By this point, you've probably heard that more and
more Americans are riding bikes.
Bike sales are surging.
The bike industry said that sales in May were up
81 percent.
That's a second consecutive month that sales have
topped a billion dollars.
People have been scrambling to buy bicycles,
causing major shortages.
During the pandemic, some cities closed their
streets to give bikers and pedestrians more room
to maintain a social distance.
In the spring and summer of 2020 bike shops
struggled to meet the surging demand from new
cyclists. Since then, retailers have been able to
get their inventories in shape.
With more bikes, motorcycles, mopeds and scooters
on the road, transportation experts say the
moment is primed for a transit upheaval.
All of this combined is called micromobility.
Here's how having more bikes on the road could
change the U.S. transportation system.
There are two groups of people who have picked up
biking during the pandemic, those who use it to
commute to work or get around, and those who use
it for fitness and recreational purposes.
Shannon Ng falls into the first bucket.
She signed up for a Citi Bike membership in New
York City this September.
Using the bike for me right now is basically just
getting myself from one place to another.
I was not biking before the pandemic just because
biking in New York City was so scary and cars are
just all over the place and I just avoided bikes
at all costs. But now the reason why I changed is
because that there's lesser cars and I just feel
much safer on the bike.
Shannon also represents the growing number of
women in the traditionally male dominated
activity. In New York, women are now the biggest
users of the city's bike-share program since it
launched in 2013.
A big reason behind the gender difference is that
fear and concerns about traffic safety, in
addition to personal safety, but primarily
traffic safety. And so in this environment where
there's less motor vehicle traffic, it certainly
has the potential for getting more women out
there riding.
Cyrus Kolar lives in North Carolina.
He wasn't biking before the pandemic, but now he
bikes around seven hours a week.
During the pandemic, the gyms closed.
And so I bought some weights, but I really wasn't
I was getting a lot of cardio from basketball and
was, I guess, looking for another way to get some
exercise. I might just race for one season and
that might fall off. But I think cycling just for
fun and just for exercise is something that might
hold on. Cyrus was lucky.
He scored a road bike by looking on Facebook
Marketplace, but not everyone has been as
fortunate. Early on in the pandemic, basic level
adult bicycles under 200 dollars led bike sales
soaring more than 203 percent from the year
prior. Sales of mountain bikes increased by more
than 150 percent in children.
Bikes grew by 107 percent.
Then in June 2020, the demand shifted to
higher-end bicycles worth more than $1000 like
road, mountain and electric bikes.
Before the pandemic, high-end electric by company
VanMoof tripled its production in anticipation of
growth, but that wasn't enough.
Covid changed a lot for us as a company.
It cost a lot of more demand.
Demand is much higher than production at the
moment. To give you an idea.
I think we in Q2 2020, we had six times
more demand than in 2019.
We worked harder than we've ever worked in our in
our lives. Just trying to keep up with things.
You know Specialized has been around almost 50
years. So it's not like there's no bikes, it just
depends on which bike you want.
The biking infrastructure in the United States
lags behind European nations and other countries
where cycling is already integrated into their
transportation systems.
And for one big reason in the U.S., cars are
king. It's still the most common transportation
mode. And actually this is also very much an
impact of federal funding and federal policies.
Up to 1991, almost all federal funding was going
towards the building of highways towards, you
know, the car and public transit.
It's the first time in 1991 that we see some
dollars that is allocated to active means of
transportation, improvements for cycling and
biking. Since then, we have witnessed more
funding, which has some impact in terms
of, you know, building an infrastructure that is
safer for cyclists.
So cities already had the funding and plans in
place to launch an expansion of their biking
network ahead of the pandemic.
They were able to act quickly when they saw a
rise in cycling interest.
Seattle was one of those cities.
It also was one of the first municipalities to
announce it was making 20 of its 25 mile Stay
Healthy Streets program permanent, a program
meant to allow residents outside while
maintaining a social distance.
Really early on in the pandemic, we made a
decision to repurpose some of our neighborhood
streets, our Neighborhood Greenways, as we call
them, to be local access only and to make them
closed for cars going through and open for people
walking and people biking. And this allowed
people to socially just and also get to key
destinations. And we found really quickly that
more people were walking and biking on the
streets and we decided to make them permanent.
And now we're working with communities as we
hopefully emerge from the pandemic to figure out
what exactly that means in terms of making those
permanent. Seattle isn't alone around the world.
Cities like Bogota and Berlin also expanded their
biking infrastructure.
Others, like Milan, London and Geneva have added
flexible bike lanes to separate bikers and cars
in the U.S. Some cities have seen a gradual
recovery and rides on shared bicycles and
scooters as a result of temporary cycling
infrastructure. But one of the things we are
starting to see in the data is that the trips are
actually growing in length, which I think is a
really interesting finding is people are are
taking longer trips with shared micromobility
post pandemic, and I think that may be closely
aligned with a growth in infrastructure to
support it like slow streets.
The biking infrastructure in the U.S.
can range from a parking protected bike lane,
protected bike lanes, bicycle boulevards,
off-street trails and paths, traffic cones,
streets and traditional striped bike lanes.
Those elements, in addition to things like bike
traffic signals, we have all of those tools and
they just need to be combined in the right
context, in the right environment.
And usually what we find are or what I would
argue is that the biggest barriers is more
political will to make those improvements.
I think we know how to build those types of
networks. We just aren't always willing to do it.
In March 2020, the Transportation Research and
Education Center at Portland State University
looked at six cities and compared the sales,
wages, employment numbers of the retail and food
services before and after the cities added biking
infrastructure to those areas.
The study was built on a 2013 New York City
Department of Transportation and a 2014 San
Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency survey.
So we have found that in a number of places, new
bike lanes, new pedestrian infrastructure in
business areas can often is associated with
increased sales, increased employment to
businesses along those corridors.
So in some cases, there's no effect, but rarely
have we seen a negative effect.
Funding remains a big challenge for biking
infrastructure. The money for bicycle
infrastructure traditionally comes from federal
and state gas taxes.
Most of the money ends up going toward automobile
infrastructure. Opponents argue that since it
comes from gas taxes, the money should be used on
improving infrastructure for motor vehicles, not
bikes. Once funding is secured, the next step is
determining where to place the infrastructure.
That placement can often cut along class and
racial lines. Currently, up until now, when we
look across cities in the U.S., bicycle
infrastructure is usually not equitably
distributed. And so there's some good research
out there that shows, at least in larger cities,
white and higher income people are probably going
to have better access to bicycle infrastructure.
So that certainly has to change.
We need to do a much better job of being more
equitable in providing accessible, safe
infrastructure for everyone.
Even though more Americans are biking during the
pandemic, it's not clear biking will maintain the
popularity once it's over.
When the U.S. reopen from covid lockdowns during
the summer months, transportation planners
carefully watched a metric known as the vehicle
miles traveled.
It measures the amount of travel for all vehicles
in an area over a period of time.
That metric fell in March 2020.
The number increased when cities reopened from
covid lockdowns, indicating that people were
taking longer rides in their cars and a possible
return to congested roads.
Car traffic levels have not returned completely
to pre-pandemic levels.
For cities that have already prioritized shared
mobility and pedestrian pathways, biking will
continue to grow as a permanent transportation
option. One of the silver linings that we're
seeing is an increased appetite for cycling and
scooter use and walking.
So one of the things we're predicting is that
we're going to see more infrastructure dedicated
to safe walking and cycling and scooter use
moving forward and people taking advantage of
active transportation as a mode.
So as we look at where we're making those
infrastructure investments, a lot of it is based
on where the streets themselves need the
investment and where we need to rebuild streets
or repave streets. And when we do that, what we
can do in terms of making those streets into
supporting multimodal travel as we recover from
the pandemic and people need to move again, we're
going to need to make sure that people have all
sorts of travel options so we don't get back to
congestion and frustration with our with our
transportation system. And we can make sure that
people can get around the city safely no matter
how they choose to do so.