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Brilliant.org/citybeautiful. So I like a good bike lane. They keep me
separated from traffic when I'm on my bike and they generally make me feel
safer, but they're not perfect. Cars and delivery trucks will block them.
Sometimes drivers open their doors into the bike lane without looking, and they
don't feel safe enough for most people. If we want more people to bike, we need
better bike infrastructure. The good news is that's happening here in the United
States, but we need more of it and faster. Let's talk about why and how. Like I said
bike lanes work for me, but they don't work for everyone. If you're not
confident, cars moving past so close to you can be scary. Transportation planners
actually have a way of classifying cyclists according to their comfort
level. First off, you have the strong and fearless cyclists that will ride in
mixed traffic, weaving through cars. That's not me. That's maybe 1/10 of 1% of
people. Then you have people who are comfortable in a narrow bike lane or in
a shoulder. That's about 10% of the people out there, and that includes me.
They're sometimes called enthused and confident cyclists. Then you have the
people who would ride on a street where the bike lane is buffered from
slow-moving traffic. That's the majority of adults. Finally, you have people who
will only ride on completely separated bike lanes. These kind of lanes are great
for kids and very nervous riders. That means that only 10 or 15 percent of
cyclists feel comfortable riding in bike lanes. Imagine if we designed
roads that only 10 or 50 percent of drivers felt comfortable in? They would
probably look something like this. We would never build city streets so
dangerous, but we're okay with building bike infrastructure that is. It doesn't
make sense, and with more people using scooters and bike share the need for
safe bike lanes is even more important. Now, all right, this is feeling a little
bit unsafe so I think we get off my bike for the rest of this. Okay, so this is
much better. So, there's no reason to treat bikes and scooters any worse than
we treat cars. Bikes are the most efficient form of transportation out
there. You can go miles on a single burrito. Almost a billion people already
have access to one, and they're relatively affordable. They also don't
take up a lot of space. This makes them a good fit, literally, for dense urban
places. There's certainly a better fit than those two-ton vehicles that
typically carry only one person at a time. So, I could go on
and on talking about all the ways bikes are amazing. They're great and I wish
more people have felt comfortable riding them. But until we designs streets that
feel safer they won't, which is why we have to design streets with more than
just a common bike lane. Here in the United States,
we'd lag behind the bike innovation happening in Europe. In particular, Dutch
and Danish transportation planners have popularized innovative bike
infrastructure. They include cycle tracks, which are bike
lanes separated from traffic, protected intersections, which are intersections
designed to keep cyclists safe crossing streets, and advisory bike lanes that
give two lanes to bikes and only one lane for cars and quiet roads. They've
also installed impressive grade-separated intersections,
multi-story bike parking garages, and traffic lights time for bikes instead of
cars. As a result lots of people bike there. 43% of Dutch
people bike daily. To put that number in perspective, in Portland, Oregon, a
famously crazy bike city here in the US, only 7% of commute trips are made by
bike. People in the Netherlands are on bikes from the time they're born.
Families often own cargo bikes so the whole family can bike together. They are
also leading the way with new technologies. Just this month, ebike sales
outpaced regular bike sales in the Netherlands. These bikes make it even
easier to get around on two wheels. So there are probably already people down in
the comment section writing "the USA isn't Europe, this kind of thing won't
work here, the USA loves its cars too much." But I'm here to tell you that US
cities are building infrastructure like this already, right now. I recently
co-authored a design guide that features twenty five case studies highlighting
amazing better than a bike lane projects that have already been built here in the
US. it's called "Rethinking Streets for Bikes" and you can download the PDF for
free over at rethinkingstreets.com. I'll leave a link in the description. I want
to share with you a few of my favorite projects. In Oakland, the city replaced a
car lane in each direction on Telegraph Avenue with bike lanes protected by the
parking lane. These striped buffers make sure the cyclists aren't in danger of
getting doored. The result is a really pleasant experience.
You're a good 13 feet from moving traffic when you're in the bike lane.
New infrastructure like this gets results, too. This corridor now attracts cyclists.
Bicycle and pedestrian traffic has almost doubled since the redesign.
Speeding has also gone down since these protected
bike lanes went in, adding another layer of safety for those using it.
On the other side of the country, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, they installed a raised
bike lane. These are still very rare here in the US. Just like the name suggests,
it's a bike lane raised up to sidewalk level instead of at street level. People
feel safer being separated from cars by the curb. On Western Avenue in Cambridge,
this kind of thing works. The corridor saw peak hour bike trips increase 122
percent, and again speeding declined. What happens on a street is too narrow for
protected or raised bike lanes? On Somerset Street East up in Ottawa,
Ontario, they installed advisory bike lanes. The basic idea here is that there
are dedicated bike lanes in each direction, and only one car lane for cars
going in two directions. Now that I know that this sounds crazy, but when two cars
are coming at each other they have to carefully pass by using the bike lane
space, but cars have to yield to bikes. Bikes have priority. This street design
is used in Europe and has been shown to reduce traffic speeds and make streets
feel safer for those on bikes. This Ottawa project was so successful that
they expanded it by two blocks a few years after the first lanes went in. I'm
back close to home for this last example. Linden Road in West Sacramento is one of
my favorite streets in the guide. This street had two lanes for cars in each
direction but there wasn't enough traffic to warrant two lanes. The road is
a loop and there's never going to be more traffic than there is right now.
Transportation planners removed a lane for cars and created a wide buffers
for bikes. Now cars are nowhere near the bikes and it's a much more comfortable
place to ride. "Rethinking Streets for Bikes" is full of these amazing case
studies from the US and Canada. We've got case studies in small towns and big
cities, East Coast, West Coast, north-south, anywhere in between.
There's guaranteed to be a project in this guide that will apply to somewhere in
your community. So go check it out! The PDF is free and available now. But wait!
There's more! if you go to rethinking streets.com you can download "Rethinking
Streets," a design guide for complete street retrofits. "Rethinking Streets for
Bikes" is for the best of the best in bike street design, and the original
"Rethinking Streets" guide is full of streets that I've made smaller, more
incremental change to their streets but have still seen big improvements in
safety and in walking, cycling, and in transit use. So please go check them
both out. After you're done checking out those guides why don't you head over to
brilliant.org and check out the great courses you can take on science, math,
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just tell you if you got the answer right or wrong, but they teach you the
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Thanks for watching, CC folks!