There’s a quote that’s stuck with me for some time from Aaron Sorkin’s The Newsroom: “You know why people don't like liberals? Because they lose. If liberals are so f***ing smart, how come they lose so goddamn always?”
American urbanists and bike advocates are smart, or at least well informed. We know how important cycling is. We are educated about cycling cities in other parts of the world and how they are so much better for health, well-being, economics, traffic, pollution, climate, equity, personal freedom, and on and on.
But if we’re so smart how come we lose so goddamn always?
Why is the best we seem to be able to accomplish just a few miles of striped asphalt bike “lanes,” or if we’re lucky, a few blocks of plastic pylons—“protected” bike lanes?
Our current model is to beg for twigs
More often than not, bike infrastructure is created reactively. Typically in response to a collision or near collision with a car, an individual or advocacy group identifies a single route that needs better infrastructure. We gather community support and lobby local officials for the desired change, trying as hard as we can to ask for the cheapest, smallest changes so that our requests will be seen as realistic.
What’s the problem with this model?
It’s like imagining a bridge and asking for twigs—useless, unable to bear any meaningful weight, easily broken. And it’s treating bike infrastructure like a hopeless charity case.
This makes bike infrastructure seem like a small, special-interest demand that produces no real results in terms of shifting to sustainable transportation, and it makes those giving up road space and tax dollars feel as though they are supporting a hopeless charity.
But when roads, highways, and bridges are designed and built, they aren’t done one neighborhood at a time, one city-council approval at a time. We don’t build a few miles of track, or lay down some asphalt wherever there is “local support” and then leave 10-mile gaps in between.
And yet this is exactly how we “plan” bike infrastructure.
Bike lanes are intermittent at best in most North American cities, and since they are usually paint jobs that put cyclists between fast-moving traffic and parked cars with doors that capriciously swing open, only experienced riders brave them. The lanes are easily blocked anyway, by police, delivery trucks, and film crews, if not random cars banking on the low likelihood of being ticketed.
This kind of bike “infrastructure” doesn’t actually do very much to protect existing cyclists, let alone encourage and inspire the general population to start cycling.
Why are we settling for easily broken twigs? The total number of people on bikes and other micromobility modes like scooters and skateboards is large and growing. An enormous force has been divided and conquered, splintered among thousands of neighborhoods.
In the grand scheme of things, the twig bike lanes we fight for aren’t going to create the significant mode shift needed for the environmental, social, and safety gains we hope to achieve. No one wants to fight for twigs. This cycle does nothing to inspire and grow a strong pro-micromobility movement.
Cars and trucks get billions in federal, state, and local money. Governments can mindlessly belch out vast sums for highway widenings—see the $1.6 billion spent on a single-lane addition to the 405 freeway in Los Angeles, even though we’ve known for years that it would not make a dent in travel times. With all this money seemingly available for car infrastructure, some of which is absolutely useless or makes traffic worse, there’s only a pittance devoted to robust bike networks. Why?
Bigger is better for infrastructure projects
For infrastructure projects, the larger you make it, the bigger the engineering and construction firms vying to get lucrative contracts, the more jobs are created, and bigger ribbon-cutting ceremonies politicians can go to. Expensive projects get media coverage, fire up the imagination, and grab hold of valuable mind share.
Our tweets and op-eds may vaunt the vital virtues of car-free mobility, but our infrastructure demands and budget sizes sadly do not. By lowballing our demands, we micromobilists are pitching ourselves as a niche, special-interest group: We are tacitly agreeing that cars are and should be the dominant mode of transportation, making our near nonexistent position in the budgetary pecking order inevitable. We also leave billions on the table by doing little to go after state and federal transportation funds.
by Terenig Topjian, City Lab | Read more:
American urbanists and bike advocates are smart, or at least well informed. We know how important cycling is. We are educated about cycling cities in other parts of the world and how they are so much better for health, well-being, economics, traffic, pollution, climate, equity, personal freedom, and on and on.But if we’re so smart how come we lose so goddamn always?
Why is the best we seem to be able to accomplish just a few miles of striped asphalt bike “lanes,” or if we’re lucky, a few blocks of plastic pylons—“protected” bike lanes?
Our current model is to beg for twigs
More often than not, bike infrastructure is created reactively. Typically in response to a collision or near collision with a car, an individual or advocacy group identifies a single route that needs better infrastructure. We gather community support and lobby local officials for the desired change, trying as hard as we can to ask for the cheapest, smallest changes so that our requests will be seen as realistic.
What’s the problem with this model?
It’s like imagining a bridge and asking for twigs—useless, unable to bear any meaningful weight, easily broken. And it’s treating bike infrastructure like a hopeless charity case.
This makes bike infrastructure seem like a small, special-interest demand that produces no real results in terms of shifting to sustainable transportation, and it makes those giving up road space and tax dollars feel as though they are supporting a hopeless charity.
But when roads, highways, and bridges are designed and built, they aren’t done one neighborhood at a time, one city-council approval at a time. We don’t build a few miles of track, or lay down some asphalt wherever there is “local support” and then leave 10-mile gaps in between.
And yet this is exactly how we “plan” bike infrastructure.
Bike lanes are intermittent at best in most North American cities, and since they are usually paint jobs that put cyclists between fast-moving traffic and parked cars with doors that capriciously swing open, only experienced riders brave them. The lanes are easily blocked anyway, by police, delivery trucks, and film crews, if not random cars banking on the low likelihood of being ticketed.
This kind of bike “infrastructure” doesn’t actually do very much to protect existing cyclists, let alone encourage and inspire the general population to start cycling.
Why are we settling for easily broken twigs? The total number of people on bikes and other micromobility modes like scooters and skateboards is large and growing. An enormous force has been divided and conquered, splintered among thousands of neighborhoods.
In the grand scheme of things, the twig bike lanes we fight for aren’t going to create the significant mode shift needed for the environmental, social, and safety gains we hope to achieve. No one wants to fight for twigs. This cycle does nothing to inspire and grow a strong pro-micromobility movement.
Cars and trucks get billions in federal, state, and local money. Governments can mindlessly belch out vast sums for highway widenings—see the $1.6 billion spent on a single-lane addition to the 405 freeway in Los Angeles, even though we’ve known for years that it would not make a dent in travel times. With all this money seemingly available for car infrastructure, some of which is absolutely useless or makes traffic worse, there’s only a pittance devoted to robust bike networks. Why?
Bigger is better for infrastructure projects
For infrastructure projects, the larger you make it, the bigger the engineering and construction firms vying to get lucrative contracts, the more jobs are created, and bigger ribbon-cutting ceremonies politicians can go to. Expensive projects get media coverage, fire up the imagination, and grab hold of valuable mind share.
Our tweets and op-eds may vaunt the vital virtues of car-free mobility, but our infrastructure demands and budget sizes sadly do not. By lowballing our demands, we micromobilists are pitching ourselves as a niche, special-interest group: We are tacitly agreeing that cars are and should be the dominant mode of transportation, making our near nonexistent position in the budgetary pecking order inevitable. We also leave billions on the table by doing little to go after state and federal transportation funds.
Image:Robert Galbraith/Reuters
[ed. Bike-centric planning, no. Micromobility, yes. There are lots of ways to get around (I like golf carts myself).]
