What A Biking Network Is and Isn't

Recently I was with a bunch of fellow Quad Citizens talking to a potential candidate to move here, and the topic of biking came up. My compatriots were eager to describe the biking trails here--the Duck Creek trail, the twin riverfront trails--as a bike network. 

I was a little less enthusiastic.

That isn't to say that I don't enjoy biking in the QCA. I do! I commute by bike, for goodness' sake, at least when it's not terrible outside. But I think we have a bit of a way to go before we can call our trails a network, and I want to talk about why.

1. Scope

The biggest issue here remains scope. A true biking network needs not just one or two routes, but a whole interconnected system. And not just "roads one could theoretically bike on" but roads, trails, routes you could actually see real bike volume on without creating major problems.

This is part of what makes Dutch (and Belgian/Flemish, as in the photo above) biking distinct from many parts of the world. It isn't just that there are marginal improvements over what we offer here in the QCA; it's that there are deliberate fietsroutes (bike routes) that work together to create a transportation network. This above is LF 5; it crosses the entirety (more or less) of northern Belgium, ending in Bruges where I took that photo.

The 5 is an important part of that photo. This isn't the only one, and of course they link into local lanes along the way.

And for once, comparisons to much smaller countries than the US aren't meaningless; the QCA is much smaller than Belgium, so in our local context a denser network would still make sense, as opposed to claims that there should be a single bike route across the whole US (which would be cool, but hardly of significance to commuters or other high-volume users). An integrated network in a region, though? That's what Belgium has.

2. Scalability

As I mentioned above but want to emphasize here, it's not just about the existence of routes (though those are important!). It's about the idea that they should be routes that a lot of bikes could actually use at once. A route that I can bike on myself is good for me; but if adding more bikes than just me to it would create problems (either conflicts with cars, conflicts with other bikes, conflicts with pedestrians, or just plain lack of space) then we don't have a biking network; we have a personal bike path.

I love my bike, but the lack of other bikes in the photos I take here is meaningful. 

Seattle here is doing a bit better.

The Dutch are on another level, though.

These pictures are of bike parking, which is a significant part of scalability, because if there's nowhere to put the bike when you get somewhere that means fewer people will bike (shoutout to Temple Emanuel for installing the bike rack above! Thanks guys!). But it's also about the actual paths. I do a lot of biking on this kind of thing in the QCA:

Ignore the piled up water (itself a problem, but bad drainage can happen on an otherwise good bike network too). It's just...a residential street. It lacks cars because it lacks density, but it's not actually optimized otherwise for bike use at all (see, bad drainage, for example). If there were suddenly 20 of me, we'd fill it up and create a massive traffic jam, not to mention the problems with the cars that would develop.

Toronto's bike lanes aren't actually wider, but they're designed for use: 20 of us biking here will bike through here, not bothering cars or pedestrians or anyone else, and we'd know where to be and where to go from the design. Not to mention the visible grate that would keep the water off ;).

The street alone doesn't scale up; actually intentional design can.

3. Optimization

A truly good bike network goes beyond these two, however, and provides benefits other transit options don't, because of the distinct benefits of the bike.

One of these is that the routes for bikes can go places that routes for other transit, including cars, can't, or can't for similar prices and difficulties of construction. Sorry to go back to the Netherlands here, but they do really do it well--and here near Amsterdam Sloterdijk, this bike path literally goes places no other approach (except walking on the parallel path from which I took the picture) does. It can go over things because a bike path needs less support than a car, bus, or train route due to the lighter weight of vehicles. It can go through places that are narrower, for similar reasons.

This means that a bike network can unlock options that other transportation options don't provide, rather than simply paralleling other routes.

And it can integrate well with other modes, to build something bigger than the sum of its parts, as the view from that same bike path shows (hello tram, pedestrians, and bike parking). 

So I would love a true bike network in the QCA: expand things like the Duck Creek and Riverfront Trails (which do, to be clear, provide routes that can't be exactly duplicated on the road network), build them into a full system that covers the whole area, scale them up to allow greater traffic volumes). But we aren't quite there yet, and it's a bit disingenuous to tell newcomers that we are.

Traffic, Timing, and Clockfaces

One of the most common reasons I hear (both in person and in writing) for preferring using a car over public transit is control: the idea that with a car, I have control over when I go somewhere, how fast I get there, etc.

And superficially, this is true.

But I was thinking last week as I was stuck in traffic again (and that is becoming more common in the Quad Cities than it used to be--and of course has been common for a long time in some cities that I know well, *cough* Seattle *cough*) that this is not really as true as we want it to be. 

It's certainly easy to claim that a car allows me to control and predict when I'll get places, because it's jibes with everything we've been told all our lives in the USA about self-determination and individualism: no one knows my needs like me, I need to do it myself, I can do it best alone. And it may be that no one else on the street is going exactly where I'm going from where I'm going at the time I'm going. But that doesn't actually mean that good public transit (to be fair, something most US cities don't have) isn't more useful than a car for actually getting where you want when you want predictably and controllably.

1. Accurate Transit Schedules Are Predictable

This is perhaps obvious, but the main tool for this is that, unlike my car (no matter how much Google Maps tries to), public transit has a schedule. If that schedule is accurate--whether consistent by the hour like clockface scheduling in Switzerland or just never late to an extreme degree like the Jet Lag boys found in Japan--it actually gives me more power to determine when I'll be where than a car does.

Now, UK trains might not be the best example for this, but consider this board: it tells me when the trains are coming (should come) and where they'll call. Every single stop has its own designated time as well, which I can see on a schedule. If these trains run on time (which is largely a matter of design and investment, rather than the whims of fate) I can decide to take one and get to a place at a predictable time.

This relies on a few factors, of course. Right of way is the biggest. 

Not to be too on the nose, but there's a reason that this Amtrak timetable only shows the current time, not the scheduled one. Amtrak is notoriously late because while it legally should have priority on its tracks, in practice it doesn't. And the same is true of many bus systems, on the more local level:

There's a bus up there, but it's just in the same traffic as everyone else, because Toronto (like most cities) doesn't have separate right of way for its buses. 

Tragically, the same is true of their trams as well.

But once you get other traffic, whether trains or cars, off the transit's right of way, you create a more effective system--one in which it is actually more predictable to use transit than a car.

2. Virtuous Cycles

There's a reason my CityBracket competition was dominated by cities with extensive and growing transit systems. It's not just because I like them; it's because more transit tends to be more effective transit, and there's virtuous cycle of having more connections, more transit-only or at least transit-preferred rights of way, and more of the city area covered directly by transit--as well as more people living near each other.

Density and transit-oriented development lend themselves to people being able to and willing to use transit, and that in turns produces more demand for density and transit for development to orient itself on--witness Vancouver, above.

The system map, like Boston's here, is a good guide to this (though note that not all maps show the same levels of transit--as with these two maps of London). Bigger and more extensive systems allow for more use of transit, and less of cars. This much is obvious. But they do it not just by having more areas literally served, but by a near-exponential increase in the ability to predict how a trip will go: the more transit-oriented a city, the more (generally) you can assume that the trip will actually proceed as scheduled and planned, and the more options you have if something goes wrong (just like with a slowdown or a street closure in a car--freedom isn't just about being the one in charge of each vehicle). 

And of course, the ability to interchange makes a big difference--to the point where some transit advocates think that proposed free buses in NYC are an issue because they make transfers between modes more difficult.

The convergence of multiple forms of transit is a force multiplier, as here in Amsterdam.

3. Who Gets Grace

The real distinction, I think, comes down to what we blame for problems--or rather, what we don't. When people drive this, they don't place the blame on the car itself if something goes wrong.

I might blame other drivers, or traffic, or the road design, but not the fact that I'm in a car. That's the default!

But if I take this instead, I'm more likely to blame the bus for being late than the same factors that delayed the car.

Literally the same traffic--these pictures are from the same trip.

And while this is from Boston, not Indiana, the same is true if people take the train: delays get blamed on the mode, not on the day, on chance, or any other factor. We give grace to the car because it is transparent: it is for so many of us the absolute default mode of getting anywhere, and so blaming the car would be like blaming the fact that we chose to go anywhere at all. Transit, by contrast, is treated as a choice, and therefore as a potential factor in a delay in a way that the car is not. With transit the problem is seen as a problem of the transit mode; with cars, it's a problem of that trip. 

If we extended like grace to transit, we'd see that in many places it's at least as predictable and effective as a car (at least if it exists--too many US places just literally don't have it, or more than hourly at any rate). 

Giving that grace in turn provides transit a chance to build up to those virtuous cycles, and to be extensive and predictable enough to make trips much, much more predictable and controllable than any single vehicle can be.