It's Happening!
For decades, advocates of cycling-as-transportation told anyone who'd listen that pedaling was the cure for urban ailments from congestion to loneliness. Suddenly, residents and politicians aren't just listening—they're riding.
By florence williams
Kagan McLeod
I tried out bike share for the first time in Copenhagen in 2009. The bicycle was cute, blue with artsy ads on the wheels, but it was a bear. It weighed about a million pounds. It hardly moved. No wonder so many of them ended up (perhaps hoisted by crane) in the canals. The ill-fated system was used mostly by tourists who didn't know better. "Most Copenhageners wouldn't touch them with a 10-foot pole," said Mikael Colville-Andersen in his popular blog, Copenhagenize.
Five years later, staring at a dock of San Francisco's bright-red share bikes on a nominal bike lane on lower Market Street, I wasn't too keen on repeating my experience. But it was a nice day, and I had a meeting to get to, and I saw some other people riding them. I wouldn't say that the bike felt like a carbon race machine, but it was a notable improvement. My ride was smooth, the gears worked, and I got up the hill fairly quickly despite a confusing bus lane and scores of shoaling pedestrians, the usual mix of homeless people and Twitter employees.
A couple of blocks down from the Twitter building sits the humble headquarters of the San Francisco Bicycle Coalition, a 43-year-old advocacy group that—like so many—finds itself rather suddenly a big player in the newly dynamic world of urban transit. Something strange has happened in American cities over the last eight years: Bikes are in. After decades of being generally considered a noble but quaint, kooky, risky, impractical, or even impossible mode of transportation, bicycles are being embraced by the public and politicians as the solution to urban problems that range from climate change to traffic congestion to obesity and even loneliness.
"We were kind of dormant in the '80s," admits SFBC director Leah Shahum. "It was hard times." Now her group has 12,000 members who collectively volunteer 14,000 hours a year. Shahum has served terms on the boards of the SF Municipal Transportation Agency and the Golden Gate Bridge Highway and Transportation District, and witnessed a 71-percent increase in cycling in the city from 2006 to 2011. She is proud of a new, paint-buffered bike lane called "the Wiggle" that connects the Market Street lane to Golden Gate Park uptown—the culmination of a 15-year battle that included fighting a court injunction to get three blocks marked. (When I tell her I biked the Wiggle and got lost, she says, "It's by no means an awesome ride. But imagine it without the green paint.")
Shahum points out that, while San Francisco already has nearly twice the bike lanes and signed routes per square mile of its nearest competitor, Austin, Texas, the momentum has yet to peak. The SFBC is working with the city to build 100 miles of new crosstown bikeways, upgrade 200 miles of existing network, and overhaul 200 intersections. "Our goal is that 20 percent of trips by 2020 will be by bike, and that's now the official city goal," says Shahum.
It sounds good, but this is, after all, San Francisco, birthplace of the mountain bike, natural habitat of the bike messenger (now endangered), and epicenter of hipster culture. Is it really so impressive that lots of people bike here? Or in Portland, Oregon, or other sites long held up by advocates as shining examples of what should be? Until recently, I lived in one of them—Boulder, Colorado, where there's almost a 1:1 ratio of bikes to people. When I moved to Washington, DC, I figured I'd be mostly shuttering my beloved Dutch townie. The city had a longstanding reputation as a Death Star of traffic, crime, and potholes. My new neighborhood promised two decent paths, but they seemed like trails to nowhere; I couldn't see how to connect them past a rat's nest of expressways to downtown.
Yet on a recent morning in my new hometown, I saw scores of bicyclists streaming ant-like from the Logan Circle neighborhood to the city center. They looked like gangly insects, too, some wearing dresses and funky shoes, some in helmets but most not. In this district, an astonishing 15 percent of residents bike-commute (not Holland's 40 percent, but still).
In fact, as relative bike paradises like Portland appear to be plateauing in bike use, it's the unexpected cities like DC, New York, Chicago, Indianapolis, and even Pittsburgh that are powering the urban revival. Over the past five years, the number of Bicycle Friendly Communities (a designation granted by the League of American Bicyclists) has grown by 300 percent to 291 in 48 states. More than 50 million Americans now live in a Bicycle Friendly Community, and from 2000 to 2011, the rate of bike commuting in the 70 largest increased 80 percent. And the bicyclists in these big and midsized cities are no longer just young white men careening through traffic and obstacles. They are, increasingly, Real People.
I caught up with Lesly Jones and Delores Simmons, founding members of the two-year-old group Black Women Bike DC. We met at 7:30 a.m., in wan light in front of the Chocolate City Brewery warehouse in Northeast to catch Simmons on her morning commute. Jones, 55, rode a black Surly Crosscheck decked with silver reflectors and a hot-pink water bottle. Simmons, 53, wore a lime green helmet from which sprouted the long antenna of a rearview mirror. Both women wear whistles around their necks whenever they ride. Simmons had already come six miles from Silver Spring, braving all manner of street traffic and a stretch alongside the Fort Totten Transfer Station known as Big Stinky. Jones, who lives downtown, rides nearly every day and recently cycled from New York to DC. These ladies are not in it for the scenery.
We stopped at the terminus of the two-mile-long Metropolitan Branch Trail near Union Station for a quick cup of coffee. They told me the group started with a Twitter post and now has 1,200 members. Many are middle-aged women who hadn't been on a bike since childhood. Jones, who grew up biking around the Bay Area, instructs safety and commuter classes. "We've been able to reach a group that others have not been able to," said Jones. "When I teach classes, I always wear my regular clothes and bring my singlespeed."
Jones talked about how much DC has changed. "Ten years ago, if you were bicycling, you were by yourself." Both women say they feel growing safety in the growing numbers of riders. DC drivers are getting used to bikes, and bike lanes have also increased—quadrupling from 14 to 74 since 2006. According to the Alliance for Biking and Walking, the best way to get more women riding in cities is to provide not just a stripe-on-a-street but lanes that are separated and protected from motorized traffic. Sixteen cities have recently installed these, including Chicago with 54 miles of them. Across all these cities, the simple algorithm seems to be: the safer a street feels, the more bikes show up.
The infrastructure, although changing, can't keep up with demand. For instance, according to U.S. Census data, which notoriously undercounts ridership, cycling increased from 1 to 4.1 percent of all DC commuting between 2006 and 2012. That's a growth of more than 400 percent.
"To increase that much is incredible," said Greg Billings, the advocacy coordinator for the Washington Area Bicyclist Association (WABA). "When you talk to a transportation engineer, they say [commuter mode] numbers are frozen. That's just not true. If you build places that are safe and comfortable to ride, more people will ride."
The founder of Streetsblog, MIT visiting scholar Aaron Naparstek, says, "We're in the midst of a radical transformation of American cities right now. We're in a similar period to when the car came in. Cities weren't prepared and nobody knew the rules. Cities are quickly accommodating themselves to the bicycle. We'll look back and be stunned we had this technology—cars—that constantly ran people over and killed them and honked and polluted cities and cooked the planet. We'll see, wow, this is when the shift happened."
What's caused the seismic shift in attitude across U.S. cities? How did advocacy groups, who went unheard for decades, find themselves splashing lanes across city plats like Jackson Pollack?
It seemed a good man to ask was Gabe Klein.
As the ambitious transportation commissioner of Washington, DC, then Chicago until last fall, Klein oversaw the huge expansions of cycling infrastructure in both cities, including rollouts of bike share and hundreds of miles of new lanes. Streetsblog likened him to the controversial mid-20th-century urban activist, Jane Jacobs, and called him a "transformative figure in the history of American cities." Klein, 43, spent time as a teen living with a spiritual Hindu guru, and his dad ran a bike shop. After business school, Klein marketed bikes then helped run Zipcar, an automobile-sharing venture. In both posts as a city official, he was an unusual kind of transit wonk—less interested in traffic speeds and flow, more interested in quality of life and what planners and activists are calling livable streets.
"I'm Generation X and a student of history," said Klein. "I like looking back 100 years. Fifty years ago, we made tremendous mistakes. We killed streetcars, and we wondered why everybody wanted to leave. Of course they did. They had no way to get around. Now we're undoing those mistakes and healing the fabric of the city."
Klein points to young people re-colonizing city centers who are not attached to cars the way their parents are. They're crawling back from a bad economy; they have student debts. Their tech-enabled lives meld well with car and bike-share systems. Bike share, added Klein, has the potential to reconnect neighborhoods if it's not just kitschy tourism but used as a serious transit option by enough people. Meaning, a lot of people.
That's exactly what's happening in DC, New York, and Chicago. In DC, bike-share users make 9,000 trips a day. In New York it's closer to 40,000. As of last December, 20 U.S. cities have a bike-share system, up from five in 2011. These include cities you might not think of as bike-forward, like Houston, Omaha, Columbus.
"Bike share is the closest thing that many people get to the streetcar," says Klein. "It's above ground, it's reliable. It is not rapid transit; it's mass transit that connects neighborhoods. "
Naparstek, another bike-share proselytizer, says the programs make the idea of pedaling attractive to a population that's broader than cycling nuts or hipsters. "You see guys in suits, women in heels, old people, young people, Latino working class." He also says it transcends partisan politics: City officials are all seeking a vibrant urban core. As Indianapolis's Republican mayor Greg Ballard testified before Congress while asking for alternative transportation funding: "The battle for the future of American cities will be won by the place that attracts and retains talent."
I left my townie behind one day and gave DC's Capital Bikeshare a try. I rode out to meet the commander of the three-year-old program, Eric Gilliland, in his bunker in a warehouse in Southeast. Gilliland has serious street cred, having been a messenger then the executive director of Washington Area Bicyclist Alliance. The bikes are sweet and sturdy. Each is worth $1,200, says Gilliland, yet an annual membership costs 27 cents a day. And if it gets stolen, like 2,000 other bikes per year in this town, it's not your problem. From a transit perspective, the system works because there are 318 stations and nearly 3,000 bikes, so they tend to be where you want them. The program is so beloved it could be crushed by love. CaBi has had trouble keeping up with demand. There are backorders for stations (Bixi, the Canadian company that makes them, declared bankruptcy earlier this year) and the seven vans that redistribute the bikes to try to make sure all the docks always have some available—as well as empty slots to dock one in—get behind. The day I visited Gilliland, I wanted to park mine downtown in mid-morning, and my first-choice station was full. I was, in CaBi lexicon, dock-blocked.
But these are minor complaints compared with the new territory CaBi has seized. With so many bikes zipping around, and so many normalish people riding them, the streets have changed in two important ways: People who never rode are starting to do so, and the people who still aren't are getting accustomed to bikes on the streets.
I thought back to the end of my ride with Lesly Jones and Delores Simmons. Before Jones tucked her curly copper hair beneath her white helmet, mounted her Surly and headed for Pennsylvania Avenue, she said, "I've been to Amsterdam. Our central business district could very easily be car free. We could be a model city for the U.S.!" Her whistle dangled from her neck, ready to be heard.
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