Center for Local and State Solutions
Other Resources--Neal Peirce Column

Category: Article (Journal or Newspaper)
Jurisdiction: City/County Government, International
Management Issues: Catalytic Government, Community Based Strategies, Community/Economic Development
Policy Area: Cities/Counties

For Release Sunday, July 8, 2007


© 2007 Washington Post Writers Group

     
“CYCLE TRACKS”? WOMEN BIKERS?
A NEW TWO-WHEELED COURSE?

By Neal Peirce

Anne Lusk of Harvard’s School of Public Health has a startling -- many would say quixotic -- ambition for America’s cities.  She’d like to equip them all with cycle tracks.

Cycle tracks?  Does she means the painted buffer lane for bikes you see on some streets?  No!  Those lanes are easily blocked by parking vehicles.  And they leave cyclists within inches of fast cars and monster trucks; if there’s any error you know who get hurts, often badly.

Cycle tracks, notes Lusk, are actually a separated part of the roadway, yet distinct from the roadway, and distinct from the sidewalk.  In their purest form -- Odense, Denmark, where 50 percent of all city journeys are by bicycle -- the paths even have their own traffic signals.

What actually separates the cycle track?  One possibility is a long, narrow but distinct curb.  Another is a line of cones or concrete barriers.  Or metal stanchions.  Or a line of trees and other vegetation (an on-street greenway).

Another solution, tried on relatively wide streets in Bogota, Paris, London and elsewhere, is to move the parking lane several feet from the sidewalk, creating a new lane for cyclists between sidewalk and parked cars.   Brooklyn-based bicycle advocate/blogger Aaron Naparstek has an excellent online video celebrating that solution (www.streetsblog.org/2007/01/02/the-case-for-physically-separated-bike-lanes/).

OK, why should we go to all this trouble -- and years of reconstruction, and unquestionable expense?

Global warming is the biggie: bicycles are zero emitters of the CO2 emissions that are shaping up as the planet’s greatest peril in this century.
        

Then there’s the obesity epidemic threatening both Americans’ health and economy.  Cycling does help millions; it could help tens of millions of Americans stay slimmer. 

As a New Yorker interviewed in Naparstek’s video says: “I’ve lived in 10 cities around the world.  The thing about a separated bike lane is that you feel totally separate. Which means you get a ton load more people on the streets-- mother, kids, even at rush hour you think nothing of it.”

That dovetails with Lusk’s point -- that in today’s America, cycling is too often the preserve of athletic men who don’t mind heading out into the fast-moving main lanes of traffic. 

Great for those guys if they think they can handle it, says Lusk. The most extreme among them, she notes, don’t even want to have a white painted bike lane.

But if the numbers of Americans who bike regularly remain overwhelming male and macho, she warns, huge portions of the American population -- women, seniors, children on their way to school, and men who use more caution -- will never join in.  We’ll never save the energy, reduce the carbon emissions, lighten the vehicle traffic, make the health gains we could.

Opponents of cycle lanes argue they’re a bad idea because earlier research shows them to be more hazardous than sharing the road with regular motor traffic.

Lusk replies that the research cited is dated, based on earlier-style bike tracks with less safe curb cuts and intersection crossings. 

Just check around the world, she says -- to China, Canada, Norway, Sweden, Australia and elsewhere -- to find positive examples of cycle tracks that draw entire populations, all ages, both sexes, into daily, overwhelmingly safe use.

It’s time to stop assuming, she insists, “that what works for men will work for the rest of the population.”  The clear fact, she argues, is that women tend by nature to be more cautious.  They simply won’t try biking (or encourage their children to bike around town) until it appears to be, and is, a lot safer.

The pitch for exclusive bike lanes does come at a moment of potential serious change, as societies seek to reduce many short car trips that account for a growing share of auto emissions.  A big potential is seen, for example, in getting more people to haul groceries in bike saddle bags or tote their small children in bike seats.  From “active elderly” to children biking to school, major new user groups are being developed across the world.

Amsterdam has built five new bicycle garages in recent years and now plans a 10,000-bike garage in its center cities.  Paris this summer is putting thousands of low-cost rental bikes at strategic spots across the city, aiming to cut traffic and reduce pollution.

It is true -- the U.S. has a long ways to go to get serious, population-wide bike usage, including dedicated cycle paths.  Even leading cycling cities (Eugene and Corvallis, Ore., for example) lack contiguous grids of separated bikeways.

But who’s to deny our towns and cities (and environment) need bicycling opportunities, safe routes that serve both sexes, all ages?  The debate should be about the how, not the whether.

Comments may be addressed to npeirce@citistates.com