If you've ever encountered an argument against building bike infrastructure that you knew
wasn't strong but you didn't have the exact counterargument in your pocket—this video
is for you. It’s the second in our series refuting bad arguments against bike infrastructure
but, don't worry, this one doesn't contain any spoilers for the other one.
Before we get started---some people disagreed with the last video because we sometimes used
the term “bike lane”, which gave them the impression that we’re advocating for
nothing more than painted lanes on the street. That’s the most basic form of a bike lane
and it’s all that some cities have, but the ideal is for a bike lane to be separated
from car traffic by concrete or trees or parked cars and bollards. You could also call these
cycle tracks but in everyday speech most people just say bike lanes, at least in Canada and
the U.S.
The first bad argument in our new list is that Canada is a massive country, the second
biggest in the world. How can bikes be practical?
If we’re talking about traveling vast distances across Canada or the U.S. or Australia then
bikes are irrelevant but cars don’t fare so well either. The real winner is the plane,
which can get you from coast to coast in about eight hours. That compares to sixty hours
driving in a car, which realistically needs to be spread out over a week or two. This
fact doesn’t really matter for transportation in people’s daily lives though, because
most people in these countries don’t travel anywhere near those vast distances on a regular
basis. They mostly travel around their neighbourhood, city, and maybe their province or state. There
are exceptions, like truckers, but travelling across the country on a regular basis is not
actually that common.
We don’t need to speculate or rely on intuition for this. We can look at studies on people’s
trip patterns and see exactly how far they travel. One study from Greater Toronto found
that one third of all trips currently being made are within reasonable cycling distance,
between 1 and 5 kilometres, and could potentially be made on bike if the infrastructure was
there. 28% of teenagers are within biking distance to work or school, but only 1% actually
do so. 22% of trips to a GO Transit station for a regional train or bus could be done
by bike if the infrastructure, including safe bike parking at the station, was adequate.
We need to stop talking about how not every trip can be done by bike and look at how many
trips could be done by bike but aren’t.
The second bad argument is that you should stop the “social engineering” of forcing
bikes onto cities. People just want to drive.
The reason this debate is even happening and why so many cities are building bike infrastructure
is that an increasingly large part of the population supports it. This isn’t some
small activist group or bike lobby, although it started like that decades ago, with campaigners
like Robert Silverman and Claire Morissette in Montreal, for example. Today, according
to an Angus Reid survey, 46% of Canadians in larger cities want more separated bike
infrastructure, which easily beats out the people who want less infrastructure and almost
equals the combined group of people who want less or the same amount. This doesn’t mean
that all bike projects will be popular, some cities are more supportive than others and
maybe more importantly there’s usually a big urban versus suburban divide within each
city, but support for cycling is real. One survey of Ontarians found that 41% wished
they biked more than they do; another poll found that 78% think more people overall would
bike if there was better infrastructure for it.
Another problem with this argument is that, by their definition of social engineering,
it already took place when we forced cars onto cities. North American car-focused suburbia
is the result of government designs and policies, like density restrictions that spread people
out and minimum parking requirements that frequently require stores to dedicate more
space to free parking outside than to the actual store inside. We can’t implement
these policies that shape our communities and personal habits and then treat the result
as the natural state of the world that cannot or must not be tampered with.
The third bad argument is that cyclists don’t have the right to road space because they
don’t get a license or registration.
Arguments like this show that a lot of people have lost perspective on the fact that cars
are dangerous machines on the same scale as weapons. Cars can kill and maim people really
easily, while non motorized bikes just can’t. Motor vehicles are the leading cause of death
for young Canadians. We’re not making an emotional argument to say that cars are inherently
evil, so for example we’re not on board with the practice we sometimes see of referring
to all car crashes as “traffic violence”, because “violence” has strong connotations
of being intentional. However, we are making a practical argument that it’s completely
normal to apply more restrictions and precautions to more dangerous things. Bikes don’t require
the exact same treatment as cars any more than bread knives need the exact same treatment
as guns. If you propose that everyone moving around in public be treated the same, we’d
have to say that pedestrians need a license to walk and people need to register and attach
a license plate to their skateboard.
Toronto actually introduced a bike licensing system in 1935, which they got rid of in 1957
because it resulted in bad relations between the police and children. Toronto considered
bringing back licensing three more times, in 1984, 1992, and 1996, but each time rejected
the idea because it would be too costly to set up a database and processing system, it
would be too difficult to set up a standardized test that can be applied to children and adults,
it would waste limited police resources on enforcement, and it even wasn’t clear that
licensing would help fix any actual problems, like illegally riding on the sidewalk.
The fourth bad argument is that cyclists don’t need dedicated infrastructure; they should
learn to share the road with cars and trucks.
We actually hear this sometimes from cyclists themselves and it’s perplexing because it’s
a vision of cycling that we can’t relate to at all. For us it’s not a matter of experience
or ability — we’ve spent lots of time biking in traffic, we can do it, it’s just
really unpleasant. Cycling for us isn’t an adventure sport and it’s not a way to
prove our toughness and bravery. We have deadlifting for that. We just want to comfortably get
around our city, and with the exception of strongly traffic-calmed streets like Vancouver's
local bikeways, cycling in the same lane as cars doesn’t do that for us. If cycling
always meant riding with cars, we definitely wouldn’t bike as much, and that’s coming
from people who are interested enough in cycling to make these YouTube videos, so we’re used
to putting ourselves out there in the name of active transportation. Regular people who
are less inherently interested in cycling or aren’t as young or physically able are
much easier to discourage.
It should come as no surprise that the road environment matters a lot for how likely people
are to bike. Telling people to toughen up or get educated can only go so far. One system
that urban planners use for thinking about the road environment is called the Level of
Traffic Stress, or LTS, a four level classification of how discouraging streets are to cycling
based on the speed and volume of car traffic, how close the traffic is to you, and other
features, like how often the lane is blocked. LTS 2, the second lowest level of stress,
might be seen as the benchmark for a serious bike network because it’s accessible to
most adults, but LTS 1 is the gold standard because it makes cycling accessible to all
ages and abilities, including children. If you can’t bring road stress down to one
of these levels, you’re essentially limiting cycling in your city to only an activity for
people who are fit, risk-taking, adventurous, and in a hurry.
One concern we sometimes hear about dedicated bike infrastructure is that it will be used
as justification for not allowing cyclists to use the roads if they want to, at least
in places where there is a bike lane. We wouldn’t go out of our way to advocate for banning
cyclists from car lanes, but retaining the right to ride in traffic is low on our list
of priorities. Far more people benefit from dedicated bike infrastructure than the right
to ride in traffic. When we look at dedicated, separated bike infrastructure, like Laurier
Avenue in Ottawa or Laurier Street in Gatineau, or even painted bike lanes which can be fine
on low traffic streets like Laurier Avenue in Montreal, what draws cyclists here isn’t
the right to intermingle with cars, it’s the dedicated accommodations for bikes. Either
that or cyclists just really like streets named Laurier.
The fifth bad argument is that cyclists don’t need dedicated infrastructure because they
should just bike on the sidewalk.
We understand why someone might choose to bike on the sidewalk when good infrastructure
isn’t there, but the city just telling cyclists to use the sidewalk isn't a good solution.
Biking on the sidewalk is actually illegal for adults in most cities in Canada, including
Toronto, Montreal, Vancouver, Calgary, and Ottawa, and in many cases these are provincial
laws that cities don’t control. The U.S. seems more varied on policy here; Los Angeles
and Boston allow sidewalk riding, while New York, Chicago, and Houston don’t. Setting
aside the legal obstacles, there are practical problems too. Sidewalks usually don’t have
enough room for bikes to comfortably pass each other, let alone room for cyclists and
pedestrians all interacting, and sidewalks are often a bumpy ride because they’re made
with slabs meant to be walked on, not rolled over. You could fix these issues by widening
the sidewalk, making sure the cycling portion is smooth, and clearly separating the two
uses — but then you’ve just created a bike lane.
The idea that cyclists should just bike on the sidewalk was among the most common responses
to our last video on bad arguments against bike lanes and it’s pretty frustrating.
Sidewalks are already much smaller than the road, sometimes comically so. It’s really
an indication of who matters when you give motorists 80 to 90% of the road space to drive
and store their vehicles and you give the scraps to everyone else—cyclists, pedestrians,
wheelchair users, people in mobility scooters, skateboarders—and expect them to figure
it out among themselves.
Some people might reply to this by saying they live in a suburban area that doesn’t
have much pedestrian traffic. We have to point out that the amount of pedestrian traffic
you get is based partly on whether your city chooses to make it comfortable and practical
to walk, but setting that aside, it’s fair that different contexts can warrant different
solutions. One interesting idea might be to turn more sidewalks into comfortably wide
multi-use pathways so that at least cyclists can have a smooth surface and room to pass
each other and pedestrians. We saw something like this in Boucherville, a suburb of Montreal,
which had a regular sidewalk on one side of the road and a smooth multi-use pathway on
the other side. This setup worked pretty well, from what we experienced, although integrating
multi-use pathways into intersections can be a challenge. This route mostly avoids that
issue because it follows a river.
The sixth bad argument against bike lanes is that biking is no fun. Oh wait, I'm just
hearing now that nobody has ever said that.
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lane on an arterial road. Thanks for watching, and as always, don't forget to bike and subscribe!