Making Biking Livable

How do we make biking liveable? By this I don't just mean, how do we make biking pleasant, enjoyable, a part of everyday life that's embraced (as we might mean by liveable cities or a liveable neighborhood). I also mean: how do we make it survivable given the current car dominance of American cities?

I ask because everywhere I go in the US it seems like bike infrastructure outside of the absolute largest cities is basically out to kill its users.

1. The Edges Aren't Options

Here's a fun question: where should I bike here:

Now, I approached this as a pedestrian, so unless you're in the UK it looks like the wrong side of the street. But ignore that; assume I biked back the other way. Where am I to go?

Lots of automotive users will tell me to bike on the sidewalk. That's obviously not an option here. Neither is where I'm actually supposed to bike, on the edge of the shared road. I could bike around the car, and I certainly would, but the whole reason the car is parked on the sidewalk is that there's not really supposed to be parking here at all, and so biking around pushes me out into the middle of the street, where the cars really don't want me either.

How about here?

This is a normal street. No car is parked oddly. But it's also a fast road, and the only way through this area without zigging and zagging a million times. But the only options for biking on it would be the side of a road where cars are zipping past over 40 mph, that is to say 2-3x my speed, or on the sidewalk which is both illegal and not designed for wheels (a conversation for wheelchair users as well of course).

We need to stop pretending that just putting bikes on the edge of the road is giving them space of functionally incorporating them into the city.

2. Don't Squeeze Pedestrians

The reasons I shouldn't bike on the sidewalk begin with the law, but there's reason behind that law--and not just the way sidewalks are often built out of slabs that don't lend themselves well to riding. 

One of them is this: the width of paths designed for pedestrians and only technically incorporating bikes. Yes, the Mississippi River path is gorgeous, and it's underutilized so a bike usually has no problem. But actually passing a pedestrian, or a group of them, here is a bear. And that makes sense: people on foot take a lot less space to safely negotiate their way around each other than people on bikes, due to things like speed and reaction time, and the paths were built with either just pedestrians or pedestrians and very slow bikes in mind. 

Sidewalks for natural reasons do even more of this, and have cars on one side as an added danger.

But now we have both e-bikes increasing speeds and the kind of spandex/road bike combinations that passed me on the Duck Creek Trail last week (no shade, it was impressive! But it's also a lot faster than the trail was designed for).

Now, a wider and better engineered path can work for this; I'm not against shared paths! But all too often if we get bikes out of the gutters on the streets, we just shove them into pedestrian spaces without redesign or accommodation.

3. Plan for Biking 

What this boils down to is that we need to actually plan for biking not as a behavior that we can't eradicate and thus must grudgingly give something to, but as an actual mode of transportation and movement. 

That means space given to bikes independent of the car and the foot traffic. It can share space, if the space is engineered to be shared, like this slightly wider path on the other side of the Mississippi:

But it shouldn't be simply putting bikes where others go and hoping it works out.

That's why spaces that actually acknowledge the bike formally are generally preferable.

Note that there's actually not much if any more space for the bike here than in the trails above; what's been done is to visibly and tactiley separate the bike space, and thus make it so that no road users need to accommodate each other without help from the road design.

I used Boston above, to emphasize this is doable in the US, but of course there's European examples as well, like the classic Dutch street:

The cities may be larger than, say, the Quad Cities, but the streets aren't; do we really think Brady and Harrison, all four car lanes each way, get more traffic than downtown Amsterdam or Boston? 

And if they do, isn't that actually a bigger indictment of how we've organized these much smaller cities around the car?

Biking can be liveable--can be survivable--but only if we actually design streets to make it so.