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Because they can go further they will go further.
Many Dutch people cut back or halt driving in their midseventies because they don’t feel confident behind the wheel, Kluit explains: “But then they will increase their cycling.
In Odense, more than 81 percent of children ride to school.21
In the United States, by contrast, the most recent annual study by the National Center for Safe Routes to School found that even for students living between one and two miles away, a distance rideable in little more than fifteen minutes, just 2 percent of them cycle.
She has also found that children who live within three miles of a dedicated bike lane are twice as likely to cycle to school as those who do not.25
Carver has found that cycling is a particularly good way to boost exercise levels in teenage girls who might be wary of competitive sports.
without good bike infrastructure, cycling tends to be an activity for the enthusiast rather than the everyday rider, and these are often middle-class people riding relatively expensive bikes.
A more recent Transport for London study in early 2016, following the advent of some better bike routes, found black and minority ethnic Londoners were now just as likely to be regular cyclists as white people in the city.30
the cost to the environment and to people’s health isn’t fully reflected in the price we pay to drive.”
driving, worldwide, needs to be disincentivized by being made more expensive.
One 2012 study from the UK, however, estimated that emissions from road transport contributes to about 40 percent of air pollution deaths.37
This high respiration rate means that, overall, cyclists tend to absorb more pollutants than drivers, according to Dr. Audrey de Nazelle, an expert in air pollution at Imperial College London. However, she stresses, the benefits of physical activity still massively outweigh the risks, barring “very extreme conditions”
Paris introduced emergency antismog rules to allow only cars with odd or even car registration numbers on alternate days, and now has a monthly ban on all cars in parts of the center.
The study worked out that if every EU nation reached Danish cycling levels, this would on its own make up between 5 percent and 11 percent of the emissions reductions needed to reach the bloc’s official 2020 emissions targets, and would be between 57 percent and 125 percent of the reduction needed in transport emissions.
A separate US report in 2015 worked out that e-bikes can often be more energy efficient per passenger kilometer than many rail systems.
If the global share of urban journeys made by bike even rose slightly from the current 6 percent or so to 11 percent in 2030 and 14 percent in 2050, this would cut overall emissions by 7 percent (in 2030) and then 11 percent (in 2050).49
“Transportation is not an ideology, it’s not a left or right thing,” she told me. “It’s about taking a look at the capital asset we have and using it in the most effective way possible.
He sees it as a vast waste of resources, pointing to research showing that in Manhattan, almost a third of drivers at any one time are looking for on-street parking, a figure that rises to 45 percent in Brooklyn.15
A 2012 study by German academics worked out that just road crashes, pollution, and noise from cars cost $420 billion a year across the EU, or about $850 per man, woman, and child, much more than was raised
“A bicycle way that is not safe for an eight-year-old is not a bicycle way.”
Lanes marked with just paint won’t do it. In fact there’s evidence that in some cases this can be worse than nothing.
Another fundamental element of a useable and accessible bike network is that on smaller roads, where separation for bikes is not practical, significant speed differentials should be addressed by getting cars to slow down to about 20 mph at the absolute maximum.
In many cities in the Netherlands a trip that might take ten minutes by bike could be more than twice as long by car, even if you can park at the end of it. So lots of people cycle.
One of the most celebrated examples is New York. Data from the city’s department of transport shows that from 2000 to 2014, as cycling levels grew almost 450 percent, the number of cyclist deaths stayed fairly stable, between about fifteen and twenty, while the number of severe injuries fell from 440 to 341.23
From 2000 to 2014, as cyclist numbers across London rose by 225 percent, and by much more than that within the center, the number of riders killed or seriously injured per year stayed level.
if you look at recent examples of change, the slightly sad truth is that now, whether or not your city gets bike lanes often comes down to individual politicians, and sometimes just luck.
Portland sees an impressive-by-US-standards 7 percent of all trips made by bike,
Chris Boardman—the British Olympian and Tour de France cyclist–turned-campaigner for cycling—says he has a standard rejoinder to those who tell him they oppose the construction of new bike infrastructure. “If anybody wants to object I totally respect that,” Boardman says. “But I would say: if you’re going to object you must give me a viable alternative. I think that’s a fair way to have any kind of debate or discussion.”
“I don’t usually ask people about traffic or bike lanes,” says Saskia Kluit. “I ask them: what sort of environment do you want? Because there’s not a single person who will raise his hand and say, ‘I want to live next to a busy car road.’
ninety-pound child is seen as facing an almost equal burden of responsibility for traffic safety as does an adult driving a one-ton vehicle.
You don’t make cycling safe by obliging every rider to dress up as if for urban warfare or to work a shift at a nuclear power station. You do it by creating a road system that insulates them from fast-moving road traffic.
“Cycling is a benign activity that often takes place in dangerous environments. Of the three main elements determining serious cycling injuries—the road design and conditions, the motorist, and the cyclist—the cyclist is the most studied.”
The results showed motorists tended to pass him more closely when he had the helmet on, coming an average of 8.5 centimeters nearer.
Yes, a helmet might make you safer if you get knocked off. However, it might also, even marginally, increase the chance that this happens in the first place.
Goodwill was speaking to a parliamentary inquiry into cycling in May 2016 and was asked why relatively so few British women ride bikes, he gave an alarming response. There are several genuine and interconnected reasons for why this happens, almost all connected to poor bike infrastructure. Goodwill, however, breezily recollected how his wife had once told him she worried about getting “helmet hair” if she rode a bike.14 This is the man with ultimate responsibility for cycling in the UK. We should despair.
The research found that, even when a driver was clearly to blame, the focus groups tended to criticize the cyclist, seeing fault as innate to their status.
Crucially, while the drivers were at pains to insist that they themselves were always patient and careful with cyclists, they predicted that other drivers would be notably less so.
The authors argue that as well as seeing cyclists as an outgroup, drivers feel a “strong obligation” to other members of their motor-powered ingroup to not delay them, even if that means passing a cyclist recklessly.
As an aside, more than 90 percent of the incidents were found to be the driver’s fault, though you could argue this was skewed by the expectation that cyclists fitted with cameras for an experiment are less likely to be reckless.
“What is something annoying that a cyclist might do?”26 A wholesome-looking young woman from one of the competing families pushes the buzzer to give what proves the most-given answer: “Ride in your car lane.” Amid the appreciative applause there’s no explanation of what a “car lane” might be, and how it differs to an ordinary lane on the road.
Most of those who saw and played around with the early heat maps were just curious to see where people rode in their own town or city. But one Strava user browsing the heat maps worked for Oregon’s department of transportation, and a thought struck them: could this be useful for planning bike infrastructure?
“At first we weren’t really sure what we had,” says Shaw. “Was this just performance athletes? But what we found is that when cyclists are in the urban core they optimize for the same kind of things as everyone else. They’re not trying to race across the city, they’re trying to get there in one piece.”
the gradual demise of private cars would make the suburbs more walkable and bikeable, and thus increasingly pleasant places to live.
Even if you’re a regular driver, chances are your car spends 90 percent or more of its time sitting idle outside your home or in a parking space elsewhere.
Self-driven cars, the futurists believe, could be like a universal and less exploitative version of Uber—the click of an app summons the nearest free automated car. No more private cars—and this is the big hypothetical step—could see the number of vehicles in most cities fall to 10 percent or 15 percent of what it is now. Bingo—lots more space in which to move, and to live, and to cycle.
In his book Roads Were Not Built for Cars, the British writer Carlton Reid explores the fascinating story of how, in the late nineteenth century, it was mainly cycling organizations that led the lobbying for properly paved highways.
In 2015, Oslo, the Norwegian capital, announced plans to completely ban private cars from its compact city center within four years, in part to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
“It’s so old-fashioned in my eyes. The private ownership of a car—that will end in the next ten to fifteen years.
“Why on earth would you make a big investment that you just leave outside ninety-five percent of the time and don’t use it?”
But his hope, Johnson explained, was that London could see the current 3 percent or so of trips made by bicycle shoot up to 20 percent. This was, he agreed, “a big ask” but very possible. Typically for him, Johnson phrased the serious intent within a joke. “It was twenty percent in 1904,” he said. “What’s the point of being a conservative if you can’t turn the clock back to 1904? That’s what I want to know.”7
