Landscape Architecture Magazine

From the January issue of LAM:

I wouldn’t call 2013 the Year of the Bike in the United States, but only because I hope that 2014 will be an even better one. It was a pretty great year, though. Two of the biggest American cities added bicycle sharing programs. New York City opened its Citi Bikes system in May with 330 stations; by year’s end, nearly 100,000 people had bought a year’s subscription to the system, and by October, the system had recorded 42,000 trips a day. Not bad! Chicago started its Divvy bike system in June with 3,000 bikes at 300 stations between Cicero Avenue and Lake Michigan, and is planning on 4,000 bikes by this spring. The new Bay Area Bike Share started in late August in San Francisco. It was considered a slow start by some measures, but then many people in the city are already married to their own bicycles. The San Francisco Chronicle reported in December that the Municipal Transportation Agency, which has counted cyclists around town since 2006, found that by 2013, cycling had risen by 96 percent. One September evening during rush hour, more than 1,200 people were counted on bikes at the corner of Fifth and Market Streets.

What could be the downside to all of this? I honestly don’t know, but for some people, there seems to be one—usually grounded in irrationality. A perfectly benign technology that runs on calories, presents almost no harm to anyone, that is cheap and environmentally sound, fast, convenient, and, not least, very enjoyable will inevitably make people uptight for their own reasons. Dorothy Rabinowitz, of the Wall Street Journal editorial board, finds Citi Bikes depressing to no end because she thinks it’s socialist and ugly. You could grant her those points and she still sees no benefits. Rob Ford’s bike hatred helped him become the mayor of Toronto. Adrian Fenty’s bike love helped unseat him in Washington, D.C. Many people in cities greet bikes as you might an invasive species.

There are attitudes, and then there are economics. Lately I’ve been following a push in St. Louis County in Missouri, where I am from, to create a Complete Streets program. The bill before the council is a landscape architect’s dream. It would flat-out require bike lanes, better transit stops, and nicer streetscapes for all new street and road projects. It throws in everything—everything—except any cost consideration. A group called Trailnet is lobbying for the bill, and it was moving quickly toward passage this fall until officials with the county’s transportation department, who apparently had not been consulted closely, showed up to say, where is all this money coming from? Their concerns about the costs are not out of line. The bill was tabled for the time being. Meanwhile, next door in the city of St. Louis, a Complete Streets bill in place since 2010 requires the city to study the costs and benefits of multimodal improvements on new street projects and to “strive” to incorporate them. So their hearts are in the right place, and we’ll see if their design and resolve are, too.

Up front, St. Louis’s approach is more persuasive to a money-weary audience than the county’s. The finances are the FAQs of Complete Streets. The benefits can be shown to validate the costs. But people want to know in plain figures what the costs are based on experience. Costs vary. The better question is one of how costs have leveraged into benefits, and what the multiplier effect of Complete Streets spending is in terms of the economics, environment, safety, and health of a place. Seattle redesigned one street, Stone Way North, to accommodate cyclists and pedestrians; bike traffic rose by one-third and collisions involving pedestrians fell by 80 percent. Lancaster, California, redesigned several blocks of a central streetscape for $10 million and saw $125 million in investment move in around it; sales tax revenue rose 26 percent. There are plenty of examples, especially as these programs proliferate and succeed. (The National Complete Streets Coalition can furnish many others.) People have unreasonable reasons for opposing things like bicycles and transit, but they also often have reasonable ones until you show them otherwise.