Visible Transit

 I think it's a critical element of transit infrastructure that it be visible. That doesn't mean it has to be big, hulking, and permanent; not all rail is visible, not all buses are invisible. But it does mean that someone who is on the street (whether a pedestrian, a bicyclist, a driver, or someone not moving at all) should be able to see that there is transit there.

Why? 

1. Visible Transit Is A Visible Option

If there is no transit visible, the most natural conclusion in the world is that there is no transit there. 

Where's the transit, St. Matthews?

Now obviously that example is particularly bad for its lack of even a sidewalk--but it's also a space where you would assume that there is no way to get places but walking (without sidewalks) or driving.

Underground transit may not be visible itself, but can be made visible through things like the above T sign. 

And of course a giant rail pit like this in Chicago is visible for a lot of people--though note that it matters whether you can see somewhere to actually get on!

2. Visible Transit Can Give A Sense Of Destinations

Good visible transit can make it easier not just to see that there is transit, but to think about where that transit might go. Just like a road itself gives a direction of travel (or two), a rail line, a bus stop, or any other visible form of transit gives you a sense of where you can go.

A rail line can give two directions too--and directions the roads may not go.

A posted bus schedule can give a sense of where buses go, too, even beyond the road you're on.

Ditto a subway map.

And of course the same is true of a list of train departures (though similarly, once you're in a train station, you probably knew that already).

3. Visible Transit Is A Commitment

The more visible the transit, the more it seems like the city is actually investing in your ability to get places via transit. That train station in Paris above (Gare du Nord, of course) is not just a place to get transit from; it's a sign that transit is a significant part of how you are supposed to get across the city and to other places.

A national edifice, indeed.

The Chicago Loop is likewise iconic, and speaks not only to where trains go, but to the fact that trains are valued here.

And if you combine more than one (like this Metro entrance directly across from Amsterdam Centraal station, with trams in the middle), you're really promising something.

And in case you thought all my examples were trains:

Here is the one major bus depot in Davenport, which does indeed make it look like buses matter here.

And this bus station in Boston is also pretty clear.

Overall, the point is that the more visible (and more frequently visible--see "one major bus depot" above) the transit infrastructure is, even for a mode like buses that is not itself always visible, the more clear it is that the place values its transit and you can expect that transit to help you move around.

What about your city? Does it have good, visible infrastructure, or are you hoping to find a few nods to transit along the way?

Quasi-Urbanism

 I want to talk today about a very particular kind of urbanism, which I want to call "quasi-urbanism," that is getting more and more common on the fringes of the Quad Cities (and other similar urban and surburban areas in the US). This is an urban form that consists of the following:

A. Concentration of housing (usually apartments) even though the overall population density remains low

B. Presence of nearby destinations, such as grocery stores, coffeeshops, small other shops, etc., in reasonable proximity to the concentrations of housing as the crow flies

C. Large sidewalks, mixed-use paths, or other biking/walking infrastructure running through the area

But that also has the following feature:

D. Despite A, B, & C, walking is dangerous there, no one does it, and the place was clearly built with the assumption that cars will be by far the most common form of transportation, to the point where this undoes the benefits of A, B, and C for most people.

This is similar to the false walkability I talked about before, but bears a few additional elements with it to represent a more fleshed-out urban environment, beyond just the markers of walkability.

This is, as I said, becoming more and more common, and I want to talk about why it doesn't really work, despite seeming on the face of it like it should tick a lot of urbanist boxes; or, in other words, why does D happen despite A, B, and C? And for this, I'm going to use a particular example out in Bettendorf--not because it's uniquely bad, but precisely because it feels typical to me.

1. Too Much Empty Space

The biggest flaw of this form of urbanism is that despite ostensibly including things like density, good sidewalks, and walkable amenities, there is just so much empty space. Not parks--though this space is often "green," it's usually all-grass lawn, not organized into parks, and sometimes not even green (lots of asphalt.

Let's look at the example: the Villas apartments and surrounding area on Devil's Glen Road in Bettendorf.

There's the apartment building. I'm standing, to take this photo, on the nearby mixed-use path. And what do I see? Lots and lots of space between me and the apartment building, and between me and the coffeeshop, and between the coffeeshop and the apartment building.

Looking down the road, I see the exact same thing: a huge berm of mostly grass, not attractively molded into a park or anything, just...present. Everything here is actually quite far away from everything else, so the gestures towards density and walkability are undercut. You can just about see the two grocery stores in this neighborhood down this path, but both are so far away that they're not actually visible--and most of the space in between is just empty.

2. Too Much Parking, Too Centered

Here's a closer view of the apartment complex: 

Notice what is given direct access to the apartments, and what is indeed literally the only thing you are confronted with when exiting and entering them?

That's right, a parking lot.

The apartment is surrounded by parking, the neighboring businesses (coffeeshop, boutique, locksmith, bike shop, brewpub) are all surrounded by parking, everything is parking. That creates more of this empty space (see #1) but it also directly counters the idea that this is a space where one could or should walk. There isn't even a marked (let alone protected) walkway through the parking lots to the sidewalk or mixed-use path from any of the businesses or the apartment complex. It's like the separate pieces of an urbanist jigsaw puzzle are all kept apart by three inches of table space, rather than combined into the puzzle they could potentially make.

3. Odd Choices In The Details

Here's the mixed use path, looking north:

It kinda looks like a big sidewalk, which is really what it is. But there's nothing wrong with that, as long as it's big enough to allow people to pass. Let's zoom in.

So here's what I notice (and this is mostly true in Bettendorf): the explicit prioritization of cars over bikes/pedestrians (a literal stop sign for the path at every single place that the cars could cross it), with no protection for the path as it crosses the roadway (no continuous raised sidewalk, even though again this is also a bike path).

I have biked here and do bike here (though I was not on the bike for this particular trip, since I was dropping someone else off who can't ride on the back of my bike). And I can tell you that these are notable issues in practice: cars coming out of these drives do not look for or notice bikes, and if you were actually to stop (as opposed to Idaho-stop) at each stop sign you'd go really, really slowly.

My favorite example, which I didn't happen to get a shot of because it's a few blocks over, is that this mixed-use path coexists with a painted bike gutter lane on a major street--as if the designers themselves weren't sure if this was actually bike infrastructure or not.

And, honestly, these paths don't tend to go anywhere: they begin and end without necessarily having an actual destination--not quite where the sidewalk ends but close--and so that also is an odd detail that reduces usability.

The frustrating thing is that all of the basic elements are good! All of them are helpful! But they aren't combined helpfully. And I worry that this means that people who live here, if asked to vote for more urbanist infrastructure, will say "I've seen dense apartments, I've seen bike paths, I've seen these elements that you say make a 15 minute city, and no one uses them/they're useless/they don't work."

Because this looks like someone cribbed off the test of the person designing a 15 minute city (yeah! Apartments! Yeah! Bike lanes! Yeah, a grocery store nearby!) but didn't realize that the whole point was not to accommodate more cars but to make them less necessary. So instead we have a neighborhood where you need a car, despite all this infrastructure, and so no one uses the infrastructure except weird bloggers getting their caffeine fix.

What about your neighborhoods or cities? Do you see urbanist elements combined into a quasi-urbanist design that fails them? Or are there parts that actually work--or no parts at all?

Building Bikeshare Better

 The Quad Cities do not have a bikeshare system, but many larger cities do, and it's often touted as a good solution for so-called last mile solutions, as well as a way to help people start thinking about alternatives to car travel for short trips. And bikeshare systems are often quite successful! But in this post, I'd like to think about some ways that they can be better, because the systems I've seen implemented often have quite visible flaws--but fortunately, ones that are pretty easily fixable.

1. Support Them With Infrastructure

This really has two parts: infrastructure for bikes, and infrastructure for getting to bikes. 

First of all, bikeshare is only as good as the actual biking experience can be: if it's painful, dangerous, or otherwise inhospitable to bike in a city, then bikeshare is going to be inherently limited. 

I like Seattle's bikeshare options, and there were a lot of them, but actually using it seemed quite unsafe in some areas, because it was just me, a bike, and a road with cars going 30+ mph. Even when there was a "bike lane," it wasn't protected or separated. Now, this was four years ago, so it could have gotten better since, but it certainly didn't help back then.

I did like the dockless nature of many of the bikeshare bikes though, since that meant that you didn't have to find somewhere to connect them at the end of a ride.

This is much easier, though it does mean that sometimes the sidewalk has too many of the bikes just standing there, not out of the way.

The other side of this is that bikes (and bikeshare specifically) work well on their own (at least sometimes) but work even better when they're connected to a larger transportation infrastructure. As I said above, this is a great last mile solution: but that means that you have to have the other miles covered by another form of transportation (unless the city is dense enough that you don't need to go too many miles at all). Bikesharing for a 45 minute bike commute is different than bikesharing from a metro station to your actual workplace/other destination. 

This bikeshare in DC is a good example: a dock near a major transit location (Union Station) with plenty of space to park the bikes and still let traffic on the sidewalk past. Someone could take a train here, bike to a destination, then bike back and take the train back. This makes the bikeshare much more useful, especially since someone else can use the bike during the time you're at the destination.

2. Incorporate (More) E-bikes

Now, I'm not saying that bikeshare needs to be only e-bikes. After all, they're more expensive, they can run out of battery if not properly charged (however a system does charging), and they can't be user-fixed in most cases.

But!

Especially in cities with environmental or geographical elements that might make biking less pleasant (think cold, snow, hills, etc.) an e-bike can really improve the situation, especially for the kind of casual riders who are likely to use bikeshare (or at least are the target market). Big hill between you and your destination? Who cares. Too cold to bike? Well, you'll be on the bike for less time with the e-bike. Long distance from bikeshare to your final stop? It'll go faster. Too many cars? Well, at least you can keep up with them better. And so on.

Now, many bikeshare systems are indeed already doing that. But as in the above NYC example, I would suggest that not enough of the bikes are electric. Yes, Citibike has e-bikes, but that display is pretty much all acoustic bikes. And while they're getting used (see all the empty spots!) I still suggest it could be better.

3. Plan Locations and Bike Numbers Carefully

Bikeshare only works if there is predictable bikeshare where you need it--but a system can also get overstressed by having too many places for bikes so that money is getting wasted in creating the system. You can't put a bike dock on every corner (or for dockless systems, a bike on every block)--and if you have that kind of funding, you still might want to spend some of it on the infrastructure in #1 rather than solely on bikes themselves. 

Locations that are on busy streets in busy areas like this one in Toronto are a good choice. 

There's also a careful balance to be made in terms of how many bikes you provide: that station is pretty empty, but not wholly empty, which is ideal. You want to see most of the bikes getting used (see, money, above) but not all, because an empty station (or no bikes, in a dockless system) means someone who can't use the system and who is therefore less likely to rely on the system in the future and so may create a spiral reducing usage.

Too many bikes (or scooters--which I haven't really mentioned here, but follow some of the same logic) can clog up a street, especially in a dockless system, as in the above example from Seattle. And they can also perversely give the sense that no one is using the system so it must suck--a silly idea, but one that you'd be surprised how many people can fall prey to nevertheless.

Now, I'm not an engineer or city planner myself, so I can't do the calculations that would lead to the correct numbers here. But it's crucial to get them right, or you end up with an albatross of a system in the classic Samuel Taylor Coleridge sense: hung around your neck, weighing you down, and a sign to others of your faults.

Does your city have bikeshare? Or one near you? Have you used it? What do you think could make it (even) better?

Groceries and Urban Planning

A constant (or at least frequent) pattern in Americans-who-go-to-Europe videos is the emphasis on how their grocery stores are different, and I want to talk about it in terms of core urbanism principles.

For those who are unfamiliar, or don't click through links like the above, groceries in European cities are often smaller than in the US and also dotted more frequently through the cities. They don't have big parking lots and you aren't expecting to do a week's worth of grocery shopping there at once--a few days at a time at most.

I'm not talking about farmer's markets and similar events, which occur in both places; I'm talking about the urban design as it relates to fixed grocery stores.

So why is this good design? Why should I want less choice and more trips?

1. Smaller Stores ≠ Less Choice

Well, first of all, it's not actually necessarily less choice. Go to a US grocery store and you'll see a lot of variety in some areas, but you'll also see whole walls of very similar looking or identical goods. Because Americans are used to doing big trips, we get a lot of stuff each time, typically, but we don't necessarily get different stuff, just more of what we buy--so those big shelves are often full of a lot of the same stuff in larger quantities.

When you buy more often, even in smaller quantities, things rotate in the store's stock. And that means more things can be stocked in the same space, because what's being bought isn't taking up space sitting there waiting for someone to buy 100 at once.

Small purchases, more often--like this.

This is especially true for fresh and unpreserved foods, like the cheese and bread above, but it's even true for canned and packaged goods: despite the huge shelves, we don't actually always get more variety. Now, we might for something like breakfast cereal, which they just don't eat as much as we do--but for commonly used foods, that both Americans and Europeans eat, we often don't.

There's a larger urbanist point here too: all the preparation we do in the US to allow for all that stuff to be bought all at once (huge cars, huge parking lots, huge stores) isn't necessary either: and that space and effort could be redirected in more productive ways. 

As mentioned, the above point is especially important in relation to fruits, vegetables, pastries, bread, meat, fish, and other perishables. See, a lot of these things, when sold in the US, need to be treated for preservation: they will spend a lot of time on supermarket shelves, and then even more in storage at home (because we make less frequent trips), so they have to stay edible through all of that. In Europe and other places with similar habits, they will be fresher when bought (because stock rotates) and when consumed (because they are bought closer to when they are used). And as such, they can be less treated for storage, and fresher for use. 

So more trips to the grocery store can actually mean better food.

Again, I would make a larger urbanist claim related to this: like grocery design, urban design should focus differently than it does in the US by focusing more on what actually makes people happy. Like our grocery stores, US cities have the wrong focus. Our groceries focus on making sure food doesn't spoil by itself without considering if "eaten before it spoils" might be more important than "takes longer to spoil." Our cities focus on making sure cars can move through without wondering if "fewer cars" or "more positive reasons to stop and do something" might be more important than "cars don't have to wait."

Fewer car trips, and more local amenities, might matter more than a faster freeway.

2. Leave Room for Improvisation 

A weekly grocery trip and a multipack of ingredients implies a planned existence, or at least one that is predictable and relatively invariant. A daily trip means more room for changing plans and new ideas (successful or otherwise).

When the norm is to buy small amounts and use them up, you can more easily take a risk with a recipe, a new prepared food, or something else. If you have to buy 5 lbs (since we're American) of flour to use 2 tbsp for a recipe, you're either wasting food or really committing to making that recipe a lot.

More frequent trips come with smaller packages, and both create space for more improvisation in life, and greater flexibility in plans even when there are plans.

This too can expand to greater urbanist implications. A big point of 15 minute cities is to let you change routine if you want or need, because nothing is so far away that you have to center your whole day on planning around it. So many American cities plan their transit and urban design more generally around predictable commute patterns, rather than flexibility. There's a reason a lot of European planners speak of "regional rail" when Americans would say "commuter rail."

Not to put too fine a point on it, but a model that allows for more flexibility and improvisation promotes human flourishing more.

3. Fewer Food Deserts

And of course one side of the pond is likely to have fewer food deserts than the other, because fewer, smaller stores means they spread out across the cities more. Rather than having a single store that everyone from a given area drives to, European cities are more likely to have several smaller ones that might have overlapping walksheds but end up closer, on average, to a given spot.

That doesn't mean Europe doesn't have food deserts. It just means that they way their system is typically set up means they have fewer, especially in large cities.

What do you think? How often do you go to the grocery store, and what do you notice about how that reflects larger currents in your life?

Comparison Is (Not) Odious

So the Quad Cities isn't a European capital London, Paris, or Madrid, but it also isn't a major US city like New York, Chicago, or DC. It's not a large city (or a combined large city). But that doesn't mean that we can't compare it helpfully to other cities that do urbanism differently--and, often, better.

Not that everything here is bad, of course. Have some Duck Creek to tide you over as we look at some similarly-sized international cities from which I think we could adopt some ideas.

Just for clarity: I'm working from this estimate of the Quad Cities as about 380,000 people spread over 170 square miles, with about 1/3 in Iowa and 2/3 in Illinois to find similar-ish sized places, primarily in population, for comparison.

1. Utrecht, Netherlands: Connections Are Power

Utrecht, in the Netherlands, has a population of just about 370,000. But while the Quad Cities has desultory, mostly-hourly bus service, Utretcht has three tram lines, and multiple frequent bus lines. It also has a highly developed cycling network, not to mention multiple heavy rail lines to the rest of the Netherlands.

All of these build on each other, and I'm certainly not claiming that the Quad Cities could develop any of these kinds of connections overnight. But they speak to the value of connecting place to place by something other than a car: at least partly because of these connections, Utrecht has a strong knowledge economy, including serving as a hub for university life, transportation, and even gaming. Obviously that is also a feedback loop: the more desirable things a city has, the more people will want to connect to it. But it's important to note that Utrecht hasn't had to become huge to have these things; it just has to move the same number of people around as we do in the Quad Cities.

2. Nice, France: Embrace Natural Advantages

Nice (pronounced like the counterpart of nephew, not the adjective) has about 350,000 people. It's also pretty well-connected, with four tram lines and a high-speed connection to Paris. But if I made all of these about who has trams and who doesn't, this would be boring--and besides, Nice is at the end of a lot of its connections, whereas Utrecht was in the center--you can decide for yourself which fits better to the Quad Cities.

Rather, I want to suggest that Nice has taken full advantage of its geographical position in a way that the Quad Cities have not. We have relatively little ecotourism, despite the mighty Mississippi flowing right through the middle of town, and our connections to other population centers that might fuel such activity are minimized rather than maximized. No, we are not a Mediterranean resort town (or towns), and I acknowledge that replicating the specifics of Nice are unlikely. But we could certainly be better-connected to the other cities around us, and try to focus on what nature has given us more than we do. Huge amounts of our riverfront, especially in Iowa, are taken up by industry or (worse) departed industry, and there is relatively little emphasis given to artistic and cultural engagement with the natural landscape. What there is works well--or at least I think it does--but it's not a major focus of civic engagement.

Nice has a lot of cultural, non-transportation and non-housing amenities that we cannot directly replicate, but that we might try to take inspiration from.

3. Cork, Ireland: Revel In Distance

Perhaps this is the opposite of my lesson from Utrecht, but Cork, Ireland (population: only 220,000, about the size of the Illinois side of the QC) takes advantage of the very distance from other places to embrace an outsize importance despite small size. Cork has multiple universities, a major arts scene, and several major industrial employers. It embraces the fact that the larger city that dominates international perceptions of the country (Dublin) is fairly far off--if we're not going to actually connect to Chicago, perhaps that's a better model.

In some ways, of course, you might say Cork is more like Iowa City than it is the Quad Cities, given the massive presence there of U of I. But to me that's just a covert way of saying that we don't have to look to international models to see some productive urbanism. We can and should be more like these European cities of a similar size--but we could and should also be more like some of our own neighbors, which have managed to produce more vibrant urbanism even under very similar conditions.

Shel Silverstein, Urban Planner

In college, I was technical director on a production of An Evening With Shel Silverstein, a surprisingly (?) raunchy production written by the famous poet. 

That doesn't, however, mean that I like seeing his most famous, more child-friendly, work repurposed into urban planning circles.

I'm talking, of course, about Where The Sidewalk Ends.

Sidewalks ending is, in fact, one of my biggest complaints about urbanism in cities that might otherwise do better (see: New York losing to Vancouver). So today I wanted to talk about the issue of when and why sidewalks end--and why it sucks.

1. Sidewalks Should End With Purpose

Since I do not, in fact, wish to see the entire world covered in concrete and asphalt, I do agree that sidewalks have to end.

I'll even acknowledge that there are roads where there should not be sidewalks: fast roads, interstates, that kind of thing, places where walking would be inherently dangerous. There should be alternate routes around those of course, but a sidewalk might end when it reaches such a place if there is nowhere else to go.

But it shouldn't feel random or pointless.

And it really shouldn't feel pointed, as in the example above: this is literally feet from my local Hy-Vee, near a major intersection with lots of shops in addition to the grocery store, and the sidewalk--which had been perfectly existent before--suddenly ends.

It's not even in anyone's way! There's no reason that this strip should be grass, not sidewalk, because that retaining wall on the right already has people's lawns on it! If anything, this is harder to maintain, since somehow someone has to get down here to mow it!

A sidewalk should end when there's nothing to walk to--not when a landowner or the city is just too bored to put one in.

2. Sidewalks Should Be Functional - Even Under Construction

There is, of course, another way a sidewalk can "end": it can cease to function as a sidewalk, even if something bearing that appearance or name continues. Something like this:

There's no actual option here forward for a pedestrian, let alone for someone in a wheelchair or pushing a stroller/pram/etc. Yes, legally the sidewalk didn't end--but practically it did.

I acknowledge the need to repair sidewalks. I like that they're putting in actual curb cuts (which is what that is for above) near my house. But when they do that, there should be some kind of alternative provided--a protected walking path, or a detour sign, or something. Not just--this.

3. Sidewalks Work As a Network

The reason I emphasize this so much is that sidewalks really work as infrastructure, rather than as mere civil obligation, when they are part of an interconnected network that allows for pedestrian and related access. Yes, it helps to have a sidewalk to go from parking space to shop, but that could just be a parking lot. What sets a sidewalk apart is the ability to keep walking on. To experience the city. To go places on foot--whether from one shop to another after you parked, or actually on foot from the start (assisted or not by public transit). 

Like this Toronto example, a good sidewalk is designed with the idea that people will actually use it to go somewhere. Wayfinding like this is useful, but the bigger point is the width, and the fact that it is part of a whole set of routes so that you can do meaningful wayfinding, because there is a way to find. This kind of pole wouldn't mean diddly in Davenport. In Toronto, it's a way of understanding how you could walk from that spot to other spots in the city.

Sidewalks that end disrupt that network; they make it so that walking both looks like and is less of an option. Both of those matter, by the way: both the appearance (why would I walk here?) and the reality (how could I walk here?). And a sidewalk that isn't there because it ended contributes to both kinds of skepticism. Sidewalks do need to end--but they should do so in chosen ways in chosen places, with the default urban form being one that is actually walkable.

There is one exception to the need for sidewalks, of course: if there's no road to be beside.

But I don't really think that the places where sidewalks randomly end are up to fully pedestrianized streets.

Maybe for a parade.

Not, like this, for always.

What is it like in your city? Do you have a real pedestrian network of sidewalks? Or are you too hoping not to run into a Shel Silverstein poem on your way to the grocery store?

Margins for Error

For much of the last year, my partner's car has been showing various interrelated malfunctions that have kept it in and out of the dealership. For much of that time we've had a loaner car from them, but not all of it -- and not for the last month or so. Instead, and at various points throughout the year, my Aventon Abound has been serving as our "second car," with my partner taking mine (her commute is much longer and harder to bike). 

The trusty steed.

This has given me an appreciation both for my ability to do this and for the limitations that our urban design here in the Quad Cities (and more generally) imposes on someone who is not bike commuting by pure choice (as I have done before while in possession of a working car) but by necessity (as I am now).

And it's doable. We've been doing it. But in doing it, I've become (more) aware of the constraints that operate to let us do it, and the small margin for error that would flip it from possible to untenable.

1. Timing 

The single biggest issue I encounter with biking around the city is how long it takes to get places, and thus the timing of closely ordered events. That is to say: if I get off work at time X, where can I get in time X+5 minutes? X+15?

Biking adds buffer time to all those decisions. It shaves some off too (ask me about not getting in the car line for kindergarten dropoff!). But by and large, the more that things have to be bam-bam-bam tightly scheduled one after another in different locations, the harder biking here gets. Pick up the kids after school? Sure. Do that, then a grocery run? Yeah. Do that, a grocery run, AND get the kid to theatre practice? Maybe we're pushing it, or we need to figure out how to rearrange things to build in more time.

2. Roads

The impetus for this post was the way that the road closures for repairs around my house have us hemmed in. This pushes my bike from safer streets with more space and/or less car traffic to the few roads everyone is going down on their car. This makes things take longer (more traffic), feel less safe (more cars) and often makes for a bumpier ride (the streets they haven't fixed aren't in good repair and now I can't avoid them).

Please fix the dang roads, yes, but also please don't fix them all at once so I have to go with cars.

Also please do fix them; can't say how often a road gets closed but the bike-relevant issues with it don't actually get fixed.

3. Vagaries of Employment 

I am blessed in a job that is close to my house (we bought the house first, so I phrase it that way; one could also say I am blessed to be able to live near work). I am also blessed with a flexible job where I can often do work from home, or on my own schedule, outside of certain ironclad times. 

If either of those things weren't true, yeesh.

Even my partner's job (which can be fairly flexible) is too far and too many evenings to make this doable. Any combination of going further, staying longer, or going back and forth would make this less possible.

And don't get me started on jobs that assume you can move locations midday but don't actually provide transportation for it.

I guess there isn't a lot of conclusion here other than this: I am pretty blessed in my ability to use the bike here the way I do, but it's fragile. In my ideal city design we'd want to make it the opposite: almost everyone would be able to do this, and it would be robust and flexible. For now, I'll count my blessings, but I encourage you to think about how you can or cannot do this in your life--and how your city could change to make it easier.