Distance: Yes, in cities like Amsterdam lots of people make short trips, but many short trips, because…their destinations are closeby. Don’t be fooled. On average, a Dutchie (man/woman/senior/teenager/etc) cycles 1000 km a year. It is often believed by people from countries with low cycling rates that the Dutch only make short journeys. That of course is not the truth. Across the whole of the Netherlands, 35% of all(!) trips for all purposes that are under 7.5 km are made by bike. So are 15% of journeys between 7.5 and 15 km and 3% of journeys over 15 km.

The same distances that most Americans, British and Australians, for instance, choose to cover by car, with national averages between 0.5 or less than 1%. The difference lies of course in the fact that many can’t opt for the bike, because of the lack of safe provisions/infrastructure > a major problem when we talk actual and subjective safety.

Speed: it’s not about the type of bike, it’s about the person. I can’t keep count the nr of times a visitor mentions how fast they think we go. On our beater bikes, or beautiful 10-speeds, or bakfiets or whatever. That’s all in relative terms, of course. But, we go from A to B and we don’t mess about. Then again, generally speaking, we don’t like to race either. It’s not the Tour de France, you should enjoy it. There’s no point to racing, either. It will only save you a few minutes, tops, not worth the sweat. That’s why you’ll see people just dress for whatever occasion and get on a bike. “What do you mean, cycle gear? I have a wardrobe!” . Regarding the linked picture of the beautiful girl on the blue bike: you’d be surprised how quickly she can get around .

Of course we also have our speed demons, not many, but we do and you don’t hear them complain. First, people here are very used to cycling in close proximity to each other, and second, there are some ‘rules of the path’ that most abide to. Using a car metaphor, someone in a Veyron won’t ever think he’ll be able to floor it and reach top speed in a residential area.

Stopping:
If you look closely in Amsterdam or any other city in the Netherlands, you will see that cycle paths / routes always provide either a shorter route, the right of way over cars and more and more you’ll ride a ‘green wave’ path. Cars have to give way to bicycles when at a crossing and one way streets always exempt cyclists.
It’s not just paths, but the way the city has chosen the bicycle as main transportation. Traffic calming where needed, segregation for busier roads.

Anyway, hope that clears up a few things. I lived in NYC in the early 90′s, I rode my Dutch bike there every day (and often got ridiculed for it). Nobody deemed it possible for anyone but crazy bike messengers to use bicycles as daily transportation. I recently went back there after a 3 year hiatus and look at it now, cycling is becoming the norm!

I’ve been following Florida’s progress (Miami) for some time now, it’s a whole different ball game than NYC, but it can work anywhere.

Cheers,
Marc

Avalon Park used to be the old Rocket City subdivision. It was named Rocket City because it was half-way to the Cape from Orlando, yet people there have an Orlando address, just a way-out-there zip code.

My point is simple. Time estimates are easily manipulated. Most people know this and are wary of them.

To me, that is one of the huge problems with Orlando–there are too many of them.

Based on what my bike computer says, my *moving* average is about 12 MPH. The bike computer stops counting when the bike stops moving.

Since I am old and slow, I’ll try it/them out and report back what happened. Your target audience is probably more like me than the teenage girl on her way to her friend’s house two blocks over.