nearby that’s very useful to me for getting to a few shops, and getting there doesn’t require cycling in the road very much, but going any farther requires me to cycle in traffic which sucks, thankfully the main street I’d be going down is still pretty residential so it’s not too busy and isn’t too fast (the sign’s 50km/h, though tbf people do always go at least a bit over the limit), still feels dangerous though to have to rely on cars safely passing, especially when Canada absolutely has loads of large pickups and SUVs just like the US
The amount of hills in my area is also pretty troublesome, I had to get an e-bike just to be able to handle them at all, it’s the only reason I’m even able to venture outside the neighborhood on this thing
Currently living in Shanghai. The bike lanes are often so big that cars could drive on them, and often separated by flowerpots from the actual roads. The biggest downside to driving a bike here are the motorcycle drivers, they constantly honk and drive like crazy. But shared bikes are everywhere, and I paid like 13¥ for a month of using them as much as I like. So it’s very convenient and extremely cheap.
Good to hear that such an enormous city has decent biking infrastructure. It really saves on car usage.
It’s crazy because China has essentially created public transit infrastructure that is everything western transit nerds want. All the discourse about more trains, denser development, multimodal transit, accessible transit etc. has already happened in some Chinese cities. Still lots of problems (e.g. aggregate traffic fatalities), but it’s incredible stuff getting done.