AI6YR Ben
BBC: China roads blocked by thousands of cyclists in night quest for dumplings
"It started as a social media quest for breakfast dumplings, but ended with thousands of cyclists bringing traffic gridlock between two cities in central China... the trend went viral - tens of thousands on rented bikes cycled through the night from nearby Zhenghou....A six-lane expressway between the two cities quickly filled with cyclists as police took to loudspeakers urging them to leave...."
Dr. Eric J. Fielding, PhD
@max_in_somer @raymondjohnson @ai6yr They said it was a 6-lane highway, so probably wide lanes and more than 3 times your estimate.
Raymond Johnson
@max_in_somer @ai6yr The math for this gets interesting. Suppose a two-lane road is 25 feet wide and each cyclist needs a 5' x 10' space. So that's 5 cyclists wide (using the whole road) and 5280 / 10 x 5 = 2640 cyclists per mile. If those cyclists are riding 12 mph, that means in one hour you can get 2640 x 12 = 31,680 cyclists down that road. Keep that up for 3 hours (or on a 4-lane road, 1.5 hours), and you can approach 100,000 riders.
Max 🌆🏳️🌈:vbike:⛵️
@raymondjohnson @ai6yr Functionally, a 2 lane road here is 22 feet, not accounting for parked cars, just lane widths. 12 is fast for these rides, the front might be going 8-10, the rest varies as it stretches and compresses
By your math, that's 30 miles of bikes on a 2 lane road for 100k bikes?
Max 🌆🏳️🌈:vbike:⛵️
@ai6yr I don't really believe that the average on looker can estimate the size of a bike ride. 40 bikes is a pretty large ride. 100 people on bikes stretches further than you can see on most roads in the Boston area. We had a reporter described what was possibly 600 to 1000 people as "a few dozen" or "about 100".
100,000 sounds wild
AI6YR Ben
@EricFielding @max_in_somer @raymondjohnson Oooh, time to pull the Google Earth 3D view of this area (which is typically completely out of sync with reality) vs. Sentinel-2. There are entire cities where farms show in places in China on Google.
AI6YR Ben
@EricFielding @max_in_somer @raymondjohnson That's "MASSIVE FREEWAY" between Zhenghou and Kaifeng. (road map and images are very much unaligned in China there, for sure). 34.8006,114.1789
Dr. Eric J. Fielding, PhD
@W6KME @douglasvb @ai6yr @max_in_somer @raymondjohnson I don’t know much about Chinese dumplings, but we have several restaurants in Pasadena specializing in dumplings so there is substantial demand.
Douglas
@ai6yr @EricFielding @max_in_somer @raymondjohnson so all we need to do is have really good dumplings somewhere accessible by bike and freeways will be taken over by cyclists? 🤔
W6KME
@douglasvb @ai6yr @EricFielding @max_in_somer @raymondjohnson Stop-you had me at dumplings.
AI6YR Ben
@EricFielding @max_in_somer @raymondjohnson They actually have TWO major freeways between those two cities. Looks like Houston 😬
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