@jon these are quite common in the United States. San Francisco being one of the early adaptors. I am not sure if these have caused accidents (or made accidents worse) but they don't really block driver sightlines. Bicycles being mostly empty space.
@BryanLastRedDrop there’s sind deep cultural difference here. Europeans seeing that picture were like “what?”, and Americans and Canadians were 🤷♂️ what’s the problem. Amusing!
@jon@BryanLastRedDrop I don’t think it’s cultural. It is our built environment. We have no trains, our bus services are generally terrible and distances are huge. Our “first and last mile” problem is often much bigger than that, so popping your bike on a bus can be really useful.
@bluGill@jon@PedalHoppy it is not. Honestly these bike carriers were a way to suggest municipalities were taking green transit seriously. In Boston, 1/4 of all subway lines (the Green lines) do not allow any bikes at any time and the othet 3/4 prohibit them during rush hour. So, for the 300 or so bus lines each trip allows for two bikes. Not very much but better than zero. Regrettably Boston and surrounding cities are in a terrible spot to be very forward thinking about inclusion of bikes.
Bikes on transit seems like a good idea, but the amount of space they take up makes them nearly impossible to work.
In order to pull it off you need extra wide doors, and extra long transit vehicles, so that they are always nearly empty and thus there is plenty of room on board for people to bring their bikes on, and it doesn't take too long. This is very expensive though and so nobody can afford to do that to their transit system. (Wheel chairs need similar accommodation, but there are only a few disabled people, while nearly everyone could bike: the scale of what is needed is different)
If you are serious about bikes as a last mile solution it is better to think of secure bike parking at transit stops so that people can ride to their local transit and park the bike. You still need to make sure the places most people are going is withing walking distance of a transit stop, but if transit is successful most stores and businesses will want to locate near great transit and so be willing to pay for TOD (if transit is bad they want to locate near busy roads). Thus we are mostly looking at people going from home to transit - when people visit friends/family they will have a long walk, but that isn't as common a trip (though bike rental looks like a useful option for this)
@jon@BryanLastRedDrop They are very useful for a few individuals once in a while, however they are not useful for the masses. They fill up far too fast to be useful for everyone to use often. Once in a while is okay, but they are not a solution to any cities transport problems as with capacity for only 2 bikes before they are full you can't have many users. Once you realize they cannot be useful we can have a realistic conversation about them, and frankly I find the benefits for people who use them on occasion not worth the drawbacks to the rest of us who aren't using them then but still have places we want to be.
@jon Those things are stupid, but they look useful in a press release and are cheap, so most bus agencies have something like that in the US (generally not that large).
While you can put a bike on them, I've been the passenger trying to get someplace when someone at an intermediate stop struggles to lift their bike on, and walk onto the bus - it was only 30 seconds, but that was 30 seconds stolen from my life and time with my kids.
Worse, they can only hold 2 bikes which means you will need to take steps to ensure they never become popular. Once they are full no more people can use them, so they need to be empty most of the time with only a few rare people using them.
They only hold 2 "normal sized" bikes: this means your family can't use them to go to a distant ride. This means you can't ride a tandem, tricycle, or cargo bike. Many recumbent won't fit either. You can't have a trailer (useful for both cargo and small kids).
Bikes on transit is a useful thing if you can pull it off. However it is very hard to do this usefully as bikes take up a lot of space. You have to put them inside transit - this means extra wide doors, and no/few seats in a large area. I don't think any bus is large enough for this, but some trains would be (you would want to discourage bikes during peak times, but off peak there should be plenty of room on a train) This is why serious transit agencies put bike lockers at the stations, and don't make provision for bikes on transit.
@bluGill the city I live in has been allowing bikes on board for some 20 years without any issues (until recently). The measure ensuring “never too popular” state is pricing, the bike on board are free for pass holders who are unlikely to do this on a large scale, people using per-ride tickets have to pay full fare which gets expensive pretty quickly. @jon
@jon i've never seen a bus where a normal person could get a bike on. A young gym nut could do it, but you need to to be rather strong to get a bike through a bus door and around the corners. This is about leverage and control, I could do it if given time on an empty bus. Howeve you need to not hit the driver or other passengers while the bus moves.
On a train it doesn't look that bad, but every metro i've been on (only that Canada line, so not a useful sample) has been packed.
@jon 30 or so years ago they changed school bus design in North America to make the fronts flat rather than having the engine sticking out front. This was done as a safety measure so that the driver could see kids crossing in front more easily. This strikes me as a massive step backwards.
Also, I didn't really see until I expanded the image, which earned it a massive WTF??
Very common in the US, though I've never seen one that looks like that. Most of the ones I've seen didn't have a flat floor with a rack on, they were just tubes to hold the bike.
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