Anyone should be able to ride a bike to any destination. But they can't. Why not? Join us as we try to solve this puzzle and make bike transportation possible for everyone. Bike Networks Now! is a production of Bike Streets. Learn more about how to unlock your city by bike at bikestreets.com
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Why isn’t tactical urbanism more common? On the grandest scale, it was good enough for New York City in the redesign of Times Square. Why aren’t we using this to figure out how to make streets better all the time? Indianapolis hasn’t quite done that, but they are one of the few cities with has a formal Tactical Urbanism program.
Our guest is John Simmerman, founder of Active Towns. John travels around the world trying to understand what’s working well in active transportation systems and what’s not. He chronicles his adventures on the excellent Active Towns podcast and his prolific Active Towns YouTube channel. 00:00 — The Idea of “Activity Assets” 05:14 — Streets for People and Human Flourishing 09:54 — How We Gave the Streets to Cars 12:26 — Lessons From Around the World 15:30 — What Paris Can Teach Us About Livable Streets 19:27 — It’s Not About the Bike, It’s About Mobility Choice 24:11 — The Hidden Network of Low
In this conversation, we’re headed to Blacksburg, Virginia, the home of Virginia Tech. In previous episodes, we’ve investigated the state of biking in big metropolitan areas – Denver, New Orleans, Houston, Portland. Blacksburg, by contrast, is a college town with a population of 45,000. When school is in session, the population almost doubles. So what’s it like trying to get around this college town on a bike?
On this episode, we’re headed to Portland, which is to many people the Xanadu of American bike cities. If I only had a quarter for every time someone, talking about biking, has wistfully started a sentence with, “In Portland…” What is the reality on the ground in Portland? It’s ranked 8th for cities its size in the PeopleForBikes City Ratings. Is its reputation deserved? And why have recent times seen decreases in ridership?
In this episode, we're headed to Houston. If you’re like, “Biking in Houston?!” that's exactly why this is one of the conversations I've been most looking forward to. Houston is the punchline in a lot of national conversations about cars and sprawl—the fourth-largest city in the country, defined in the popular imagination by freeways and heat and distance. The city rating from PeopleForBikes for Houston is a 17 out of 100. No less, the bike movement persists.
My guest today has spent years building the tools that let us actually measure whether that is indeed true. Martina Haggerty is the vice president of infrastructure at People for Bikes, where she leads the great bike infrastructure and the city ratings initiatives, which score hundreds of cities on how well their bike networks actually connect people to the places they want to go. They call this the bike network analysis, and we'll dive into that in a moment.
If there’s one picture that summarizes the vision of a modern innovation approach to building complete bike networks, it’s this: a small child on a 16-inch bicycle on a New York City street. She’s not ripping along with an urban ninja’s grimace on her face; rather, she’s serpentining joyfully as kids do.
My guest is Andy Boneau, the Director of Transportation for the City of Richmond and the author of the Substack Urbanism Speakeasy, which he’s been writing since 2013. His 2024 book is called “Neighborhood Character: 365 Daily Affirmations for Defenders of the Status Quo (2024).” A recent post he wrote called “Here's why the status quo keeps winning” caught my eye and I wanted to have him on to talk about it.
We’ve only succeeded if huge numbers of people use the complete bike network we create. Without that outcome, it’s just a bunch of inanimate signs and concrete. Part of our work to activate the network is to reframe how people perceive biking. We need to up our advertising and communications game. Those of us who already ride bikes know how awesome it is, but that perception isn’t widely shared.
Among those cultural changes cities need to make is a shift in the research questions they ask. Once you’ve done enough innovation work and taken enough lumps from getting it wrong, you know not to touch the question “What would you do?” with a ten-foot pole. Behavioral psychology has shown us that people aren’t good at predicting their future behavior. Instead, we need to ask people questions about their experiences in the past and present and then, when we build bikeways, we need to observe what they actually do.
In this conversation, we’re taking a good look at Minneapolis. Laura Mitchell is the previous board president of Our Streets, the main advocacy group in the city. She’s now the founder of the Minnesota Cargo Bike Library. And Patrick Stephenson is a long-time Minneapolis bike person. He’s the founder of 30 Days of Biking and the Joyful Riders Club.
One of the strangest ironies is that cities already have many of the techniques described above. We have the tools to create complete networks, but we don’t use them. It’s also quite clear that we’re not getting enough people on bikes. Yet we persist with the status quo approach to building bike networks.
After a decade of observation and advocacy, I’ve become convinced that endless conflict to build bike networks is a failed strategy. It’s the bike equivalent of trench warfare: unacceptably limited progress and massive costs in time, money, and pain.
David Meza is the Community Programs Coordinator and Adam Davies is a Board Member at Bike Easy, the bike advocacy group in New Orleans. We’ve been collaborating on a low-stress bike map over the last few months and I’ve been fascinated by the challenges in New Orleans that are at once unique and quite familiar based on what I’ve seen in cities across the country. So we’re here today to discuss the state of biking in New Orleans.
The bike movement’s struggle is rooted in two problems: 1. Inadequate Political Support – We need broad coalitions that impel mayors and city councils to give local departments of transportation mandates to build and activate complete bike networks. 2. Inability to Execute – We need incentives designed to produce actual ridership and an entrepreneurial innovation model to actually make it happen. Policy alone isn’t enough. Implementation matters.
Any battle-hardened entrepreneur will tell you there’s no such thing as a complete or finished product. Rather, a product is always imperfect and there are always opportunities to refine and optimize. Throughout the process of creating a complete network, we should have our ear to the ground, observing what’s working well and what needs improvement. Quantitative insights come from digital infrastructure, permanent fixed bike counters, ephemeral tube counters, and volunteer-led bike counts.
Bill Nesper is the Executive Director of the League of American Bicyclists, the voice of bike advocacy at the federal level. We talk with Bill about where bike advocacy needs to grow, getting people on bikes to experience “the good life,” and building a more mainstream movement.
Having resolved many of the low-hanging fruit upgrades to our complete bike network, we turn our attention to the big, chunky projects – many of which exist in a city’s bike master plan. Some of these are projects that the status quo approach would address first: protected bike lanes on big, gnarly arterial streets, dedicated signals, new trails, etc. The Network First approach is quite different. Rather than building these projects in isolation with a promise of future connectivity, they are instead upgrades to an existing, complete network.
The creation of network version 1.0 is a huge milestone. It’s a dramatic departure from the status quo approach to networks that theoretically take 25 years and hundreds of millions of dollars to complete – but never really happen. Nonetheless, our work is far from over. Entrepreneurs are their own worst critics and recognize that their products are never fully optimized. Network version 2.0, which unfolds over the following 1-2 years, is about improving point locations on the map.
We now have the toolkit to make streets safer, quieter, and better for neighbors. So we turn our attention to scale and the creation of a complete citywide bike network for people of all ages and abilities. This is the elusive reality that has limited the adoption of bike transportation in America. The days of piecemeal bike lane creation over decades must end. And now we have the tools to do it.
Paul Karolyi & Avi Stopper: A VAMOS Deep Dive This is a podcast trying to figure out how cities can produce complete bike networks, make bike riding a real transportation option. And true to form, this is a different kind of episode oriented around our work here in Denver to get the city to build a complete high-comfort bike network. We think it can be done in a short period of time for a budget that pales in comparison with the normal costs. Instead of me asking the questions, paradoxically, I've asked one of Denver's best reporters, Paul Karolyi from CityCast Denver, to come on the show and
A VAMOS Audio Snapshot TranscriptThis is Avi Stopper from Bike Streets and this is an audio snapshot of what the Vibrant Streets Pilot Program would be like. You’d step out your door, hop on your bike, and ride to the nearest demonstration project location. This would be on a weekend – that’s as long as the initial pilots would last. You would ride a mile or so down a quiet residential street made even quieter with no high speed cut-through traffic. And that would be because small sets of cones on the street placed in strategic locations would make it so these streets were for local drivers on
Once we’ve created solid molecular units, which should take about six months, we graduate to small networks composed of multiple intersecting streets that make neighborhoods more connected, navigable, and delightful. There’s a clear progression from simple atomic units to complex clusters. If we don’t adequately refine our atomic and molecular units, our networks – big and small – will struggle to produce results. By now, we have earned the right to start to scale.
Once satisfied with our atomic units, we assemble atoms into molecules. These are corridors that prioritize bike transportation by linking multiple atomic units in sequence. For example, a series of diverters every 2-4 blocks, that connect to a sidewalk designated as a multi-use path, that, in turn, makes it possible to overcome a challenging boundary and connect to a regional trail.
We’ve now done 10 episodes of the podcast in our quest to understand why bike transportation still isn’t possible for most people in most cities. They’ve been pretty high-level conversations about the bike movement broadly. Over the next five episodes, we’re going local. We’re going to try to learn as many things as we can about how the bike movement is doing in cities across America by talking with the folks who know those cities best – the advocates who are trying to make bike transportation a practical reality. We’re starting in Denver, where Bike Streets is based, and my guests on this epi
