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.