Cycling is a breath of fresh air for transit supporters.
Transit supporters should be onboard with big changes to how local travel happens in our communities.
Transit is hard. While you can build a great system with some buses and paint, the kind of transit network that enables a truly incredible level of accessibility for a large city requires a lot of infrastructure. Not only does this require a lot of public support, but it takes time and costs a lot of money, even in places like Spain and Korea that usually manages to build transit at reasonable prices.
For English speaking locales, the upgrade path from inexpensive to expensive transit really isn’t all that easy, as has been wonderfully evidenced by Ottawa,who has struggled in converting its former primary BRT corridor into a rail system. Not only did converting to rail mean years without the city’s main transit artery, but until rail is extended further as I discussed a while back, the forced transfers greatly hamper convenience on the system.
I think there’s often a feeling of hopelessness among advocates and mobility enthusiasts, even in cities like Ottawa and Toronto that are building a lot of transit, that our networks will be truly excellent any time soon. That’s in part because of the dispersed nature of our cities, and the time and cost of getting transit built. I think for folks like us, spending a little more time watching and engaging in the active transport space could probably be helpful since a lot more can be accomplished quickly and affordably.
Now, speaking from personal experience, I live near to a functional rapid transit system here in Toronto as I did previously in Vancouver, and I find the connection less than optimal. There’s clearly a big hole that exists in our mobility landscapes for short hops where getting on transit would be nonsensical — since even a good headway would take up a large portion of the time it would take to walk, but where walking every single time especially when you have to go back and forth a few times, or when time is of the essence is deeply annoying. Even if your transit trip is only 10 minutes, (which is quite short) a 10 minute walk to the station doubles that! Of course, one solution to this problem is to do more transit-oriented development directly adjacent to stations, however that is unlikely to always be a rapid process, and leaves a large area surrounding each station out from accessibility improvements.
Clearly there are real problems here with rapid transit, and there is also an answer: bikes. Now, I have spent the last 5 years of my life communicating and promoting public transit, and what I have found is that a lot of people like transit not for mobility reasons, but because of a like of the engineering and infrastructure complexity. I think that’s totally valid and we should really welcome anyone into the tent that we can, but there are problems transit cannot reasonably solve, and at the same time, a world where most people drive is less friendly to transit than one where most people walk or cycle. It’s also important to remember that the less transit funds needed to be spent on often very inefficient and expensive hyperlocal service, the more that can be used to enhance longer distance routes that are much harder to replace or augment with active modes.
At the same time, transit supporters should remember that if you are on foot, you are much easier to coax into transit than if you are in say are car, and there is no reason the same cannot be true for someone on a bike. Of course, since cycling massively widens the effective catchment area of transit services — there is a big opportunity for attracting new riders. Thus, I think it’s also really important to also consider improving cycling facilities whenever engaging in a transit project, because this is an open opportunity for such changes, and also because it also helps promote a more integrated non-car mobility ecosystem.
The fact that this doesn’t happen more often and that more people do not get why urban cycling is so important is for reasons that I do not think are very widely appreciated. So let me share some personal experiences and my theory on the issue.
Growing up in the suburbs of North America and arguably in a better than average one, and also having spent time living in rural areas, I (like a lot of young people) owned a bike and rode it around a fair amount. That being said, the experience of riding a bike in suburban North America is sort of like an accelerated and condensed version of being a pedestrian — with the added impacts of being on a bike. For one, you certainly notice the lack of space: I’d say a very large portion of trips are done on sidewalks, but it becomes clear quite quickly how under-provisioned sidewalks often are. At the same time, there is a real predominance of narrow shoulders as the only space for pedestrians, cyclists, and often road work. I wouldn’t say this discouraged me from riding as a kid (probably because of foolishness), but over time it certainly started to feel pretty dangerous. Of course, the frequency of traffic lights and crossings that are not optimized for bikes certainly does not help.
At the same time, a lot of the time I spent riding a bike as a young person was for pure recreation, whether it be doing similar rides to those above, but without a particular destination; or often times on longer off road dirt trails on longer trips, often with long and tiring hill climbs and the like. The issue here is that it leads to a mental association of cycling with exercise and getting dirty, both from perspiration, lack of comfortable paved infrastructure (or obvious absence of it), danger to some extent — such as when riding on poorly maintained trails, and stress. All of these are things that the average person does not want to experience on the way to work, or to get dinner, or on the way to the mall, or just heading to the train.
And of course, urban cycling need not be any of this.
So what appealing attributes do I see in urban cycling?
(I’m aware the benefits are broadly well known, but I think there is some value reminding people!)
For one, the problem of middle distances can be pretty simply solved: Going any distance over about half a kilometre is an easy win for the bike, and in the amount of time it takes to walk about 800 meters (about 10 minutes). That said, this can raise another problem: once passengers get to a stop or station they need to do something with their bike, and far too few station facilities in North America have secure bike storage.
Cycling also offers the opportunity for people to get some exercise as part of their trip, which is clearly a big problem in a lot of places. I am not suggesting people get a workout going to their local station, but just getting the blood pumping is clearly good.
Something which we talk about a lot in the transit space is night transit service, and while providing it can often be a challenge, cycling — like walking (and driving) — works quite uniformly no matter the time, arguably even better during low traffic periods like overnight!
The other nice thing about cycling is that it’s much less susceptible to random delays than transit, and it’s highly rerouting and speed-modifying friendly. If you find the subway isn’t working when you arrive you can cycle onwards, and if you are late you can speed up right away.
What do I think the urban cycling experience should be like?
I mentioned before my association between cycling and (often exhausting) exercise, and this certainly should not be the experience cycling around a city (unless you seek that out). Not only does that mean making space for cycling low-stress, but it also means reducing the amount of stopping and starting — which requires a lot of additional energy — and providing alternative methods of tackling major geographic barriers. For example, while a large hill is the recreational cyclist’s best friend, it should have powered alternatives (including elevators, funiculars, and more conventional transit) for everyone else. The same is true for crossing waterways: While wrapping around them and clocking more and more kilometres is fine if you are looking to work out, those using a bike for transportation should be provided bridges or tunnels or even ferries.
I mentioned before about not having to stop and start, and this is absolutely huge for cycling, unlike when you are in a car or on transit or even walking — Keeping in constant motion is really important on a bike, and so sometime grade separations or even slightly longer paths that allow continuous movement are good. That being said, things should not be looked at in a binary way: If people have to stop, we need not give up, provide infrastructure like leaning posts so riders do not need to dismount when waiting at say a major intersection.
Of course, not forcing cyclists to frequently stop also requires a connected network. Far too often historically projects have left small gaps in cycle tracks, which make using them a lot less attractive. Having to walk your bike on the sidewalk or through a crowded open area is a great way to make your trip less convenient. Of course this isn’t a good reason not to build parts of cycling infrastructure when we can, but situations like Eglinton Avenue where the street will be a mixture of nice dedicated cycling infrastructure at subway station locations, more temporary infrastructure everywhere else should be avoided (the benefits of proper infrastructure everywhere from the opening of Line 5 seem significant).
Cycling routes also need to be extensive. If not enough destinations are accessible by bike, the usefulness of the network is greatly diminished. At the same time since far fewer cycling trips will cross a huge swath of the city when compared to transit or driving, it is okay to have smaller discrete dense networks of cycle tracks in localities where bike transport is attractive, such as downtown and near York university.
With that, it does bear repeating that people need a place to put their bikes. I think one of the most frustrating parts about cycling in an unfriendly environment is the constant mental overhead — “the cycle track is ending, where do I go?” or “I want to go into this building to grab a bite to eat, where should I put my bike? do I need to watch it?” Providing seamless connections and providing obvious places for people to securely store or park their bikes are critical here.
What does building more urban cycling infrastructure look like?
Historically, a big part of my work on YouTube has involved covering the construction of new and enhanced transit facilities and infrastructure. Transit more than ever is hard to build, and so what’s so refreshing is that even excellent world class cycling infrastructure need not be. Of course, as with a transit system buildout, public and political support is critical to building a high quality cycling network, but the reality is that the engineering challenges are much smaller with cycling (though some would argue needing to take road space away from other users — namely cars — makes things more politically challenging). While a massive piece of bike infrastructure might look like a large over bridge or an underground bike parking facility, these things are generally fairly trivial when compared to major transit infrastructure.
Another nice thing that cycling infrastructure shares with roads at large is that it is much easier to incrementally build and upgrade. While you cannot simply have sections of a rapid transit line with buses in between, having sections of cycle track connected up by less than idea infrastructure is actually workable, and rerouting cyclists when a piece of infrastructure is being upgraded is also a lot more practical. Cycling infrastructure is also much more decentralized. Like roads, there is a lot of built-in redundancy, and that helps when you want to upgrade or repair!
Not unlike transit, the more cycling infrastructure you have, the more you need: as use grows, you feed more people into existing infrastructure, creating a virtuous cycle but one which is much easier to actually respond to by creating a denser network of routes!
All in all, theres a lot to love about cycling infrastructure if you already like transit, and we should work much harder to build more of both, while better integrating them!
I personally think that cycling as a means of transit is sometimes oversold. There are a few factors that can make cycling impractical that building good public infrastructure is not able to fix.
(a) People also need a practical way to store their bikes at home. No public infrastructure can provide that. Where I live, I can leave it in the yard, under what is essentially a car port (but for bikes), where it is only partly protected from the elements and not really safe from theft. Or I can store it our basement, which is indoors and pretty secure, but then I have to carry it up a steep staircase to street level every time I want to use it. This factor alone means that for anything less than a kilometre away, for me cycling isn't practical.
(b) Cycling is very sensitive to bad weather. While you might be able to protect yourself from rain with an umbrella while walking, no such luck when cycling. Yes, I know that bad-weather gear for cyclists exists, but in my experience you end up drenched anyway. If not from the outside, then from the inside. Plus, I can't see where I am going because my glasses will be wet. Bad weather tends to affect cyclists more than pedestrians, transit users or drivers.
(c) Speaking about being drenched from the inside, this is a problem especially for cyclists. If you want to cycle a good distance to work, maybe in the summer when it's fairly warm, you practically need a change of clothing and a shower facility when you get there. (And when it's really hot, cycling for that distance can become outright dangerous.) I personally am already half-drenched after getting my bike out of the basement, but even trained cyclists will not be able to ride for a long distance in their work clothes and look their sharpest when they arrive.
Yes, cycling is great, and you can absolutely use it as a mode of transport, but it's not the be-all, end-all of transit as which it is often billed, especially here in Europe. That doesn't mean cycling infrastructure should not be built, but don't think everyone will be able, or willing, to cycle.
Great piece. And your concluding point is right on. We should build more of both. You probably know this already, but there was debate here [Wash DC] about the displacement of a segment of the capital crescent bike trail by a segment of the new Purple Line. The bike trail is the right of way of a closed rail line. Part of the Purple Line is using a segment of the right of way. Some folks got very upset and quite vocal when the trail was closed for the Purple Line construction (ongoing, as you noted in your video on the Washington metro system). It wasn’t clear if the right of way could accommodate both a double track for the Purple Line and a new trail. I’m not clear on whether a solution was found). There have been other conflicts elsewhere in the US when former rail right of ways converted to trails are reconverted to rail, pitting transit against bike and vice versa, although banking those rights of way was always part of the equation. Another part of the capital crescent bike trail - not the part that’s been given up for the Purple Line - is actually an important commuter route for cyclists going into downtown DC to the office. And there are quite a few who do, all weather. There’s only one grade crossing on that segment. And, yes, there’s been one cyclist hit and killed by a driver at the crossing, which is busy. One would have hoped that the county would build an underpass or overpass there for the trail, but so far, no. Frustrating!