Tips For Getting More People To Bike

The following question was recently posted on Quora:

“Transportation: How can we get more people to use bicycles?”

A study conducted in Oslo, Norway, discovered creating bicycle paths was not enough to get more residents to move around via bikes rather than cars. Here are some other strategies to boost alternative transit success:

• Less car-centric urban planning
• Make it safe and easy to commute with bikes
• Better bicycle lanes (wider, better maintained, and safer)
• Incentivize bike commuting
• Car driver awareness
• Make it costly and impractical to commute by car
• Higher-quality bicycles at reasonable prices
• Cultural promotion
• Eliminate parking subsidies
• Showers at work
• Incorporate automobiles’ externalities into their cost
• Good bike sharing companies
• Better and safer bicycle parking/storing (inside and outside)

Dheera Venkatraman:

• Real bicycle lanes - Not these 80-cm wide things they call bike lanes where you always have to fear getting hit by a truck mirror. Also, there should never, ever be parallel parking to the right of bicycle lanes or on any high-traffic roads, period. Parallel parking on high-traffic roads is not only unsafe for cyclists but also generally poor city planning.
• Bicycle-friendly public transportation - when a schedule says a bus has bicycle racks, it should have bicycle racks. Unfortunately that isn’t consistently the case over here. Also, every long-distance bus and every train should accept bicycles unboxed (at your own risk). Currently, Greyhound, Vermont Transit and several other companies require a box, already making it impossible to use (how in the world are you supposed to bicycle to the station carrying a box that size and all the tools necessary to disassemble your bicycle on-site?) and Amtrak doesn’t even have bicycle space on-board (except on the Downeaster). For bicycles to be usable with public transportation, you need to be able to ride into the station, hop on, hop off, and ride away.
• Car driver awareness - the awareness that bicyclists have a right to be on the road and behaving nicely around them. Motor vehicles should never be on the bicycle lanes. Where I live, giant public buses and taxis regularly drive on the bicycle lanes.
• Higher-quality bicycles at reasonable prices - Walmart sells a lot of junk bicycles that break in a year, and local bicycle stores can’t offer people affordable prices. Craigslist is about the only way to get a decent bicycle at a reasonable price, and that’s only if you have the know-how to fix them and you have friends to accompany you for safety. There need to be more well-publicised used bicycle markets in large cities.
• Cultural promotion - There is the ongoing cultural notion that the elite use cars to get around, that bicycling is something that only poor college students do. Your average businessman doesn’t think of bicycling in a suit to work and your average middle-upper class citizen wouldn’t think of letting their high school kid cycle to school. Others consider bicycling purely as a recreational activity rather than a mode of transport.

Vivek Kumar, transportation enthusiast:

Bicycle as a mode of transportation is mostly a European and Asian concept. Talking about US, one needs to take car centric development of American city into account. Planners and officials have initiated some innovative approach such as installation of ‘bus racks’. This caters to the classic problem of first mile last mile bottleneck and it augments well for greater mode share of bicycle. However, we need to implement measures which spikes the use of bicycle and which are very well corroborated by research. The perception of safety with bike use is highly correlated. So we need to come up with the idea which enhance safety both in perception and actuality.

One of the effective measures which is getting credible traction is protected bike lanes.These on-street lanes provide more space and physical separation between the bike lane and motor vehicle lane compared with traditional striped bike lanes. In many cases, bikers get priority in terms of traffic signal conflict. Following picture shows before and after scenario of protected lane.

Protected lanes (PBL) reduce the accident probability by 50% and serves as a catalyst of perception led behavioral change. Washington DC and New York, two of the forefront cities in PBL have several year data to corroborate the modal shift.

More: citylab.com -protected-bike-lanes-arent-just-safer-they-can-also-increase-cycling

http://ppms.otrec.us/media/proje...

Heidi M. Petersen, avid cyclist for 10+ years:

1. Good bike routes. This means fix potholes, not having bike lanes that just mysteriously end leaving you in the middle of a busy street. Better signage for which roads are bike friendly, removing parallel parking or putting it on the outside of the bike lane.
2. Don’t let people drive who shouldn’t. Make the driving tests harder. Require repeating the driving test once a decade (both written & driving), you know people don’t actually know all the laws anymore by the time they’re 25. Drinking and driving = pull the license. Reckless driving = pull the license. Certain number of accidents = pull the license. Seriously why do we think people can be trusted with these things? Our accident rates, death by car incidences show they shouldn’t be. And if you have more people unable to drive you’ll have more people biking.
3. Make being safe around pedestrians and cyclists more prominent in the driving tests and driving enforcement. There should be as many tickets for speeding on city streets as there are on freeways. More tickets for blocking bike lanes. More tickets for blocking crosswalks. More tickets for all the ‘little’ city and local driving laws.
4. Encourage kids biking to school. Kids on the streets = incentive for parents and community to have better bike routes and drive better, healthier kids, less of a mess of cars at the schools dropping off kids, better experience for parents in the morning, and adults who are experienced at biking.
5. Stop increasing the length of the work week - people have to go further for jobs, then work longer hours, fit childcare into the crazy schedule, and Americans at least are working longer than we used to. All of that makes changing commute methods to something slower really hard.
6. Make electric bikes more affordable/easy. I’ll happily bike most of the time, but some help up the hills would be nice.

Alex Jouravlev, part-time cyclist:

1. Off-street cycling paths and trails
2. “Meter Matters” - laws that prosecute driving closer than certain distance to a cyclist.
3. “Bike entrances” in the office buildings, with lockers and showers
4. Bike racks on buses, so you can get you bike home if its raining heavily, you sprained your ankle, had some drink etc.
5. Bike racks on taxis for the same purpose
6. Mass cycling events
7. Creative promotions like http://www.performancespace.com....
8. Move cycling upmarket by implementing relevant facilities.
9. Remove hidden subsidies. It is likely that well-executed home delivery can be cheaper for retailers than shopfloors & carparks. Without need for shopping in person, one of the key reasons to drive disappears.

1, 3, 4 & 6 are implemented brilliantly in Canberra, the capital of Australia. 7 is done in Sydney. I am not aware of 5 been done anywhere.

The mentality of urban planners is wrong. There is a paradox to be solved. Cycling is challenging golf as upmarket fitness, with people who can afford car, taxi or limo prefer to cycle. At the same time, commuting on bicycle is still seen as something those who cannot afford a car space in the city will do and, frankly speaking, that is the message the design of most of the cycling lanes communicates.

If you put a cyclist at the mercy of a driver who decided to open a car door across the bike lane, that sends a message of disrespect. If you just paint your bike lane on a road going through old industrial zone, ditto.

The image they should have in their heads - 5 years from now, a businessperson or a consultant arrives to another city for a day, walks out of a plane in lycra with an ultrabook in a Camelback, jumps on a ready carbon bike (preset to exact specs by the hire company) and pedals to the City via a tree-lined high-speed cycleway.

Cycling paths should be treated like the Opera House, embankments, boulevards - the parts of built environment that create quality of life.