When biking is comfy, the people will bike.
For some reason I have a fondness for the word "comfy" - while it's obviously a contraction of comfortable, it has its own connotation. The word itself somehow feels comfy, in a way I can't quite articulate, almost like an onomatopoeia; the word buzz clearly buzzes, and the word comfy is comfy.
The way people move themselves around the world is usually comfy, or at least, the comfiest option available. No one wants to feel fear, anxiety, or stress just to move themselves from one place to another. I think by default, people will pick the comfiest method of travel first, unless one way is astronomically faster than another; that being said, I think speed factors into comfort as well as I'll describe later.
Walking somewhere can be comfy, biking somewhere can be comfy, driving can be comfy, taking a train, bus, ferry, or even airplane can be comfy. I think the best way to illustrate all of these might actually be to give counterexamples, times where traveling by some travel mode has been uncomfortable for me in the past.
I don't want to be in danger
This is probably the highest priority for me in all situations. I just don't want to get in a crash, I don't want to get hit by a car, and I definitely don't want to die. Hopefully a relatable sentiment!
I have never been hit by a car or in a serious crash on a bike since I was six and wiped myself out going way too fast around the corner to my own street. But I have witnessed other people riding bikes get hit by cars twice; both times the person on the bike was riding on sidewalks and attempting to cross intersections in awkward places.
Riding on the sidewalk, at least in the US, is rarely a truly safe option. You have to contend with curb ramps and crossing intersections where drivers aren't looking for you at a minimum. Often you're also dodging people walking, random obstacles like poles or trash cans, and there's often not really enough space to do this. So to want to do that rather than riding in the street, the street must be even more unsafe than this.
It's hard to describe what exactly makes a street feel safe to bike on, so I'll describe a few things that I'm usually looking for.
- Physical separation from bigger vehicles. Preferably a hard barrier like concrete or planters
- The route needs to continue to be safe the whole way, not just randomly spit me into mixed traffic with half a block of warning and no route finding
- It should be easy to figure out how to get where I'm going
- Enough space to maneuver and dodge obstacles if needed, ideally even enough space to pass another bicycle, or be passed, as needed
I think all of these actually apply to walking and driving, too; but in the USA where I live, the default is that driving has all of these, walking has at least 2 or 3, and biking often has the least. When I'm talking to people that don't ride a bicycle it's difficult to explain that this is what I mean when I'm talking about a safe route, because you take all of these things for granted when driving a car around here. If it's missing even one of these it will feel less comfy, although I'll be happy not having number 3 or 4 in a pinch.
I want to get where I'm going relatively quickly
There's some sort of magic about thirty minutes. That's about the amount of time for a one-way journey that it doesn't feel like you're spending half your day to get somewhere. Drop that to fifteen if you're running an errand like a grocery run.
I think this applies no matter how you travel. Driving 30 minutes to get somewhere doesn't really sound like a big deal, while an hour seems like too long to bother most of the time. Similarly, a 30 minute bike ride feels easy and doable just to get myself somewhere, whereas an hour each way sounds like an adventure in and of itself.
Air travel never takes 30 minutes of course, but there's also no faster way to cross an entire continent, so that's kind of moot. But when it takes more than 30 minutes to get through the security line it feels like your entire life is wasting away waiting to take your shoes off and put your valuables in a bin that definitely no one is going to take things out of. Air travel would be a lot less painful and frustrating if you could plan to show up, like, 20-30 minutes before your flight like you might for an intercity train.
Basically this boils down to: I don't want to feel like I'm spending all my time getting somewhere if I have other options.
I want to have an approximately zero chance of getting stuck
This is related, but not exactly the same, as speed. I think I've gotten majorly stuck with every mode of travel besides walking.
I think most people that have traveled by air enough have gotten stuck overnight in a city they don't want to be in, often on a layover. This is maybe the worst way to get stuck since you have nothing real to do there, usually don't get good sleep, and then in the morning you are probably still playing travel hell figuring out when/how to get on another flight toward where you're actually trying to go.
I've gotten stuck on an island for an entire day because Washington State Ferries was having staffing shortages and the first of the 4 boats for the day didn't end up sailing, and then there was an enormous queue that nobody knew how to manage. Even just the thought of this experience makes me not want to take the ferries to islands with no other way off anymore. WSF continues to have struggles keeping all their boats maintained and staffed; maybe in another 5 years it will feel truly reliable again, or maybe not.
Cars can of course get stuck in traffic, and I've gotten really, really stuck before when there's a ton of traffic trying to get through a bottleneck caused by construction or an event that overwhelms the road capacity. I don't think I've ever gotten stranded overnight like this, though.
The most likely way for me to get stuck on a bike is to get a flat tire. I don't think I've ever really gotten truly stuck in bike traffic, at worst it's somewhat slower than usual. I have also gotten semi-stuck by running out of battery on my very heavy electric bike with a 50 pound child as cargo on a rear rack-mounted seat. I did get home eventually but had to go very slowly and make a couple rest stops.
Seattle is sometimes a comfy bike city, but it's getting better
Seattle has constructed a lot of protected bike lanes just in the last eight years since I moved here. That's great! There are also still a ton of gaps, especially the farther out of the center city you get and especially on the South end. That's less great. It's honestly agonizing sometimes just how close Seattle is to being a truly great biking city because it seems like there's not a concrete plan to actually get 100% of the way there. But every new comfy route that appears makes it feel that much nicer to just bike everywhere, everywhere that the train and good bus routes don't take you anyway.
It's now getting to the point that filling in gaps in the comfy bike network has an exponential payoff, because each gap filled connects a ton of the bike network that wasn't quite connected before. I think a lot of people assume that you can just navigate these gaps, because you technically can; but I want to put the idea out there that until it's comfy to get all the way through a route, a lot of people just won't do it.
A lot of people bike like a six-year-old
Imagine a six-year-old trying to bike around town. This kid knows how to ride a bike, even shift and brake confidently, but you still probably wouldn't want them riding in mixed traffic with cars and buses. There are several routes that I would be comfortable taking a six-year-old on with no problem, but when protected bike lanes end suddenly with no possible safe route to continue on, I just won't take my young child biking there at all.
I actually think a lot of people instinctually bike like this hypothetical six-year-old (or at least the six-year-old constrained by going where Dad says they can). I see way, way more people riding and scootering around downtown and Capitol Hill now that there's an actual connected mesh of good bike routes there. I still don't really see that many people biking around South Seattle, even on the parts that are pretty comfy, because of how disconnected all the routes are. There are some signed neighborhood greenway type routes zig zagging through back streets, but they are very hilly and quite slow compared to if you could just go down the main roads. If you can't get all the way to your destination safely, and in a reasonable amount of time, you probably won't do it, or you'll pick another way like driving or transit.
Seattle honestly is already not that comfy of a city to drive in. Traffic sucks, parking is often expensive or very scarce, and driving in the rainy dark is not very fun. It really wouldn't take very much more progress building good bike routes for biking to be equally or more comfortable than driving.