We Need to Dream Bigger Than Bike Lanes

> that it should go to bikes and not public transport + walkability.

The article specifically talks about switching our mindset away from a strictly bike lane oriented world view to one that emphasizes diversity in micromobility solutions. That's why it wants the reader to "Dream Bigger Than Bike Lanes". Public transport and especially walkability do not contrast with this viewpoint.

I’ve thought about this a lot having lived in Chicago and now London and seen two very different types of infrastructure.

Chicago arguably has a true “cycle superhighway” with its 23 miles of continuous bike lane on the lakefront I was able to commute 10 miles to work very fast and with little exposure to cars.

London is a work in progress, with lots of infrastructure slotted in.

What I’ve come away with being a pretty committed bike commuter is that a good bike network should incorporate routes that are disassociated with the road network where possible. Like the lake path in Chicago, these routes are much safer, accessible to new cyclists, And fast (with few intersections). Also see Chicago’s elevated bike path the 606 for another example.

London could develop something similar along the river Thames (it does exist in parts, but it needs to be continuous, wider, and better developed), and improve routes along its canals. London could also develop and allow more routes through its parks. This in particular is low hanging fruit as routes through many parks are limited and have just been added to roads that cut through parks in many cases (another issue worth debating is whether roads should be cutting through parks to begin with).

US Federal highways were built for homeland defense first, then commercial traffic, then individual automobiles. The infrastructure is built on government credit and maintained via gasoline taxes. A 50 mile segment of freeway might move more than $50 million worth of cargo and labor each hour. The same is true for city streets, on a smaller scale.

Bikes, by their nature, are rather terrible at moving things around like cows, refrigerated goods, building supplies and such. They are excellent at moving around people, and providing them healthy exercise in the process.

The demonstrable economic impact of a road closure in terms of real wages, purchases, freight, and more is analyzed with incredible depth here: https://www.purdue.edu/discoverypark/nextrans/assets/pdfs/Fi...

From an economic standpoint, the value that bike transportation facilitates is the aggregate value of the wages, production, and consumption of its riders. They represent 0.6% of urban commuters, with 86% in automobiles and 5% in mass transit. Even in Portland, OR only 3.5% of the workforce commutes via bicycle, and certainly less on the rare snow day.

Many would argue that our transportation infrastructure is the cause of this disparity. I think that they are in fact a reflection of economic reality. In places where bicycles carry lots of economic value, such as a highly compensated workforce, they have more infrastructure. In places where they convey relatively little economic value, they receive virtually no accommodation. In agricultural areas, roads have special accommodations for tractors, and rail is extremely valuable.

I could imagine, as many have and the article suggests, a vision for urbanism that is centered around human-first transportation networks. In a place where knowledge work dominates, this is entirely possible. Its happening now, in NYC where roads are being closed off to cars block by block. The roads themselves still exist because people still need things that are most efficiently moved by trucks, such as refrigerated goods, construction equipment, and so on.

A pedal-powered utopia would need to have a robust solution for moving kilotons of things like food if people want to eat, building materials if people want shelter, stuff if people want stuff to put in their shelters, and raw materials if people want to make things instead of just consuming stuff.

Bicycling provides plenty of recreational value, which is in itself economic value, and that should not be discounted.

If we're envisioning things, I'd like to see integrated networks of airborne, ground-level, and subterranean conveyance, each with macro, micro, and intermodal transit solutions that have maximal economic bandwidth and minimal environmental impact. Better yet, technology that eliminates the need for transit, like localized manufacturing and recycling... ie, instead of a garage sheltering a car, it could hold waste materials, shredders, extruders, 3d printers/fabbers, etc for anything from plastics to proteins. If everything we needed to transport could be transported via bike or drone at the last mile(s), if everything we needed came in small packages, if labor happened in place, if everything we made came from commodity components and openly shared designs... roads would vanish rather quickly.

Until then, bikes will get the infrastructure budget commensurate with the value they transport, and the same goes for each other mode. At least cyclists don't have to pay gas tax.

Indeed, there is much evidence that even when the weather is shit, getting some exercise is really much better for you than sitting in a static seat, parked in traffic.

.. and thus, Americans still spend hours of their day parked in traffic.