● You can find evidence of the growing popularity of cycling in unlikely places.
Sometimes you can find evidence of the growing popularity of of cycling as a means transportation in unlikely places. For example, a recent edition of the Ottawa Business Journal carried an article about the local commercial real estate market for office space.
In reviewing some of the forces driving the current market for office space, the article reports that in a developing trend, “parking is becoming less of a requirement for some tenants, particularly those staffed by younger employees. In buildings without abundant parking, many tenants are happy with on-site bike racks and showers.”
Also interesting is a recent CBC report about “ The slow death of urban parking“. It says that “Canadian urbanites are gradually turning against the car and turning against parking.” The report indicates that young urban talent working in large cities is increasingly using bicycles, public transit, and Uber. As a result, some residential buildings in Toronto are being built with no parking. One example is a condo on University Avenue that has spots for 300 bicycles, but no other parking.
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Interesting, as space becomes expensive in downtown urban areas (merely following what other countries have done really).
I suspect the same will happen to housing as lot sizes are getting smaller and smaller and people are being driven to condos.
Oil will go up as well, inevitable. They say the USA has around a trillion barrels of oil in its shale reserves, but they blow away close to 20 million barrels of oil a day ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_oil_consumption ) china close behind as they want to live like americans, big…
The most efficient countries (high ROI- return on investment) will be those that consume the least energy as energy will become more and more expensive (so will resources). The stock market manipulation of booms and busts can not continue for the true costs of things will soon shine (limits of resources in a limited world). Thus, driving will become expensive and so will maintaining the infrastructure. Most cities top spending is on transportation and maintaining roads (closely followed by policing).
Thus, cycling should help a city reduce its costs and lower taxes with time. Don’t think that in ottawa (or in north america) that taxes will ever be lower, for the costs of transportation will keep increasing (ie bringing in food alone is costly).
So, as we hit close to 7 billion hungry people on the planet all wanting a big lifestyle like the USA, expect resources to be squeezed. As this happens, taxes will go up, costs of resources will go up, energy consumption will go up… all driving the need for efficiency. They talk about efficiencies of scale in economics 101, but we’ve yet to really see the likes of it. In our lifetime we will though.
Cycling will help curb the costs (taxes) with time. Unfortunately, most americans are too stupid to see this though… thus our debt (canada 1 trillion in debt, USA 20 trillion in debt)