Re: On Biking, Why Can’t the U.S. Learn Lessons from Europe?

[Loren Demerath]

Thanks Kari!

On Jul 16, 2011 1:52 PM, "Kari" <brown....@gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi Loren,
>
> Hope all is well with you. An interesting article on what communities
> really need to do to promote bicycling as a viable way of transit!
>
> KB
>
> Sent to you by Kari via Google Reader: On Biking, Why Can’t the U.S.
> Learn Lessons from Europe? via ThinkProgress » Climate Progress by
> Climate Guest Blogger on 7/16/11
>
>
>
> Building bike paths alone will not get people out of their cars in the
> U.S. and onto bicycles. To create a thriving bike culture in America’s
> cities, people must begin to view bicycling as Europeans do — not just
> as a way of exercising, but as a serious form of urban mass
> transportation.
>
> – Elisabeth Rosenthal, in a Yale360 re-post
>
> This spring, curiosity propelled me onto a New York City subway bound
> for Prospect Park West in Brooklyn, where a new bike path along the
> edge of Brooklyn’s largest park had angry residents worked up into a
> lather.
>
> For those not familiar with the territory, Park Slope is one of New
> York City’s most prosperous and progressive neighborhoods, home to the
> famed Park Slope Food Cooperative and liberal U.S. Senator Charles
> Schumer. And yet… the creation of a simple green bike path — the kind
> that edges dozens of streets in Barcelona or Paris or Copenhagen — at
> the expense of one lane of car traffic and a few parking spaces evinced
> the kind of venom normally reserved here for The Tea Party.
>
> I expected to find a diversity of opinion about the bike path, which
> was created last year by Mayor Michael Bloomberg. I did not. Almost
> everyone I interviewed began with the following introduction: “Don’t
> get me wrong I love bikes, I ride all the time…” and then segued into a
> barrage of objections: The path was a hazard for old people and mothers
> with baby strollers crossing to enter the park. Riders pedaled too
> fast. They should just ride inside the park. The loss of a lane made
> parking worse and traffic slower. It made it harder to stop to drop
> kids at school. It was unsightly.
>
> Wow.
>
> I had spent much time over the last five years in Europe, where
> cyclists and bike lanes have become part of nearly every urban
> streetscape. If you are a European mayor, running a good bike-sharing
> program seems as much a barometer of success as having a good school
> system.
>
> In Copenhagen, 37 percent of commuters now use bikes to get to school
> or work — a number that dips only slightly in the dead of winter. Sure,
> cities like Amsterdam and Copenhagen have something of a bicycling
> tradition — certainly far more of one than in car-centric U.S. cities.
> But Europe’s bicycling enthusiasm extends to cities like Barcelona and
> Paris, with no cycling history. Even Rome has a bike-sharing program,
> though that city is supremely unsuited to travel on two wheels: Its
> roads are too narrow, its drivers mad, and its streets are paved with a
> kind of cobblestone that makes every meter a jarring experience.
>
> In comparison to these cities, major United States metropolises are
> bicycle deserts. When we talk about “bike friendly” cities in the
> United States, most are mere college towns and none boast more than 6
> per cent bike commuters. According to the United States Census Bureau’s
> 2009 community survey, 76 percent of Americans drive to work alone in
> their cars each day, while only 0.6 percent arrive by bicycle.
>
> What’s going on here? One key component that has enabled Europe’s
> successful bike revolution, I think, is not infrastructure, but
> sociology: While Americans still view bicycling as a form of exercise
> or recreation, a tectonic shift in attitudes has taken place in many
> parts of Europe, where people now regard bicycling as a serious form of
> urban mass transportation.
>
> Last month, The Atlantic did an interesting survey of the top bike
> commuting towns in the U.S. They are Eugene, Oregon (5.6 percent of
> people commute by bike), Fort Collins, Colorado (5.2 percent),
> Missoula, Montana (4.8 percent), Boulder, Colorado (4.77 percent), and
> Santa Barbara, California (3.74 percent). The pictures that accompanied
> the survey were telling: bike riders with surfboards, riders with
> backpacks, and even riders traversing an empty forest. Students.
> Students. Students. A good portion of the bikes have drop handlebars,
> and many of the riders are wearing racing gear.
>
> Now look at photos of bike riders in Paris or Copenhagen or Barcelona
> or Marseilles. They are men and women of all ages, in suits and
> dresses, fur coats and heels. They are riding sensible bikes. These are
> not sporting types, but a typical cross section of Europe’s working
> population, people going to the office on the vehicle that works well
> in their city.
>
> There is more to making a city bike friendly than creating pathways,
> and part of that is changing attitudes: “In New York, there are lots of
> bike lanes, but not too many people on bicycles, so cars still think
> they own the road,” said Peder Jensen, head of the transport section at
> the European Environment Agency.
>
> For the last several years, sociologists at Lancaster University have
> been studying the factors that keep people off two wheels in Britain,
> where biking has been relatively slow to catch on compared to other
> European countries, despite large government investment. Their
> diagnosis is similar: “Many people barely recognize the bicycle as a
> legitimate mode of transport; it is either a toy for children or a
> vehicle fit only for the poor and/or strange,” wrote Dave Horton, lead
> researcher of the Understanding Walking and Cycling study.
>
> That also helps explain why bicycle commuting is expanding only slowly
> in U.S. cities — 3.0 percent of commuters in San Francisco and 2.2
> percent in Philadelphia and Washington D.C, according to United States
> Census Bureau 2009 data.
>
> In New York it remains at 0.6 percent. Mayor Bloomberg has built us New
> Yorkers some really nice state-of-the art bike paths, but rank-and-file
> commuters aren’t much using them. Even at rush hour, the new bike path
> on Columbus Avenue near my home is a sparsely populated chute
> predominantly used by 20-somethings, bike messengers, and restaurant
> deliverymen.
>
> Until we start thinking of bikes as essential transportation and not
> just a hobby, all the small changes that will allow working people to
> commute along those beautiful bike paths won’t happen.
>
> Take me as an example: On paper, I should be riding to work. I live
> just blocks from a bike path along the Hudson River which would let me
> off at West 42nd Street, just blocks from my office.
>
> But my apartment building sequesters bikes on high wall hooks in a
> basement storage room. That may be fine for a weekend ride in Central
> Park, but not readily accessible for daily use in work dress. On the
> bike path, many riders travel hunched over handlebars at death defying
> speeds. Could I ride here to the office — upright, slowly, and
> sweat-less? And then where would I park my “vehicle” once I got to
> work? There is nowhere convenient. So instead I take the subway.
>
> The 2010 interim report of the Understanding Walking and Cycling study
> noted that “Walking and cycling are often thought of as simple forms of
> travel which require little equipment or planning. In fact this is not
> the case.” In truly bike friendly cities, the needs of bicycle
> commuters are taken seriously: The terminal stations in Bogota’s bus
> rapid transit lines have plentiful indoor bicycle parking. In
> Copenhagen, the European Environment Agency has 150 parking spots for
> bikes.
>
> Bogota’s former mayor, Enrique Penalosa, once told me that when he
> unveiled that city’s new Bus Rapid Transit System one of the biggest
> challenges was to “rebrand” bus travel so that upper middle class
> people would use it. When Zurich wanted to encourage more people to
> ride bikes to work, its ad campaign pictured a banker in a 3-piece suit
> with a bicycle clip affixed to his trouser leg.
>
> But to follow this model, bike paths must be tailored to suit
> commuters, not hot shots. On Copenhagen’s bike highways into the city,
> lights are synchronized at about 12 miles per hour. On Beijing’s bike
> lanes the hordes of bike riders travel — fender to fender — at an even
> slower pace. If bicycling was rebranded and refocused as essential mass
> transportation, I think some of the objections I heard from the
> residents of Park Slope this spring would disappear as well. They
> wanted bicyclists to ride inside the park because they viewed them as
> sportsman who want to ride fast. Middle-aged professionals on clunky
> bikes don’t mow down the elderly or babies in strollers.
>
> – Elisabeth Rosenthal, in a Yale360 re-post. Elisabeth Rosenthal has
> covered international environmental issues for the New York Times and
> the International Herald Tribune.
>
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