Cities are giving more space to bicycles. But… why bikes?
Perhaps you’ve noticed: American cities are dedicating an increasing amount of space for use by people travelling on bicycles. Less controversially, this takes the form of shared use paths, sometimes called multi-use trails, but to most people, simply, “trails.” More controversially, this takes the form of bike lanes. Some of these bike lanes even have barriers to keep the cars out. You might hear these called “protected” or “separated” bike lanes, or “cycle tracks.”
But… why? Why would it be important to serve bikes in this way? The question is understandable. Most people drive (by “most,” I mean, “enough to make driving normative”), so people understand the goodness of driving. Driving is comfortable, and feels fast. Many people also intuit the goodness of sidewalks: it’s important to have a safe place to walk, even if only for walking the dog or getting your steps in.
Bicycles, on the other hand, seem like a strange third party. Cycling is something most people abandoned in childhood, and a few still do it for fun in bright Lycra outfits, using the city streets the same way a jogger uses the adjacent sidewalks - nothing we need to think too much about.
But what if, like cars and walking, bikes, especially as transportation, had a particular goodness to them? Something that went a little deeper than the commonly touted benefits of saving gas money or reducing pollution? Something that explains why they shouldn’t go away, even though the car is dominant. That’s what I’ll explore here.
Bikes are an important step in providing true choice in transportation.
The first point to the goodness of bikes is that bikes are an important step in providing true choice in transportation. In the majority of America, Americans are dependent on their cars; loss of access to a car doesn’t mean less convenient mobility, it means no mobility at all. This is what philosopher Ivan Illych called a “radical monopoly”: you can choose between Toyotas and Hondas, Fords and Chevys, but you cannot choose between cars and not-cars. Even though some fear being “forced out of their cars” when cities attempt to improve different transportation modes, the reality is that we are forced into them daily.
It may come as a surprise to those who have only known cycling as a sport, but bikes are highly versatile for transportation. Bikes can carry cargo in baskets or panniers, attached to front or rear racks. They can pull it in special bike trailers. Sometimes the cargo is precious: small children are often carried in attached seats or in those same bike trailers.
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| Cargo bicycle |
With a little creativity, bikes interface with other vehicles in surprising ways. Bikes can be loaded onto some public transit vehicles using special racks, hooks, or in the case of my hometown KC Streetcar, simply rolling it on board. Each vehicle functions as a range extender for the other. Some bikes can be folded up so they don’t need special accommodations at all. Electric-assist technology presents yet another force-multiplier for bikes. With the increasing uptake of e-bikes, and with the price of a good e-bike matching the price of a clunker car, arguments against the practicality of bikes are dwindling. Combining e-assist and capacity, an increasingly popular style of cargo bike is the “bakfiet,” which features a large bucket container in the front. American bakfiet owners probably carry children more often than they do cargo.
We should question whether the speed of our cars is worth the independence of our kids.
While bikes can carry children, one of the best arguments for the goodness of bikes is one that many people, including myself, don’t talk about enough: bikes are the most widely available mobility enhancing device operable by children. Yet, between isolated subdivisions and the high-speed roads that form dangerous barriers in built-out urban areas, children’s mobility is subordinated to the preferences of driving adults. Parents are then saddled with the duty of chauffeuring their children into their early teens. We should question whether the speed of our cars is worth the independence of our kids.
Bikes are also good because they represent transportation that honors the function and needs of the human body. Just as the automobile is an amazing invention because it converts small explosions into motion, the bicycle is an amazing invention because it takes walking - the natural transportation function of the human body - and multiplies its efficiency and effectiveness. This is good because the human body needs to move. In our culture, we have steadily built up the notion of the good life as one where we are not moving and sitting most of the time. We are now realizing that this is not ideal after all. Still, too often movement (and biking itself) is seen as merely recreational. We need to recognize that recreational exercise has become so important to us today because so few of us have few opportunities or incentives for useful, low-impact movement. Enter bikes: the device that can fulfill your need to move your body and your need to get milk from the store at the same time (provided you’re not threatened by cars). This is not to say that all transportation needs to give you exercise to be good. It is simply to say that bodily movement is part of what makes bikes good.
Encountering your neighbors on a bike - and riding with them! - is the best of what city life has to offer, and it’s a rare pleasure more people should experience.
The last point of the goodness of bikes I want to highlight is that they honor the purpose of the city. The purpose of the city is to bring people and things together. This is why people live in them and keep building them. Building a city with cars as the normative form of transportation undermines this purpose. Among other issues, it sprawls people out so they need to travel an artificially long distance to see each other. It also creates the impression that the city is not made of people at all, but cars. Bikes do the opposite: they remind us that the city is made of people, because you see them riding. Interaction with others in the city is always much easier outside of cars. I wave at my neighbor sitting on his porch when I ride by on a bike. That doesn’t happen when I drive by instead. The other day I bumped into someone I knew through work. We were both on bikes; he was transporting his daughter in a bakfiet. We were able to ride together and chat until we reached a natural splitting point. Encountering your neighbors on a bike - and riding with them! - is the best of what city life has to offer, and it’s a rare pleasure more people should experience.
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| Woman riding cargo bicycle |
So, if we were to agree on the goodness of bikes, and if we were to agree that this goodness meant that their usage should be encouraged, not discouraged … what would that take? What would it look like? There are a couple of possibilities.
The first possibility is the one that some advocates have been encouraging and some cities have been pursuing: facility separation. While cyclists have the same legal status as motorists on most streets, “nobody bikes here” because streets are built foremost with cars in mind, and people intuitively understand that cars and bikes are not the same thing. They show vast differences in speed and weight. Bike lanes have been the front-line tool to account for this discrepancy. As time has gone on, those who work in bike planning have noticed that merely because a bike lane is present doesn’t mean it’s inviting. Riding on a bike lane with a single line of paint between you and traffic flying at 45 miles per hour will help you jump-start your prayer life and surrender to God’s Will, but it might be a spiritual experience you’ll only want to have once. This is where the vertical barriers that separate cars from bikes come into play. American cities are experimenting with different forms of separated bike lanes now. The other major form of separation is the shared use path (a “trail”) which cyclists and pedestrians share. In my region, some cities are starting to build these behind the curb when they do street rebuilding projects; they look like extra-wide sidewalks. What form of separation a city chooses for a given street can have a lot of factors, both engineering and political.
The second possibility also solves for speed and weight differentials, but in the “simple, but not easy” way: the cars would slow down. Way down. Charles L. Marohn, Jr., author of Confessions of a Recovering Engineer, proposes only two types of driving rights-of-way: streets and roads. Roads are high-speed connections between two places. Streets are low-speed access points to properties; they are “platform[s] for building community wealth.” Instead of this system, we have built a system of “stroads,” where we both drive relatively fast and access all commercial properties from our cars.
Motorists in the United States have certain expectations about how day-to-day driving should work and feel.
Both of these possibilities seem remote (the second more than the first), for cultural reasons. Motorists in the United States have certain expectations about how day-to-day driving should work and feel. They should always be able to drive at relatively high speeds, even within neighborhoods, perhaps because movement feels much slower inside a car when driving one than it does outside of a car when getting passed by one. No street treatment accommodating pedestrians, cyclists, or public transit should ever make it “hard to drive” - as if operating a modern car with comfortable seats, power steering, hydraulic brakes, and a light-touch accelerator pedal could ever be described as “hard” - even though most such projects still include lanes for driving. Nor should we engineer streets to make motorists drive slower, even in neighborhoods or school zones - this would count as “hard to drive.” We must settle for begging them to slow down with signs and hoping there is a police officer around to issue them tickets if they don’t. Pedestrians and cyclists are admonished for not following car-style traffic laws to the letter, even though the motorist wields thousands of pounds of kinetic force and should rightfully have the responsibility to defer to people who aren’t in the same weight class.
At the top of the article, I used the word “normative” in relation to driving. Motorists know at an intellectual level that they should “share the road,” but the culture I described above reinforces that there is only one normal mode of ground transportation, and it always takes priority. Motorists should understand that they are one mode among several, and all have the potential to grant freedom. They should understand that while speed is a good in transportation, it is not the only good, particularly in an urbanized area. They should understand their effect on those outside of their vehicles, because there will always be somebody outside of a vehicle. I have an inkling that, while separated cycling infrastructure is very good, pairing it with a different driving culture would be the most sustainable way to ensure that more people, including children, can take full advantage of the goodness of bikes. In the meantime, I hope you find the opportunity to experience that goodness for yourself.
This article was first accepted by Preamble magazine. Patrick Trouba is a transportation planner working in the Kansas City metropolitan area.
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