Author: Tom Babin Page 16 of 17

Tom is an award-winning author and journalist who has written about cycling for years. He is the author of Frostbike: The Joy, Pain and Numbness of Winter Cycling, a bestselling exploration of getting around on two wheels throughout the year. He has delivered speeches about cycling around the world, and is often in the media addressing issues related to cycling. For several years, he wrote the Pedal blog for the Calgary Herald. He lives in Calgary.

Tale of Two Cities: Vancouver flourishes as a bike city, while Toronto is mired in yesterday’s battles

By Tom Babin

On July 20, 2016

In Cities

A decade ago, riding a bicycle in Toronto and Vancouver was, in some ways, a similar experience.

Two of Canada’s biggest cities, both had dense and walkable urban cores, but little in the way of bike-specific infrastructure, so riding through the city could be a harrowing experience. Both cities had thousands of cyclists who were keen on getting around safely, but there were also those who hated the idea of carving out space for cyclists, so fierce debates played out in the media and the local pubs over the idea of bike lanes.

Since then, the two cities went in different directions, and the results are palpable. At least, they are palpable if you were reading the local papers this weekend.

In Toronto’s Globe and Mail came yet another column lamenting the “Mad Max” scenarios between cars and drivers. After witnessing a frightening confrontation between a motorist and a cyclist, columnist Elizabeth Renzetti said summer in her city feels like “Death Race 2016.”

Over on the west coast, in contrast, the Vancouver Sun ran a long piece about the blossoming of businesses located along new(ish) separated bike lanes. The feature even quoted the leader of a downtown business group that was once hostile to bike lanes, who said there has been a “sea change” in attitudes toward cycling, as many business groups embrace the burgeoning scene and the spendy nature of those cyclists.

Bike routes good for business. #bikeyvr Chain reaction: Vancouver's burgeoning bike routes spin off new businesses https://t.co/hawP1MzwNX

— BikeMaps.org (@BikeMapsTeam) July 19, 2016

Neither piece is, of course, completely representative of their respective cities (Renzetti’s column is a tad dramatic, and the Sun’s piece is a tad optimistic), but they both are further signs of how much their respective cities have changed (or stagnated) for cyclists in the past decade.

First, Toronto: After an ambitious plan from city hall in the 1990s, Toronto went through a bikelash the likes of which few cities have experienced. After making some headway on the plan, late crack-smoking suburban populist Rob Ford was elected mayor in 2010, and he promptly went about dismantling what little progress the city had made for cyclists. With typically wrong-headed rhetoric, one of Ford’s first acts as mayor was to remove a recently installed bike lane. “The war on cars is over,” he famously said.

Six years later, a more forward thinking and reasonable regime is leading city hall, and the plans for making the city better for cycling are slowly being dusted off. In a city that is filled with so many bicycles only the willfully ignorant could deny their place with a straight face, those lost years are taking their toll. Progress is finally being made, which means the growing pains of its transportation infrastructure are being acutely felt, and the result is those portrayals of a bottled-up sense of hostility on city streets, confrontations, raging debates in the press, and those “Mad Max” analogies.

That scenario might sound familiar to Vancouverites. The city was within the throes of its own George Milleresque dustup over bikes just a couple of years ago, when plans to add a bike route sparked street protests, allegations of class warfare and general unpleasantness directed toward those on two wheels. The turnaround has been swift, with formerly hostile business owners making a complete turnaround, cyclists flocking to the new routes, and city planners trying to keep their I-told-you-so smirks in check.

That may seen a dramatic flip, but it’s not atypical. The controversies that dog bike-lane proposals seldom last long, often because well-planned and well-executed projects quickly prove their worth and then fall from the minds of reasonable people who were once opposed. That tends to leave those dug-in opponents looking like lonely cranks, like this guy.

https://twitter.com/PeterDormaar/status/626836873009238016

What worked in Vancouver, and in so many other cities, was the political courage to back a project that was well-conceived but contentious. Not every project will work, but sometimes giving them a try is worth the pain.

Toronto is a different city than Vancouver, with its own unique transportation and political problems, but you can’t help but wonder if those bike plans had been implemented all those years ago, Mad Max would exist only on Netflix.

Here’s what happens to your bike ride when thousands of more cars are added to roads

By Tom Babin

On July 13, 2016

In Cities

You’ve been there, even if you haven’t consciously been there: Riding your bike down a typical city street feeling squeezed from all sides, unable to see past the next intersection, worried about being doored and generally unwelcome on what should be public space.

Why do you feel that way? Because the street looks like this:

There’s nothing wrong, technically, with this street. These scenes are everywhere. But the reason you feel all those things is so obvious it’s almost invisible. There are cars everywhere. And I mean everywhere. Crammed along the curbs, congested on the street, taking up space everywhere.

I know you know this. Like me, you’ve read all the statistics about the increasing number of cars on our streets. But maybe you were like me and didn’t really stop to think about what that means to your everyday bicycle commute.

What opened my eyes was a comment from a reader named Stu on my piece a couple of weeks ago about vehicular cycling. Here is part of Stu’s comment.

I can barely remember 1976, but what I do remember is that I could bike down most streets and not encounter a motor vehicle. Today it is the (opposite), no matter how ‘residential’ the street, the chance of not meeting up with a MV is slim. Times have changed, everyone seems to own a car or two and they use them for even the shortest of trips.

Something about Stu’s comment stuck in my head. I started imagining my bicycle commute in 1976. I’d be riding a steel-framed 10-speed in tiny shorts and knee socks, my feathered hair unencumbered by a helmet, and I would pass down a residential street with no cars. It’s almost unimaginable (not the hair, the image of a street with no cars).

So I did some digging into the impacts of increasing car ownership rates on the physical space in a city. Beware incoming numbers:

I live in Calgary, Canada. Back in 2008, the number of registered motor vehicles in the city was 829,030, according to this. By 2015, that number had grown to 1,005,109, according to this. That’s an increase of 176,079 vehicles in about seven years.

Think about how much space that takes up in a city. If each vehicle is, say, five metres by two metres (that’s an estimate, mostly to make the math easier, but it’s in the ballpark), that’s 10 square metres we’ve lost for each of those vehicles. I know they aren’t all on the road at the same time, but no matter how you slice it, occupying 10 square metres more than 175,000 times is a lot of space — 1.76 square kilometres, to be exact.

There’s more. According to the 2011 census, the size of Calgary is 704.51 square kilometres. For the sake of argument, let’s say that number didn’t change much between 2008 and 2015 (the city has grown, but not by much: Calgary’s wise but belated push to reduce sprawl, like basically every other city in North America, means there hasn’t been a big annexation since 2011, and the last major one was in the early 2000s).

A map of a land annexations in Calgary over the years.

That means the number of cars per square kilometre had grown to 1,426 in 2015, from 1,176 in 2008.

Think about the square kilometre around your house, and then imagine cramming in an average of 250 more cars in that space. Guess what? That happened over the last seven years, and you probably didn’t realize it.

Here’s one more thing to think about. I couldn’t find car ownership rates going back to 1976 to test Stu’s memory. But I did find this fascinating study from NYU, which compared vehicle ownership rates around the world between 1960 and 2002. In Canada in 1960, the number of vehicles per 1,000 people was 292. By 2002, that had climbed to 581. Based on a 2015 population of 1,230,915, the number of vehicles per 1,000 people in Calgary in 2015 was a whopping 816.

That isn’t an entirely apples-to-apples comparison, so I wouldn’t base your Ph.D thesis on it, but it does give you an idea of how many more motor vehicles are on the roads these days, and it’s a safe bet a similar story is playing out in other North American cities.

It also helps explain why you sometimes feel like an alien, unwelcome and pushed around, on your own street, when you ride a bicycle.

A well-functioning society of course needs motor vehicles, but Stu, it seems was right — our streets are much different now than they were just a few years ago, never mind back in 1976.

Much of this has happened unconsciously, so maybe a first step in making our cities more friendly is to start thinking about what enabled all those cars, and to take the steps necessary to curb the growth of car-ownership. We all, after all, have to share that space.

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Are our irrational consumer tastes holding us back from more bike-friendly lives?

By Tom Babin

On July 6, 2016

In Bikes

Several years ago, Zak Pashak was in the market for a new bike. Not an expensive carbon-fibre race machine, or a $10,000 status symbol. He just wanted a simple, practical bike that wouldn’t require a lot of maintenance, time or money.

But he was quickly turned off by the athletic focus of the bike shops he visited, where salespeople pushed him toward tricked-out bikes well beyond his needs. Eventually, he found a bike that worked, but the experience planted a seed in his brain.

Today, Pashak is a bit of a folk hero of the American bike scene thanks to his company Detroit Bikes, which uses Motor City mechanical know-how to churn out American-made versions of that bike he had such trouble finding all those years ago: Simple, reliable, sturdy, well-made city bikes without needless bells and whistles.

“I just thought there’s people like me who want to buy a bike, and they can’t,” Pashak told me recently.

DetroitBikesManufacturing from Detroit Bikes on Vimeo.

But the market for such bikes in North American remains small, which leads to a bigger question: Why are so many North Americans reluctant to embrace the kind of bikes Pashak is building? And is that reluctance holding us back from more bike-friendly lives?

Several years ago, I had an almost identical experience as Pashak. After a tough winter of bike commuting, the constant need to fine-tune my slush-saddled commuter bike had sapped my already limited gearhead tendencies. At that point, I was in desperate need of a bike that wasn’t so damn needy.

Yet, I struggled to find one. After months of searching, I finally came across a bike so nondescript I might have missed it had my state of mind been different: Comfortable steel frame, three-speed internal hub, no-fuss matte black finish. It even had coaster brakes — I didn’t even know foot brakes were even a thing anymore.

Years later, I still ride this bike nearly every day, and I love it. It’s the easiest, most practical and efficient ride I own. Best of all, it demands almost nothing from me.

The A-Type by Detroit Bikes.

Such city bikes are much easier to come by these days than even five years ago. But when shopping for a new ride, many consumers, especially those not already immersed in the bike world, tend to default to the standard machines we’ve been sold for several generations now: mountain-bike style frames brimming with gears, often upsold to include suspension systems and carbon parts.

These can be great bikes in the right situations (like, say, scaling a mountain), but for some casual city cyclists, they can be expensive, impractical and sensitive. The risk is bigger than just a consumer choice. If you’re trying to use your bike for more than recreation, it can be completely discouraging if that bike doesn’t support that kind of lifestyle. If you’re bike is uncomfortable, you’re less likely to ride on a sore ass. If it can’t carry stuff, you’re less likely to use it for errands and shopping trips. If it’s loaded with needless gears that are in constant need of adjustments to prevent them from annoying rattling and rough shifting, you’re less likely to choose the bike.

So why do so many of us buy them?

Pashak likens it to the consumer demand for impractical SUVs. Most consumers have no need for off-roading gas-guzzling 4x4s, but they still sell by the bucketload. We tend to have a weakness for aspirational consumer goods, and we conflate stuff with lifestyle.

You really see a contrast when visiting the great bike cities of Europe, which are overflowing with practical, unsexy, well-used bikes in all manner of black. Mikael Colville-Andersen of Copenhagenize says Danes see bikes, not as status symbols, but as household appliances (he likens them to vacuum cleaners, which was an apt analogy, until we also managed to turn vacuum cleaners into fetishized status items. Thanks, Dyson).

I’m not saying everybody needs the kind of bike that Pashak is building — hell, I’ve never even tried a Detroit Bikes model — I’ve just seen how my own practical ride has made it easier to choose a bike as my transportation choice more often. I still love my road bike and my mountain bike, but they stay in the garage when I’m headed to the pub or grocery store.

Where I see hope in this scenario is the always reliable North American quality of laziness. Perhaps the only thing we value more than consumer status symbols is convenience. And if you’re looking for convenience, not much beats a reliable, time-tested, ultra-practical, universally unsexy, plain old bicycle.

How to pass a bike in a car without killing anyone (or being a dick)

By Tom Babin

On June 29, 2016

In Bikes

Some things about driving a car are difficult. Doing a 180-degree e-brake slide into a parking space, for example. Or that famous kickflip in the James Bond movie The Man With the Golden Gun, which was so difficult nobody even attempted to replicate it for 40 years.

Another thing that’s difficult, apparently, is passing a person on a bike. A newish one-metre passing rule that has been adopted in Ontario, but is not yet being enforced, seems so difficult that drivers are outraged. It’s madness, it seems, to think that a grown adult with government-approved driving skills could possibly overtake a cyclist safely. The only options, if you believe the angry reaction, are maiming the cyclist or plunging headlong into oncoming traffic. The law, according to the reasoned comments in this CBC story, is “idiocy,” “sick,” and a “raging double standard.”

We can empathize with the concern. After dominating the roads for the last 60 years with bully tactics and consequence-free killings, learning to share can be a challenge for some drivers.

But we’re here to help. Here are 10 tips for drivers trying to safely pass a cyclist on a road.

Don’t kill anybody.
If you approach a cyclist from behind, wait until it’s safe and then pass on the left, then give the person on the bike a wide berth, at least a metre (that’s about three feet). It’s OK to venture into the oncoming lane when doing so. Crossing that yellow line in this case is legal, and is preferable to killing that cyclist.
If there are cars in the oncoming lane and you can’t get around that cyclist, just wait. There’s a pedal in your car next to the accelerator. If you press it, your car will slow down. Use it to reduce your speed and wait behind the cyclist until it is safe to pass.
But what if there is a lot of traffic in the oncoming lane, and you can’t safely pass the cyclist? Good question. There are a few options here.
1. You could lean on the horn to frighten the cyclist out of the way. Poor option: Dick move, and possibly illegal.
2. You could rev your engine, preferably the six-cylinder type found in a half-ton pickup, and lurch toward the person on the bike to express your displeasure with having to wait. Poor option: Dick move, and possible illegal.
3. You could accelerate and narrowly pass the cyclist, based on the theory that if you are going to endanger a person on the road, you might as well get it over with quickly. Poor option. Now illegal in Ontario, and many other places. Also a dick move.
4. You could just wait until it is safe to pass. Good option. Legal, courteous and compliant with tip No. 1.
But what if you want to obey tip 4d, but you have to wait behind that cyclist for a long time, like for 30 seconds, or even — gasp — a minute? That cyclist is slowing you, and all the people behind you, down too. Must you just sit there and wait until it’s safe? Even if you are in a hurry? The answer: Yep. Remember tip No. 1.
But what if you’re really in a hurry? Like, say, you’re driving your daughter to soccer practice and you’re running a little behind, which means she’ll be punished with a set of pushups? Or you’re returning from an evening out and you want to get home in time for the season finale of the Bachelor, which promises the most dramatic rose ceremony ever, and that cyclist is just riding in that lane like she owns it, without even caring that she’s holding up the people behind her? Must you just sit there and wait, even if it annoys you? Yep. See tip No. 1.
Imagine, for a moment, that person on a bike is driving a different vehicle, like a car. Perhaps a little Honda Civic, or, say, a Lada Riva. And she’s driving that Lada a little below the speed limit, and it’s holding you up. What would you do? You might get annoyed. You might vent a little frustration into your dashboard. But you probably wouldn’t try to roar past that Lada in the little space between the car and the traffic in the oncoming lane. You would probably recognize that person in a Lada has a right to the road that trumps your right to drive the maximum posted speed, even if it’s annoying. Got it? The same applies to a person on a bike.
But driving too slow is against the law, you say. You can’t impede traffic. This is true. Kind of. Most jurisdictions have a law that requires road users to travel at a “normal and reasonable” rate to maintain the flow of traffic. But that doesn’t mean it’s illegal to drive slowly. The posted speed limit is a maximum, not a minimum. And if you are driving slower than that posted speed, you are often required to drive as close to the right of the lane as is practical. If you are on a bike, does “practical” mean that riding unsafely in the door zone, or in a gutter lane filled with dangerous debris and obstacles, just to appease the inpatient drivers behind you? I’m willing to bet most police officers and judges would err on the side of safety, rather than road efficiency or speed (because they see the consequences of reckless driving on the roads). So if you plan on arguing that you absolutely had to squeeze past a cyclist illegally because that cyclist was impeding the normal flow of traffic, good luck. Sure, you might win that argument, but it may be simpler to just wait until it’s safe to pass courteously. See tip No. 1.
If you are a cyclist caught in this situation where you need to ride in such a way that traffic is building up behind you, my sympathies. This situation sucks. It’s stressful and unsafe. Yes, you have a right to do it, but consider those people behind you, and choose to pull out of the way occasionally to let those impatient drivers pass. Or better yet, find another way. Or even better, get your city council to build some separated infrastructure to eliminate such situations.
See tip No. 1. Be safe.

Vehicular cycling is dead, just don’t bury the body yet

By Tom Babin

On June 22, 2016

In Bikes

The biggest argument in urban cycling of the last 20 years is pretty much settled. So why are we still arguing about it?

After last week’s post about the ways Montreal managed to become one of the continent’s most bike-friendly cities, that old saw fired up again. Much of the commentary focused on the perceived shortfalls and benefits of vehicular cycling, which is a a philosophical and practical guide to getting around a city on a bike, described by its chief proponent John Forester like this: “Cyclists fare best,” he wrote in his 1976 book Effective Cycling, “when they act and are treated as drivers of vehicles.”

For a long time, this was a dominant idea among North American bike advocates, but over the last 20 years, a counter theory grew that was, in some ways, the polar opposite. Rather than accepting bicycles as vehicles on a road, the new idea has cyclists being accommodated with dedicated infrastructure that keeps them segregated from cars.

Cue the bicycle culture wars, with factions on each side battling it out like Buckley versus Vidal (or, perhaps more accurately, Hitchens versus Hitchens) to the bafflement of outsiders who could never seem to understand why people who all loved bikes hated each other so much.

Today, the debate is pretty much over. There’s a winner, which means there’s also a loser. Vehicular cycling is dead. As an overarching theory designed to guide the way our transportation system develops, vehicular cycling is a mastodon. Bike lanes are being built everywhere in North America, and civic politicians are tripping over themselves to be seen as bike builders.

So why does vehicular cycling still have its defenders? I think it’s because in our nascent bike cities, vehicular cycling as a personal tool for getting around remains very much alive.

There’s a distinction that needs to be made here. Vehicular cycling is more than just a style of riding. It was a theory of transportation that was never fully adopted anywhere. Treating cyclists as vehicles on the road required more than just cyclists to take the lane. It required equal treatment by motorists and the law. It required mutual respect, the development of better skills among both cyclists and motorists, and the end to what Forester still refers to as the motorist-superiority/cyclist-inferiority complex. That didn’t happen.

What happened instead was some hearty bicycle lovers adopted the tenets of vehicular cycling in the way they got around cities. They started riding in the centre of lanes instead of cowering in the gutter lane. They asserted their rights to the road, and made those cross-traffic left-hand turns that make less confident cyclists gasp in horror. All of which pissed off those drivers who thought they owned the road.

And guess what? This works. This is the part of vehicular cycling that remains alive. If you have the skills and confidence to ride this way, it’s probably the best way of staying safe on the vast majority of North American streets. And even though bike lanes are being built all over North America, it’s going to be a long while before you’ll be able to get to all of your destinations exclusively on safe, separated bike routes.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m a believer in bike infrastructure, and I think it needs to be built faster and more extensively in every North American city. I think vehicular cycling has failed, and it failed because it doesn’t work for the vast majority of people interested in cycling. I was almost giddy when I realized that, during a recent trip to Montreal, decent bike infrastructure meant I almost never had to make one of those hair-raising left-hand turns across rows of cars.

Yet, my city remains far from that state. So while I look forward to the day when I no longer have to rely on the tenets of vehicular cycling I have picked up over the years, I know that, from time to time, I’ll still be taking the lane.

Here’s what happened when one city rejected vehicular cycling

By Tom Babin

On June 15, 2016

In Cities

In the 1970s, an American named John Forester came up with an idea for keeping cyclists safe while riding on busy roads. The idea was that bicycles should be piloted, and be treated, like motor vehicles — riding alongside moving cars, using hand signals and crossing traffic for left-hand turns. The idea, which he called vehicular cycling, caught on, and it soon became the dominant theory of bicycle transportation in North America.

Today, that idea has been almost universally rejected. Cities everywhere are scrambling to do something Forester argued against for generations: building bike lanes separated from cars.

But here’s a thought experiment: What if Forester’s ideas had never caught on? What if, 40 years ago, the idea that all people on bikes should be strong and confident enough to mingle with cars was rejected, and today’s ideas of building safe, bike-specific infrastructure had been embraced back then? What would North American cities look like?

Here’s one idea: They’d look like Montreal.

One of Montreal’s many segregated bicycle paths. Photo: Tom Babin.

Montreal is a fascinating bike city. For much of the past 30 years, the city was nearly alone in North America in building segregated bicycle infrastructure. Today it has grown into a bicycle haven in a continent of car-centricity, perhaps the most bike-friendly city on the continent (sorry, Minneapolis).

So what was different in Montreal that gave it a 30-year-head start? I recently put the question to Jean-François Pronovost, the VP of Public Affairs of Velo Quebec, a cycling advocacy organization that, next year, celebrates its 50th (!) anniversary. He has an interesting theory.

Montreal pioneered the use of bike-sharing systems in North America. Photo: Tom Babin.

First, some background. Around the time Forester was developing his ideas for vehicular cycling, a different approach was developing in Europe. Fuelled by the oil crisis and grassroots protests from citizens horrified by the post-war takeover of their cities by cars and the carnage they had wrought, a few cities started building safe spaces for bikes on city streets. Amsterdam (and much of the Netherlands), and Copenhagen were chief among these cities.

The positives of cycling were also dawning on North American cities at the time (albeit on a vastly smaller scale), but the ideas being embraced were Forester’s. Blind to what was happening and Europe, North American cycling advocates rallied behind the idea of vehicular cycling, and its promise that education and training would be enough to fill the roads with cyclists.

In Montreal, however, things were a little different. A much more robust citizen movement in support of bikes was taking place, driven by several groups, including Velo Quebec, but also by an organization called La Monde a Bicyclette. This group quickly drew attention thanks to the advocacy of Claire Morissette, and the theatrical leanings of Robert (Bicycle Bob) Silverman, who had a knack for making it into the newspapers by doing things such as dressing as Moses while attempting to part the waters of the St. Lawrence River for cyclists because the bridges were too dangerous.

Pronovost was getting started in his bicycle advocacy at the tail end of this era, and he remembers the unique mood in Montreal at the time.

“There was more of a connection to Europe here (in Montreal),” Pronovost says. “The model was the Netherlands. The model was Denmark. We saw that it was a way to bring more people on bikes.”

To outsiders, Pronovost says this approach seemed bizarre. He remembers meeting with bicycle advocates in Vancouver in the early 1990s, who were openly hostile to the idea of infrastructure built specifically for bikes.

“They were very against bike paths,” he says. “We even invited John Forester here for a public debate in 1992. It was like a boxing match,” he says with a laugh.

Undaunted, the Montreal groups continued lobbying and eventually got their wish. The first segregated bicycle path was build on Montreal’s Berri Street in the 1980s, while the idea was being mocked by vehicular cyclists elsewhere.

The first on-street separated bike lane in Montreal was built here, on Berri Street. This is what it looks like today. Photo: Tom Babin.

Montreal, and Quebec, has often embraced its independent status, and that proved true with cycling as well. For the next 40 years, the city quietly grew more bike friendly while the number of bicycle commuters in nearly every other city stayed stagnant, and minuscule.

Today, we know things are changing. Those European ideas of encouraging people to ride bikes by ensuring their safety with segregated infrastructure are being implemented everywhere. In Montreal, the idea is still growing. The difference is a 40-year head start.

This plays itself out in many ways. The province is adopting new laws to protect cyclists, and continues to build for cycling. On a recent visit to the city, I found myself among hundreds of commuters, including Pronovost heading home at rush hour along Laurier Street, where a bustling bike lane was recently installed, dappled with wide pedestrian plazas. While Pronovost stopped at a bakery on the way home for dinner, I marveled at the volume and diversity of cyclists streaming past.

The bike- and pedestrian-friendly spaces around Laurier Street. Photo: Tom Babin.

The result, according to a recent Velo Quebec study, is that, over the past 20 years, 600,000 people have started riding bikes in the province, and 2.7 million people now ride a bike weekly. The network of bikeways in Quebec has grown by 30 per cent since 2010 to reach 12,000 kilometres, while the number of serious injuries continues to drop.

A new bike counter on Laurier Street. Photo: Tom Babin.

Much work remains to make Montreal more bike-friendly — Pronovost thinks more of a focus on completing small connections between existing bike routes would make a huge difference, and my ass can attest to the terrible state of the city’s pavement — but the work in Montreal shows what a difference a long-term commitment to cycling can make.

And as far as thought experiments go, with cities all over the continent just beginning to embark on bike-friendly building binges, just imagine what they will be like in 30 years.

Four ways New York’s bike renaissance can help fix your city

By Tom Babin

On June 8, 2016

In Cities

Streetfight: Handbook for an Urban Revolution, the new book by Janette Sadik-Khan, offers insight into how the former traffic commissioner of New York City overcame decades of planning inertia to put the city on a path to a more human-centred transportation network by improving walking, cycling and public transit.

Street Fight details Janette Sadik-Khan’s transformative time as the transportation czar of New York City.

While some of her experiences are of limited relevance in places that lack the density and pedestrian/transit traditions of New York, there is much applicable for other cities. Here are a few lessons for other cities looking to refocus their transportation networks away from cars and onto people — on bikes, transit and their own two feet.

Sell it on safety

The environmental benefits of walking and cycling are real, but can be a tough sell thanks to the annoying intractability of what passes for modern environmental debate. Likewise, selling bike lanes on the idea of improving traffic is often a non-starter, not because they don’t, but because arm-chair planners have developed a skin of skepticism so thick it’s impervious to logic and evidence. Touting the increased health benefits of active transportation may be a little more effective because it’s a no-brainer, but if nagging people into being more active was an effective strategy, we’d all be a nation of health nuts by now.

What seemed to tip the scales in favour of cycling in New York under Sadik-Khan was the realized safety benefits. Traffic violence, as she calls it, is so pervasive in modern cities that we barely notice it, but the improvements that came about because of the changes in the city were eye-opening. From Streetfight:

On streets with protected bike paths, injury rates for cyclists, pedestrians and people in cars plunged as much as 43 per cent.
On streets with bike lanes, serious crashes were 40 per cent less deadly for pedestrians.
The rate of cyclists killed fell by nearly 75 per cent.
At locations where major engineering changes were made, fatalities dropped 34 per cent.
One small street redesign on Clinton Street lead to a 21 per cent reduction in crashes on the street.
Reducing speeds to 30 mph from 40 (from 64 km/h down to 48 km/h) lowered the chance of death for pedestrians by 50 per cent.
Improving a pedestrian crossing on one busy Manhattan street decreased injuries by 88 per cent.

Considering the blase attitude we continue to display about the inevitability of vehicle violence, these numbers can be sobering.

Jeanette Sadik-Khan

The backlash is inevitable

Not every bike lane project is a good one. Not every street needs a bike lane. But the opposition to even well-planned, well-designed bike routes is eerily similar in every city. New York is no exception, except that everything was magnified.

Sadik-Khan won many of the battles over the streets, but what struck me about her recollections of the debates was their familiarity of the arguments against the lanes, even when such arguments have been disproven in other cities time and again. Opponents said bike lanes would create traffic chaos (they didn’t), they would make the streets more dangerous (they didn’t), they wouldn’t be used (they are), they weren’t justified because the number of cyclists was too low (the number of cyclists grew after lanes were installed), the community wasn’t consulted (one project included 151 public meetings), the city is not Amsterdam and never will be (well, it was once called New Amsterdam, but duh), the city faked the data to justify the project (Sadik-Khan denies this), the bike lane would increase pollution from the exhausts of cars stuck in traffic (data showed traffic actually flowed better on some roads after bike lanes were installed), the bike lane location was arbitrary and wrong (cyclists might disagree), and, not incidentally, bike lanes are ugly (compared to what)?

I’m not saying there is never a good arguments against a bike lane. Bike advocates have a tendency to over promise in their zeal to make their point. The point is that common arguments against bike lanes tend to be ill-informed, wrong and nearly universal. Prepare for them.

Beware of the top-down nature of planning

Like every other book about city building written in the past 50 years, Sadik-Khan evokes the epic battles between grassroots activist (and now urban icon) Jane Jacobs and her nemesis, New York city builder Robert Moses in the 1950s. The lesson most people take from these battles in the importance of giving the community a voice in the way a city evolves. That’s what led to the extensive public consultations whenever city planners do anything except tie their own shoes.

One of the troubling, and ironic, aspects of the modern renewal of pedestrian and cycling infrastructure is how opponents often accuse planners of bullying through projects onto unwelcome citizens. It’s almost a reversal of what Jacobs advocated: high-minded bureaucrats foisting projects onto communities for their own good, all in the name of making the city better for them.

Sadik-Khan makes an interesting counter-argument. She says, in essence, that 60 years of automobile-centric planning has skewed the way planners, politicians and even citizens view their own cities, so it’s difficult for most people to even fathom how to design a street differently than the multi-lane highways that have proliferated since the 1950s. Even if communities aren’t storming city hall demanding a better pedestrian realm, she argues that people are doing just that in their actions, if not always in words.

She recounts dispatching legions of planners to watch the behaviour of people moving through the city. If dozens of people are jaywalking across a specific street, they are, in essence, asking for a better way to cross the road. If cyclists are taking to the sidewalks, it’s because they don’t feel safe riding on the roads and they are, in essence, asking for a bike lane.

She says it’s important to watch for the “desire lines” that people exhibit in their behaviour, and respond to them. That, she argues, is responsive planning, not simply listening to those arguing against every project.

Move quickly

One of the more astonishing aspects of Sadik-Khan’s reign is how quickly she managed to move on projects in a city that seemed intransigent because of the decisions of the past. In only a few years, she managed to build hundreds of kilometres of bike lanes, build new plazas all over the city and pull off projects that once seemed unimaginable, like shutting down parts of Times Square to cars.

Throughout the book, she repeats the mantra that moving quickly and inexpensively to make changes, then assessing them afterward, worked better than the traditional process involving long public consultations and a slow-moving bureaucracy.

I’m not sure this approach is replicable, nor advisable, everywhere. New York’s governance model gave her more power as a commissioner than most city bureaucrats tend to wield. And the risk of moving quickly is alienating neighbours who feel left out of the process.

What might be taken from this experience, however, is the power of bold experimentation. Trying new things as pilot projects, or urban experiments, can loosen opposition and give citizens a more open mind. It can also get projects seen as innovative, or even a little wacky, installed quickly as a trial run, which can lead to more permanent changes later. They key, she says, is to be nimble, keep the costs down and use ingenuity to get the ideas implemented.

Can a cargo bike pass the ultimate test of suburban life: A trip to Costco?

By Tom Babin

On June 1, 2016

In Bikes

The bag of chips, inhumanely large, groaned under the strain when I heard the passerby say it: “Now that,” she said, “is the kind of bike you need for Costco.”

Mercifully, the bag didn’t explode and send a thousand kilograms of quinoa- and chia-infused tortilla skyward, but instead settled nicely into the saddle bags of my Xtracycle, which gave me a chance to collect my thoughts. “Yes, random passerby,” I thought. “This is exactly the kind of bike you need for a trip to Costco.”

This moment came about halfway into my recent urban cargo-bike experiment. After hearing about the benefits of cargo-bikes for years in Europe, I’m finally seeing more and more on North American streets these days. It’s easy to see why. They’re ultra-practical machines, capable of transporting all those loads of suburban life, from children to shopping bags. They’re the minivans of the bike world.

So I jumped at an offer from local bike shop BikeBike to give a cargo bike a whirl. But I didn’t just want a spin around the block. I needed a challenge; the ultimate test of the cargo bike as a modern suburban family vehicle, where I could test if a bicycle really can support our profligate North American consumerist lifestyles with the absurd conveniences we feel entitled to: Yep, a trip to Costco.

I convinced my 11-year-old son to tag along, both to bear witness and also help pick up the stray groceries that I imagined dropping from the bike as we rode home (I envisioned a slow-mo scene in which a barrel of cranberry juice dislodges itself and bounces down a hill before bursting into a tart tsumani that washes a school bus from the road), but since he was more keen to ride himself than suffer the indignity of watching his old man strain to push him up the hills, I turned down BikeBike’s offer a bakfiets. That’s a cargo-bike model you’ve probably seen in photos from Amsterdam, in which effortlessly sexy moms pedal kids sitting in a wooden box affixed to the front forks. Bikebike had such a model that came installed with a child seat that looked Lay-Z-Boy-esque in comfort, but I instead opted for an Xtracycle. On this model, most of the junk was in the trunk — a frame extension on the back could accommodate everything from straddling children to surfboards to, in my case, some massive panniers primed for bulk foodstuffs.

Off we went, on a crisp Saturday morning. The Xtracycle handled more smoothly than I expected. Once I got riding, it felt like any other bicycle, save a rather wide turning radius. It’s not the lightest frame in the world, but I barely noticed its girth or weight while riding. Especially when we managed to discover a multiuse pathway that took us from a quiet residential street past the gauntlet of a big-box retail district, right up to the entrance to the Costco parking lot.

Normally I enter such places on a bike the same way a young wildebeest crosses a crocodile-infested African river. Tentative and alert, I ride almost expecting a GMC Suburban to unexpectedly leap from the shallows and clamp its jaws around my tender rump. But riding the Xtracycle felt different. This was where its additional size finally came to mean something to me. I was the king of the road, bitches, and those GMC Suburbans bowed to me for a change.

Amazingly, this Costco had a well-placed bike rack that looked like it had actually been used before. So we locked our machines, flashed our card, and entered the Shangri-La of bulk retail, where the food samples are plentiful and everybody appears tired.

As far as test experiences go, we knew we had our limits. We wouldn’t be able to revel in an orgy of bulk groceries like we might had we been driving an F-150, but we pushed it as much as we dared. We loaded our cart with the staples on our list and a few giant bags of snacks packaged to make us think they are healthy, and got into the checkout line with hundreds of others who also didn’t want to be there. Before we left, though, we knew we had one more thing to do to make this an authentic Costco experience: I dropped $3 for two foot-long hot dogs, and we headed outside.

As the hot dog rumbled in my gut, I loaded the panniers with our haul. Months worth of granola bars, prepper’s sized boxes of pasta and those faux-healthy tortillas — the bike bags opened wide and took everything we threw at them. A few people stopped to gawk, cargo bikes being rare in these parts apparently, but once I cinched up the panniers with the attached straps, we were good to go.

On the flat bits, the loaded cargo bike felt almost no different than it did before. But I dreaded the uphill, for good reason. This is where I started feeling the weight of all that food. So I quickly gave up any pride in a swift ascent and shifted down to the Xtracycle’s granny gear. With my legs spinning furiously, the hill proved little trouble. Before I knew it, we were cresting the rise near the Lamborghini dealership, where a few bored-by-the-recession salesman stared at us through the windows with dumbfounded looks on their faces. Try hauling this load with your $300,000 Italian engineering, bitches.

About halfway home, things were going so well I decided we might as well do another errand on our trip. This made perfect sense for my suburban family test — no self-respecting suburban mom has time to restrict herself to just one errand on a Saturday morning. So we would do the same.

I took a slight detour and pedalled toward the shop where my lawn mower was in for a sharpening. My mower isn’t exactly a John Deere — it’s a 15-year-old push model — but still, it’s a lawn mower. After a little rearranging, and the help of a few bungee cords, we had it strapped onto the bike. Off we went, my son expressing a mix of dubiousness and embarrassment at the load that was trailing behind me.

The Xtracycle, however, barely batted an eye. Loaded with groceries and a lawn mower, we turned toward home barely breaking a sweat (Ok, I sweated a little bit) where a neighbour, out gardening, stood and stared wordlessly as we rolled by.

As we unloaded, I felt a little pride in the Xtracycle. It passed this suburban test with barely a flinch, and I had grown a little attached to this big-hearted giant, in the same way you feel about Andre the Giant in The Princess Bride. Only later did I read that the bike is built to haul hundreds of pounds of gear — one person later told me he once used a cargo bike to move all of the furniture from his home — so our load, as impressive as it felt to us, was child’s play.

But hauling capacity isn’t everything. The experience did prove that cargo bikes can live up to their claims of convenience and versatility. I reluctantly returned the ride after the test, thinking about all kinds of things I could do if I had my own cargo bike. Next stop: Home Depot.

The sharing economy comes to bikes, but can it replace the government?

By Tom Babin

On May 25, 2016

In Bikes

Spinlister is a cool little app that just feels right. It brings the so-called sharing economy to the world of bikes in a no-brainer, intuitive way.

But the company is aiming higher than its modest Airbnb-type success so far, and betting on an even bigger idea, if only it can get it off the ground: Can the convenient borrowing of somebody else’s bike replace the need for a government-operated bike-sharing?

Spinlister already offers an Airbnb-style app, but has bigger plans to make bike-sharing easier.

Company officials sure think so. Andrew Batey, Spinlister’s Chief Marketing Officer, told me the company didn’t set out to replace bike-sharing, rather they were simply trying to solve a customer need.

On its most basic level, Spinlister enables the sharing of personally owned bikes. If you have a bike with some downtime, you list it for rent on the app. People who need a bike log into the app, search for those on offer nearby, and go pick up the bike for the pre-designated rental time, with the app handling the financial transaction. It’s Airbnb for bikes, a slick and easy sharing app (that, not incidentally, also works for snowboards and skis) that makes a whole lot of sense.

But the company has bigger plans, and this is where things get really interesting. Traditional public bike sharing thrives on little, impromptu trips. Unplanned rides rides home from the pub. Commutes on sunny days when the bus is full. Last-mile commutes, from the train station to the front door of the office. Not the stuff Spinlister currently thrives on.

The company, however, has developed a so-called “smart” bike (I know, that term makes me roll my eyes too) that Batey says has the potential to do away with traditional bike-sharing systems and their taxpayer-funded costs.

Spinlister’s “smart bike” enables bike-sharing of privately owned machines.

Here’s how it would work (or skip this paragraph and watch the video below): In a nutshell, it’s Car2go for bikes. The bikes are equipped with GPS and nifty Bluetooth-enabled locks. Using a smartphone app, you locate a bike nearby, track it down, then unlock it. You go about your ride, then lock the bike anywhere you want, while the app takes care of the rental-fee transaction. Another tap on the app makes it available to the next rider. No need for docking stations like a traditional bike-sharing program.

Spinlister – The Global Bike Share: Challenges Traditional and Broken Bike Share Model Through Advanced Technology from Spinlister on Vimeo.

But there’s one more important aspect. Each bike, rather than being bought and paid for by program administrators (which, with traditional bike-sharing programs, tend to be government agencies) is privately owned. The rental fee is split by the owner of the bike and Spinlister.

Batey says this idea eliminates the need for taxpayer-funded programs and big, sometimes controversial, rollouts of docking stations.

“To date, there has been no bike share (except ours) that is sustainable without government funding and private sponsorship,” Batey wrote to me in an email. “Through back channels, (politicians have) said their reasoning is self preservation. When bike share fails and needs more funding, it will be the problem of another administration. Until then, it’s seen as a win with popular support. That just seems like a significant waste and misuse of funds to me. Especially when a self sufficient option exists, costing the city absolutely nothing to implement.”

If that quote sounds perhaps a tad, well, conspiratorial, Batey might have good reason. Plans to launch the idea in Portland last year were scuttled by the city government, ostensibly over concerns that Spinlister’s plan would have negative impacts on the city, such as the city being forced to pick up the costs of dealing with bikes that are stolen, parked illegally, or left to rust in poor locations. There were other concerns as well, and Batey minces few words (even if others might disagree with his read of the situation): “The city there threatened to create a special tax just for us as they didn’t want us competing with their traditional bike share model they’ve been trying to launch for 10 years.”

Many traditional bike-share systems, such as Chicago’s Divvy, rely on docking stations that can be difficult to place in dense urban areas.

This kind of reaction seems to be what’s holding Spinlister back. Yes, there are some outstanding questions that even the company acknowledges need to be ironed out in the real world, but the company is largely ready to go. It just can’t find a city willing to give it a shot. Most cities these days have well-established bike-share programs and city governments aren’t interested in competition. Somehow, before it has even had a chance to test its business model, Spinlister has found itself to be the Uber of the bike world, at odds with city governments everywhere.

But there’s little doubt the idea is worth a try somewhere. So what will it take?

What the company really needs is a city that is big enough to sustain the business, with a decent bike culture, a populace that understands the sharing model of Car2go, lacks an established bike-share program, has a soft-spot for entrepreneurialism and a hard-spot for government spending.

Sound like a city you know?

In fact, I already signed up to buy one of the smart bikes if the idea ever takes hold in my city of Calgary. Perhaps living in a bike-share-laggard city will pay off in the end.

Behold: the ultimate tool for transforming our cities, the humble camera

By Tom Babin

On May 17, 2016

In Bikes, People

For all the work that goes into making streets safer and more welcoming for cyclists, consider perhaps the greatest and most under-appreciated tool of this transition: The ubiquitous camera.

Street photography is nothing new, of course. From Henri Cartier-Bresson to Robert Frank, impromptu moments from city life have always been at the forefront of photographic art.

Henri Cartier-Bresson’s famous Hyères, shot in 1932.

You could even argue the first photograph ever taken of people was street photography.

“Boulevard du Temple,” a daguerreotype made by Louis Daguerre in 1838, one of the world’s first photographs to include people.

That influence has only grown in recent years, from blogging (the Sartorialist) and then social media (Humans of New York, everything on Instagram that isn’t food). And thanks to that little computer in your purse that happens to have a camera lens attached to it, sdtreet photography these days transcends even its own medium and helps define the esthetic of cities.

That’s why it’s evolved into such a powerful tool for urban cycling. Consider Mikael Colville-Andersen’s Copenhagen Cycle Chic, which spawned imitators all over the world.

https://flic.kr/p/sgMcK

The original Copenhagen Cycle Chic photo by Mikael Colville-Andersen.

Cool photos, right? But because these photos involve bicycles, and everything about bicycles these days is political, this type of photography is inherently political.

In Toronto, during 2011 and 2012, photographer Lincoln Clarkes captured dozens of images that became Cyclists, a book of photography of people on two wheels, most of them looking sexily non-plussed despite the hostile environment surrounding them at the time. While not overtly so, the politics of these photographs is obvious considering Clarkes shot them at the height of late mayor Rob Ford’s anti-bike backlash, when the ever-thoughtful mayor compared riding a bike in Toronto to swimming with sharks.

A shot from Lincoln Clarkes’s Cyclists.

In the book’s forward, Clarkes is quoted saying the photographs serve as “sexed-up, environmentalistic, fashionesque portraiture, which is a subtle protest against the petro-chemical and automobile industries.”

Here in Calgary, a bike-loving man named Peter Oliver has started a formal project to harness the political power of bicycle street photography. He’s part of a group that rallied support for the adoption of a pilot project of downtown bike lanes last year, and now he’s hoping to solidify that support by giving people a glimpse into exactly what those bike lanes have wrought: People on bikes.

https://www.instagram.com/p/BFXSapHlTCQ/

Oliver hopes showcasing photographs of everyday cyclists in Instagram will help dispel the notion that all cyclists are latte-sipping hipsters or angry Lyca-clad suburban commuters blowing through red lights (or sometimes both).

https://www.instagram.com/p/BFJ_-0IFTIy/

“I really want to get down to people on the street, and show the diversity of people who ride bikes,” Oliver told me over a beer recently. “I want to break down the stereotypes about who cyclists are, and show that’s it’s just ordinary people doing what they do. It’s just part of their life.”

https://www.instagram.com/p/BFEbwemFTP1/

Bryce Meyer, a top editorial photographer, jumped at the chance to be the first contributor to People On Bikes YYC. Meyer, a former competitive road cyclist who ended his itinerant career in his early 20s after being robbed at gunpoint while training in Arizona, says the project is less about the politics or fashion for him, and more of a passion project. He loves everything to do with cycling, and he thought this was a way to give back to a cause he cares about while indulging himself (the fact that he’s managed to learn how to shoot photos while riding his own bike certainly helps — “Forget the viewfinder,” he advises. “Trust the shutter.”)

https://www.instagram.com/p/BEzK5bBFTBa/

“It doesn’t matter if you’re wearing cutoffs with socks up to your knees or whatever,” he says. “It’s all about the riding.”

https://www.instagram.com/p/BE-AwH0lTAc/

It’s a simple concept that has proven political punch. Think about the defining images of Amsterdam, and you’ll probably think about a bike. In Paris, those cafes will elegant French women fingering cigarettes often have bicycles as a backdrop. Even in Montreal, photographs of hirsute young artists riding a Bixi bikes are becoming a de facto brand.

All of which shows that bikes can be a seamless part of any city.