Not Italian, but am there frequently and have lots of friends there:
Naturally, it depends on where you are. Some places are frequented by tourists with mobile homes, and those have a higher amount of “casual riders”.
But generally speaking, Italy is… let’s say not really bike friendly…
For example: At Lake Como, the SS 36 runs along its Eastern Coast. SS stands for “Strada Statale” which is the Italian name for highway, a road where only cars are allowed.
But! At some points the SS36 is the only road since Lake Como is sitting next to mountains, and they only dug a tunnel for the highway. This in turn leads to these parts being demoted from an SS to a regular road, meaning other modes of transport are allowed.
Which of course means you’ll find people on road bikes, without any lights, riding in an old and badly illuminated tunnel with cars zooming past them at ~130 km/h 🤡
Had the opposite experience unfortunately. Tunnels on the ligurian coast are single direction, that switches with a timetable. Just 50 km/h or so, but bikes not allowed. Oh, sure, I’ll just pedal my bike over this 9km detour over a 350 meter high mountain pass instead 🤡
Belgium. It was mainly about the very large difference within Italy. I don’t see fundamental differences in infrastructure (low quality almost everywhere in Italy I’ve been, mostly because non-existant), so I was wondering why for example lodi does have so many normal cyclists that do not seem to be part of those two demographics.
Italian here, from a small/medium city nearby Milan. Experience might vary, but generally speaking, Italy is not a very bike friendly country. In the cities you might have separated bike lanes, bike lanes which are part of the street and devided from it by, well, a strip of paint, or no bike lane at all. Outside of the cities, yeah, those are for hard core cyclists and, unless you are in the countryside, not safe at all. The point is, safety on a bike is not guaranteed and you should be aware that our streets are built for cars first. I live in the Netherlands and here the infrastructures are built FOR bikes rather than being an afterthought. Be safe, wear an helmet and hope no one abruptly opens a car door while parked next to a bike lane.
Little OT: mopeds and electric bikes are turning bike lanes in the Netherlands a nightmare too. I am of the idea that electric bikes (the non-assisted types) and mopeds should belong to streets, should have an insurance, a plate an require a motorcycle rated helmet. Sorry, delivery guys. You are danger to other cyclists.
Yes, helmet + fluorescent stuff. Try to take smaller roads, but not always possible. The difference was just striking between for example Alessandria (pretty much 0 cycling) and Lodi (lots) while infrastructure seems almost equally bad.
I am from Belgium, Speed pedelecs (45 km/h!!) are ruining our bike paths too… :( they shouldn’t be allowed on the cycling paths, the speed difference with a regular non electric cyclist (15 km/h?) and especially kids and old people on regular bikes is just too big, and the speed pedelecers (car brains on a fast bike) bring a very toxic behaviour to the cycle paths
Also, in the comments section of this video I saw a really good comment about car dependency and accessibility:
There’s one aspect I want to add to this because I’m ashamed at how ignorant I used to be in this regard: Driving and Disability.
For context, in 2015 I became very ill suddenly and instead of the illness going away it kept getting more and more severe. In 2018 I was medically confirmed disabled due to my worsening heart and as a result I couldn’t drive anymore. Before my disability I assumed, much like quite literally everyone I knew, that disabled people could only realistically get around by car or by being driven somewhere. The idea of getting groceries or heading to a medical appointment seemed impossible for someone non-able-bodied and as a result I made the ignorant assumption that reducing car infrastructure would be horrific to some of the most vulnerable people in our population.
Instead, becoming disabled taught me how HORRIBLE it is to be disabled in a car-infested world. First off, I live alone due to a suppressed immune system so the very act of trying to get a ride is either impossibly expensive through a ridesharing service or I’d have to beg my friends to help me get to the store when they already have enough going on in their lives. Second, despite me living remarkably close to a grocery store for an American suburb, I have to cross a major road, 2 parking lots, and 2 backstreets before getting to the store which is exhausting as someone already weak and without a simple, flat path to walk on. Third, and this is the most important part, despite being less than half a mile away from the store and in slow-speed parking lots, I have been nearly hit SO many times I can’t even count. I already can’t move nearly as fast as my able-bodied counterparts but it’s made even worse carrying heavy groceries back to my home since drivers do not care about your safety at all.
Now the immediate question I get from people all the time is: “Well, how exactly would walkable streets help you at all? You still struggle to walk to the store so wouldn’t it be better to have a personal driver or make public passes for free ridesharing?” The thing people seem to completely miss is the fact that most disabled people can walk fine. We WANT to walk more. We WANT to do low-impact exercise and experience the world around us. We WANT to be able to visit friends or go to bars or just have fun in our lives just like you. The struggles I get from walking to the store aren’t from the walking itself but the hyper-vigilancy I need to practice around drivers and the uneven, altitude-changing roadways that make going up and down a struggle. Had I just had a regular, flat path I could walk along without the worry of rushing across a street then not only would my time walking be cut dramatically but I’d actually be comfortable doing it. It’s also saying nothing about how much it would help people confined to motorized wheelchairs that are rarely able to get around rough terrain. That’s not even including the consideration of a mixed-use development where my store could literally be an elevator ride away and going to the store wouldn’t be a calculation of risking life or death to feed myself.
The only reason I can say this with any amount of confidence is because I met a fellow disabled friend across the ocean in Denmark. While Denmark is certainly far from a car-less utopia of walkability and freedom, Danish cities still blow our cities out of the water with being at least partially viable for the disabled. My friend has similar heart problems made even worse by being forced to walk with crutches. Yet, despite his clear worse health, he does FAR more walking than I ever could because his grocery store is in a mixed-use development and even if he needs to make a longer trip he can do so without ever considering that his life might end. When I told him about how badly I needed a car over here he reacted with complete shock when he heard what I had to go through just to get food to eat. It’s one of those things where I slowly realized that I’ve normalized something that’s a complete injustice to any disabled person when we’re some of the weakest in society yet we work HARDER than the average person just to survive the basic act of walking.
And the worst part about this is that I still love cars. I love the feeling of fixing things and giving a symbolic middle finger to any overpriced shop for friends and family. I love tinkering and modifying cars and watching my dreams slowly come to fruition. I love seeing everyone’s personal ride and listening to the stories of how each dent got there or the friends they’ve made along the way. I want to love all of these things but I now need to take a hard look back at everything I’ve loved and realize how much of it truly stems from horrible lobbying and marketing that made me love cars at the expense of everyone else. Like I said before, I’m ashamed it took me this long to wake up to just how bad it is to be outside of a car and how lucky I was before my illness to even be able to afford it or be around people who could. Falling into poverty and seeing the dark underbelly of something I once loved hurts so bad, but frankly I, and many others, NEED to force ourselves through it not just for my own survival but for everyone I’ve ignored (and even fought against…) throughout the years. My hope is that if I ever meet them again someday I can show my deepest regrets and just say sorry for implying that their survival came after my love for big things that go fast. I hope the first step to that is finding someone who reads this and realizes that things could be better for all of us rather than a lucky few. Walkable cities are better for everyone, including drivers, and now I may literally have to fight to the death to prove it.
Traffic, pollution, and the cost of owning a vehicle wouldn’t be such big factors in day-to-day life. I’m sometimes floored at average commute times, it adds up to years of your life spent sitting in traffic. Not to mention car accidents.
We have light rail in Denver, but it's not really the same as a streetcar system. Buses aren't, either. Imagine if I could just walk to the grocery store without running a gauntlet of trucks and commuters. The unfortunate thing with where I lived was the light rail station was on the other side of one of the most ridiculously pedestrian-hostile intersections I've ever seen. I guess I could take an Uber there...
I think I was dealing with one of those situations where racist/classist people in the 60s built highways to separate areas of town. There were small Asian and Central American grocery stores near me, where I had to cross 1 or 0 large roads... but the wealthier, mainly white area of town, with the Post Office and bar district, Safeway and Natural Grocers etc? Good luck. Good news is they're currently redesigning it. For anyone familiar, I mean the interchange of I-25, Santa Fe and Alameda in Denver.
Denver also had a street car network until the 1950s. There are still spots around downtown where you can still see the trails poking through the asphalt. They didn’t even rip up the old rails. They just paved over them.
I used to live in a city in the northern Midwest that like many others had a street car network, until they took them out in the 30s for the usual bullshit “sell more cars” reasons. You could still go to a city lot and see the old street cars laying around, junked out. Such a regressive waste.
It’s so depressing. Our city in Australia had such a good robust tram network and they ripped it all out because they hired an American urban planner that promoted cars is the future. Now instead we have a long car tunnel named after the Lord Mayor that was responsible for it.
I'm always impressed how this point is usually happily ignored in the US. You had a sane public transport network ffs. You destroyed it on purpose to now pretend it's not possible.
@Ooops@Fried_out_Kombi When US people tell you their cities were built for the car, remind them that in fact their cities were bulldozed over to make room for cars.
I was driving out to a job site in Montréal this week. On Wellington Street, within the Griffintown neighborhood, a street that was redone less than a year ago is already cratered to the point that tram tracks were poking out; I believe they were killed in the 60’s.
That story again: Montréal traffic so heavy it’s self excavating public transit.
Indeed there was so much bulldozing that you have to remind people that American cities were not in fact bombed out during World War II, we did that to ourselves
In my city museum (itself located in a former passenger train terminal) there is a 1/64 scale model of the city from the 1930s-40s, complete with the full streetcar system with trains that run. Every time I go there, it fills me with rage at what was destroyed.
I’ve always read that freeways are too steep and turns too sharp for rail, but Brightline says newer European trains are light and powerful enough to make it up the Cajon Pass in the median of the 15, so let’s stop screwing around with a single track for trains in the median. Just take the leftmost lane in each direction. Most of the cost is right-of-way acquisition; let’s use the one we already have. It’ll be better than nothing.
The interstate standard max grade is 6% and that’s only used when there’s no other option over mountains. The limit for standard passenger trains seems yo be 4-5%. So it’s not that different, the vast majority of the interstate corridor could support passenger trains. Not freight trains through, those need a much gentler grade.
The US has essentially built a railway network with the interstates, it’s just paved over and less efficient.
Also for the extreme cases, don’t forget cog railways. The steepest one is Pilatus railway with maximum gradient of 48%. Good luck trying something like that with a car.
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