Build It and They Will Come (or not)
It seems intuitively obvious that the presence of bicycling facilities in the form of signed bicycle routes, bike lanes, and off-street bike paths encourages bike commuting. The idea is widely promoted, and it appears to be effective in certain cities. It’s always been puzzling to me though, that I live in an area with excellent facilities, yet they’re woefully underused. The old adage,”if you build it, they will come”, doesn’t always seem to hold true, at least not here in the suburbs of Northern California.
To dig into this a little deeper, I pulled some data from the Alliance for Biking and Walking’s Biking and Walking in the United States 2010 Benchmarking Report and put it into a graphic. I lined up the top 30 major cities based upon “bicycle mode share among commuters” in one column, and the top 30 major cities based upon “miles of bicycle facilities per square mile” in another column. I then drew lines between the columns, matching up the cities. Cities that placed higher in the “commuters” column than they placed in the “facilities” column got a green line, while those that placed lower in the “commuters” column than they placed in the “facilities” column got a red line.
I can’t say I see a pattern here, and I didn’t come up with the definitive takeaway that I was hoping for, but I think it’s an interesting infographic nonetheless. Obviously, there are many factors other than just the amount of facilities per square mile that contribute to a higher bicycle mode share, some of which may include local bike culture, the proximity of housing to workplaces, the quality and continuity of existing facilities, weather patterns, and so on.
View the Graphic [PDF] →
Biking and Walking in the United States 2010 Benchmarking Report →
30 Responses to “Build It and They Will Come (or not)”
I think the piece of information missing from here is the type of facility and its connectivity to destinations. Dallas ranks high in the facility per square mile category but was recently tanked as the worst city in the United States for cycling. One reason for the descrepancy between miles of facilities and mode share in Dallas is that the vast majority of those miles are off-street trails in parks and greenbelts that were designed primarily for recreation use. Many exist within neighborhoods and do not originate or terminate at any sort of destination. Fewer still connect to transit stops. There are some very significant trails (White Rock Creek, for example) that cover considerable distance, but they still do not provide very meaningful connections at this time.
All of that said, Dallas is now putting quite a bit of effort into enhancing its bicycle infrastructure and is in the process of developing a very comprehensive bicycle master plan. The political will to implement it will be the key to its success.
Not all bike infrastructure is create equal.
I think the key word in your post was suburban. If a trail is not near the places people need to go or not in a logical path to popular destinations, it will not increase bicycle’s transportation share. Your picture looks like it’s out in the country and from reading you blog I take it your commute is more than 2-3 miles. Trails and bike paths are often built with a recreational focus, not going anywhere in particular. I’ve also experienced great facilities that have barriers right in the middle, like 6 lanes roads and highway overpasses.
If bike paths connect grocery stores, malls, schools, movie theaters, etc (basically the places people go in cars) in a reasonable distance (no more than 4 miles), I think you’ll see a difference.
@Elliott
The bike paths in the photos on the blog run through the middle of a large suburb with a population of over 100,000. They appear to be in the country, but they’re not; they follow greenbelts that criss-cross the city, mostly under high power lines. They also run along creeks. For the most part, they’re quite useful, and when combined with on-street bike lanes, it’s possible to put together relatively quiet routes across an otherwise very busy city.
The issue in my particular case may be that we have a high percentage of State employees who commute to downtown Sacramento. For many of them, the difficulty and complexity of a 50+ mile round-trip multi-modal commute is probably too much of a disincentive.
Alan
I was surprised to see my city of Los Angeles in the left column. Not at all surprised to see it lacking in the right; our facilities are horribly inadequate. And yet in terms of commuter share we’re up there, and growing. I suppose the combination of year-round great weather, relative flatness, and cache of cool help cycling’s popularity in the city. As for lack of facilities, the city is thankfully working on that, albeit slowly. As someone who’s been car-free for a few years now I make do in the meantime. The streets are our facilities, and I’ve noticed over the past couple years that, with the increase in cycling, motorists seem to be behaving themselves better.
To add another comment, I think the important thing is not the amount of bike-specific facilities but the overall bikeability of the urban pattern of a city that corresponds to mode share.
One take-away for me was . . . Yep! I’m still colorblind!
I’m not sure what the graph might be trying to show. It seems kind of like the presence of a red line is a negative. But the ranking of the 2 doesn’t necessarily lend itself to that.
If we assume, for example, that there is a problem in San Francisco based on the red line, because it has a higher facilities ranking than is does commuters, the solution would be to take out some facilities.
Seattle, Minneapolis’ and Portland’s high commute rankings force San Francisco and Tuscon into a situation where they rank higher in facilities than commuting. If those 3 cities were flat or ranked higher in facilities then SF & Tuscon would come out differently.
I would suspect also that there may well be unique local variables that affect this. Boston, for example, probably has the highest student to total population ratio of any of the cities. It also has cowpath designed, narrow, winding, confusing streets with no parking and, if I recall an earlier post, the highest cost of car ownership in the country. Adding all of that together and it would be surprising if it didn’t have a higher commuting ranking than facilities.
I think city layout has a lot to do with it. Portland is a prime example of this in that the city is (for a western US city) dense and compact, thus making it easy to take short bike trips to almost any local and requires less in miles of bike infrastructure to do so. In contrast, places like Las Vegas need to build many miles of bike infrastructure and requires bicyclists to ride more miles per trip.
So although Portland may have few miles of infrastructure, it is more attractive from a bike commuter perspective.
I think the real issue here is that we’re essentially picking at nits. Ranking is one way of making very small differences seem larger than they are.
If you look in the benchmarking report (thanks for posting that link, Alan), the mode share percent for cycling for the top urban area (Portland) was 2.8%. The mean of all metro areas surveyed was .94%. The mode share for Sacramento (Alan’s area) was 1.6%, so well above average but still a very small amount of the overall percent of trips made.
Let’s be clear – this is an estimate of *percentage of all trips made*. By mileage it is surely much lower. So, we’re dealing with very small numbers which can be sliced any way you want without much correlation. When we compare these numbers to a quickly obtained reference from Europe (Potsdam, Germany), where the mode share for cycling has not dipped below 7.8% in 40 years and currently stands at just under 20%, we see that our current level of cycling participation is not in any way comparable to European levels. It’s surely not weather related; it may be marginally facilities related but I’d imagine it’s more tightly correlated to culture and perceived notions of safety, accountability and affordability than anything else.
Alan, I’m afraid that bike paths like the excellent example you picture will continue to be sparsely used in Sacramento and elsewhere throughout the land until something rather dramatic changes here.
As another aside, while I’m musing on this I think that perhaps the easiest and most cost effective way to promote transit over private automobile use, especially for commuting, would be to make certain lanes of multi lane streets ‘transit only lanes’ at least during commute hours. Buses and carpools only. Strict enforcement by local police, with revenue going back to the apprehending municipalities. If your community is like mine, having the bus ride to work take 30 minutes while driving in a private car takes 50 minutes would change a lot of people’s minds about buses and transit in a hurry. Of course, that would impact our ‘freedoms’. Being a Socialist at heart, I’d give up this perceived freedom for a little more efficiency..
The UK’s greatest providers of cycle infrastrucure – Sustrans – in my view largely provide options for recreation rather than transportation. Locally, while they make some very good connections (eg using old railway lines and bridges) they don’t usefully connect major population centres without discouragingly circuitous routes full of barriers to motorcycles and other potential intruders. The local highways agency has kindly provided 3-4 miles of cyclepath along a major trunk road – but it dumps cyclists at a very awkward junction and leaves another 4 miles of busy trunk road to the next town with no simple link. I’m amazed that they’re prepared to spend £000,000s on “road improvements” yet produce half thought out cycle provision that is of little use. I’ve only seen one other cyclist on the above-mentioned path. Maybe the purpose is to allow them to say that no-one uses cycle paths and so there’s no point in building them…
The graph on page 130 of the report also tries to compare this data. You can see a very rough correlation in that graph.
@Ted
“I’m not sure what the graph might be trying to show. It seems kind of like the presence of a red line is a negative. But the ranking of the 2 doesn’t necessarily lend itself to that.”
Ted, I was thinking in terms of ROI. For example, Las Vegas has the highest facilities per mile, yet they ranked far down the list. That makes it appear (at least on paper) that building out bike infrastructure wasn’t a good investment for them.
Alan
The problem here is that “facilities per square mile” is meaningless, for 3 reasons.
1) City boundaries are nearly arbitrary.
San Francisco only includes the urban core and oldest suburbs of the Bay Area, while Los Angeles contains huge stretches of the suburban San Fernando valley. Jacksonville Florida has miles of undeveloped land. So comparing bike facility miles versus surface area is silly.
2) Bicycle facilities are often worthless, and quality varies greatly between cities.
Los Angeles has many miles of “bike routes” which are nothing more than a line on the map with a few signs. Compared to the cycletracks build on streets in New York… well, there is no comparison.
3) The density of good facilities varies
Copenhagen and Amsterdam work as bike cities because they have tons of bike infrastructure in a small area, with a high density of jobs and homes. A similar density of good bike facilities in a suburb (were there such a place) would not be effective. And in many cities, most of the bike facilities are in the suburbs, not downtown where they are most needed
Furthermore, commute mode share is a suboptimal metric. In areas with high bike use in Europe, many bike trips are for shopping, taking kids to school, visiting friends, while commute trips might still be via bus or train. We really need all-around mode share numbers.
A better way to start would be to compare density of bike facilities compared to total lane miles of roadway in the central business district of each city, perhaps an area 3 by 3 miles around the center of town. I imagine this would be more enlightening.
But you would also need to do a multivariant analysis, comparing bike use to income level, transit use, cultural demographics, and so-on, to properly find the impact of bike infrastructure amongst all the confounding variables.
@Adam,
Dallas sure does stick out. I haven’t checked the full benchmark’s methodology, but will guess that the facility numbers for Dallas include the on-street bike routes (signs) which are neither promoted nor used. Considering only trails, as you mention are all Dallas currently has (for all intents and purposes, I agree), surely wouldn’t be enough to place it near the top.
On a different note, I’ve only recently moved to Dallas and have found it frustrating to commute. It seems to be great for those that ride for recreation or sport, but even finding a shop that carries any products relevant to commuters has proven a challenge. That said, the new bicycle plan has a lot to offer. As for changing commuting habits… well, count me as a skeptic.
It’s the lighting. Recreational paths that don’t have lighting, and might very well have a dusk til dawn curfew, is inadequate for commuting infrastructure. Thus, such infrastructure is a recreational facility and not transportation infrastructure.
In a gridded city that may have next to no infrastructure, but a large percentage of 25 mph roads, will likely have a much higher modal share, as all routes are awash in ambient lighting.
Further, one has to consider that how a city is defined in one part of the country is very different than on the other. Phoenix is 519 sq miles with a 2,937.8/sq mi, while Boston 90 square miles with a 13,321/sq mi density. This will definitely effect the relevance of bicycle infrastructure and it’s relation to modal share.
Or maybe, just maybe, bicycle mode share is so low for most of these cities (around 2%) that it frustrates further statistical comparisons.
Las Vegas is a great example.
This city has many recreational bike paths on the edge of the city, and bike lanes or routes in the suburbs, but nothing in the areas with jobs.
Map: http://tinyurl.com/25ctzre
The downtown area is near the 15 and 95 freeways, and the Strip continues south-west from there.
If the bike facilities don’t connect jobs with homes, no one will commute by bike
(And >100 F temps half they year don’t help)
@Joseph E
“San Francisco only includes the urban core and oldest suburbs of the Bay Area, while Los Angeles contains huge stretches of the suburban San Fernando valley. Jacksonville Florida has miles of undeveloped land. So comparing bike facility miles versus surface area is silly.”
I only partially agree. In areas where sprawl in prevalent, it follows that the bike routes, lanes, and paths need to be correspondingly longer. Of course, often time in these areas, bicycle infrastructure is completely non-existent.
Alan
Sharper, mode share is about 2% for some of the much higher scorers on that list, unfortunately. For instance, according to Census figures, Washington D.C and Philadelphia are at about 2.2%. If the study above used the same methodology that means at least 8 of those cities have virtually identical figures as those two cities. Likewise, according to Census data, Los Angeles, Austin and Baltimore are tied at 1.0%. According to the figures above that would mean that virtually every city on the bottom 15 of list would be in a dead heat at 1.0%, and Baltimore didn’t even make the list, even though it was tied with Austin. With the exception of a couple of outstanding outliers like Portland, Minneapolis, San Francisco and Seattle virtually every American city seems to be hovering between 1 and 2%.
@Sal,
That’s a great point. Dallas’s former person-in-charge-of-bikes was a John Forrester disciple and believed all that was needed were route signs. The result is a confusing and practically invisible system of routes, many of which are on six-lane 45mph+ streets.
Regarding bike shops…I hear you. I’ve not been there, but I hear good things about the Oak Cliff bike shop. There’s a couple in south fort worth (Panther City and Trinity) that are supposed to be more commuter-friendly.
Talking about bike facilities, check this out: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2010/12/08/DDF71GL328.DTL
Can’t wait..
What jumps out at me when I look at the chart is that 8 of the top 10 cities for mode share are west of the Mississippi. As a person who resides in the east half, I tend to think of the west as newer. I also think that western cities were not hit as hard by white flight. This took large numbers out of urban cores and left dead zones. Which still impacts Indianapolis today. Just an observation.
Hey folks, what I’d really like to see an analysis of mode share (that’s the best we have for now) with network completeness measured by miles of dedicated bikeway space to miles of roadway. I’m not sure I’d count bike routes but think bike boulevards should be included. I’ve done this for one city but this still doesn’t address two major impacts to activity levels- network gaps and discontinuous facilities. If there are two miles of bike lanes getting you near downtown but nothing actually in downtown, that bike lane is only going to get used by the ‘strong and fearless’ riders.
The reason why this graph is all doesn’t work (sorry Alan) is that it doesn’t use the right metric. Usage does not depend on the length and number of cycle lanes, but on the resultant usability of your bike as a viable mode of transportation.
Suburban lack of density isn’t prohibative, as suggested by Joseph E. Amsterdam might be densly populated, but other dutch towns like Houten, Assen, Zwolle and Groningen are much less so. Yet they all have great numbers of cyclists, the latter sporting a cycling mode share of around 50%. For comparison: Portland is less than 5%, Copenhagen is about 22%, Amsterdam is 42% i think.
The graph Alan made is actually more useful in assessing the quality of cycling infrastructure (as it relates to commuting). If you build good quality infrastructure, people will use it. If you want to know what we should mean by “good quality”, than I’ll simply refer you to David Hembrow’s exellent blog:
http://hembrow.blogspot.com/
Spend an afternoon clicking around, reading the articles there. Alan’s graph will probably start making a lot more sense.
This has been said before, but I think there are a number of issues:
I question the reliability of usage data when trying to distinguish “none at all” vs. an improvement to “hardly anyone.” With small numbers I question the robustness of a measured increase from 0.9% to 1.3%; compared to 20% all these differences are not significant..
Distinguishing causality from correlation is a big deal. The facilities I see in Philadelphia and Baltimore are almost all in the door zone and route bicyclists to the inside of turning motorists; when I’ve been with new bicyclists they quickly realize facilities where motorists can’t see them don’t really help.
The drivers in Philadelphia have very clearly explained to me that the bike lanes are to keep bicyclists out of the #@$% road. To me having facility use mandatory in Baltimore is a strong indicator that it is a response to actual riders or to advocates; if facilities were meant to help bicyclists they should not remove their right of way.
I think you and J. are both right – the mode share is obviously not dependent solely on building any infrastructure at all, but also on general factors (distance involved, student population). All the poorly designed infrastructure you can build won’t sustain bicycilng in the absence of encouraging factors.
Density of destinations is a major driving factor. In Amsterdamn and Copenhagen, most bicycle trips are only a few miles. I think the same is true in the USA. So denser urban areas have much more potential for a large modal share.
Other factors I’ve noticed are flatness of terrain and a cool climate. Although the San Franciso area is an outlier in flatness. A cool climate is very important as most people don’t want to get too sweaty on their trips. Although Davis, CA gets pretty hot in the summer – it may be a special case as a small college town. A climate that doesn’t get too frigid also helps. Again, Amsterdamn and Copenhagen fit into this category.
Slower traffic also helps as it reduces the actual and perceived risk of automobile traffic to bicyclists. Again, many of the older urban areas match this. Amsterdamn and Copenhagen both have this factor going for them, being old, medieval cities.
I think facilities only attract bicyclists when all of the above factors exists. There are, of course, exceptions.
But I would think it would be very difficult to get a large modal share of bicycling in a hot, hilly, suburban area, for instance, especially if the roads were designed for high-speed freeway type traffic.
@peteathome:
I think your comments about climate and terrain are valid when considering extremes. For instance, I think it’s no surprise Las Vegas doesn’t score high in modal share, with extreme summer temperatures. But most urban centers aren’t extreme, which is why they became urban centers in the first place.
My main point is that people everywhere around the world are (contrary to common wisdom, even on this blog) absolutely clammoring to get on bikes. Loads of people desperately want to go cycling. The problem is that it’s prohibitively inconvenient and prohibitively unsafe and stressful. All you need to do to rectify that situation is build *good* infrastructure.
What do I mean by good? The litmus test is very simple: ask yourself “would I let my nine year old child ride his/her bike there without parental supervision?”. If the answer is Yes, than your infrastructure is OK. If the answer is No, than it’s not good enough.
Turns out, building cycle paths is not rocket science:
1. Cycling has to be safe
2. Cycling has to *feel* safe
3. Infrastructure needs to be direct and efficient
4. Infrastructure needs to form a comprehensive network, in order to be useful
Follow these principles and you’ll be fine. The good thing is, you don’t need to figure out all the details, when other people elsewhere in the world have already done that for you. The Dutch have got this thing down to an artform, and it’s not like a state secret or anything. Design guides are probably available. The Danes are very ambitious too. Copenhagen is a case study in how to (and sometimes how not to) implement and modify the Dutch model to make it work for your own cities.
There’s really only one big pitfall you need to avoid, and it goes by the name of “vehicular cycling”. Don’t go there. Just don’t. I’m sure John Forrester means well, but his ideas are the single biggest obstacle to mass cycling in the world today. (aaaaaaand let the flaming begin)
“The litmus test is very simple: ask yourself “would I let my nine year old child ride his/her bike there without parental supervision?â€Â.
Feel safe is not the same as actually safe. I will argue that your 9 YO is in greater danger bicycling down a suburban sidewalk, due to cars backing out of driveways, than he would be bicycling in the right lane on a moderately busy city street.
And I doubt you would feel conforable letting your 9 YO bicycle by himself on any US bicycle network system, including Portland. Maybe Davis?
You realize that Copenhagen completed a before and after study of streets where they added bicycle facilities and found in every case the facilities DECREASED the safety of road users?
And you also ignore the size of spawling US cities. No matter how safe or apparently safe you make the system, if most of the trips that you need to do are greater than 3-4 miles, bicycling will not have a large modal share.
I have been pushing a difference approach to bicycle facilities. When you look at the real bicycling fatlaity numbers, two things stand out when it comes to safety: automobile speed and intersection design. Rather than focus on lanes, paths, etc., we should be focusing on these real issues.
What I’d like to see is a fully connected grid of existing streets that have the speed limited to 20 mph, with this limit actually enforced by policing, speedhumps, etc. Anywhere this low-speed grid crosses larger streets with significant traffic, put in traffic lights and well-marked turn lanes.
The lower speed will keep these streets from being used as through streets by other traffic, so automobile traffic will be relatively light on these streets, so they will be attractive to fearful bicyclists.
Because only minor modification to existing streets is required, it should not be horribly expensive to do, although traffic lights have a significant engineering study and deployment cost.
To get the political the political will to do this, we should team up with the “neighborhood electrical vehical” (NEV) movement and AARP, saying the grid of fully connected streets can be used by NEVs. This might be epecially appealing to the growing elderly population who worries about being able to get around on their own. A well-designed NEV, engineered to be safe for the driver and people on the street, combined with the low speeds, should make this a very viable and safe alternative for people who are beginning to have difficulties. NEVs tend to be a lot cheaper than automobiles, making them a great second car for younger people. And they reduce the use of imported fossil fuels. So these roads will be a useful way for bicyclists and people in NEVs to do short to moderate distance errands and trips.
The important thing is that the grid can get you anywhere you need to go. The grid needs to be dense, about 1/2 mile between roads. But many residential and other existing secondary streets in urban areas can be converted to slow streets. It shouldn’t hurt businesses on these streets as all vehicles will still have acess, they just have to go slower. Bridges, etc. will be the main problem. It might require designating the right lane of multi-lane bridges as the low-speed lane and with special ramps at other end to connect to the slow streets. Inter-city connections would also still be an issue that needs solving and might actually require some new roads.
I think this would be a lot more successful infrastructure approach to bicycling. I think it would be a lot easier to fund as it supports multiple groups, filling multiple real needs. And it would actually increase the safety of bicyclists, pedestrians and all other road users rather than just give the illusion of safety.
“Feel safe is not the same as actually safe. I will argue that your 9 YO is in greater danger bicycling down a suburban sidewalk, due to cars backing out of driveways, than he would be bicycling in the right lane on a moderately busy city street.”
Of course feeling safe and being safe are different things, which is why I enumerated them seperately in my previous post. Furthermore, you seem to be under the impression that I would have you build cycle paths everywhere. This is not what I was getting at. When I say “cycling infrastructure”, I mean any surface on which cyclists are supposed to be riding. So in my opinion, sharing the road is OK as long as it’s safe for a 9 year old.
This video explains this in some detail:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mIdQ8RMDtGM
(please note: 30 km/h roughly equals 20 mph)
The reason safety in Copenhagen decreased, is because they got some things wrong. Contrary to what the hype claims, Copenhagen is by no means the Gold Standard of Cycling, much as they may wish to be:
http://hembrow.blogspot.com/2009/12/truth-about-copenhagen.html
And yes, sprawling suburbs are big, but the reason trips are more than 3 miles usually has little to do with actual distance, and is largely caused by the breathtaking inefficiency of suburban planning. Andres Duany explains this more eloquently than I ever could, here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W1X5uVR5NxY
(This is part 3 of a lecture in 9 parts. I highly recommend watching all of it)
And by the way, 3 or 4 miles may be a reasonable estimate of what is still a practical distance for grocery shopping by bicycle, but for commuting or riding to school, much greater distances are easily achieved.