[dexen]

The article is about latency, the GP is about latency, you instead pivoted to throughput. Of course throughput can be made arbitrarily high when you don't measure latency. Doesn't help your case at all, quite the opposite.

I am in the happy medium where I can just as well bike or drive to work. It takes 2x to 3x as long (latency) to bicycle than to drive. Aside of slower speed, numerous latencies add up along the way - I can't time bicycling to hit green wave; I require brief but measurable time to dress into bicycling clothes and then to change at the destination, to park & lock the bicycle - nowhere near as quick as clicking the car's remote!. I know both modes, and while bicycling is better for my health and likely has higher throughput along my route, it certainly has higher latency. Which is the OG subject.

Lastly there's matter of variability: between occasional flat tire, the rare drained headlight battery, and other uncommon issues, my bicycle is significantly less reliable than my car. And that's in spite of heavy, and ongoing, investment into the bicycle - including well known puncture-resistant tires. This unreliability adds non-trivial variability to the latency.

[sebstefan]

I'll just get the point out there that latency isn't increasing because people are living further from their destination. Latency is increasing because there's traffic (not that you made that point)

Throughput fixes traffic

Plus your point stands for "adding lanes for buses" as well! How would that fix latency?

People only started living further from their destination because they gained the ability to travel faster. In transit, the invariant is how much time people are willing to spend commuting on average

If you increase throughput you will, in time, decrease latency

Looking at your post,

* I live in a very bikeable city in Europe and I've never worn "bicycle clothes"

* Variability in cars are entirely dependent on traffic. I've never been stuck in traffic on a bicycle. Bikes are much more reliable than cars and you can get one for $80 on craigslist literally overnight, meaning you'll never care about getting a spare. Flat tires almost never happen, and bike maintenance is a gimmie. Let's flip. What happens to your day when your car breaks down?

* The "green wave" is an infrastructure problem that can be fixed with infrastructure solutions

Then for the point of speed, cycling is only faster in dense areas and it'll mostly save you time in traffic & parking

If you live 7km away from your workplace, go through suburbs and large roads with single story buildings, the only people who'll benefit from cycling will be the people who are already living close to the center

But that's good for you, because you won't need to fight them for parking nor stand behind them in traffic

Once you have bike lanes though you can densify your city a bit more easily