> A cramped bus or train ride gets pretty miserable too.
It's unpleasant but the bus/train will get there at about the same time it would with fewer riders, which is not the case for car congestion.
> There's nothing fundamentally preventing bike congestion either, aside from bikes being miserable enough that they have a fraction of the usage.
Because bikes are smaller and more nimble, it takes substantially more of them to have congestion in the same amount of space as it does with cars. A single stopped car in an 11-foot-wide lane will back up that lane; given the same amount of space cyclists will just go around.
I've been traveling in the Netherlands/Belgium the last few weeks and it's made the space taken up by cars extremely clear. On the streets where cars are restricted, there's a ton of space for pedestrians and cyclists - until a single car shows up, at which point it dominates the available space.
It's unpleasant but the bus/train will get there at about the same time it would with fewer riders, which is not the case for car congestion.
> There's nothing fundamentally preventing bike congestion either, aside from bikes being miserable enough that they have a fraction of the usage.
Because bikes are smaller and more nimble, it takes substantially more of them to have congestion in the same amount of space as it does with cars. A single stopped car in an 11-foot-wide lane will back up that lane; given the same amount of space cyclists will just go around.
I've been traveling in the Netherlands/Belgium the last few weeks and it's made the space taken up by cars extremely clear. On the streets where cars are restricted, there's a ton of space for pedestrians and cyclists - until a single car shows up, at which point it dominates the available space.