Bike Infrastructure as Virtuous Cycle

 This article about bikes in Cambridge, MA suggests an unsurprising result: making it easier to bike places makes more people bike.

But while this is obvious, it is also massively controversial, as many efforts to make it easier to bike are routinely "refuted" by pointing out that few people bike anywhere right now.

The Catch-22 should be obvious, but let's try to unpack it here.

1. The Easier The Better

Look, I love biking, but I didn't start actually commuting by bike, transporting my children by bike, or doing other errands--I wasn't on my bike often--before I got an e-bike.

That's because with the current infrastructure where I live, here in the QCA, and with my current levels of fitness, and with the weather, and so on and so forth, it was hard to bike consistently or for any serious purpose. I know this because I had in fact commuted by bike before, in Seattle, without an e-bike. But the activation energy here in the QCA was higher than that, until I got the e-bike.

Not everyone needs an e-bike. The e-bike here is an example: biking needs to be a certain kind of easy to actually happen. For me that was e-bike here, but it was better bike lanes (and worse car options) back in Seattle. Better infrastructure will make it easier for everyone to bike, and that will make people do it.

2. Connections Connect

Again, we are explaining the obvious, but a connected set of lanes and trails will make it easier to get from place to place. 

A bike lane or trail that goes somewhere will help more than a bike trail that just exists like the one above. Even if you have an e-bike, or calm traffic, or some kind of other easiness that gets you on the bike, you want that to translate to actually using the bike frequently or regularly. And for that, having more infrastructure isn't just a matter of making biking easier; it's making biking effective. 

So building infrastructure creates connections that weren't there before. Especially for bikes, where there are chances that the connection may not be actually bikeable (say, if it's on a freeway or a high-speed road with minimal shoulder) or only bikeable if you're brave or desperate, built connections are critical to making biking not just easier but possible.

3. The Power of Crowds

Biking is also something people are more likely to do if they see others do it, or know others are doing it. So better bike infrastructure also draws in people who may not have been its first customers, but are still part of the change.

Bikeshare can help with this (this mostly empty bikeshare in Toronto implies that people are using the bikes). But it's really visible infrastructure with people biking on it that brings others in.

The host of bicycles at Sloterdijk makes a more compelling argument for biking in Amsterdam than any bikeshare could.

Another Amsterdam street scene, just to pound the point home.

Seeing others use bikes is the best way to get a bike culture going. Arguably, it's the only way. And better bike infrastructure employs points 1 & 2 above to make point 3 happen. Of course there's a virtuous cycle at play here: once people bike, you can no longer deny that they will.